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Below I’ve posted the audio of a talk by economist and historian Murray Rothbard on America’s only two just wars, the American revolution and the war for southern independence.
Here is Rothbard’s definition of a just war, from an essay based on this talk:
My own view of war can be put simply: a just war exists when a people tries to ward off the threat of coercive domination by another people, or to overthrow an already-existing domination. A war is unjust, on the other hand, when a people try to impose domination on another people, or try to retain an already existing coercive rule over them.
By the way, Rothbard points out in his voluminous history of the US, Conceived in Liberty, that Washington was no Jefferson when it came to the principles of small, decentralized government and personal freedom. Lincoln, however, was an absolute tyrant. He abolished habeas corpus, jailed newspapermen and others for dissent, and waged total war on civilians, all to support the agenda of northern railroads, steel mills and banks.
Here’s a little more on the war for southern independence from that essay. The war of course was really about taxes and corporatism, and Lincoln was as big a racist as anyone in his day (and a longtime advocate of shipping America’s blacks off to Africa or South America).
His (Lincoln’s) major emphasis was on Whig economic statism: high tariffs, huge subsidies to railroads, public works. As one of the nation’s leading lawyers for Illinois Central and other big railroads, indeed, Lincoln was virtually the candidate from Illinois Central and the other large railroads.
One reason for Lincoln’s victory at the convention was that Iowa railroad entrepreneur Grenville M. Dodge helped swing the Iowa delegation to Lincoln. In return, early in the Civil War, Lincoln appointed Dodge to army general. Dodge’s task was to clear the Indians from the designated path of the country’s first heavily subsidized federally chartered trans-continental railroad, the Union Pacific. In this way, conscripted Union troops and hapless taxpayers were coerced into socializing the costs on constructing and operating the Union Pacific. This sort of action is now called euphemistically “the cooperation of government and industry.”
But Lincoln’s major focus was on raising taxes, in particular raising and enforcing the tariff. His convention victory was particularly made possible by support from the Pennsylvania delegation. Pennsylvania had long been the home and the political focus of the nation’s iron and steel industry which, ever since its inception during the War of 1812, had been chronically inefficient, and had therefore constantly been bawling for high tariffs and, later, import quotas. Virtually the first act of the Lincoln administration was to pass the Morrill protective tariff act, doubling existing tariff rates, and creating the highest tariff rates in American history.
In his First Inaugural, Lincoln was conciliatory about maintaining slavery; what he was hard-line about toward the South was insistence on collecting all the customs tariffs in that region. As Lincoln put it, the federal government would “collect the duties and imposts, but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against . . . people anywhere.” The significance of the federal forts is that they provided the soldiers to enforce the customs tariffs; thus, Fort Sumter was at the entrance to Charleston Harbor, the major port, apart from New Orleans, in the entire South. The federal troops at Sumter were needed to enforce the tariffs that were supposed to be levied at Charleston Harbor.
Of course, Abraham Lincoln’s conciliatory words on slavery cannot be taken at face value. Lincoln was a master politician, which means that he was a consummate conniver, manipulator, and liar. The federal forts were the key to his successful prosecution of the war. Lying to South Carolina, Abraham Lincoln managed to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Stimson did at Pearl Harbor 80 years later – maneuvered the Southerners into firing the first shot. In this way, by manipulating the South into firing first against a federal fort, Lincoln made the South appear to be “aggressors” in the eyes of the numerous waverers and moderates in the North.
Outside of New England and territories populated by transplanted New Englanders, the idea of forcing the South to stay in the Union was highly unpopular. In many middle-tier states, including Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, there was a considerable sentiment to mimic the South by forming a middle Confederacy to isolate the pesky and fanatical Yankees. Even after the war began, the Mayor of New York City and many other dignitaries of the city proposed that the city secede from the Union and make peace and engage in free trade with the South. Indeed, Jefferson Davis’s lawyer after the war was what we would now call the “paleo-libertarian” leader of the New York City bar, Irish-Catholic Charles O’Conor, who ran for President in 1878 on the Straight Democrat ticket, in protest that his beloved Democratic Party’s nominee for President was the abolitionist, protectionist, socialist, and fool Horace Greeley.
The Lincoln Administration and the Republican Party took advantage of the overwhelmingly Republican Congress after the secession of the South to push through almost the entire Whig economic program. Lincoln signed no less than ten tariff-raising bills during his administration. Heavy “sin” taxes were levied on alcohol and tobacco, the income tax was levied for the first time in American history, huge land grants and monetary subsidies were handed out to transcontinental railroads (accompanied by a vast amount of attendant corruption), and the government went off the gold standard and virtually nationalized the banking system to establish a machine for printing new money and to provide cheap credit for the business elite. And furthermore, the New Model Army and the war effort rested on a vast and unprecedented amount of federal coercion against Northerners as well as the South; a huge army was conscripted, dissenters and advocates of a negotiated peace with the South were jailed, and the precious Anglo-Saxon right of habeas corpus was abolished for the duration.
seaterk
February 14th, 2010 at 4:10 pm
Or better known as the war of Northern aggression. Funny how you never hear about the other side of things but it’s the winners that write the history books so no surprises here for me. The south was doomed from the start but I think that Lincoln freed the slaves not so much because he was opposed to slavery but as a way to cripple the south economically and ensure that they could never rebel again.
As an aside, its kind of funny that people from the south form the core of Americas armed forces, especially in the areas of combat. Don’t know why that is but it does seem strange.
Mike
February 14th, 2010 at 4:51 pm
Their firey Scots Irish heritage? Their aptitude for shooting and outdoor sports? I happen to be half southern, but I can’t tell you.
Mike
February 14th, 2010 at 5:07 pm
I’ve heard it suggested that the south may have had far better odds if rather than forming a traditional, centralized command and control military structure and meeting the union in open battle, they had chosen the early tactics of the American Revolution. Their weakness in heavy industry would not have been such a hindrance for a guerilla army of riflemen.
Such a fighting force is harder to chase down and slaughter or starve, and their morale and motivation are higher, much higher than that of Lincoln’s poor conscript army.
seaterk
February 14th, 2010 at 5:22 pm
Mike,
I’ll just reference Sherman’s march through the south as an answer to the suggestion that guerrilla warfare would have worked. You don’t win wars with that tactic, not even the American Revolutionary war was won with that tactic but with large fielded armies and a lot of help from the French, otherwise we’d have been toast and still saying God save the queen.
Personally, I think that the Souths mistake was not invading the North. You can’t win on just defense and that’s all the south really did for the whole war. If they had caused enough damage (read economic pain) to the elites behind the war they might have forced Lincoln to accept the break away of the south.
Mike
February 14th, 2010 at 5:55 pm
I’m by no means well-versed in military history, but I’m not sure a guerilla resistance wouldn’t have worked. Just look at how much trouble the French had in Algeria, and what Afghanistan and Vietnam have done. In the 1860s there were no bomber aircraft, either.
During Sherman’s march, most of Georgia’s soldiers were away fighting in Tennessee, so the guerillas he encountered were way outnumbered.
I don’t see how an invasion of the north would have gone well. From a psy-ops point of view, it would have been a bad move, antagonizing the large portion of northerners who either supported the south or didn’t care either way.
The early tactics of the revolution worked fine, but Washington and some others had notions of being grand commanders in the old European style. I’ve read that they ended up alienating a lot of enthusiastic militiamen with their heavy-handedness. A guerilla war doesn’t mean a disorganized war — it can mean an organically organized one, a more efficient, capitalist approach than what Davis undertook with his conscription, trade regulations and paper money.