American History

In fact, he's right that lots of other countries got rid of slavery peacefully and by remuneration of people who held human property entirely legally under the previous laws. The phase "massive public bailout of slaveowners" is jarring, but it's not a historically accurate analogy. Slaves in the south were one of the few economic asset in the South that held their value. Throughout the rest of the South, the land and cotton were both on an arc toward losing their value. Slavery itself was not a faltering economic trade. The cash crops they harvested were losing their value (due to a combination of land depletion and growing competition from Egyptian and Indian cotton crops). Cotton & tobacco could wipe out a soil's fertility for a decade. But the labor of the men and women and children imprisoned by slavery held its value.

Where he's wrong is in saying Lincoln brought on the war and (strangely enough) ascribing the impetus for an alternative course of action to Lincoln. In Ron Paul's "unevolving" view of the Constitution, it should be the Congress, not the Executive, who has the responsibility for changing policies. It would be Congress who would have to authorize the payments to slaveholders and pass laws to mandate receipt of those payments and relinquishing title to the human property. Of course in Ron Paul's world view, the federal government couldn't compel ending of slavery at all--it would be a state's prerogative. Any federal ending of slavery in his scheme of things would be a matter of federal overreach. In this, he's in lockstep with the slaveocracy of the time (and Lincoln, too, by the way, who thought he couldn't end slavery in the states and only could justify by the continuation of the rebellion).

But the wrongest point Paul makes is blaming hostilities on Lincoln. It's not just that Lincoln didn't put a match to a cannon in Charleston Harbor in 1861. There was a growing culture of violent resistance to restrictions on slavery in the 1840s and 1850s. The Mexican-American War was, to a large extent, an effort to extend slaveholding regions of the country. The reaction to the Compromise of 1850 was notably violent and full of promises of hostilities if southern California wasn't allowed to choose a slaveholding economy. The main reason for this is that the South's cash crops were already in economic decline and the slaveholders of the older South needed new lands to sell their slave property off to (as well as undepleted lands to expand their short-staple cotton fields onto). Failure to extend slaveholding lands would eventually start to threaten the economic value of the slaves themselves. And human chattel was by 1860 the most valuable asset in the South.

Pro-slave forces were also the main instigators of violence in the Bloody Kansas wars. There were a few violent Free Soilers (John Brown being the most famous), but the first and second shots were fired by Slavery men and the greater part of the election fraud in Kansas was the work of slavers. Outside of Kansas, there was a growing trend toward the violent repression of anti-slavery ideas. Abolitionists were treated like communists were in the 1950s. What few could be found faced abuse and ostracization. Antislavery literature was subject to interdiction in the US mails. Book burnings were common. Antislavery newspapers didn't exist out fear of such reprisals (there certainly were Southerners opposed to slavery or its extension but none of them published). By 1858 the newest trend was lynching Yankee agitators. As with any lynching system, only a few cases sufficed to silent the masses. After the Republican Party was formed in 1854 and supplanted the Whigs as the opposition party in the 1856 elections, Southerners increasingly declared their willingness to fight to maintain their peculiar institution. Long before Lincoln called up troops to prevent the rebellion, Confederate states were organizing militias to enforce the Secession by violence.

Did Lincoln maneuver the Confederates into firing the first shot at Fort Sumter? Yes. But it didn't take much effort on his part. They were long-since ready to make a bloody fight of it. Did Lincoln radically extend the powers of the executive branch? Yes. But he did so in the context of putting down a violent insurrection that geographically surrounded the national capital. It was the South that started the fighting and the South that started the tone of violence that, along the Union's unique federal structure, made the fighting all-but-inevitable. The election of any Republican president, whether it took until 1864 or 1868, was going to provoke a secession. Blaming Lincoln for the Civil War is a distortion of history.

I'm from the South. I love the South, but there's just no reason to pretend that our section and our dominant political factions were not the primary instigators in the Civil War.