Down with the Brits and the Yankees

by Murray N. Rothbard

The idea of a just war has occupied the energies of some of our civilization's most learned and respected figures. For war, as a grave act of killing, needs to be justified.

My own view can be put simply: a just war exists when a people try 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 tries to impose domination on another people, or tries to retain an already existing coercive rule over them.

My ideological and political activism has focused on opposition to America's wars, first because I have believed our waging them to be unjust, and second because war, in the penetrating phrase of the libertarian Randolph Bourne, has always been the "health of the State," an instrument for the aggrandizement of State power over the health, the lives, and the prosperity of its subject citizens and social institutions. Even a just war cannot be entered into lightly, and an unjust one must, of course, be anathema.

There are two wars in American history that were, in my view, assuredly and unquestionably proper and just; not only that, the opposing side waged a war that was clearly and notably unjust. We did not have to worry in these two wars about whether a threat against our liberty and property was clear or present enough; in both of these wars, Americans were trying to rid themselves of an unwanted domination by another people. And in both cases, the other side tried ferociously to maintain its coercive rule over Americans. In each case, one side - "our side," if you will - was notably just, the other side unjust.

To be specific, there have been two strikingly just wars in American history: the American Revolution, and the War for Southern Independence.

It is clear that the American Revolution was a just war, a war of peoples forming an independent nation and casting off the bonds of another people insisting on perpetuating their rule over them.

What I want to focus on here is not the grievances that led the American rebels to the view that it had become "necessary for One People to dissolve the political Bonds which have connected them with another." What I want to stress is the ground on which the Americans stood for this solemn and fateful act of separation.

The Americans were steeped in the natural-law philosophy of John Locke, the scholastics, and the classical republicanism of Greece and Rome. There were two major political theories in Britain and Europe during this era. One was the older -- but by this time obsolete -- absolutist view: that the king was the father of his nation, and that absolute obedience was owed to the king by the lesser orders; and that any rebellion against the king was equivalent to Satan's rebellion against God.

The natural law view countered that sovereignty originated not in the king but in the people, but that the people had delegated their powers and rights to the king. Hugo Grotius and the other conservative natural lawyers believed that this delegation, once transferred, was irrevocable, so that sovereignty must reside permanently in the king. The more radical libertarian theorists, such as Father Juan de Mariana and John Locke and his followers, believed quite sensibly that since the original delegation was voluntary and contractual, the people had the right to take back that sovereignty should the king grossly violate that trust.

The American revolutionaries, in separating themselves from Great Britain, and forming their new nation, adopted the Lockean doctrine. It is well known that the biggest moral and psychological problem the Americans had, and could only bring themselves to overcome after a full year of bloody war, was to violate their oaths of allegiance to the British king. Breaking with the British Parliament, their de facto ruler, posed no problem. But the king was their inherited sovereign lord, the person to whom they had sworn fealty. It was the king to whom they owed allegiance; and so the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence mentioned only the king, even though in reality Parliament was the major culprit.

Hence the crucial psychological importance to the American revolutionaries of Tom Paine's Common Sense, which not only adopted the Lockean view of a justified reclaiming of sovereignty by the American people, but zeroed in on the office of the king. In the words of the New Left, Paine delegitimized and desanctified the king. The king of Great Britain, Paine wrote, is only the descendant of "nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang; whose savage manner or preeminence in subtlety obtained him the title of chief among plunderers." And now the kings, including the "Royal Brute of Great Britain," are but "crowned ruffians."

In making their revolution, then, the Americans cast their lot with a contractual justification for government. Government is not something imposed from above, by some divine act of conferring sovereignty; but contractually, from below, by "consent of the governed."

Based on libertarian doctrine and on republican models, the people of the several colonies set up independent sovereign states. The powers of each government were strictly limited, with most of the rights and powers reserved to the people, and with checks and balances, and written constitutions severely limiting state power.

These thirteen separate republics, in order to wage their common war against the British Empire, sent representatives to a Continental Congress, and then later formed a Confederation, again with severely limited central powers, to help fight the British. The hotly contested decision to scrap the Articles and to craft a new Constitution demonstrates conclusively that the central government was not supposed to be perpetual, not to be the sort of permanent one-way trap that Grotius had claimed turned popular sovereignty over to the king forevermore.

In fact, it would be very peculiar to hold that the American revolutionaries had repudiated the idea that a pledge of allegiance to the king was not contractual and revocable, only to turn around a few short years later to enter a compact that turned out to be an irrevocable one-way ticket for permanent central government power. Revocable and contractual to a king, but irrevocable to some piece of paper!

And finally, on this point, does anyone seriously believe that any of the thirteen states would have ratified the Constitution had they believed that it was a one-way Venus fly trap? The Constitution was barely ratified as it is!

So: if the Articles of Confederation could be treated as a scrap of paper, if delegation to the confederate government in the 1780s was revocable, how could the central government set up under the Constitution, less than a decade later, claim that its powers were permanent and irrevocable?

And yet, of course, this monstrous illogic is precisely the doctrine proclaimed by the North during the War Between the States. In 1861, the Southern states, believing correctly that their cherished institutions were under grave threat and assault from the central government, decided to exercise their natural, contractual, and constitutional right to withdraw, to "secede" from that Union.

The separate Southern states then exercised their contractual right as sovereign republics to come together in another confederation, the Confederate States of America. If the American Revolutionary War was just, then it necessarily follows that the War for Southern Independence was just, and for the same reason. In neither case was this decision made for "light or transient causes." But if the American Revolutionary cause was not just, then neither North nor South had a leg to stand on, and both sides should have returned, hat in hand, to beg forgiveness of the British monarch.

What of the grievances of the two sets of seceders? Were they comparable? The central grievance of the American rebels was the taxing power: the systematic plunder of their property by the British government. Whether it was the tax on stamps, the tax on imports, or the tax on imported tea, taxation was central.

The slogan "no taxation without representation" was misleading; in the last analysis, we didn't want "representation" in Parliament; we wanted not to be taxed by Great Britain.

The other grievances, such as opposition to general search warrants, or to overriding of the ancient Anglo-Saxon principle of trial by jury, were critical because they involved the power to search merchants' properties for "smuggled" goods that had avoided payment of the customs taxes. Trial by jury was vital because no American jury would ever convict such smugglers.

One of the central grievances of the South, too, was the protective tariff that Northerners imposed on Southerners whose major income came from exporting cotton abroad.

The protective tariff at one and the same time drove up prices of manufactured goods, forced Southerners and other Americans to pay more for manufactures, and threatened to cut down Southern exports.

What of the opposition to these two just wars? Both were unjust, since both the British and the North were waging fierce war to maintain their coercive and unwanted rule over another people. But if the British wanted to hold and expand their empire, what were the motivations of the North? In the famous words of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, at least early in the struggle, why didn't the North "let their erring sisters go in peace"?

The North, in particular the North's driving force, that ethnocultural group the "Yankees," had been swept by a new form of fanatical and emotional neo-Puritanism. They were driven by a fervent postmillennialism," which held that, as a precondition for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, man must set up a thousand-year Kingdom of God on Earth.

This Kingdom, of course, must be a perfect society. In order to be perfect, this Kingdom must be free of sin, which must be stamped out as quickly as possible. Moreover, you yourself would not be saved if you didn't try your hardest to stamp out sin by force. It was very clear to these neo-Puritans that in order to stamp out sin, government, in the service of the saints, is an essential coercive instrument. As historians have summed up the views of all the most prominent of these millennialists, "government is God's major instrument of salvation."

Sin was very broadly defined by the Yankee Puritans as anything which might interfere with a person's free will to embrace salvation, anything which, in the words of the Old Shadow radio serial, "might cloud men's minds." The particular cloud-forming occasions of sin were liquor ("Demon Rum"), any non-religious activity on the Sabbath, slavery, and the Roman Catholic Church.

If anti-slavery, prohibitionism, and anti-Catholicism were grounded in fanatical post-millennialism, the paternalistic big government required for this social program on the state and local levels led logically to a Big Government paternalism in national economic affairs.

Whereas the Democratic Party in the nineteenth century was known as the "party of personal liberty," of states' rights, of minimal government, of free markets and free trade; the Republican Party was known as the "party of great moral ideas," which amounted to the stamping out of sin. On the economic level, the Republicans adopted the Whig program of statism and Big Government: protective tariffs, subsidies to big business, strong central government, large-scale public works, and cheap credit spurred by government.

The Northern war against slavery partook of fanatical millennialist fervor, of a cheerful willingness to uproot institutions, to commit mayhem and mass murder, to plunder and loot and destroy, all in the name of high moral principle and the creation of a perfect world. The Yankee fanatics were the Anabaptists, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks of their era.

In the pseudo-Biblical and truly blasphemous verses of that quintessential Yankee, Julia Ward Howe, in her so-called " Battle Hymn of the Republic," are summed up the fanatical spirit of Northern aggression for an allegedly redeeming cause.

It should be mentioned that the southern United States was the only place in the 19th century where slavery was abolished by fire and the "terrible swift sword." In every other part of the New World, slavery was peacefully ended by agreement with the slaveholders. But in these other countries -- in the West Indies or Brazil, for example -- there were no Puritan millennialists to do their bloody work, armed with a gun in one hand and a hymn book in the other.

In the "party of great moral ideas," different men and factions emphasized different aspects of this integrated despotic world outlook. In the fateful Republican convention of 1860, the major candidates for President were two veteran 'abolitionists: William Seward of New York,and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. Seward, however, was distrusted by the anti-Catholic hotheads because he somehow did not care about the alleged Catholic menace; on the other hand, while Chase was happy to play along with the former Know-Nothings, who stressed the anti-Catholic part of the coalition, he was distrusted by Sewardites and others who were indifferent to the Catholic question.

Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was a dark horse, who was able successfully to finesse the Catholic question; his major emphasis was on Whig economic statism: high tariffs, huge subsidies to railroads, and public works. As one of the leading lawyers for Illinois Central and other big railroads, Lincoln was the candidate of the railroad magnates.

Thus, 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 as general. Dodge's task was to clear the Indians from the designated path of the country's first heavily subsidized federally chartered transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific.

Having successfully employed Union troops against the Indians, Grenville Dodge left the Union Army to become one of the leaders of the Union Pacific. In this way, conscripted Union troops and hapless taxpayers were coerced into socializing the costs of constructing and operating the Union Pacific. This sort of action is now called "the cooperation of government and industry."

But Lincoln's major focus was on raising taxes; in particular, raising and enforcing the protective tariff. His convention victory was particularly made possible by support from the Pennsylvania delegation. Pennsylvania had long been the home and political focus of the nation's iron and steel industry, which ever since its inception during the War of 1812 has been chronically inefficient, and has 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. In his First Inaugural, Lincoln was conciliatory about maintaining slavery, but hardline about collecting all the customs tariffs in the South.

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 was that they provided the soldiers to enforce the customs tariffs; thus, Fort Sumter was at the entrance to Charleston Harbor -- apart from New Orleans, the major port of the 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 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 eighty years later; maneuvering the Southerners into firing the first shot.

By manipulating the South into opening fire on a federal fort, Lincoln made the South appear to be "aggressors" in the eyes of Northern moderates.

Outside of New England and territory 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, New York, and even Pennsylvania, there was 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.

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 fewer 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.

What about the rest of the millennialist worldview?

While it is true that Lincoln himself was not particularly religious, that did not really matter since he adopted all the attitudes and temperament of his evangelical allies. He was stern and sober, he was personally opposed to alcohol and tobacco, and he opposed the private carrying of guns.

An ambitious seeker of the main chance from early adulthood, Lincoln acted viciously toward his own humble frontier family in Kentucky. He abandoned his fiancee in order to marry a wealthier Mary Todd, whose family was friendly with the eminent Henry Clay, he repudiated his brother, and he refused to attend his dying father or his father's funeral, monstrously declaring that such an experience "would be more painful than pleasant." No doubt!

Lincoln, too, was a typical example of a secular, liberal humanitarian in another dimension: a familiar modern "reform liberal" type whose heart bleeds for and yearns to "uplift" remote mankind, while he treats abominably actual people whom he knew. And so Abraham Lincoln, in a phrase prefiguring our own beloved Mario Cuomo, declared that The Union was really "a family, bound indissolubly together by the most intimate organic bonds." Kick your own family, and then transmute familial spiritual feelings toward a hypostatized and mythical entity, "The Union," which then must be kept intact regardless of concrete human cost or sacrifice.

Indeed, there is a vital difference between the two unjust causes we have considered, the British and the North. The British, at least, were fighting on behalf of a cause which, even if wrong and unjust, was coherent and intelligible: that is, the sovereignty of a hereditary monarch.

What was the North's excuse for their monstrous war of plunder and mass murder against their fellow Americans? Not allegiance to an actual, real person, the king; but allegiance to a non-existent, mythical, quasi-divine alleged entity, "The Union." The king was at least a real person, and the merits or demerits of a particular king or the monarchy in general can be argued. But where is "The Union" located? How are we to gauge the Union's deeds? To whom is the Union accountable?

No, this fictional entity was taken, by its Northern worshippers, from a contractual institution that can either be cleaved to or scrapped, and transformed into a divinized entity which must be worshipped, and which must be permanent, unquestioned, and all-powerful. There is no heresy greater, no political theory more pernicious, than sacralizing the secular.

But this monstrous process is exactly what occurred when Abraham Lincoln and his northern colleagues made a god out of the Union. If the British forces fought for bad King George, the Union armies pillaged and murdered on behalf of this pagan idol, this " Union," this Moloch that demanded terrible human sacrifice to sustain its power and its glory.

For in this War Between the States, the South may have fought for its sacred honor; but the Northern war was the very opposite of honorable. Civilized nations with great care had developed classical international law. Above all, civilians must not be targeted; wars must be limited. But the North insisted on creating a conscript army, a nation in arms, and broke the nineteenth century rules of war by specifically plundering and slaughtering civilians, by destroying civilian life and institutions so as to reduce the South to submission.

Sherman's infamous March through Georgia was one of the great war crimes, and crimes against humanity, of the past century and a half. By targeting and butchering civilians, Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman paved the way for all the genocidal horrors of the monstrous twentieth century.

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about memory, about Never Forgetting, about History as retroactive punishment for crimes of war and mass murder. The great libertarian historian, Lord Acton, said that the historian, in the last analysis, must be a moral judge. The muse of the historian, he wrote, is not Clio, but Rhadamanthus, the legendary avenger of innocent blood.

In that spirit, then, we must always remember, we must Never Forget, we must put in the dock and hang higher than Haman, these who in modern times opened the Pandora's Box of genocide and the extermination of civilians: Sherman, Grant, and Lincoln.

Perhaps, some day, their statues, like Lenin's in Russia, will be toppled and melted down; their insignias and battle flags will be desecrated, their war songs tossed into the fire. And then Davis and Lee and Jackson and Forrest, and all the heroes of the South, "Dixie" and the Battle Flag, will once again be truly honored and remembered.

The classic comment on that meretricious TV series, The Civil War, was made by that marvelous and feisty Southern writer, Florence King. Asked her views on the series, she replied: "I didn't have time to watch The Civil War. I'm too busy getting ready for the next one." In that spirit, I am sure that one day, aided and abetted by people in the glorious copperhead tradition, the South shall rise again.