Usonian Civil War

From Hobson's Choice

This article needs to be edited to comply with the standards of Hobson's Chice

The Civil War of the United States was a sectional conflict fought between 1861 and 1865. It pitted eleven southeastern states against a badly strained union of twenty-three other states. The southeastern states, all of which recognized slavery, were known as the Confederate States of America (CSA), or Confederacy. The states loyal to the United States retained the name "Union," which is the preferred term for referring to the CSA's opposition in the War. Of the Union states, 18 were free states, four were slave states, and one (West Virginia) was a part of a seceding state that broke away to remain with the Union side. West Virgina had legal slavery. Slavery was outlawed in these border states in October 1865, after the termination of the War and two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

The Union victory in the War was in large measure thanks to the leadership of Pres. Abraham Lincoln, whose 1860 election was the immediate cause of Southern secession. The slavocracy launched the war to slam the door shut forever on any possibility of itself ever being regulated or contained in any way; instead, it proved to its would-be collaborators that it could not suffer co-existence, and was destroyed. Having been beaten, this system of cruelty based on coercion could not recover, even with every advantage.

Contents 1 Description of the Belligerents 2 Sections of the Civil War 3 The Civil War as a Continuation of the Usonian Revolution 4 Notes

Description of the Belligerents

The Union was a political grouping with an ambiguous position on slavery, tending toward tolerance. All of the states of the Confederacy were committed to slavery forever. Political activity in the CSA was simplified by the fact that all public officials had long been devoutly committed to the legal defense of slavery. In the Union, only a minority of public officials called for an immediate termination of slavery. Some member states had slavery, and could have voted to block its abolition; this was harder after secession. The Union side was mostly anxious to prevent further defections in states like Maryland or Kentucky. So it is not accurate to say that the Union was abolitionist until 1865. As a federation, the US government could do nothing until it had the necessary votes in the House or the Senate.

President Lincoln's decision to oppose the Confederacy was based on a logical objection to anarchy: if a section could dissolve the Union, then republican government was inherently unstable and doomed to disintegration. Worse, had Lincoln agreed to secession, there was no chance of a Velvet Divorce: there was still about 3.1 million Km² of territories, including land connecting California and Oregon with the rest of the Union, and there had long been energetic partisans for seizing the California government for the slavocracy (before any serious talk of secession).^[1] It is difficult to take seriously the notion that a polity so bitterly opposed to recognizing the right to outlaw slavery in territories it regarded as its own, would consent to the permanent loss of California. Lincoln's career in the '40's and '50's had been largely defined by sparring with Stephen Douglass, inter alia, over territorial questions (e.g., the popular sovereignty debates).^[2] He could not have failed to notice that, in the 1860 elections, the Southern states had angrily rejected candidate Douglas for suggesting that territories had the right to reject slavery; if the South had taken the position then that slavery was a matter for the states to decide, Douglas would have beat Lincoln in a landslide.

While there was little risk of the North acting to stamp out slavery—it lacked the votes to recognize Haiti or Liberia, or even suppress the slave trade—there was a constant risk that the economy based on slavery would eventually come under some regulatory fiat, however ephemeral. The Southern polity had once embraced moderates like Douglas; now, the idea that there could ever be a legitimate intrusion on the right of capital to use humans like chattel, was a monstrous heresy.

The Confederacy was not the sole manifestation of aggressive anarcho-capitalism.^[3] The industrial bourgeois of the North likewise had a conception of the righteous function of the state. Under this alternative version of anarcho-capitalism, the rightful function of the state was to cultivate the conditions for industrial flourishing; it was duty-bound to expropriate to the limits of its ability from those outside the legal protection of the state in order to do so, but it was also morally bound to refrain from regulating those able men on whose behalf it expropriated. Today, most self-described libertarians would probably object to this summary of their dogma, but it is compatible with the notions of economic liberty then prevailing; nor is it any less logically consistent than contemporary "libertarian" philosophy.

This strain of thinking reflects the universalist nature of the sectional divisions of the United States and, indeed, the Trans-European Project. The South regarded any state as tyranny; the Northern capitalist regarded the state as a force of nature, to be tamed by "able men." When it serves the able men in it, it is worthy; when it succumbs to some fay notion of equal rights or social democracy, it pollutes the nation. Should it deign to regulate those able men, it sinks to the lowest depths of iniquity. This was the deep-seated conviction of the Northern bourgeoisie in the War, and after the War was over, and a backlash arose (as inevitably it did) to its social monstrosities, the Northern bourgeois became deeply embittered about Emancipation. It had never wanted Emancipation for itself, but after the War its subservient historians and economists declared that Emancipation was a foolish delusion of revolutionary visionaries.

Sections of the Civil War

The United States Civil War is the ultimate validation of the role of the state: only a powerful federal government could an end to the single worst crime in history.

Because of this, anarcho-capitalists and their allies in the economics field like Hayek, Fogel & Engerman, Coase, Nozick, and so on, usually have to tackle this some way. Fogel & Engerman were the most aggressive, writing a book entitled Time on the Cross, which was widely recycled by White Power groups (The South was Right). This book was decisive in politically rehabilitating White Supremacist ideology in the 1970's, because F&E were so successful in cloaking their real agenda. Part of the book was quite correct: there was evidence that, on the whole, the slave economy was doing well—that slaveowners as a group were optimistic about the future of slave agriculture. However, this is the part that actually validated the need for a vigorous prosecution of the Civil War, and F&E therefore created an extremely misleading piece of pure polemic which in places actually gives the game away—that F&E approved of the slave economy. The irony of "libertarians" being so doctrinaire they approve of slavery is striking.

Basically F&E had to make the case that the slave owners were actually benevolent. In something like two dozen references to "abolitionists," the great majority were negative—and this includes those who merely favored abolition, not specific individuals like William Lloyd Garrison.^[4] In the three dozen or so references to slave owners, nearly all were positive ^[5] Social historians observing the devastation of Black American social institutions like the family were wrong to pin the blame on slavery, said F&E; that was the result of events which followed the Civil War. F&E then pose the counterfactual that African Americans would be better off if slavery had faded out gradually—something it never did anywhere else and something F&E strongly hinted was unlikely to have happened even after the advent of machinery.^[6]

F&E are extremely aggressive in defending their absurd claim that the slavocracy was the true friend of Africans. They do this by saying that, if slavery were as bad as scholars usually say it is, then modern day Africa Americans would be a people without a history. Their means of survival—hard work on plantations, deference, etc.—would have been spiritually degrading. So people who say slavery was evil are actually insulting its victims. This is the connection between their claim that slavery was economically efficient, and that it was "not so bad at all" for the slaves.

Herbert G. Gutman and others (Slavery and the Numbers Game: a Critique of Time on the Cross) quickly impugned the book's methodology. There was a booming interstate trade in slaves which Fogel and Engerman brushed off ("Slave owners had an economic incentive to keep the families of slaves intact. It increased productivity."), and the extremely low population density of North America generally meant that profoundly destructive farming practices could flourish economically for a long time. The regions of cultivation shifted constantly.

Fogel won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work, not because the Alfred Nobel Memorial Foundation is staffed by members of the Order of the White Carmelia, but because of his application of statistical analysis to history to achieve a conclusion desired by the neoliberals who run banks, namely, that the state is incapable of meliorating injustice or containing the consequences of free markets. While this seems fairly remote from the battle fields of the US Civil War, it points to the key sectional issue that brought it on: whether human ambition may justly be contained.

The Civil War was not a battle between those who would abolish slavery and those who would continue it as it "always was." F&E's data showing that slavery was a dynamic, economically robust, institution is the one conclusion that has not been challenged. It was the most dramatic form of ecological redemption effected by the Trans-European Project up to that time.

The Civil War as a Continuation of the Usonian Revolution

The 4th of July had been, especially since the 1830's, an occasion for reflection and speeches on what the Revolution "proved." Around the 87th anniversary of the Revolution, the Battle of Gettysburg proved the turning point in the Usonian Civil War. The Confederacy had regarded the 4th of July as a powerful symbol of the White man's boundless right to subdue the earth. In the Northern states, the parallel between freedom of White subjects, and that of Black slaves, was a little more obvious; in 1827, the State of New York proclaimed the emancipation of slaves there.

As early as the late 18th century, this cleavage between rival notions of freedom—freedom from the state versus freedom defended by the state—erupted into clashes on the 4th. At first, the issue was the ratification of the US Constitution; soon after, the issue was slavery. In 1852, Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison commemorated the occasion by burning a copy of the Constitution^[7]; by then, this was somewhat more inflammatory than, say, burning the flag. In 1859, Robert Barnwell Rhett used the occasion to propose the creation of an independent Southern confederacy^[8]; two years later, his idea was a reality, as rival armies clashed along the Mississippi Valley and near the capital. During the years following the Civil War, the focus turned to pride in the country's dramatic industrial accomplishments—an achievement seemingly detached from the political implications of the Usonian Revolution.^[9] Yet the revolutionary tradition was insidious; opponents of black codes, proponents of women's suffrage, and socialists insisted that the revolution was not only living piece of history, it was incomplete. Native Americans commemorated the occasion, often within years of being suppressed by the US Army; they readily assimilated the concept of the Declaration of Independence, and appealed to a higher legitimacy than the arbitrary expropriations of encroaching marauders.

The other thread persisted—the one that said that the Revolution had rendered the American Republic above moral judgment. Or that freedom meant the unrestricted right to subdue other people to extract a livelihood from them. The tradition remained that said that the major point of freedom was the ability to march further West, expropriate more land, level more forests, and stake more claims to mineral wealth. Even before American settlement reached the Pacific Ocean, there were adventurers intent on taking over Cuba, Mexico, and Nicaragua. This was by no means unique to the USA; but it was an ideology which appropriated the revolutionary tradition. Frustrated businessmen and adventurers, thwarted by the laws and the reluctance of the Republic to go to war, were far quicker to remind others that Usonians had ousted a recalcitrant government before, and would do so again.^[10] In 1898, Pres. McKinley annexed Hawai'i as a territory, enabling more expropriation of territory. This, naturally, had been stimulated by war with Spain—war that would lead to the annexation of the Philippines and a protectorate over Cuba.

Revolutions involve seizing the state, liquidating some of the existing elites, and replacing them with a new polity—ideally, a far broader one. The Usonian Revolution had done that; but like nearly all such events, it also created a sense of lofty superiority, much as readers of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia would feel reading articles about the Samoyed peoples; dispossessed by the Czars, plundered or conscripted by the early Red Army, the GSE insists all the same that they were elevated by the experience since it was all part of the road to Socialism. Identical rhetoric is to be found in defense of the British Colonial Empire, the French Colonial Empire, European conquest generally, or defenders of the imperial conquests of Islam. Part of this is the bloodshed and confiscations that go on in revolutions. The victors have to stake out the high moral ground for themselves. Revolution begins in frustration and ends in bottomless self-satisfaction.

The other thread of the Usonian Revolution has appealed to the Usonian thirst for freedom: humans living under slavery are not free, and people whose lands are seized by settlers are without a government to secure their own life, liberty, or pretty much anything else. While beginning students of economics are trained to dutifully declare that the robber barons were actually geniuses of efficiency who were entitled to their enormous wealth, those who find themselves in the iron grip of these peasant-pinchers were driven to demand their freedom, too. The rival demands for freedom and protection usually clashed along the principle of property rights, but of course abolitionists, feminists, and socialists, whose demands put them at odds with "property," were in fact merely advancing another fundamental claim to property—one from a different narrative of how property originates and where it goes.

Notes

1. ↑ See, for example, Hobson's Choice article on William Walker.
2. ↑ Daniel Meyer, Stephan A Douglas and the American Union, §5: "Popular Sovereignty", University of Chicago
3. ↑ Lysander Spooner and Clement Vallandigham were Northern opponents (for quite different reasons) of the principle of that the state could ever legitimately act to end slavery. Spooner was a (rather insipid and silly) abolitionist; Vallandigham was a standard conservative. Both could be characterized with justice as anarcho-capitalists. Neither were aggressive, however.
4. ↑ It's understandable if some F&E held negative opinions of particular activists of the era, even if their judgments were mistaken. But F&E uniformly treat critics of slavery, including former slaves like Frederick O. Douglass, as inherently untrustworthy; like a court under the Southern black codes, they dismiss all testimony furnished by former slaves no longer dependent upon their former owners. Time on the Cross, p.78 "The evidence put forward to support the contention of breeding for the market is meager indeed. Aside from the differential in profit rates produced by Conrad and Meyer, the evidence consists largely of unverified charges made by abolitionists, and of certain demographic data... The many thousands of hours of professional research by professional research by historians into plantation records have failed to produce a single authenticated case of the 'stud' plantations alleged..." (Bear in mind F&E elsewhere divulge that plantation records are very sparse).
5. ↑ Time on the Cross, p.5: "... Slaves were exploited in the sense that part of the income which they produced was expropriated by their owners. However, the rate of expropriation was much lower than has generally been presumed"; p.77: "There is too much evidence of deep personal attachments between owners and their bondsmen to deny that this was a facet of the slave system..."; p.119, "... Barrow, owner of one of the largest Louisiana plantations, treated slaves as though they were sick even when he thought they were pretending. Nor was Barrow alone in this attitude. ..."
6. ↑ Much of the slave population of Brazil was ditched by bankrupt masters after the El Nino drought of 1877; huge numbers of "emancipated" slaves actually starved to death while their masters received stipends for what was actually a costless release of control over slave children. In 1889 the Emperor Pedro II declared general emancipation and was almost immediately ousted in a coup . But the slave owners merely restored debt peonage, not slavery. Slavery was abolished in Cuba after a slave revolt in 1875, also associated with a collapse of agriculture in the famines of '73-77. Slavery was formally abolished in 1975 in the Emirate of Musqat & Oman after the late Sultan ousted his father in a coup d'etat.
7. ↑ David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World p.263
8. ↑ David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 p.466
9. ↑ David Edwin Nye, American Technological Sublime, p.118
10. ↑ One spin-off of this was the coup ousting the indigenous Hawai'ian monarchy by a cabal of Usonian businessmen; one account is Pat Pitzer, "The Overthrow of the Monarchy" (May 1994).

James R MacLean (16:20, 11 September 2007 (PDT))