War, Reconstruction and the End of the Old Republic

0:00If there are those here this afternoon who feel that they are devoted followers of the grand old Republican Party and an astounding saint, A. Lincoln, then you probably will feel a bit of discomfort this afternoon during the proceedings, have a feeling bordering on sacrilege, probably. So, if you are inclined to be shocked by that, you probably should prepare to put your hands over your ears at some point. Now, I'm actually going to be very temperate in my remarks, but I can't vouch for Lew Rockwell or Tom Blaine, who are of a much more fiery disposition than I am.

0:46There is a team of paramedics standing by, however, in case any Republicans are too deeply shocked by the evidence proceedings. The War of 1861-65 is still the largest event in American history in terms of the scale of mobilization, of destruction, of death, of revolutionary change in American society. More Americans were killed in that war than all the other wars put together. That's an absolute number. It's not in proportion to the population at the time. We would have had to have had something in World War II, something like 300,000 battle deaths in order to equal the scale of casualties in the Civil War. We should not forget that.

1:39A famous American historian of a couple of generations ago used to say that the historical knowledge of a great many people consisted of an enthusiastic belief in a few things that were not true. He had in mind the words Washington and the cherry tree and things of that sort, but it It seems to me that comment is very apt when we consider what passes for knowledge about the American Civil War in our public discourse that we are allowed to have and in government subsidized television productions. What we are generally allowed to assume about the Civil War consists of several things which Consider the image of the winning victorious side marching into battle singing hymns with the goal of striking the chains from the poor suffering black man, or in a slightly more Marching into battle singing hymns in order to save the sacred union, although exactly why the union is sacred is never made clear.

3:10So what we have is the fact that the triumph in 1861-65 of the Republican Party, a minority of the American Citizens. Carried out by the conquest, invasion, destruction of the southern states, part of the nation, is somehow mixed up with the idea of government of by and for the people. A strange result, so it seems to me. I plan during most of this talk to H. L. Micken in 1920 wrote an essay on the Gettysburg Address, in which he praised its It is genuinely stupendous, but let us not forget that it is poetry not logic, beauty not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of every day. The doctrine is simply this, that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination. That government of the people by the people for the people

4:51should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination. It was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the Battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, that is to say, of the people of the states. Edgar Lee Masters, the Middle Western poet, said something similar in 1931. The Gettysburg Oration, therefore, remains a prose poem, but in the inferior sense that one must not inquire into its truth.

5:39One must read it apart from the facts. Lincoln dared not base the facts of Gettysburg. He was unable to deal realistically with the history of his country, even if the occasion had been one when the truth was acceptable to the audience. Thus we have in the Gettysburg Address that refusal of the truth, which is written all over the American character and its expressions. The war then being waged was not glorious, it was brutal, hateful, and mean-minded. It had been initiated by radicals and fanatics. To try to spell out a little further, how the concept of the Union, which to the founding and Fires was an ideal of consent, of rational self-government, how this was transformed into a kind of a religious symbol, a mystical self-justifying goal, suggesting a religious symbolism as Mel Bradford has written about.

6:51In his first message to Congress, Lincoln used the traditional term union, implying a confederacy of states 32 times, the term nation 3 times. In the Gettysburg Address and in the second and overall the term union is not used. And we are told that the war then going on is for the preservation of the nation, though exactly how you preserve the What we have is clearly a nationalist pathology. John Lukas reminds us, the historian reminds us of the old saying, over and over again, patriotism is the wholesome, constructive law of the ones, on people and country. Nationalism is the aggressive, destructive law of the ones, on people and country. Nationalism is the aggressive, destructive law of the ones, on people and country.

7:48and the desire to put down and conquer others. What we have here is a nationalist mythology, it seems to me. Patriotism is an appropriate sentiment for people who wish to maintain their freedom. Nationalism is not an appropriate sentiment for people who wish to maintain their freedom, as the history of this century seems to demonstrate very fully. The Union was preserved, but it was not the Union established by the founders. It was like the authoritarian governments of the old world, self-justifying and not based upon the consent of the people.

8:40As Jean-Cyclone put it in his last speech describing the Triton Union, But surely that can, with no propriety of language, be called a union with the only means by which the weaker is held connected with the stronger portion is force. It may indeed keep them connected, but the connection will partake much more of the character of subjugation on the part of the weaker to the stronger than the union of free, independent, and sovereign states. Moreover, the cry of union comes from those we cannot believe to be sincere. If they love the union, they would necessarily be devoted to the Constitution.

9:25The Constitution made the union, and to destroy the Constitution is to destroy the union. That is the truth. Alexis de Tocqueville, thought by many to be the most profound European commenter on America, wrote in the antebellum period, The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States, and these in uniting together have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the states chose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so, and the federal government would have no means of maintaining its claims except by force, foreseeing the situation that arose in 61-65.

10:22James Madison tells us that the Constitution, the meaning of the Constitution, is to be sought not in the opinions and intentions of the body which planned and proposed it, but in those of the state conventions where it received all the authority which it possesses. That is to say, when we talk about the sovereignty of the people, a republican system or a democratic system, the sovereignty of the people means, purely and simply, the people of each state acting in their sovereign constitution-making capacity, as they did in the American Revolution, when they overthrew British authority and established their own constitutions, as they did in accepting and ratifying the Constitution of the United States, as they did in rescinding that ratification.

11:27If we don't have that sovereignty of the people expressed in that way, then our alternative for the ultimate authority is those black robe justices in Washington who go into the closet and commune with the gods and tell us what the Constitution means and what we're supposed to do. So, I suggest that the cost of the war was the end of the old union and the substitution of the idea of force for the previous American idea of self-government and the old-world idea of obedience to authority rather than consent, however the authority may be established.

12:22Recall the fact that Lincoln in 1860 received the votes of 39.9% of the American electorate. That he was almost an unknown quality. He had no, unlike every other previous president, he had no record of distinguished public service. He was unknown, and his public statements were deliberately ambiguous, which is more hostile, or is more threatening actually, than being hostile, the ambiguity. and that he was the first completely sectional candidate to be elected president.

13:07In the election of 1864 with the South out of the Union, the vote in the North against Lincoln actually increased by 10%. The election was carried by the arrest of political opponents, suppression of newspapers, holding the election at that point in the border states and New York City and other places. The hasty admission of several new states, like Davana, we need to consider exactly what is meant by the concept of government of, by, and for the people, it seems to me, and even after the war was won, the position of the republicans who had won it was not secure, Because they had conducted the war on the idea that the states could not succeed.

14:05The states were merely under the control of a conspiracy of rebels. When this conspiracy is ended, then presumably the states are where they were before when they cannot succeed. And yet, as soon as the war is over, we're told, well, the states have committed suicide, so they have no existence whatsoever. and so forth, their conquered provinces, and the whole of Reconstruction was built on a series of convenient lies about the war. A very simple proposition. It would have been far better to allow the American Union to dissolve into two or more Confederacy's at and the Will of the People.

14:57There is nothing whatsoever in the legacy of the Founding Fathers, in the theory of self-government and republicanism, to prevent this or that argues against it. In the thoughts of Jefferson, we can find in fact that he rather anticipated it and welcomed it. The point was to preserve the concept of self-government in whatever the arrangements are secondary. The union in itself is not necessarily the end-all of self-government, in fact it can indeed become hostile. And supposedly Americans have always been in favor of self-determination.

15:46I don't like usually the deal, and it might have been history, I think that's unwise usually, but it might not have been necessary for the American Union to break up. If there had been an honest government in Washington that was really interested in compromise and preserving the Union, a great deal could have been done in the period 60-61 to prevent a war and a break up of the Union. Given Lincoln's minority status, he would have certainly have been sustained by much northern opinion, by border state opinion, if he had pursued a program of compromise. Instead, he kept completely quiet. It's not Not widely known, but the seceded states sent commissioners to Washington to negotiate honorably, perfectly ready to pay for the federal property in the southern states to assume their portion of the national debt to negotiate honorably any other issues that were up. These people were not officially received by Lincoln. They were unofficially dealt with by being deceived into thinking that Fort Sumter was meant to be reinforced and when it was found that Fort Sumter

17:12was to be reinforced, the bombardment was taken. But even after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, remember that all the other forts had already been surrendered peacefully, except for Fort Sumter, and Fort Sumter was bombarded in a fairly symbolic fashion and then surrendered and there were no It would have been possible, even after the war had progressed a little bit, for the northern government of a more traditional bent to have made a peace short of the destruction that and to conduct a war, a gentleman's disagreement over the matter of secession.

18:04That was far less destructive and revolutionary than the war actually turned out to be. There were many, many, many northerners who advocated this somewhat forgotten part of American History. And a great deal of the exodus's death and destruction might indeed have been avoided, as well as the destruction of the old union of consent. This did not happen, why? Because, in fact, it was the revolution that was the point. Throughout the period of the war and Reconstruction, the Republican Party, or elements of it, behaved as a A revolutionary party, a Jacobin party, bent on ruling no matter what, on establishing their authority at any cost, and at times they even hampered the Northern War effort for the purposes of maintaining their own power.

19:09It is very hard to doubt this for anybody who has actually studied the behavior of the Mr. Denson mentioned this morning the statement of Lord Acton about the end of the war, that Appomattox was a greater setback for constitutional liberty than Waterloo had been a victory. The costs of war, the greatest cost then is the growth of the Leviathan state that's inseparable from war and accompanying the shrinking of liberty, which is the greatest problem of our own time.

20:03If by liberty we mean the self-government of the individual and of the communities, which Which is what our founding fathers understood liberty to be. The absence of a minority in power who could rule against the sense of the people. It's said that the only thing worse than fighting a war is losing a war. There are also costs for winning a war. And let me suggest very briefly, there's not time to talk about a lot of things. Some of the costs to the old republic that winning the war for the Union entailed. There's nothing very controversial about any of the historical points that I'll point out. They're just usually not put together. They're well known. There's a certain tendency to say, well, The tendency to look at this period through rose-colored glasses, and historians who will admit that there was a great deal of corruption that came along sort of after the war, but they want somehow this mysteriously happened after Lincoln died, you know, it didn't, the obvious origins in 1861 are not counted on.

21:22And whenever you criticize the cause and the behavior of those who carry out the cause, of course, the ultimate argument is always slavery. I've had this argument a hundred times and whenever they are cornered by the facts of history, always, well, slavery. which is a sort of, almost a resort to mysticism about the nobility of a particular cause. If anything is justifiable, anything is excusable in this great cause against slavery. And preserving the sacred union, which I suggest is a religious image, and a religious image is not appropriate to the political discussion of free people. It's irrational.

22:22Lincoln's excesses in the exercise of power are well-known, well-documented. They were utterly unprecedented in American history to that time. The Americans had prided themselves on the rule of law, on the freedom from arbitrary authority. The economic, a great deal happened in regard to the loss of economic liberty and the loss of Republican virtue. That was a deliberate result of the economic program. That was enacted in 1861 and thereafter, because the South was out of the Union.

23:07Policies that had been prevented at that time, the protective tariffs certainly among the foremost. And certainly it can be argued that one of the chief motives for the War of the Union was the fear of the establishment of a huge free trade zone along the Atlantic and Gulf, which, after all, would have destroyed the Northern economy as it then existed because it was dependent upon the Southern economy. The National Banking System, which was so bad, although many Misesians will not agree with me, but they instituted a National Banking System that was so bad that the Federal Reserve was actually an improvement when it was adopted.

23:55The Bonded Homestead Law. Who can disagree with giving away free lands to the people? Sounds very good until you look at what had been the traditional position of the founding fathers. The public lands had been regarded as a trust. They were sold off at moderate prices to legitimate settlers. Orderly settlement occurred. And if you were selling off the public lands, The taxes mean you didn't have to have any other taxes, like the tariff or whatever. So they were all, except for the protected tariff, there were almost no federal taxes in the antebellum period. So the government got revenue and you avoided taxes and you had orderly settlement. The wise policy that was devised by Jefferson and the other southern leaders of the republic who had acquired most of these lands.

24:48Supposedly a great step forward, the homestead law. In fact, only about 20% of the land that was given away went to actual settlers. And many of those were foreigners who were lured here just for that purpose. The rest of it went to railroad corporations, mining corporations and so forth amidst great corruption. Not that the land should not have gotten into and the private hands for development but the circumstances in which this occurred were a violation of public trust and of a burden on the taxpayer and a source of great corruption and we found the origins of the American, widespread American prejudice against business, particularly big business which had not existed before arising out of the corruption, the reconstruction, post-reconstruction period, that prejudice which the left has made great use of for a long time.

25:44The arbitrary arrests, 20,000 people or more, 300 newspapers suppressed, all without any shadow of law whatsoever. Secretary Seward is supposed to have bragged to the British Ambassador, I can ring a bell on my right hand and have a citizen of Ohio arrested. I can ring a bell on my left hand and have a citizen of New York arrested. Queen Vignoria cannot do this. And Seward was actually one of the mildest of the Republicans, he was sort of an easygoing Herman Gehring. Secretary Stanton was Henry Kimbler. Clear political manipulation also by state and local governments and vigilantes.

26:31All of this occurring in the North against political opponents, almost no overt acts of subversion or anything like that, but against wrong opinions, a real fall of moral standards and standards of liberty, confiscation and destruction. General Sherman estimated that of the destruction that took place in his march across Georgia and the Carolinas, only 20% was of any military value or significance. The rest was sheer wanton terrorism against civilians in order to destroy their will to fight. Not exactly what we'd like to think of in terms of American behavior.

27:22And again, I would suggest we have never recovered from the loss of standards. And Richard Weaver commented that the greatest loss of the war, of course, was the decline of the The inauguration of the total war concept and the decline of the progress that had been made in sort of making war fair. Republicans behave very high-handedly in running the legislatures and in every other way. A theft of a hundred million dollars worth of cotton, only a small part of which went to the government and the rest was stolen by various officials of the army and government.

28:08The Secretary of the Treasury said, I'm sure I must have sent a few honest cotton agents south, but none of them stayed that way for very long, an incredible fact in American history. After all, we did free the slaves. Of what did freeing the slaves consist? It didn't start out to be a war goal. It became a war goal a year and a half after the war started. A great many northerners have no enthusiasm for it. In fact, soldiers' letters will indicate that Half of the army of the Potomac helped the trade and was ready to go home when they heard of the Emancipation Proclamation, which had changed the war into something different from what they thought it was.

28:58In the British and French empires and elsewhere, slavery was ended gradually and without great upheaval. in this society it cost the life of every tenth northern and every fourth southern white man and the greatest act of confiscation of personal property, private property, ever having occurred in the western world. But put all that aside, what does freeing the slaves mean? A delegation of freed men visited Lincoln and asked him what they should do now that they were free. This is a response and this is well documented. Root hog or die. Root hog or die. You know, you're free now. Not the slightest recognition of the social problem presented by millions of freed men without education or property.

29:51And what the effect this was going to have on American society. Give them the vote, allow them to stay in the south, and support the Republican Party, and this is the end of slavery. There's lots of free land at the west, but that is not for the black people, because that would be invasion of northern territory. One can make a very good argument from social statistics that in the year 1900, the black population was worse off than it was under slavery, in terms of health, longevity, work skills, family stability, crime, all sorts of things, that there had been an actual deterioration. If that is true, then our pundits who tell us now that most of the problems in society are due to slavery have missed the boat.

30:44Because in fact, the further that we get from the antebellum plantation in time and location, the worse the problems become. and it has to do not with slavery but with the way that slavery was ended. I could go on for a long time talking about the ways of moral and economic in which the old public suffered from the war, pensions, which were originally a reward for the disabled and for very meritorious service returning to the lavish entitlement to everybody who had ever worn the uniform for five minutes. The beginning of all the entitlement programs that come along afterward. The Rule of Terror and Reconstruction. Did the Civil War leave America a full-fledged empire?

31:38No, but not from my point of view. At least it prevented them from being repeated for a while. The fabric of self-government was too strong in this country to be overturned immediately under normal circumstances but all the bad precedents were set, the bad precedents that were adapted, as we heard this morning, by the progressives who undertook World War I, it was all there. As Herman Melville wrote, who viewed the war from Lew Rockwell's hometown of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Power unannointed may come, dominion unsolved by the free, the Founder's dream shall flee.

32:29That was the result of the war, according to Melville. The Republican victory was a Jacobin revolution. Jacobinism is a power grab by a minority, leading to a centralized state, an egalitarian ideology, which really masked the will to power of one party rule, a great transfer of wealth, a ruthless disregard for tradition, a tendency towards a totalitarian state. Not perfect because the techniques of totalitarianism were by no means perfected in the 19th century. But as I said, not from life trying. If all of that doesn't describe the way that the ruling elements behaved in the 1860s, then I don't know what does.

33:24So as a guess, we are living with a somewhat tainted inheritance. And if our desire is to restore the principle of liberty as it was originally understood by Americans, if that is possible, we need to rid ourselves intellectually and morally of the superstitions of unionism and emancipation, which are the fountain of all the other status superstitions and all the other status usurpations from which we have suffered and been cursed in this century. It seems like a very unlikely thing to happen.

34:11I met, although recently, the French people celebrated their revolution, and a great many of them rethought the heritage of Jacobinism, which they had been taught was a great tradition, and there was a real revulsion of opinion about that, a rejection of what had been regarded as a great tradition. And Americans will have to do no less if they wish to recover genuine self-government.