Review: Libertarians in the Attic, or a Tale of Two Narratives PDF

Review: Libertarians in the Attic, or a Tale of Two Narratives Reviewed Work(s): When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession by Charles Adams: The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War by Thomas J. DiLorenzo: Emancipating Slav...

Review: Libertarians in the Attic, or a Tale of Two Narratives Reviewed Work(s): When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession by Charles Adams: The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War by Thomas J. DiLorenzo: Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel Review by: Daniel Feller Source: Reviews in American History , Jun., 2004, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Jun., 2004), pp. 184- 195 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30031836 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Reviews in American History This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 03:55:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  LIBERTARIANS IN THE ATTIC, or A TALE OF TWO NARRATIVES Daniel Feller Charles Adams. When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Ca Southern Secession. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. xiv + 2 Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95. Thomas J. DiLorenzo. The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, Agenda, and an Unnecessary War. Roseville, Ca.: Prima, 2002. xiii + 3 Notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). Jeffrey Rogers Hummel. Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A Histo the American Civil War. Chicago: Open Court, 1996. xiii + 421 pp. Bibliogr essays, notes, and index. $39.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). In the stacks of my university library, three books stand side by side catalogued by the Library of Congress at E468.9. In the middle is Dav Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Published Harvard in 2001, Blight's work won a bevy of prizes and was p immediately on innumerable graduate reading lists. Flanking Blight o side is Tony Horwitz's riveting expos6 of contemporary Lost Cause cu Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. On the is a book that many readers of Blight and Horwitz have never hear Charles Adams's When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case Southern Secession. Though Adams and Blight sit adjacent on the shelves, gulf between them, both in viewpoint and in audience, is nearly bottoml Contemplating that gulf provokes some disturbing thoughts. Race and Reunion told readers like you and me what a generation scholarship had primed us to hear. Slavery brought on the Civil War. war started, the futility of fighting slaveholders without fighting sl added to genuine antislavery conviction and the self-liberating action of slaves, brought Abraham Lincoln and the Union to an emancipationist pol by 1863. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural, speakin new birth of freedom and of the nation's penance for slavery, captur essential meaning of the contest. Reviews in American History 32 (2004) 184-195 @ 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 03:55:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms FELLER / Libertarians in the Attic 185 The Thirteenth Amendment sea teenth and Fifteenth endeavored, h freedom real. But Reconstruction gains. In the next generation, bla white Americans, North and Sou mutual valor that were made pos had been about. Thus the promi Declaration of Independence and many, erased even in memory. Articulated in a host of monogr become nearly canonical in libera the trilogy begun by James McPhe Foner's Reconstruction (1988). It br story whose outlines were alread established, and its trajectory cl framing of American history as human freedom and equality, accom federal action. In this teleology, lib ing of invidious distinctions am trenched of which involve race. If collegial accolades could settle historical debate, the new orthodoxy conveyed in Race and Reunion would have swept all competitors from the field. Yet a counter-orthodoxy not only survives, but thrives. By the measure of book sales, it even prevails.' It flourishes not only among the neo- Confederates described by Horwitz, but in an alternative world of scholar- ship, a world rarely encountered by subscribers to this journal. The works of this other narrative are taught in college courses (though not necessarily in the best-known colleges) and come endorsed by university professors (though not always professors of history). The authors are not cranks in re-enactor garb, but public intellectuals with academic credentials and claims to schol- arly detachment.2 Three books spearhead the cause of Civil War counter-orthodoxy: Adams's When in the Course of Human Events, Thomas J. DiLorenzo's The Real Lincoln, and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel's Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men. All three authors teach economics: DiLorenzo at Loyola College in Maryland; Adams, self-billed as "the world's leading scholar on the history of taxation," as an adjunct at several well-known universities; Hummel at San Jose State University. Their books are linked on Amazon.com and in the catalogs of libertarian mail-order firms. None of the authors is a native Southerner or a Confederate descendant out to uphold ancestral heritage. (Hummel's dedica- tion is to his great-grandfather, a Union colonel from New York.) Yet all three defend secession and take a strongly anti-Union view of the Civil War. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 03:55:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 186 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / JUNE 2004 The marriage of neo-Confederates and libertarian oxymoron-how can a lover of liberty defend slaver political reality. What unites the two, aside from their academic establishment, is their mutual loathing of big DiLorenzo, and Hummel view the Civil War throug economics. In their view its main consequence, and e create a leviathan state that used its powers to sup personal freedom, the right to choose. The Civil Wa retreat for liberty, not an advance. Adams and DiLoren issue as a mere pretext for aggrandizing central power federal tyranny as the war's greatest legacy. And Lincoln. Adams's book, winner of something called the Paradigm Book Award, is somewhat mistitled. He does not argue the case for Southern secession so much as take it for granted. He sees secession as inseparable from self- determination, a right invoked by Americans at the Revolution and invari- ably cheered by them when exercised elsewhere in the world. Admitting the principle, the question might still arise why the right of self-government in America should inhere in a state, as opposed to a larger or smaller political community or even a lone individual. To answer, one must turn to the thorny logic of state sovereignty and the labyrinthine constitutional theories of John C. Calhoun. But Adams has no interest in going there, nor in tracing the actual events that led to secession. Seceders had a right to do as they did, and their motives were nobody's business but their own. The responsibility for a calamitous war therefore lies not with them, nor with the men who staged "that Fourth of July display of cannon at Fort Sumter" that "didn't hurt anyone" (p. 113). No, the real blame lies with Lincoln, who manipulated the face-off at Sumter and then seized on it to wage a vicious, criminal war. Adams has ransacked the wartime anti-Lincoln British press and found there plenty of cartoons and commentary (which he deems "objective" since they come from a third party) to show that the Northern rationale for fighting was all a sham. "Union" was a meaningless abstraction, while slavery was entirely a post-hoc rationalization. No one dreamed it had anything do with the war until John Stuart Mill, locked in a literary duel with Charles Dickens, lamely proposed the idea in an 1862 essay which Lincoln and his propagandizers, desperate to invigorate their failing cause, then grabbed for their purpose. These smokescreens of Union and slavery have beguiled historians for a century, but now the truth stands revealed. The real cause of this war, as indeed of all wars of separation, was taxes. According to Adams, secession posed no threat to the well-being of anyone in the North until March 1861, when the Confederates adopted a low tariff just as the U.S. Congress jacked protection to new heights. Here, to the This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 03:55:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms FELLER / Libertarians in the Attic 187 moneymen of New York and Bos American free trade zone would re invite rampant cross-border smugg fed on captive Southern markets. Union sank. "The Wall Street boy were now all hot for conquest. L secession was "where, then, shall w Sumter was vitally important as th once the city itself fell into Confe Having gone to war for taxes and ferocity and bloodthirstiness to ri conflict were rewritten or erased of civil liberties, persecution of civ "The only thing missing was the tioned their transgressions, and h moral bearings, Lincoln, Grant, monsters, not held up as heroes an Adams's disdain for convention posture of libertarian pacifism is renounces all wars except those American exceptionalism or bene dirty empire, condemned by its co can and Spanish-American wars Civil War was the worst; for her "failed miserably, tragically, and h should have been resolved by ju 229). At his best, Adams presents an arresting challenge to the moral assump- tions of the orthodox Civil War narrative. Would historians indeed palliate the scorched-earth policy of Grant and Sherman if we did not approve of their cause? Do our ends of abolishing slavery justify their means of waging war? Why--Adams touches this nerve without mercy--do we recoil at Sherman's brutal methods against the Plains Indian tribes, but not at those he employed on the march to the sea? Still, the omissions and ellipses in Adams's case are no less glaring than those he decries among Lincoln apologists. It is one thing to argue that secession did not necessitate war. It is quite another to deny, in the face of their careful public statements, that the makers of secession acted with intent to preserve slavery. Adams concedes that "a flood of verbiage from Southern leaders and writers" "vociferously maintained" that protecting slavery was the motive for secession. But as this would sully the liberating purpose he This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 03:55:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 188 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / JUNE 2004 attaches to it, he feels compelled to contradict them. T secede to defend slavery "just does not make sense, danger until destroying it became the means to ach justify) Northern victory in a war begun for other en Like many other Lincoln debunkers, Adams invok vows of noninterference with slavery not to exhibit h tion, but rather to show his utter lack of concern w statements in debate with Stephen Douglas and els negrophobe who cared nothing for slaves as people. was decidedly a worse racist than a Southern gentle who felt a paternal solicitude for the humans unde most Northerners, just plain hated blacks. Ergo he pos and no one could have thought that he did. Ergo there it; ergo Southerners could not have seceded to protect said to the contrary. To call this train of reasoning selective is to underst unexplained, if slavery was not truly at issue in 1860-1 went to such pains to say that it was-why they wo calls "a monstrous deception" (p. 70). Political expe offer no answer, for planting the secessionist case on obviously the worst way to court Northern and fo happens, disregarding secessionists' words entirely, informed neutral testimony on the nature of their Adams likes to invoke for other purposes. The wou and out of Congress during the secession crisis, men li had no goal other than to hold the country togethe hide the true grievances that threatened it. If anyone the real obstacles to saving the Union were, they d proposed to mollify the South were strangely silent silent, in fact, on everything but slavery. Adams igno Adams's version of Reconstruction follows straig everything was the fault of blacks and Yankees. Pr bloodthirsty maniacs who inflamed debate over slav hope of cooperative, gradual emancipation. After Ap aimed to "exterminate [Southern] society in every Carpetbaggers swarmed in to feast on the carcass of th slaves, many now carrying guns, they preached v premacy, and "the illiterate and simple-minded freedm of their guile." The Union League functioned as their t defense, Southern whites rallied to the Ku Klux Klan. F playful, veterans' organization, the KKK countered This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 03:55:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms FELLER / Libertarians in the Attic 189 and proved itself "a necessity for end, order was restored, but at hatreds and "a zeal for white su itself, but to the vicious way th (being no racial zealot) had lived, mongers" and forestalled this lega This is no place to delve into th infest nearly every page of When as it is, one cannot simply dismi argument is shallow and sloppy sufficient to lull the unwary. He q Inaugural (which he labels "psyc marks that purportedly expose these incriminating words are bog and then sanctified by endless rep has become a staple verse in anti-L of Jefferson Davis penned by a professor. Where he got it, no one Adams displays the standard a footnotes and a short bibliography the war as hopelessly biased, but a ideological quarters (Karl Marx, Kenneth Stampp) to buttress parti technique of crediting dubious t reversing the meaning of other nience him goes beyond fair bou been tested, if not transgressed, f without much professional opprob defense of Adams, but perhaps i method and, if not to forswear te it with greater circumspection. Adams for breaking rules we dis The thesis of Thomas DiLorenz Abraham Lincoln was a Whig, a handouts and government contr Lincoln joined the Republicans, go war in order to implement his sta he could have managed a peacef else in the world, had such been h the Constitution, the rights of sta stood athwart Lincoln's plans for d This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 03:55:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 190 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / JUNE 2004 Today's federal government is a centralized tyran corruption and taxes, and Abraham Lincoln was its arc What gives this all a veneer of plausibility is its a salient facts. Lincoln was indeed an admirer of Henr Clay's American System. And the Republicans did impo subsidize colleges and railroads, nationalize money an federal power with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Ame has to do to make his case is connect these results with the thread of Lincoln's design, erase the slavery issue by trotting out the familiar argument that turns Lincoln's nuanced opposition into unnuanced support, and omit everything else. Like Charles Adams, DiLorenzo adorns his text with scholarly-looking quotations, citations, and authorities. He relies less on apocrypha, but exerts his powers of logic to conjure eye-popping new meanings out of old facts. Obviously secession was legitimate and everyone knew it; for if such a right did not exist, there would have been no point in forcing postwar Southern governments to renounce it. Lincoln's first inaugural, abjuring the use of force except to hold federal property and collect revenues, proves that all he really cared about was the tariff. He also was no lover of democracy; otherwise he never would have tried to start up new Southern governments with only 10 percent of the voters. Reconstruction historians like Stampp and Foner are really racist because they deify the white supremacist Lincoln, a man who said worse things about blacks than scholars of the old Dunning school ever did. After this soapbox tirade, Jeffrey Hummel's Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men is a breath of fresh air. Hummel is a real historian. He reads with breadth and perception and acknowledges an "enormous intellectual debt" to those he disagrees with. The jewel-like bibliographic essays that close his chapters engage the literature deeply instead of picking at its fringes. Hummel's respect has been repaid: where Adams and DiLorenzo wave endorsements from the editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun (who calls one "a lovely example of the way history should be written" and the other "a laser beam of fact and analysis"), Hummel earns guarded praise from the likes of Gary Gallagher, Kenneth Stampp, and Robert Middlekauff. Hummel does not waste energy denying the obvious: slavery prompted secession. He reproves neo-Confederates who traffic in "blase indulgence of black slavery, censuring animosity toward abolitionists, and fawning apologetics for Jefferson Davis's despotism"-a critique that Adams, who cites Hummel approvingly, seems to have missed (p. 5). Hummel's object is not to excuse slavery or whitewash the Confederacy, but to dissociate the question of Southern secession from that of Northern response, and make a case for letting the South go on both antislavery and libertarian grounds. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 03:55:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms FELLER / Libertarians in the Attic 191 Hummel classifies Civil War h (James Ford Rhodes), revisionist (Charles Beard), cultural (Arthu tionist (Foner, McPherson, Stamp and fifth put slavery at the hear secession predetermined war. B center in the approach to war, well-crafted) neo-abolitionist a slavery does he reveal a distincti When he gets to the war, Hum more in the bibliographic essays he casts secession in a libertarian despite deep commitment to th radical tradition of '76 in its d tion, and laissez faire," says Hu the main motive for separation liberating thrust was immediatel Davis mounted a conservative counter-revolution-a Confederate Thermidor- and erected an absolutist central government that fought and lost the war Davis's heavy-handed repression destroyed Southern morale, while h forced industrialization wasted and misallocated resources. His policy of conventional war along the perimeters required crushing expenditures and led to certain military defeat. "State socialism" and hidebound West Poin strategy together did the Confederacy in. For the Union too, most of what went wrong in the war was the fault of government, while the private sector saved the cause. Abraham Lincoln imbecility and power-madness compounded his dogged statism. If not for his blundering incompetence and constant interference in military matters, the North might have won sooner. Federal taxation and bank and currency regulation subverted Northern productivity; still the Union's war econom outperformed the Confederacy's because it relied more on private enterprise. Contrary to conventional wisdom, volunteers made better soldiers than regulars, though stodgy professional officers (government bureaucrats!) waste their strengths by drilling out initiative and throwing away lives with stupid by-the-book tactics. The much-criticized substitute feature of the Union draf actually made recruitment more efficient by implementing a free market in soldiering. The Sanitary Commission, being a voluntary organization instea of an official bureaucracy, of course performed miracles, and of course Lincoln hated it. In short, the Union and Confederacy thrived to precisely the extent they followed market precepts in conducting their war efforts. Evaluating the Civil War as an object lesson in freedom-of-choice doctrine might seem a little This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 03:55:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 192 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / JUNE 2004 strange, the aims and methods of war being inherentl the record on both sides contains mixed success and failure and what-if history is resistant to disproof, Hummel can argue with impunity that No and South would both have done better had they tried another way. He applies the same purity test to abolitionists, charging those wh opposed secession with betraying their principles. Abolition's true fou tion, according to Hummel, was not religious or moral objection to tre human beings as property, but hatred for compulsion of any kind. abolitionists were "consistent opponents of government coercion at all els." One, Lysander Spooner, stayed true to this libertarian conviction thro the war and Reconstruction, but most succumbed to the allure of "Sta power and social hierarchy" and backed the Union war effort (p. 206). Unlike Adams's and DiLorenzo's, Hummel's take on Reconstruction departs sharply from Lost Cause orthodoxy. When writing about events that echo directly in current affairs, historians often slip into framing their narratives of what happened against their idea of what should have been. Nowhere in American historiography is this more apparent than Reconstruc- tion. For a Foner or Blight, the standard for what should have been is a faster, fuller approach to racial equality. For Hummel, the yardstick is not result but process: people stray from the true path when they depart from market mechanisms and freedom of choice, which-if left to work their magic- would always produce the best outcomes. As he remarks, neo-abolitionists, being "modern advocates of government assistance and affirmative action," are comfortable with Reconstruction statism but "uneasy with the confidence that Radical Republicans and abolitionists displayed in free labor and market competition." For him it is just the reverse. Reconstruction was wrongheaded but in some ways not radical enough. Hummel decries force-fed racial elevation through civil rights laws and "tax-supported, compulsory schools." But he applauds Thaddeus Stevens's land distribution program "as a just application of laissez faire principles, similar to homesteading" (pp. 308, 315, 310).3 Reconstruction's "military paternalism" did harm by sapping the freedmen's initiative and undercutting self-help. Still they made steady postwar gains in income and landownership: "without doubt, the market did much better by blacks than government at any level." But national banking regulations hurt them by impeding the flow of credit, and finally in the 1890s resentful whites, aided by "the country's latest State-worshipping reform movement, progres- sivism," reimposed a system of official repression (pp. 318-19, 327-28). The Jim Crow laws were "just one particularly ominous example of the new willingness on the part of Americans generally to employ government power to achieve social goals" (p. 328). In Hummel's scheme, segregation and integration are not moral opposites but evil twins, because both are instru- This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 03:55:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms FELLER / Libertarians in the Attic 193 ments of official coercion. The pro segregated or forcibly integrated, wealth to brainwash their minds. T Civil War. Reversing America's tr Jacksonian minimalist state and ment. In its wake came governm debt, universal taxation, a standi subsidies and regulation, veterans' and fire departments, licensing fo Hummel's summary judgment is i "the last, great coercive blight on another, in the end still greater, Hummel denies that preserving virtue in unity by force, no myst equation of disunion with the deat secession was an expression of l morally bankrupt reason to wage Hummel is least convincing wh economic theory instead of the formidable because, unlike Adam talking about, criticizes policies i of people, and does not shirk the r question remains: how, without does not duck the issue by distin abolition was an unintended con accomplishment" (p. 352). If, in ret then war was justified. But war was not necessary, for dent Confederacy could not stop which would soon have reduced s pation. Alternatively, slaves might treasure, however high, could hard And in that event, self-empower more active and fruitful hand i (Perhaps as they did in Haiti?) At what point this passes over dreaming is something that read the least, to involve some large spe cherishes close and rigorous logic favorite indicator for historians Southerners over slavery's imm ended soon under a new gover This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 03:55:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 194 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / JUNE 2004 preservation appears unlikely. Despite the worldwid cipation, the edifice of American slavery was showing of war-fewer, indeed, than it had forty years before. had shown remarkable will and tenacity thus far. O them holding on another forty years until 1900, w been a hopeless anachronism. But it was already an a one would believe it could have lasted until then, excep Much hangs on this speculation; for, on Hummel's assurance of an early end to slavery by other mea permitting peaceful secession collapses-and that ca book. Yet even where it may not persuade, Hummel's r how much our narratives are shaped by unexamined way things ought to be. The value of nationhood, th meaning of freedom-all are worth questioning, even if Of course the point cuts both ways: Hummel's own markets rests at bottom on neither historical nor logica a theoretical dogma as unreachable by argument as r All of these books challenge historians to attend to h craft. Even where the arguments are outrageous, they makes them so; the self-scrutiny that results is always for academics may go beyond diligence in ordering three books carry a simple message for our times: gover evil. To point that moral, Adams and DiLorenzo contor systematically erase slavery as an element in Civil methods nearly resemble those of Holocaust denie respectability the latter never did. Exposing them is d the subject complex, but divergent understandings of political, ideological, and even religious differences cannot be bridged.4 In my experience, argument about usually unnecessary with those who share certain futile with those who don't. Still we have a responsibility to try. The popularity of these books reminds us that academics live in a cocoon, which we mistake at our peril for the world. It is a comfortable cocoon, filled with people and ideas we feel at ease with. But outside that cocoon, convictions are being shaped that will affect us all. The inclination to ignore ersatz scholarship and go about our business is strong, for the costs of engaging it are high. But if we believe what we say we do-that knowing history is important, for such knowledge has conse- quences-then the costs of neglect may be higher. Daniel Feller is a member of the Department of History and editor of The Papers of Andrew Jackson at the University of Tennessee. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 03:55:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  FELLER / Libertarians in the Attic 195 Thanks to Steve Ash, Jim Huston, and J 1. On February 3, 2004, The Real Lincol Course of Human Events placed at 21,0 adoptions, was at 12,101. At a historia representative for displaying a towering p short stack of a much better book. "You one." 2. DiLorenzo at least may have forfeited this claim. He recently spoke on Lincoln at a Robert E. Lee/Stonewall Jackson Day Dinner hosted by the Knoxville camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The program featured a drill and flag ceremony by uniformed Confederate re-enactors and concluded with the singing of "Dixie." If DiLorenzo is not a neo-Confederate, he seems to hold no qualms about public association with them. 3. Hummel sees educating the freedpeople as an admirable endeavor until it was taken over by government, when it became, as it already was in the North, "the prime instrument for molding social conformity" (p. 315). Later, under Jim Crow, public schools became a pernicious tool to subsidize white education at black taxpayers' expense. Homesteads, by contrast, were not really government handouts, since government held no rightful claim to unworked land in the first place. 4. For some efforts to reason over the divide, see the Civil War magazine North and South. This content downloaded from 192.231.40.19 on Mon, 09 Dec 2024 03:55:44 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms