 Nothing in American history quite stirs up passion and controversy as much as the Civil War. It seems like every couple of years there's a new movement to tear down statues or ban the Confederate flag, and regardless of which side of these issues you might fall on, they serve to illustrate the enduring wounds of this conflict. And just like any area of history that has such a high degree of emotional baggage, you see narratives that are colored by the personal biases of the people interpreting the events. Thus, the Civil War is a topic worth spending some time on, and in this series I'm going to do my best to cover all the great controversies of this history, with as much accuracy as I can so we can try to unravel some of the issues that color this significant episode in our history. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. We're finally moving on from the War on Drugs, and this episode is going to kick off a new series on the Civil War. This is probably a dangerous topic for me to pick, as there is so much controversy and so much bad history on each side of the debate, especially among libertarians. So I imagine I'm going to upset many people with my own interpretation of the Civil War, of Abraham Lincoln, of the Confederacy, and of all the controversial questions that surround these subjects. But today we need some of the long background. If we wanted to give a full history of the buildup to the Civil War, we might start in 1619 when the first African slaves were brought into the Virginia colony on a Dutch ship. We might look at Bacon's Rebellion in the 1670s, which historian Edmund Morgan dates as the point in which black slaves and white indentured servants were finally seen as classes that needed legal separation by the Virginia legislature. Or we could look at the constitutional debates in which the issue of slavery threatened the unity of the fledgling nation, even at the time leading to such clauses as the infamous and often misinterpreted clause known as the three-fifths compromise. This is all interesting history, and the evolution of the relations between whites and blacks since 1619 has a rich body of literature documenting the process. The question each historian is trying to answer, ever since Edmund Morgan's fantastic book American Slavery, American Freedom, is, when did we finally start seeing the type of slavery that existed directly prior to the American Civil War? This question is not one that I have the answer to. Each book I've read on the subject gives a different answer, and each one makes a compelling case. The more important point is that slavery was controversial throughout the history of the states and the colonies, and since the United States was finally organized under the constitution, slavery was the dark cloud that hovered over the nation. I'm not a historical determinist, but if ever a conflict was inevitable, it was the division between the northern and southern states in the 19th century. Or maybe not. Some historians disagree, saying that had political leaders made different decisions at critical moments, perhaps these issues could have been mended. I don't know. Nobody knows. These are counterfactuals. But these questions may get worth looking at the years leading up to the Civil War to really understand the conflict. And maybe it's just because I find political history more interesting than battlefield history. I know that I'm a rarity in that. I do believe that the years 1848 to 1860, which we refer to as the antebellum period of the United States, are far more interesting than the warriors themselves. Between the Revolutionary War and the 1820s, slavery rapidly became increasingly a southern institution. The northern states still had about 3,000 slaves as late as 1830, but this was compared to more than 100,000 free blacks in the same states. Northern states, by the beginning of the 1820s, pretty much controlled the House of Representatives. If you're familiar with the three-fifths clause of the Constitution, which is Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3, it states that slaves, or in the Constitution the wording says only all other persons than free persons, they don't actually use the word slave in the Constitution, but nonetheless it was referring obviously to slaves and said that they would be counted as three-fifths of all other people according to the census. The northern delegates wanted slaves to not be counted at all, and the southern delegates wanted slaves to be counted as whole persons, because the population of a state was the basis for both representation and taxation. By compromising on counting slaves as three-fifths of a person, the south was consenting to paying higher taxes than the north would otherwise be imposing on them, and the north was letting the south enjoy a greater proportion of representation in the House of Representatives than they would if slaves were not counted at all. But by the 1820s, it seems that the north had gotten the better end of the deal, because they still controlled the House, but the south at least maintained control of the Senate. This was the state of Congress when Missouri petitioned for statehood in 1819. At the time of Missouri's petition, it held about 60,000 slaves, so they wanted to join the country as a slave state. This would obviously tip the balance of congressional power more in favor of the south, but because of the current division of power, the House was able to hold Missouri up. One representative from New York, James Talmage Jr., offered an amendment that would grant Missouri statehood on the condition that it not be allowed to bring any more slaves into the state, thus effectively preventing slave trades between Missouri and the rest of the south. The House passed the amendment, but the Senate blocked it. Thomas Jefferson, only a few years away from his death, offered a telling comment on the Missouri deadlock. This momentous question, he wrote, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror, I considered it at once the knell of the union. A knell, of course, traditionally refers to the ringing of a specifically funeral bell. It is worth mentioning that the north's resistance to the spread of slavery was primarily driven by the fear of the south having complete control of Congress rather than the matter of slavery itself. The south's political arm was not yet ominously referred to as the slave power, but the idea that bred this branding was already part of the conversation in Washington. So in the midst of this controversy, Henry Clay steps up. A slave owner himself, the Kentucky politician, was serving as Speaker of the House at the time, and in February of 1820 he offered a compromise that would forever be known as the Missouri Compromise. Missouri would be admitted as a slave state, but to keep the balance of power in Congress Maine would also be admitted. So anti-successionists should pay attention here because Maine was not a territory. It was part of the commonwealth of Massachusetts that voted to secede, so the secession of Maine from Massachusetts was accepted and Maine was admitted as a free state, offering balance to the Missouri Compromise. More importantly in later years, the Missouri Compromise also offered a guideline for slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Territory. The territory would be divided between the 3630 parallel, which the southern border of Missouri rested at. Territory's north of this line, except of course Missouri, would be closed to slavery, and south of the line territories would be open to slavery. The compromise earned Clay his nickname, the Great Pacificator, but even at the time of the compromise the south still depended on some sympathetic northerners, who are called do-faces by Virginia's John Randolph, to get the compromise passed. The tensions were quelled for the time, but the north's symphony for southern values was on the decline. It took less than a decade for tensions to heat up again between the north and the south, this time in the form of a tariff bill passed by Congress in 1828. This tariff, which came to be known by its opposition in the south as the Tariff of Abominations, was a protective tariff. The south protested that the Constitution allowed for tariffs as a means of raising revenue, but not as a method of protecting domestic industry from foreign competition. Because the south was an agricultural exporting economy, tariffs were seen as disproportionately harmful. Of course, most people listening to this podcast know that the tariff was harmful for both parties, but protectionism as a good economic policy is a fallacy that persists into the present day as the recent Trump campaign illustrated. When the tariff was passed, John C. Calhoun, a South Carolina slaveholder, was serving as vice president under John Quincy Adams. He would also serve as vice president when Andrew Jackson took office. Because Calhoun was vice president, he could not advertise his role in South Carolina's opposition to the tariff. The state of South Carolina published an opposition essay entitled The South Carolina Exposition in Protest. The vice president was the anonymous author. If you've read Tom Woods' book, Nullification, as I'm sure many of you have, you should already be familiar with the history involved here, but I think it's an important element leading into the antebellum controversies. Calhoun offered an interpretation of the Constitution that I find preferable to most of the conventional interpretations because he focused on the rights of the states, which is to say decentralization. But I don't want to be too generous to Calhoun here. Not only was he an unabashed supporter of slavery, but he had a long history of supporting a more central government. In his younger years, he favored a standing army, for instance, which the Constitution does not permit. It only permits the maintenance of the naval force, as well as a national bank, national funding for infrastructure. He supported, incidentally, a protective tariff. So in his early career, he looks a lot like a wig. Now whether this change in position by 1828 was principled or political is impossible to say, as it is in almost any instance of a politician changing sides on an issue. But as we will see throughout this series, the southern support for states' rights always seem to be opportunistic. The South tended to support states' rights only when it served southern ends. But in his exposition, Calhoun presented what is known as the compact theory of the Constitution, and for all his faults I do believe he is right in this interpretation of the Constitution. He argued that the Constitution was nothing more than a contract between the sovereign states that ratified it. They established the national government for specific purposes, which were strictly outlined in and limited by the Constitution. And it was the right of the states to judge whether or not the national government was violating this contract, and in the case that a state judged a national policy to be unconstitutional, it could refuse to enforce the law. The compact theory, of course, was not new. The Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798, written respectively by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, had laid out Calhoun's ideas in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts of the John Adams administration. But the principle of nullification, being that an individual state could nullify a national law, was Calhoun's original contribution to the compact theory. And statists love to attack nullification on the grounds that it was Calhoun's idea, which is a blatant logical fallacy in itself. I have no love for Calhoun. I don't think any libertarian can honestly defend the guy, but the doctrine of nullification is not only a good means of combating the centralization of the government, but it would be used against the South in the form of personal liberty laws nullifying the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in several northern states. And many of these personal liberty laws were actually passed before 1850 to nullify the original Fugitive Slave Act. But I'm going to talk more about all of this in episodes that I'm going to be devoting to the Fugitive Slave Act. But showing the true hypocrisy of politicians, southern governments did not support nullification when it was used for this purpose. So don't be too quick to laud the South on state's rights. There was a lot of hypocrisy and a lot of support of the centralization of government power in the slave states. But anyway, the idea of nullification was proposed as a response to this 1828 tariff, and although South Carolina did not immediately exercise its right to nullify the tariff, it did open up a national debate on the issue. In 1830, Daniel Webster and Robert Hain debated the issue on the floor of the Senate. Hain was a South Carolinian, so he was obviously defending Calhoun's ideas, and Webster was from Massachusetts representing the opposition. These debates received massive attention, not only where their private citizens packing into the balconies to observe, but so many members of the House of Representatives showed up that there weren't enough members remaining in their own chamber to hold a legal vote on anything. Webster provides an interesting foil to Calhoun, where Calhoun was previously a nationalist who turned into a state's rights advocate. Webster had originally opposed many of the centralizing policies once supported by Calhoun, but now Webster was arguing against the compact theory of the Constitution, and he was doing so with grand appeals to nationalism. In his closing remarks, Webster made an emotional appeal to the people present, quote, When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the Son in Heaven may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious union, on states dissevered, discordant, belligerent, on a land rent with civil feuds or drenched it may be in fraternal blood, let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous inside of the Republic, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as what is all this worth. Nor those other words of delusion and folly, liberty first and union afterwards, but everywhere spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds as they float over the sea and over the land and in every wind under the whole heavens that other sentiment dear to every true American heart, liberty and union now and forever, one and inseparable, end quote. Now look at what he was saying. He said that it was a miserable interrogatory, a delusion and a folly to proclaim liberty first and union afterwards. And of course the South was hypocritical on the liberty issue as long as it held slaves, but slavery wasn't even on the table in this debate. So Webster was not rejecting liberty on the grounds of slavery. He was simply saying that liberty by which they both really meant independence did not take precedence over unification. As we will see in later episodes, this was the position, not the desire to abolish slavery that compelled most supporters of the union cause to wage the Civil War, but more on that come. Notice also that Webster was not combating the compact theory on the grounds of any kind of actual constitutional interpretation. He was appealing to emotion. He was appealing to a sense of nationalism. He was not making a constitutional argument. So today most historians and legal scholars will offer some constitutional interpretation that objects to nullification and secession, but even if you accept those interpretations, applying them to the time would be teleological, which is to say it would be bad history or presentism. Those arguments were not being made at the time. This was purely an appeal to emotion and patriotism. But this debate did not settle the nullification issue nor did it represent the apex of its controversy. Two years after the debate in 1832, Congress passed a new tariff bill. This one actually lowered duties, but it was still a protectionist tariff rather than a revenue raising one, and South Carolina was not appeased. This time the South Carolina legislature put Calhoun's nullification doctrine into practice. They called a convention and nullified both the tariff of 1828 and of 1832. As of February of 1833, they declared both state and federal officials would be prohibited from collecting the tariff duties. This time, if you remember, Andrew Jackson was president. Calhoun was the vice president, but he resigned in 1832 before the nullification was to take effect. Now Jackson for me is kind of like Calhoun. Overall, I really don't like the guy and there are a lot of good reasons to dislike him, but he also did some things that I can't help but agree with. These guys, Calhoun and Jackson, they're good for exercises in compartmentalization, I think. We don't have to like or dislike everything about anybody to judge a specific action on its own merits. But anyway, Jackson agreed with the strict interpretation of the Constitution that the compact theory professed, but he did not believe that states had the right to nullify. I honestly have to admit that this is a difficult pair of positions for me to square up. If the federal government does not have the right to pass a certain law, then it is entirely contradictory in my opinion to say that the states still have an obligation to enforce it. But such is the nature of political logic. And Jackson also believed secession to be unconstitutional. So he declared South Carolina to be guilty of treason and privately he wanted to see Calhoun hanged as at this point it was known that he had been the author of the South Carolina Exposition and Protest. Congress responded to South Carolina's nullification with its own bill, a force bill, which granted the president the power to use the Army and the Navy to enforce federal laws. At this point we were close to seeing the Civil War in 1832 because South Carolina actually started raising its own military force to defend itself against Jackson and the pending force bill. But this was a war that would not be waged as once again the great pacificator Henry Clay stepped in with a compromise. He proposed a tariff bill that would lower duties by 20% over the course of nine years. Both Clay's tariff bill and the force act passed Congress at the same time. South Carolina accepted the compromise tariff but it retained its position that states had the right to nullify federal laws. Since this compromise bill does not eliminate the fact that the tariff was a protectionist scheme which was the basis of South Carolina's argument for the unconstitutionality of the bill in the first place we might interpret the legislature's action as submitting to the threats of force by the national government especially since they were standing alone in 1833 without the support of other slave states. Although I think this episode is important in understanding the coming tensions I do want to dispel this idea that tariffs were the reason or even one of the significant reasons behind secession in 1860. I hear this one a lot especially from libertarians and it needs to be addressed because it's bad history. Although I'm not going to go into a great deal of detail on secession now because that's coming in an episode devoted to the two waves of secession preceding the war the secession documents really don't mention the tariff a whole lot. The second wave of secession as we will see was mostly a reaction to Lincoln's mobilization of the military against the states that seceded in the first wave but the first wave was very clearly and explicitly driven by slavery. The secession documents mention this openly and in some cases right in the opening paragraphs. Slavery was the primary reason that the Confederate states wanted independence but I'm going to go into more detail about this later. I just think it's a big enough misconception that it's worth addressing early into the series. The other tariff argument is that the North wanted to wage the war over tariff revenues. The greatest exposition of this is made by Charles Adams in his book When in the Course of Human Events Arguing the Case for Southern Secession which was actually written because of the controversy caused by a chapter in one of his other books on the history of taxation that claimed that tariffs were the cause of the American Civil War. In it, Adams offers a famous Lincoln quote in which Lincoln has asked why not let the South go in peace? And Lincoln responds, I can't let them go. Where then shall we get our revenue? The problem is that this quote was reported in 1866 by a Confederate officer named John Baldwin who only after Lincoln's death claimed to have had this conversation with Lincoln. There's no other corroborating source for this quote and Baldwin being a Confederate officer is a highly questionable source to cite. Historians using that quote are frankly guilty in my opinion of poor scholarship. But this was the primary quote that drove the idea that the Union wanted tariff revenues and Charles Adams quoted it as late as the year 2000. A real quote that Lincoln offered was from his first inaugural which is used as continued justification for the tariff argument. Lincoln said quote, the power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government and to collect the duties and imposts. But beyond what may be necessary for these objects there will be no invasion, no using force against, or among the people anywhere. End quote. But this quote when the other one is rightly dismissed seems to be a weak justification that revenues were the primary concern for Lincoln and the correct interpretation isn't one that is exactly a defensive Lincoln either so don't mistake what I'm saying as a defensive Lincoln at all. To me it seems far more plausible particularly when the entire history is considered as a whole that Lincoln's concern was, as has been so often argued to simply keep the Union together. His motivation was nationalism. The decision to continue to provide provisions for Fort Sumter and to attempt to collect tariff duties is, I think, more fairly interpreted as an attempt to provoke the Confederacy into firing the first shot so Lincoln could try to avoid painting himself as the aggressor. And this is ultimately exactly what happened. But discussing secession in Fort Sumter today is getting far ahead of ourselves. I only bring this up because the compromise tariff of 1833 really did seem to put an end to the tension over tariffs between the North and the South. Now don't get me wrong, the North still supported protectionist tariffs, and the moral tariff would be opportunistically passed as soon as enough Southern states left the Union and could no longer block its passage. But these were not battles being heavily fought between 1833 and 1861. And because it is important to drive home the paramount role that slavery played, because I think some people in criticizing the Union over-correct by downplaying the importance of the role of slavery in this controversy, Calhoun himself admitted that slavery was the real issue. In a private correspondence, he wrote, quote, I consider the tariff act as the occasion rather than the real cause of the present unhappy state of things. The truth can no longer be disguised that the peculiar domestic institution of the Southern states and the consequent direction which that and her soil and climate have given to her industry has placed them in regard to taxation and appropriations in opposite relation to the majority of the Union. End quote. One other major event that would take place that would shape the antebellum in Civil War years is the independence and state hood of Texas. So we need to move back to 1821 for a moment to get the full history here. In 1821 Mexico became independent from Spain. While independence is of course a good thing, they inherited some problems particularly the difficulty of governing the quote, unquote, so the Mexican government decided to try to attract people who would be loyal to them to settle in these regions and thus they invited Americans to move into their northeastern territories and this ushered in a wave of migration to Texas and these migrants brought with them a great deal of slaves. In return for moving to Mexico the government granted them large tracts of land to work and settle on. When they were bringing their slaves into Mexico, the slavery question was somewhat up in the air. Prior to Mexican independence, slavery had been abolished in Mexico but under the new government it was not yet officially abolished. So slavery was effectively abolished in Mexico and then these Americans brought their slaves in and finally the president of Mexico officially made slavery illegal in 1829. Additionally Mexico was Catholic and the American migrants were not so by the 1830s they were dealing with pressures to convert Catholicism and to free their slaves both issues causing tension between the American settlers and the Mexican government. Finally in 1835 Mexico sent an army to the northeastern territories and the Americans responded by declaring Texas to be an independent republic. Officially the war was short lived and Texas declared itself a republic in 1836 but Mexico refused to give up its claim and skirmishes between the two nations continued until Texas finally joined the United States several years later. When the Texans declared themselves to be part of a republic they were actually seeking annexation by the United States but annexation was rejected because of the boundary dispute between Texas and Mexico and because acquiring another slave holding territory was again a threat to the political power of the non-slave states. But near the end of John Tyler's term as president he had his secretary of state John C. Calhoun submit an annexation treaty to Congress to acquire Texas. In the eight years of Texan independence the Republic of Texas had grown economically and in terms of population. So from Tyler's perspective it made perfect sense to try to absorb this growing power rather than deal with a potentially expansionist rival government in the west. It was in an 1845 article supporting the annexation of Texas that John L. O'Sullivan popularized the term manifest destiny and manifest destiny when he popularized the term was describing a sentiment that had already been long established since at least the era of Andrew Jackson but the term has stuck and been retroactively applied to a lot of that period as well as the westward expansion that followed it. So by acquiring more territories O'Sullivan believed starting with Texas the United States would gain land it would grow its trade routes it would strengthen its national security it would spread freedom and it would help the Americans who migrated west on the Oregon trail and finally it would be far better for the land to be occupied by white Protestants than Catholic Hispanics. These are the arguments O'Sullivan made for western expansion and although many people in the country rejected his arguments the expansionist mindset was becoming popular enough to elect the expansionist candidate for president in 1944 James K. Polk. Opponents of annexation saw the Texas controversies as a plot by the slave power a name that now was being used to drum up northern fear of the political power of the slave states. So the slave states did legitimately fear that if the US did not acquire Texas it might ally with Britain and slavery would be abolished thus offering a new haven for runaways but in the north particularly among abolitionists the fear of admitting a new slave state would tip the political scales in favor of the south. In both of these cases there was truth in the claims but both sides of the controversy were highly exaggerating the dangers to drum up fear for and against the annexation of Texas. Now Polk was a Democrat who beat out the little magician Martin Van Buren for the party nomination. Polk did gain the presidency and Texas was admitted as a slave holding state in 1845. The election of James K. Polk and the annexation of Texas would usher in the Mexican-American war. The war itself is a subject that I will not be covering in this series on the Civil War but the outcomes of the war offer an important turning point in the sectional crisis. Shortly after the beginning of the war on August 8th, 1846 Democratic congressman David Wilmot proposed a writer to the war appropriations bill. This writer would become known as the Wilmot Proviso. The Proviso of past would prohibit slavery in any territory that may be acquired from Mexico after the war. When drafting it, he took language from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The Proviso didn't pass but what made it important is the debate that it sparked. Wilmot himself was a racist anti-slavery politician. He wanted to protect free white labor in the future territories. The Proviso passed the House but the southern senators of course blocked it. But now that it had been proposed, the question of what to do about slavery in any new territories was on the table. Calhoun predictably voiced his opposition to the Proviso claiming that a state could only prohibit slavery once it was ready to become a state. The Missouri Compromise of course had already stipulated otherwise but Calhoun's arguments would prove important in a decade when the Supreme Court was ruling on the Dred Scott decision, though I won't be talking about that for several episodes. A northern Democrat, Senator Lewis Cass from Michigan, proposed an alternative idea known as popular sovereignty. Also rejecting the Missouri Compromise this would allow the citizens of a territory to decide for themselves whether slavery was to be allowed or not. Although Cass proposed the idea this would be the solution that Stephen Douglas would hang his political hat on in the years to come. Other members of Congress simply wanted to extend the Missouri Compromise line which seemed to be the simplest and most logical conclusion but this debate was purely theoretical for the time. The most immediate effect it had was the defining of the divisions between the north and the south and to start the process of destroying the current party system. Northern Democrats who supported the Proviso were being called barn burners as in they were willing to burn the Democratic party to the ground in order to end slavery. The other Democrats were labeled hunkers which was based on the accusation that they were just hunkering after power. Many of the barn burners including former president Martin Van Buren left the party. Northern Whigs also started to split up between the pro-slavery cotton Whigs and the anti-slavery conscience Whigs. This opened the door for leaders in the liberal party to organize the barn burners and the conscience Whigs into a new party called the Free Soil Party. Where the Liberty Party was singularly anti-slavery the Free Soil Party was broader in scope. It opposed the distinction of slavery into new territories but it also called for nationally financed internal improvements. It called for a homestead law and it capitulated to the barn burners by explicitly advocating the protection of slavery where it already existed and made no mention of the rights of free blacks. Largely because a lot of the former Democrats in the party held the same position as David Wilmot. That free blacks were a threat to white labor. The party ran Martin Van Buren as their presidential candidate in 1848 and although he did not win a single state they did get 10% of the vote which was no small feat for a new party. Zachary Taylor won the presidency but David Wilmot had successfully brought the north south division to a head. He opened the debate over slavery in the new territories and started the destruction of the first party system of the United States. At the end of the war the United States did acquire a large chunk of land but Congress was able to ignore the territorial question for a long time. Unfortunately after the population of California exploded almost overnight they would have to face these questions in real rather than abstract terms. The issue of California will be the topic of the next episode.