A New Look at the "Civil War"

by Carl Pearlston

While barge traveling down the Mississippi this Spring, we stopped at Vicksburg to tour the historic Civil War (or as it is variously termed in the South, the War Between the States, the War for Southern Independence, or the War of Northern Aggression) battlefield marking the city's siege and surrender, which gave the Union final control over the river and divided the Confederacy. Like so many, I've always been fascinated and puzzled by this tragic war in which some 630,000 Union and Confederate soldiers lost their lives. I had always learned and believed that the South's "peculiar institution" of slavery was the cause of that conflict, but in discussions with the local tour guide, he opined that the real cause of the war was Union tariff policy. This was a novel idea which piqued my curiosity. Fortuitously, a day or two later in the museum at Natchez, I found a book entitled War for What, by Francis Springer, which purported to give "the real cause of the war between the states."

Springer points out, amid a good deal of apologia for slavery, that in 1860, the 15 Southern states had 8 million whites and 4 ½ million black slaves, compared to 19 million whites and ¼ million blacks in the North's 19 states. The vast areas of undeveloped western territory were rapidly being settled by people whose economic interests were not with the South. It found itself continually outvoted in both the Congress and Senate, especially on commercial regulations, with the prospect of an increasing majority against it. The nub of the problem was that the North wanted high tariffs on imported goods to protect its own manufactured products, while the South wanted low tariffs on imports and exports since it exported cotton and tobacco to Europe and imported manufactured goods in exchange. High tariffs in effect depressed the price for the South's agricultural exports; the South paid high prices for what it bought and got low prices for what it sold because of the federal tariff policy which the South was powerless to change. Southerners viewed themselves as being dominated by the mercantile interests of the North who profited from these high tariffs.

At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Virginia had proposed a requirement for a 2/3 majority to enact laws regulating commerce and levying tariffs, which were the chief revenue of the federal government. George Mason of Virginia stated "The effect of a provision to pass commercial laws by a simple majority would be to deliver the south bound hand and foot to the eastern states". Virginia withdrew its amendment at the Convention in the interest of securing adoption of the Constitution, but ratification was with the proviso that it could be rescinded whenever the powers granted to the Union were used to oppress, and Virginia could then withdraw from the Union. True to George Mason's prediction, the high tariff of 1828 did bring the South to the verge of rebellion, leading Senator John C. Calhoun to unsuccessfully champion the concept of Nullification and the doctrine of the Concurrent Majority in 1833 to ensure that the South could have a veto power over commercial acts passed by a simple majority in Congress and the Senate.

Springer's book had certainly raised a host of questions, when I was informed of a new book entitled When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Succession, by Charles Adams, a noted scholar and writer on the history of taxation. It is a fascinating and somewhat disturbing revisionist history, for it posits the Civil War as but a continuation of the tariff controversy from 1828, ignoring the issues of slavery and the admission of new non-slave states from the territories as reasons for the South's secession and the resultant conflict.

Adams takes the skeleton which Springer had sketched and fills out its flesh with statistics, facts, and timely and instructive details from the newspapers of both the US and England. Consider, for example, a quote by author Charles Dickens in a London periodical in December 1861, "Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many other evils....The quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel". As Adams notes, the South paid an undue proportion of federal revenues derived from tariffs, and these were expended by the federal government more in the North than the South: in 1840, the South paid 84% of the tariffs, rising to 87% in 1860. They paid 83% of the $13 million federal fishing bounties paid to New England fishermen, and also paid $35 million to Northern shipping interests which had a monopoly on shipping from Southern ports. The South, in effect, was paying tribute to the North. The address of Texas Congressman Reagan on 15 January 1861 summarizes this discontent: "You are not content with the vast millions of tribute we pay you annually under the operation of our revenue law, our navigation laws, your fishing bounties, and by making your people our manufacturers, our merchants, our shippers. You are not satisfied with the vast tribute we pay you to build up your great cities, your railroads, your canals. You are not satisfied with the millions of tribute we have been paying you on account of the balance of exchange which you hold against us. You are not satisfied that we of the South are almost reduced to the condition of overseers of northern capitalists. You are not satisfied with all this; but you must wage a relentless crusade against our rights and institutions." As the London Times of 7 Nov 1861 stated: "The contest is really for empire on the side of the North and for independence on that of the South....".

If the South did not secede to protect slavery, why was that prominently stated as the principal reason in the secession resolutions of the various Confederate states? Adams claims that slavery was never in danger, pointing out that Lincoln pledged to enforce the fugitive slave law, declared he had no right or intention to interfere with slavery, and supported a new irrevocable constitutional amendment to protect slavery forever. The South's proclamation that slavery was in danger was a political ploy full of political cant to stir up secessionist fever. As the North American Review (Boston October 1862) put it: "Slavery is not the cause of the rebellion ....Slavery is the pretext on which the leaders of the rebellion rely, 'to fire the Southern Heart' and through which the greatest degree of unanimity can be produced....Mr. Calhoun, after finding that the South could not be brought into sufficient unanimity by a clamor about the tariff, selected slavery as the better subject for agitation". An editorial in the Charleston Mercury 2 days before the November 1860 election stated: "The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government from a confederated republic, to a national sectional despotism." And on 21 January 1861, five days before Louisiana seceded, the New Orleans Daily Crescent editorialized: "They [the South] know that it is their import trade that draws from the people's pockets sixty or seventy millions of dollars per annum, in the shape of duties, to be expended mainly in the North, and in the protection and encouragement of Northern interests....These are the reasons why these people [the North] do not wish the South to secede from the Union."

When South Carolina seceded in December 1860, followed by the other Confederate states, all the powerful moneyed interests in the North were in favor of appeasing the South over slavery in order to preserve the Union. If the South were to be a sovereign nation with low tariffs, it could undermine Northern business and trade. The South believed that it did not need the North, since it could buy the goods it needed from Europe, but the North needed the South as a market for Northern goods.

The Republican platform of 1860 called for higher tariffs; that was implemented by the new Congress in the Morill tariff of March 1861, signed by President Buchanan before Lincoln took the oath of office. It imposed the highest tariffs in US history, with over a 50% duty on iron products and 25% on clothing; rates averaged 47%. The nascent Confederacy followed with a low tariff, essentially creating a free-trade zone in the South. Prior to this "war of the tariffs", most Northern newspapers had called for peace through conciliation, but many now cried for war. The Philadelphia Press on 18 March 1861 demanded a blockade of Southern ports, because, if not, "a series of customs houses will be required on the vast inland border from the Atlantic to West Texas. Worse still, with no protective tariff, European goods will under-price Northern goods in Southern markets. Cotton for Northern mills will be charged an export tax. This will cripple the clothing industries and make British mills prosper. Finally, the great inland waterways, the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Ohio Rivers, will be subject to Southern tolls."

Earlier, in December 1860, before any secession, the Chicago Daily Times foretold the disaster that Southern free ports would bring to Northern commerce: "In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all of its immense profits. Our manufactories would be in utter ruins. Let the South adopt the free-trade system, or that of a tariff for revenue, and these results would likely follow."

Similarly, the economic editor of the NY Times, who had maintained for months that secession would not injure Northern commerce or prosperity, changed his mind on 22 March 1861: "At once shut down every Southern port, destroy its commerce and bring utter ruin on the Confederate States." On 18 March, the Boston Transcript noted that while the Southern states had claimed to secede over the slavery issue, now "the mask has been thrown off and it is apparent that the people of the principal seceding states are now for commercial independence. They dream that the centres of traffic can be changed from Northern to Southern ports....by a revenue system verging on free trade...."

In late March 1861, over a hundred leading commercial importers in New York, and a similar group in Boston, informed the collector of customs that they would not pay duties on imported goods unless these same duties were collected at Southern ports. This was followed by a threat from New York to withdraw from the Union and establish a free-trade zone. Prior to these events, Lincoln's plan was to evacuate Fort Sumter and not precipitate a war, but he now determined to reinforce it rather than suffer prolonged economic disaster in a losing trade war. That reinforcement effort was met with force by the South, and the dreadful conflict was upon us.

Adams attacks the opposing views of those like Horace Greeley and John Stuart Mill, who held that slavery was the one cause of the secession and the War, as uninformed and based on inadequate research. Mill's article of February 1862, reprinted in Harper's magazine, was a welcome shot in the arm for the Northern cause, giving it an undeserved moral virtue.

As part of this revisionist history, Adams discusses Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, his order for arrest of Chief Justice Taney after the Justice's opinion holding such suspension to be unconstitutional, the military courts martial which replaced civilian courts and imprisoned some 14,000 dissidents or Copperheads for varied opposition to the war, the closure of some 300 newspapers for opposition to the war, Reconstruction, the rise of the Klan, the planned trial of Jefferson Davis, and the legality of secession. He also provides a critical examination of the Gettysburg Address, of which one reader stated, as quoted on the bookjacket, "Having read this book, I can no longer, with ease, recite the 'Gettysburg Address' or sing the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic'."

What then are we to make of the case Adams sets forth? Was Karl Marx correct when he wrote in 1861: "The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for sovereignty." While historians may differ, Adams makes a convincing case. But one fact is clear: without its "peculiar institution" of slavery, the South would have never developed its agricultural might so dependent on masses of black laborers. Without slavery and the resultant plantation economy, the cultural divide and fierce sectional rivalry between North and South over tariff policy would not have developed. So, in that sense, slavery was at the root of the entire conflict between the North and the South, though tariffs may well have been the immediate precipitating factor, just as Adams contends. Whatever the cause, it is hard to quarrel with Adams' conclusion that "... the Civil war was not just a great national American tragedy, but even more so, a tragedy for civilization .... In 1861, the world's first great democracy, which was going to show the world what great benefits and virtue this new form of government could bring, failed miserably, tragically, and horribly."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/pearlston1.html

TO THE MEMORY OF THE SIX THOUSAND SOUTHERN SOLDIERS HERE BURIED . . . WHO DIED IN CAMP DOUGLAS PRISON . . . 1862-1865

Researched and edited by C. B. Pritchett

The South had Andersonville, an internationally known reminder of prison camp hardships and deaths, immortalized in song, literature, film and by many Union Monuments. The North had Camp Douglas, a little known civil war prison in Chicago that set records for prison mortality, hidden in lost and incomplete records and suppressed publicity. To the victor belongs the silence.

Andersonville is the National Prisoner of War Historical Site, with white headstones for each of the 12, 912 Union prisoners who died there with a 475 acre park and monuments erected by every Union State and the National Government. All of the main highways of South Georgia have directional signs to aid the tens of thousand who visit there yearly.

Look North to Chicago and you will find at least 6000 Confederate soldiers buried in a mass grave on one acre of land. There is only one monument to these prisoners who died, erected in 1895, 30 years after the war, by Southerners and their friends in Chicago and the North.

According to Dorothy Wells Earlandson, writing in Chicago's Heritage Guest, A few native Chicagoans knew of its existence, you see, Chicago has never publicized its one time camp. There are no highway directional signs. We will never see a film about Camp Douglas or any of the other notorious Northern prisons. The winners write the history books, and for 130 years they have been silent about their prison camps.

The Oak Wood Cemetery monument, erected TO THE MEMORY OF THE SIX THOUSAND SOUTHERN SOLDIERS HERE BURIED . . . WHO DIED IN CAMP DOUGLAS PRISON . . . 1862-65, sustains interest in the camp located near the shore of Lake Michigan. Before the camp closed, it has earned the dubious distinctions of Aundisputed first place in mortality among Northern prisons.

Prisoners from Fort Donelson arrived at Camp Douglas in February, 1862, and within one year the monthly mortality rate was at ten percent, a rate unsurpassed by any other prison in the North or South. Ultimately, one in five prisoners died, establishing the camp's reputation for extermination. The highest death rate at Andersonville was nine percent set for August, 1864.

Three traits distinguished Camp Douglas from other Northern prison camps: high mortality rates, extreme acts of cruelty, and a low official count of prisoners who died compared to documentation from other sources Historical articles and research texts have publicized these facts, but somehow Camp Douglas has escaped the notoriety of Andersonville. The most complete treatment of the horrors of Camp Douglas is contained in George Levy's To Die in Chicago (1994) from which some of the information for this article has been drawn. Levy was educated at the University of Chicago and he has served as Assistant Attorney General for the state of Illinois.

The high mortality rate can be attributed to several factors: overcrowding, unhealthy living conditions, ineffective medical treatment, inadequate food supply, and brutality. The war lasted longer than expected, resulting in more prisoners tan anticipated. By late 1862 there were 8,962 prisoners in the camp with fewer than 900 guards. Over 200 prisoners were crowded in to barracks averaging 70 feet by 25 feet. As the number increased, tents were erected to house them, with little protection against below zero winds. Huge latrines were left open, so rain washed raw sewage into the drinking water supply. Wooden floors were removed to discourage tunneling, so vermin infected the dirt floors. Rats and mice were commonplace. Some unnamed inmates recollecting the camp 37 years later said that they raised the kitchen floor to catch big gray rats which were made into rat pies. When cholera and a smallpox epidemic erupted, free medicine sent by the South was withheld as contraband of war. Food rations were restricted, partly to cut costs and partly as retaliation for Southern victories. When control of the camp was finally passed to the Chicago Police department, medical supplies were cut off and food severely restricted.

On June 30, 1862, Commandant Colonel Tucker was warned by D. V. McVickar, the Post Surgeon that the surface of the ground is becoming saturated with the filth and slop from the privies, kitchens, and quarters and must produce serious result to health as soon as the hot weather sets in. AColonel Tucker was overwhelmed; there were 326 patients in the hospital and many more in the barracks.

Coincidentally, Henry W. Bellows of the Sanitary Commission sent a negative report on the camp to Colonel Hoffman the same day: Sir, the amount of standing water, unpoliced grounds, of foul sinks, of unventilated and crowded barracks, of general disorder, of soil reeking miasmatic accretions, of rotten bones and emptying of camp kettles, is enough to drive a sanitarium to despair. I hope that no thought will be entertained of mending matters.

The absolute abandonment of the spot seems to be the only judicious course, I do not believe that any amount of drainage would purge that soil loaded with accumulated filth or those barracks fetid with two stories of vermin and animal exhalations. Nothin but fire can cleanse them.The Chicago Tribune wrote on September 22, 1862, AIt is not wonder they died so rapidly. It is only a wonder that the whole eight-thousand of the filthy hogs did not go home in pine boxes instead of on their feet.

Civilian doctors, who inspected Camp Douglas on April 5, 1863, called it an extermination camp. They drew an unrelenting picture of wretched inmates without change of clothing, covered, with vermin, in wards reeking with filth and foul air, and blankets in rags . . . it will be seen that 260 out of 3,800 prisoners had died in twenty-one days, a rate of mortality which, if continued would secure their total extermination in about 320 days.

Prisoners were deprived of clothing to discourage escapes. Many wore sacks with head and arm holes cut out; few had underwear. Blankets to offset the bitter northern winter were confiscated from the few that had them. The weakest froze to death. The Chicago winter of 1864 was devastating. The loss of 1,091 lives in only four months was heavies for any like period in the camp's history, and equaled the deaths at the highest rate of Andersonville from February to May, 1864 (OR Ser-II-Vol. 8, 986-1003). Yet, it is the name of Andersonville that burns in infamy, while there exists a northern counterpart of little shame.

Mortality rates increased as Colonel Sweet complained on October 11, 1864, that mortality at the camp was up to 35% since June. In November 1864, the death toll was 217; another 323 died in December, 308 in January 1864, and 243 in February.

THE DEADLY DEADLINE

The Sparrow diary specifically mentions the dead line at Camp Douglas. Prisoners were shot for crossing the line there just as at such other Federal prisons as Camp Morton, Indiana; Camp Chase and Johnson's Island in Ohio; Point Lookout, Maryland; Newport New, VA; and Fort Delaware for violating stated bounds, usually to answer the call of nature. Several Confederate prisoners were shot or bayoneted to death while in the very act of relieving themselves.

The arctic weather led to additional suffering. Another punishment was to make the men pull down their pants and sit, with nothing under them, on the snow and frozen ground. I have know men to be kept sitting until you could see their prints of some days after in the snow and ice. When the [guards] got weary of this they commenced whipping, making the men lay on a barrel, and using their belts, which had a leather clasp with a sharp edge, cutting through the skin.

A prisoner swore that when the men who were being punished this way attempted to sit on their coattails they were cruelly kicked in the back by the guards and forced to sit longer on their bare bones. Prisoners were forced to stand in the snow for hours without moving, and guards checked footprints to see if they had moved. Those who did received lashes. Some prisoners who arrived in the bitter cold weather lost toes, fingers and ears. One improvised two wooden pegs as substitutes for feet and hobbled around surprisingly well.

The mildest cruelty took the form of random firing into the barracks to disturb the prisoners sleep, shooting prisoners who moved too slowly, or hanging them by their feet to encourage them to take the oath to the United States. The more common severe tortures included reaching for the grub, bending over without bending the knees for several hours, causing blood to gush from the prisoners nose and protruding eyeballs almost bursting from their sockets with pain, or being lashed a hundred times with the metal buckle end of a belt. Solitary confinement meant being squeezed into a ten foot square room with twenty others, with only a ten-inch window for ventilation.

A fearsome animal came to Prison Square on June 28, 1864. The Yanks have fixed a frame near the gate (to Prison Square) with a scantling piece of timber across it, edge up, and about four feet from the ground, which they make our men ride whenever the men do anything that does not please them. It is called The Mule. Men have sat on it till they fainted and fell off. It is like riding a sharp top fence. The mule could be made more painful by adding weights. Sometimes the Yanks would laugh and say, I will give you a pair of spurs which was a bucket of sand tied to each foot. Other prisoners confirmed that men had to ride the mule in the worst winter weather. By 1865 it had grown to 15 feet tall and required a ladder to mount. There was a mule for the garrison in White Oak Square, except there it was called the horse.

A SERIOUS FLAW IN THE RECORD OF CAMP DOUGLAS WAS IN COUNTING (OR MISCOUNTING) THE DEAD

From February 1862, till all had left there, nearly all of the Medical Colleges in the northwest were supplied with the bodies stolen from the dead buried at the city cemetery and the appearance of the graves gives evidence of the truth of this statement.

On June 9, 1862, a difference between the Chicago Tribune and Official Records was reported, with 1,480 men unaccounted for according to the Tribune. One of the reasons was that some deaths were unreported. On July, 186 2, commandant Tucker, in taking command of Camp Douglas, reported, there is scarcely a record left at camp and it will be difficult to ascertain what prisoners have been at the camp or what has become of them.

By March 31, 1863, mortality was again out of control, and diseases claimed 706 prisoners. If true, the toll in two months was only 277 short of the 1862 record. Suspiciously, there are not Camp Douglas returns in the official records for March 1863. The Tribune appears to have counted the dead carefully and indicated that the toll could have been Aupwards of 700.

Unfortunately, record keeping was atrocious. It seems that in the period from February, 1862, to April, 1863, about 728 Confederates were missing. This in not the worst of it. If 700 died in early 1863, as the Tribune and some historians of the period believed, the superintendent should have found 1,636 graves. Various explanations were put forward for this discrepancy. The bodies were being washed into the lake, according to the Tribune, toward the water one mile south. The cemetery was also a favorite hunting ground for grave robbers. Another explanation is that the dead were dumped into unmarked gave and soon lost in the swampy soil. By 1864 about 2,235 prisoners had lost their lives since the prison opened according to the Official Records. This may be 967 short of the true figure at the time, based on the Tribunes figures.

There were 23,637 cases of sickness in 1864, according to the study made at the time. This is more than three times the number shown in official records for the entire 700 days at Camp Douglas; August 1863 to August 1865.

Since they were not reporting to Washington, the number sick in the Barracks (Levy), a lack of reporting deaths would certainly follow. According to the History of Camp Douglas, close to 12,000 prisoners had suffered through the bitter winter of 1862, and 1863 when temperatures fell below zero. From 1,400 to 1,700 lay dead but only 615 could be counted in the desolate graves far from camp. Between 700 and 1000 had disappeared.

On December 1, 1866, only 1,402 graves (of the earlier 2,968) could be identified. Very little care seems to have been taken in the interment of bodies. General A. Hoyt warned that close to 2000 bodies were now unaccounted for. Somehow Camp Douglas was exterminating the dead as well as the living.

THE CONFEDERATE BURIAL MOUND

Oak Woods Cemetery could have become the largest Confederate burial site outside of the South, but subsequent events made it impossible to learn the number buried there. The Oak Woods Cemetery simply buried whatever the Sullivans, (unqualified grave removers) brought in, and numbered the grave markers at Oak Woods according to City Cemetery records. These records cannot be verified because no Confederate burials were recorded with the City Clerk. Also the army failed to supervise, inspect or validate the removals. History had been blindfolded, and there is no way of knowing how many Confederates, or which ones, are at Oak Woods.

On September 1, 1880, General Bingham reported, Amany of the graves are sunken many of the corner stakes are missing. There is evidences that one of the sections has been used as a roadway. The ground around these lots has been raised and improved which gives them the sunken appearance. The mound area was later filled in to the level of the rest of the cemetery.

Other than the modest obelisk on this mound, completed in 1893 by sympathizers from the South, from Chicago, and other parts of the North, there was nothing to distinguish this burial site. Thirty years later, bronze tablets were added with a partial list of the dead. About 100,000 sympathetic persons, including President Grover Cleveland, attended the dedication of the edifice on Memorial Day, 1895. Since that time, nothing has been done to memorialize these unfortunate Confederate prisoners of war, other than a small gathering of supporters each year on Memorial Day.

Camp Douglas has to be the North's best kept secret of the Civil War.

Researched by:

C.B. Pritchett Jr.  http://www.geocities.com/bourbonstreet/2757/issues/camp.htm 

Today’s federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. Thomas J. DiLorenzo gives an account of how this came about in The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War.

As DiLorenzo documents – contrary to conventional wisdom, books about Lincoln, and the lessons taught in schools and colleges – the War between the States was not fought to end slavery; Even if it were, a natural question arises: Why was a costly war fought to end it? African slavery existed in many parts of the Western world, but it did not take warfare to end it. Dozens of countries, including the territorial possessions of the British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, ended slavery peacefully during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Countries such as Venezuela and Colombia experienced conflict because slave emancipation was simply a ruse for revolutionaries who were seeking state power and were not motivated by emancipation per se.

Abraham Lincoln’s direct statements indicated his support for slavery; He defended slave owners’ right to own their property, saying that "when they remind us of their constitutional rights [to own slaves], I acknowledge them, not grudgingly but fully and fairly; and I would give them any legislation for the claiming of their fugitives" (in indicating support for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850).

Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was little more than a political gimmick, and he admitted so in a letter to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase: "The original proclamation has no...legal justification, except as a military measure." Secretary of State William Seward said, "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free. " Seward was acknowledging the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to slaves in states in rebellion against the United States and not to slaves in states not in rebellion.

The true costs of the War between the States were not the 620,000 battlefield-related deaths, out of a national population of 30 million (were we to control for population growth, that would be equivalent to roughly 5 million battlefield deaths today). The true costs were a change in the character of our government into one feared by the likes of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, and Calhoun – one where states lost most of their sovereignty to the central government. Thomas Jefferson saw as the most important safeguard of the liberties of the people "the support of the state governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies."

If the federal government makes encroachments on the constitutional rights of the people and the states, what are their options? In a word, their right to secede. Most of today’s Americans believe, as did Abraham Lincoln, that states do not have a right to secession, but that is false. DiLorenzo marshals numerous proofs that from the very founding of our nation the right of secession was seen as a natural right of the people and a last check on abuse by the central government. For example, at Virginia’s ratification convention, the delegates affirmed "that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to injury or oppression." In Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address (1801), he declared, "If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." Jefferson was defending the rights of free speech and of secession. Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America, "The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; in uniting together they have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the states chooses to withdraw from the compact, it would be difficult to disapprove its right of doing so, and the Federal Government would have no means of maintaining its claims directly either by force or right." The right to secession was popularly held as well. DiLorenzo lists newspaper after newspaper editorial arguing the right of secession. Most significantly, these were Northern newspapers. In fact, the first secession movement started in the North, long before shots were fired at Fort Sumter. The New England states debated the idea of secession during the Hartford Convention of 1814–1815.

Lincoln’s intentions, as well as those of many Northern politicians, were summarized by Stephen Douglas during the senatorial debates. Douglas accused Lincoln of wanting to "impose on the nation a uniformity of local laws and institutions and a moral homogeneity dictated by the central government" that would "place at defiance the intentions of the republic’s founders." Douglas was right, and Lincoln’s vision for our nation has now been accomplished beyond anything he could have possibly dreamed.

The War between the States settled by force whether states could secede. Once it was established that states cannot secede, the federal government, abetted by a Supreme Court unwilling to hold it to its constitutional restraints, was able to run amok over states’ rights, so much so that the protections of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments mean little or nothing today. Not only did the war lay the foundation for eventual nullification or weakening of basic constitutional protections against central government abuses, but it also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

The Real Lincoln contains irrefutable evidence that a more appropriate title for Abraham Lincoln is not the Great Emancipator, but the Great Centralizer.

Foreword to The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War by Thomas J. DiLorenzo. Copyright © 2002 by Thomas J. DiLorenzo. Reprinted with permission.

March 22, 2005

Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics at George Mason University