 Unfortunately, however, there's a good deal more material to cover in this session. We can't focus just on one time frame, like the American Revolution. I have to try to make it up fundamentally through the ratification of the Constitution through the Civil War. And this will be much more selective in the sorts of things I focus on. This is by no means a comprehensive history you understand. It'll be obvious at the end of this if it isn't before. But I do want to touch base here and there on a number of issues that I think are important to libertarians, important for libertarians to understand. And there are areas that, for the most part, may be misunderstood by libertarians. And first, we'll deal with the issue of the Constitution. We're jumping ahead a bit here. I'm not going to really deal with the Confederation period. That is the period from the end of the war until 1787. The war effectively ends around 1781. The Articles of Confederation are ratified. And then in 1787, you have the Constitutional Convention. Most states ratifying by 1788, and then ratification becoming official by 89. And then the implementation with the administration of George Washington. Now, let me make a few general comments about this Confederation period. The Articles of Confederation, as I'm sure you all remember from your history texts, are commonly regarded as being weak. This is the standard argument one finds even in books today regarding the Articles of Confederation. If ever there were a case where it's clear that history cannot be value free, this is a case of that. Those historians who pronounce the Articles of Confederation weak are obviously injecting their own value judgments into that sort of historical judgment. Fortunately, there are two excellent books by Merrill Jensen that I've listed up here. The Articles of Confederation and the New Nation. And Jensen is a highly regarded historian which challenged this thesis about the Articles of Confederation. Again, the thesis to put it very simply is that the Articles of Confederation did not give sufficient authority or power to the central government. More specifically, it did not give the Congress power to tax. This was the key issue. The Congress under the Articles of Confederation, the government, did not have the power to tax. And this is what the critics of the Articles of Confederation most complained about. What Jensen argues is that the longstanding myth, as he regards it, that the Articles of Confederation were weak and it was natural and it was obvious to everyone that they had to be supplanted by a stronger document to the Constitution. He said, this is just flat wrong. He regards the argument that there were chaotic conditions caused by the Articles of Confederation. He treats that pretty much as political propaganda. And indeed, there are very important figures of the time who made the same kind of argument. We have to understand that many of the good early revolutionaries, some of the real important forefathers, Richard Henry Lee, Patrick Henry, Sam Adams, a whole list of revolutionary heroes were against the Constitution, against the ratification of the Constitution, at least up to a certain point. Some, like Adams, later changed their mind for various reasons that I'll get into. But there was a good deal of opposition to the Constitution when it was first proposed, because it was believed to be a betrayal of the principles that had been fought for in the revolution. And that's something about, I want to discuss that somewhat now, what the controversy was over the Constitution. First let me say that, as the historian Carl Becker once pointed out, there was more involved in the American Revolution than simply home rule. There was also the question of who should rule at home. And although there was a kind of common ideological background among many of the revolutionaries that I've discussed before, there were also very significant differences. And I don't wish to leave the impression that some of the consensus school historians, so called, leave by suggesting that somehow all these people saw the world in the same way that all of them wanted the same thing politically. It's true that they united, many of them united to kick the British out. But after the British were gone, there was the immensely important question of how the new government was to be formed, what principles it was to be operated by, and perhaps most importantly, who was to run it. And there are two distinct strains of thinking in this whole period of time. In fact, even before the revolution, but it comes more obvious afterwards. You have, on the one hand, very strong central government advocates. The best known character here by far the most important is Alexander Hamilton, whom I'll be discussing later on. Even before Hamilton came into power, there was a protege of his, a financier named Robert Morris, who was a Philadelphia businessman. Morris got rich during the American Revolution through the sale of various war contracts. And he was regarded as a brilliant financier. And after the Continental Congress had so bungled the financing of the war, they called Morris in to Congress the later phases of the war and asked him in effect to take over the whole government. He was virtually a dictator for a while. Fortunately for the country, Morris didn't last very long because the war ended shortly thereafter. But Morris was one of the first ones to try to implement various nationalist or federal schemes, strong central government schemes. He wanted a Bank of North America. That is kind of an quasi-official bank that would then issue paper currency. He wanted a number. He wanted an impose to 5% on imports. He wanted to give monetary stability to the central government. He wanted to have, in effect, taxing power. He wanted a strongly centralized government, at least strongly centralized by the standards of that day. They wouldn't be considered strongly centralized by today's standards, obviously. But it's really Alexander Hamilton, who spent most of his life in New York, who was the chief theoretician of this way of thinking. And it's Hamilton that becomes immensely important under the administration of Washington in his famous battle with Thomas Jefferson. And I'll be spending some time with that. But first, let's deal with some of Hamilton's early ideas. Hamilton is one of the most controversial figures you'll ever find in American history. It seems that historians either love Hamilton or they hate him. They either regard him as a heroic, maligned figure, or they regard him as something of an arch-villain, a Machiavellian character who was born a bastard and stayed one throughout his entire life. Some historians, you almost get the impression that they think Byrd had a great service to his country by killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel, a sympathy with which I am in some agreement, although Hamilton had done most of his damage by that point. Now, the thing about Hamilton is it's never clear what his views are, because it's clear that Hamilton was very sympathetic to the British monarchy. And it's clear that Hamilton wanted to see the British system implemented in America. He may not have literally wanted a king, but he certainly wanted something resembling the British form of government in America, a highly centralized government. This became very clear during the Constitutional Convention when Hamilton stood up and gave a very curious speech. Hamilton actually advocated during the Constitutional Convention a form of constitutional monarchy patterned after Britain. He argued that the people of America with uncontrolled passions could not be trusted to run government themselves. The British system, he said, quote, was the best in the world, close quote. He doubted whether in America, quote, anything short of it would do in America, close quote. He called the English House of Lords the most notable and noble institution which stabilized the British system of government. He believed that the House of Commons was held in check by the monarch and the aristocrats. Hamilton believed that, quote, there ought to be a principle in government capable of resisting the popular current, close quote. In other words, Hamilton didn't want the rabble, the people, to get control of the government. And he thought that the British system should be copied in America to prevent this from happening. Now you see the problem with Hamilton. Hamilton was one of the real linchpins behind the constitutional convention and the whole idea of a constitution. And the problem is that when he later becomes one of the major authors in the so-called Federalist Papers, which is an extremely famous document in American history, these series of articles written by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay in defense of the Constitution, Hamilton's tone is much different. There he talks about a republic and preserving freedom. So you see the problem here. The Federalist Papers were written explicitly pro-constitution propaganda. You have to understand that if you ever read them in your civics or political science classes. They were written as pieces for the day to convince people to support the Constitution. They weren't written just as abstract pieces of political theory. Now there's some very interesting political theory in them, particularly the pieces by Madison. But they were written as methods to persuade people to support the Constitution. So exactly what Hamilton's real views are aren't really that clear because he appears somewhat mendacious about being perfectly honest about what he wanted. So it depends on which Hamilton you read. Now, let's say a few more things about the Confederation period and what was going on with some of the anti-Federalists. Patrick Henry, in a marvelous series of speeches delivered in the Virginia legislature, really roundly condemned the Constitution as being a usurpation of power by the central government as a system which he believed would lead ultimately to a highly centralized system of governmental oppression. And this was indeed the line followed by most of the anti-Federalists, as they came to be called. This is in these speeches that Patrick Henry's famous line comes from. I smelt a rat. That was how he expressed his concern about what was behind the Constitution. Now, in terms of some sources on the anti-Federalists, the opponents of the Constitution, the best scholarly account is Jackson Turner mains the anti-Federalists, a very good scholarly account of the anti-Federalists movement, those opposed to the Constitution. There are two anthologies, Cecilia Kenyon, the anti-Federalists is a one volume paperback anthology of selection of writings. The last couple of years, the University of Chicago Press, edited by Storing, produced a marvelous, definitive edition of the anti-Federalist writings called the Complete Anti-Federalists. It's something like seven volumes. It's a marvelously edited reference set. It's a virtually complete collection of all the anti-Federalist writings. Now, the anti-Federalists included, as I said, many of the notable revolutionary characters. And they really thought that the Constitution was a step away from the principles of 76, as they were called. They thought this for a number of reasons. Aside from the obvious things like having too much central authority in the government not wanting to give the federal government taxing power, they also thought that it betrayed some of the fundamental insights and principles of radical Republican thinking up to that point. One of these was the belief almost universally shared by every thinker up to the time of the revolution, that free societies, republics, necessarily had to be highly decentralized and, in fact, could exist only over a small geographical area. That if you tried to extend a republic out over a large land mass, it would inevitably become corrupt and it would decay into tyranny. Now, this idea of the corruption and decay of republics was a constant theme in the writing of these people. They were searching history all of the time to try to figure out why it was that certain republics like the Roman Republic, the Venetian Republic, the Denmark Republic later on, why these republics started out fairly well and then degenerated into tyranny. And they derived certain principles which they thought were necessary to preserve freedom once it had been acquired. And one of these was not to extend the government out over a very large land mass. The thinking behind this was actually rather simple. It was argued that in order to keep a check, in order to keep rain on your representatives, they had to be a fairly small ratio of representative to constituent population. In other words, you couldn't have one representative for every 50,000 constituents because there's no realistic sense of representation there. You had to have a much closer sense of representation. Also, the representative had to be from a community where social sanctions could be brought to bear. That is, if the people didn't like how he was behaving, he would more or less pay for it in the community he was from. But if you extend that out, and if you make the representation much more diffuse, then there's not that sense of community. There's not that sense of cultural identity in regard to the population he comes from. There were a number of ideas like this, and let me just say that it was virtually truism that republics could exist only in highly decentralized, small geographical areas. So here you have the people advocating a central system of government over a large geographical landmass. And the Anti-Federalists thought this went against every principle they ever believed in. Plus, they saw the writing on the wall. They saw the Hamiltonians behind the system, and they knew that they were in for a lot of trouble, which indeed they were. Now, if you read some of Madison's famous writings in the Federalists, you'll find that there's a total reversal in this ideology. One of Madison's famous Federalist papers actually reverses the argument and argues that in fact, republics are better secured in a large geographical landmass. This is one of the curious twists of theory that occurs in order to justify the Constitution. Basically, the argument he used was that over a larger geographical landmass with a more diffuse representation, the better people come to the top. The better people get elected to government. Whereas in localized elections, you tend to get real incompetence in office. Now, if you can believe this, it's hard to believe that today that these people really believe that we get the best people in office, but that at least was the argument that was used. I won't say much more about the Anti-Federalists except to give you a more of a sense of what actually went on in the battles in the various state legislatures to ratify the Constitution. It's estimated by historians that probably more than half of the American population opposed the Constitution. However, the Federalists had distinct advantages. They were located in the cosmopolitan cities, the Seaport towns like New York and Philadelphia. They were well organized. They controlled a good deal of the press. And the Federalists realized that in order to put through their program of quick ratification, they required something on the order of a Blitzkrieg. That is, they had to get it ratified. They had to get the state conventions called very quickly for ratification before the opposition had a chance to organize. Most of the Anti-Federalist opposition came from the farmers, from the people out in the countryside, the people who were not organized in closely knit communities in cities. And they realized that if they delayed too long the ratification that these people would be able to get an effective anti-Constitution movement going. So key, essential to the Federalist Blitzkrieg was to move as fast as possible. And this comes out through all of the campaigns they launched to the various states to affect ratification. I should mention that the ratification of the Constitution was essentially illegal. The Articles of Confederation stated very clearly that in order to amend or change the Articles of Confederation, ratification by all 13 states was required. However, the Constitution said, and remember when they first convened to change the Articles of Confederation, they were not in power to form a new Constitution only to amend the Articles. But the Constitution said an explicit contradiction to those provisions that only nine of the 13 states were required for ratification. So that right away made it very suspect, and this was pointed out by the way by the Anti-Federalists, that it was an illegal document by the terms of the Articles. Now, let me give you a couple examples of how these are more anecdotal things. I don't tell you much about the overall picture, but as to how the Federalists tended to work to get our glorious Constitution in place. One state that really wasn't much of a question because it was clearly pro-Federalists was Pennsylvania. But there was an interesting incident in the Pennsylvania legislature that might show you something more of the flavor of what was going on here. This had to do with when the Constitution was first rushed out, and it was hoped that the state legislatures would call for ratifying conventions within their states very quickly, as soon as possible. But the problem was that the Constitution, the copy of the Constitution was hitting the Pennsylvania legislature literally on the day before it was supposed to disband for the rest of the year. So the problem was how could the supporters of the Constitution in the Pennsylvania legislature get this ratification Constitution pushed through extremely quickly? They had to do it very fast. Well, it turns out that there was a minority of Anti-Federalists in the Pennsylvania legislature. They were the radicals. They didn't have enough to stop the thing from going through. They couldn't stop a constitutional ratification procedure from being adopted. But they did have enough to prevent a quorum. They could leave the floor until the legislature expired, and thereby prevent a quorum, and thereby prevent a vote from taking place, thereby preventing, thereby allowing the Anti-Federalists time to organize. Well, what happened? Well, on the final day of the Pennsylvania legislature, you see the day before, the radicals had gone out to somebody's house, and they sat around and drank beer, so they didn't have a quorum, and they couldn't conduct business. On the final day, a Federalist mob, headed by a Captain John Berry, went to where the Anti-Federalists were staying. They went to this house they were staying in. Now, most of the delinquent legislatures managed to escape, but Berry and his mob called her two, and it turns out that the legislature was only short two of a quorum. These two men were James McAlmont and Jacob Miley, and they were enough for a quorum, so they were physically dragged back into the state house, pushed into the assembly room, and the exit was barred. Now, McAlmont was a fiery Scots Irishman, and he begged to be excused when he was counted present during the roll call. This is the roll call for a quorum. The rules of the assembly were read to him. Every member who did not answer the roll call was liable to a fine of two shillings, or five shillings if it prevented a quorum. Thereupon, McAlmont thrust his hand into his pocket, took out some loose silver, addressed the speaker, and said, well, sir, here is your five shillings, so let me go. At this point, the gallery roared with laughter. Now, a solemn debate ensued on whether McAlmont was present or not. The federalists insisted, the federalists insisted on a vote for the ratifying convention. At this time, McAlmont dashed for the door, but was restrained from leaving until after the vote. The assembly voted to hold an election on the first Tuesday of November, a month away, and thus the federalist blitz was underway. Now, if you examine the ratification procedures state by state, you'll find that there were several key states, a number of small states ratified almost immediately, but there were several very pivotal states where anti-federalist feeling was very, very strong. Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York were three key states, and it wasn't clear at all. In fact, it was largely assumed that very possibly the federalists would lose all of those battles. Let's take the case of Massachusetts. Now, Massachusetts was a very important state because it was believed that however Massachusetts went, a number of other states would go the same way. Now, the federalists attempted to pack the convention, and they sometimes resorted a trickery to do this. For example, the federalists published a report that John Bacon, who was a popular anti-federalist from Berkshire County, had been one over to the federalist's cause. Now, Bacon denied this, but his denial could not be published in time to prevent his defeat at the polls. In another county, a delegate was elected who was not a resident of that county. There were all kinds of strange elections that went on on the part of the federalists. Now, the anti-federalists in Massachusetts managed to attain a clear majority anyway, estimated to be at least 40 votes more than the federalists, 40 votes more than they needed to defeat the federalists. Now, the federalists at this point swung into action. A leading anti-federalist from Berkshire County left the convention early. The federalists claimed that he realized opposition to be hopeless, which was clearly false, but the explanation probably lies in the fact that he owed money to one federalist who was engaged in land speculation with another. Yet, another anti-federalist was informed by his father-in-law, a wealthy judge and ex-tory, that his opposition to the Constitution was not appreciated, whereupon this delegate voted for the Constitution, even though he'd been specifically elected on an anti-federalist plank. Now, certainly the poverty of many of the Backwoods anti-federalists was a factor. Some of them could not even afford the trip home without the pay they were to receive as delegates. Upon applying to the Treasury, they were informed that no money was available. As one federalist put it, quote, we have circulated, if the Constitution is adopted, there will be no difficulty respecting the pay. If it is not, they must look to the Treasury for it. Close quote. Now, the two key targets, the two main targets of the federalists were Sam Adams and John Hancock, each of whom were highly respected in Massachusetts and each of whom could bring a number of other delegates with them. Adams had always identified with the artisans and the mechanics of Boston and other seaport towns and up to this point, he had been very suspicious concerning the Constitution. The federalist secretly enlisted Paul Revere, he remember Paul Revere, the ride, and others to stage a mass meeting at the Green Dragon Inn, which had once been the headquarter of the Sons of Liberty. This supposedly spontaneous gathering, which was actually very well planned, adopted resolutions in favor of ratification and Revere brought the resolutions to the aging Adams who disillusioned by recent political setbacks and crushed by the recent death of his son, fell for the trick and responded to the call of the people. He announced his conversion to ratification on the floor of the convention. Now working from a position of strength, the federalist approached Hancock, governor of Massachusetts at this time. At a secret meeting, he was flattered and bribed. Yes, good old John Hancock. The Massachusetts federalists he was told were going to introduce a bill of rights in the form of nine amendments. And I should point out it was the absence of a bill of rights in the original Constitution that was one of the major sources of complaints by the anti-federalists. Hancock, as one of America's most celebrated patriots, was invited to introduce the amendments and thus appear in the role of hero. Moreover, though Washington would undoubtedly be the first president, he would need a New Englander as vice president and who better than Hancock himself? As Governor Morris had said, quote, loaves and fishes must bribe the demagogues. They must be made to expect higher offices under the general and the state governments, close quote. You see, the federalists were very explicit about what they had to do. They had to bribe these people to bring them over. Well, Hancock fell for it. When a motion was made to adopt the Constitution, Hancock stepped forward to introduce the nine amendments. Although he had nothing to do whatsoever with their composition, he claimed them as his own. With a confidence, as one observer noted, astonishing to all who were in the know, close quote. Sam Adams seconded the amendments and endorsed them. Hancock endorsed the Constitution and the day was carried in Massachusetts. 187 votes in favor, 168 votes against. If only 10 delegates who were actually elected as anti-federalists had refused to sell out, Massachusetts would have been lost to the federalists and in our likelihood the entire battle for the Constitution would have been lost as well. Now, Virginia was another key state, which I don't really have time to go through. New York was another key state. But I suggest that you read something like the main book to get a realistic assessment of the politics involved because it was politics as usual. It was not some sort of grand humanitarian movement for a Constitution that was unanimously agreed to. It was a very, very bitter political fight. Now, we come now to the economic motivations underlying the Constitution, or at least what some historians have claimed were the economic motivations. Charles Beard wrote a very famous book on the economic origins of the Constitution where he argued that one could understand who voted for the Constitution and who voted against it pretty much on the grounds of who stood to benefit from it financially as opposed to those who stood to lose from it. Now, Beard's research has not really stood up too well. The specifics have not. They've been rather severely criticized by Forrest McDonald and Brown and a few other scholars. But the idea that Beard had really wasn't original with him. He got it from writers of the time, some of the anti-Federalists, who believed that there were very strong financial incentives underlying the move for the Constitution. The strongest of these incentives goes back to the issue of the war debt that I mentioned before. Now, remember I told you that in order to conscript goods, that the government passed out a lot of these certificates of indebtedness to various people, farmers, merchants, and such. Now, many years had gone by since the war had ended. What had happened to these certificates? The central government had no taxing power and therefore was unable to redeem them. What do you suppose happened? They depreciated incredibly in value. They became virtually worthless, because a lot of people believed there was simply no way they would ever be redeemed. Consequently, the farmers, the poorer people, whose goods had been conscripted, sold these often at just a fraction of their face value to speculators in the market, particularly speculators located in major commercial centers and banking centers like Philadelphia and New York. Now, in the early stages, some of these certificates went for so low as, say, $0.05 on the dollar. OK, here you have Alexander Hamilton and the other Federalists, the big money types, the pro-banking types, pushing for a Constitution. What do you suppose is going to happen under this Constitution? The federal government will get taxing power. And what do you suppose is going to do with that taxing power? Well, it's going to be a good, solid government, so it's going to pay off its debts. Well, where do those debts lie? Well, some are with foreign governments, but a lot of them are to these outstanding certificates. Well, who is now holding most of those certificates? Well, the speculators who bought them up over the previous years. As news leaks out that it's very likely that a Constitution will be ratified, the market value of these certificates increases appreciably, as you can well imagine, because now there's a very good likelihood that, in fact, they will be redeemed. Now, scholars will probably, redeemed at face value, scholars will probably debate endlessly on whether this was consciously done by Hamilton and the Federalists as a scheme to make money. We do know, however, that a lot of people got rich off of those certificates. The speculators who bought them up, a lot of people. And we do know that certain individuals, such as the governor of Virginia at one point, who was originally anti-Federalist, suddenly swung over to the Federalist side and suddenly became into possession of a lot of these certificates. So they were also used as bribes. I will leave it to you to investigate to whatever extent you wish the ins and outs of this and the pros and cons. But at least it's a very good likelihood that a lot of these speculators who knew exactly what was going on were looking to the Constitution to make them very rich very quickly. Now, we have the ratification of the Constitution, the official ratification adoption of it in 1789. What happens? Washington becomes the first president unanimously elected and two key individuals enter Washington's cabinet. The first is Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury. The second is Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State. Now, Jefferson had been over in France for a number of years as Ambassador. He wasn't around during the whole ratification controversy. He had been kept informed by Madison who was actually the so-called father of the Constitution. Madison at this point worked with Hamilton and was very much of a nationalist type. But Madison kept him informed. Jefferson's initial reaction to the Constitution, as he said, basically he was kind of half for it and half against it. He thought it should have a Bill of Rights which all the radicals did. And basically the way the Federalists placated the Anti-Federalists was to promise to include a Bill of Rights, which was in fact included a couple of years later. So if you read the Constitution, you're really dealing with two different documents. You're dealing with the body of the Constitution, which is a very strong pro-Central government document and you're dealing with the Bill of Rights, which represents the viewpoint of a substantially different group of individuals, the much more pro-liberty Anti-Federalist types. Now, Jefferson eventually comes out in favor of the Constitution from what he knew about it. He comes back to take his job as Secretary of State under George Washington. At first he doesn't know Hamilton very well. You know, Hamilton fought as an aide to Washington in the war. He's kind of a war hero type. He doesn't know a lot about Hamilton's ideas and he even works with Hamilton in the early stages of Washington's administration. He strikes a few political deals. He supports him on one measure and promised to get Hamilton's support to move the capital from Philadelphia where it was then to the Potomac, which became Washington D.C. Because there was a great fear, particularly by the Southerners, that if the federal capital were located in a financial center like Philadelphia, it would simply become a tool of the financiers. That's why there was this move to create a capital city on the Potomac. So various early deals were struck, but it becomes very clear to Jefferson very quickly that Hamilton is up to a lot of dirty tricks and that Hamilton is not to be trusted. Hamilton pushes through a number of measures. He pushes through a funding measure that is a measure to fund the debt at face value. This is where Madison splits with Hamilton. Madison starts to see the writing on the wall becomes extremely suspicious of Hamilton and in fact, Madison argued for a discrimination scheme whereby the people who bought these certificates in speculation would get what they paid for them back, but the original holders would get the money that was coming to them. That was a very impractical scheme. There was really no way to trace it back like that. Hamilton was coming across as the hard money man, the honest, let's pay our debts man by saying these certificates should be redeemed not at market value but at face value to their present holders regardless of how those securities were acquired. Now, you might say, well, what's wrong with that? I mean, isn't that good honest government? Well, who was going to pay off these debts? Where was the money to come from to pay off these debts from taxes of one sort or another? So in effect, what would be happening is the very people whose property was taken who then believed that there was no way they were ever gonna get the money back sold to speculators, were they then going to be taxed when they sold it a few cents on the dollar to pay off the speculators at face value. You can understand the immense hostility that was generated by this. This is really the origin of the Jeffersonian opposition to what were called speculators, stock jobbers, and so forth. Sometimes they were even referred to as capitalists. And it's very important if you study this period to understand that when the Jeffersonians condemn capitalists or stock jobbers or speculators, they're not talking about speculators on the free market. Some historians don't even understand this. They're talking specifically about those financiers who dealt in government securities and who they believed reaped enormous profits at the expense of taxpayers. This was the opposition. This was the Jeffersonian opposition to the financial scheme of Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton also pushed through what was called an assumption of state debts. He wanted all of the state debts consolidated into one national debt. Now what was his reason for that? He wanted the government to assume all the debts, then get a taxing power, because he thought a taxing power was called the power of the purse, was essential to a solid central government. Now let me read you a passage that you may think is incredible by today's standards, but this is exactly how Hamilton thought. Here's what Hamilton said about a national debt. Now most of us think of a debt as a bad thing, right? Even liberals don't say a debt is a good thing. But here is Hamilton on the blessings of a national debt. Quote, a national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing. It will be a powerful cement of the union. It will also create a necessity for keeping up taxation to a degree, which without being oppressive will be a spur to industry. Close quote. Hard to believe. But here you have Hamilton calling a national debt a national blessing, a cement of the union. Now what did he mean? He was very specific about what he meant. Recall that I told you that Alexander Hamilton admired the British system. He admired the British system of government and he admired the British system of finance. Now what did he admire about the British system? He particularly admired the Bank of England, which had been established after the glorious revolution in 1688, specifically as an institution, quasi-private, but very closely associated with government, to loan money to the English government so the English government could fight wars of empire. Now it's a very complex financial thing, but pretty much what happens in the whole English system of finance is the idea of a funded debt system arises. As it's called, the revolution in English finance is sometimes referred to after the Bank of England. A funded debt system was basically a method where the government would borrow money from, say, the Bank of England and then would pay interest on the money, pay interest on the loan, but in effect would never, would not pay off the principal if it ever or maybe for a long time to come. And it would guarantee the payment of the interest by tying it to specific taxes in the future. That is, it would say to the bank, well, the reason you know that we're going to be good for our debt to you is because we're going to implement these new taxes in the future and it's from these taxes that we will pay this perpetual interest to you. So you'll make money and in the meantime, the financial interest becomes very wedded to the government. Because if you're a bank and if you're the financial interest and you have a lot of money loaned out to a government, you suddenly acquire a very strong interest in the stability of that government. You don't want that government overthrown because then you're going to lose a lot of money. This was the idea of the stability in England created by the financial system. This is what Hamilton wanted for America. So the third prong of his state scheme was to create a model bank, model after the Bank of England which became known as the Bank of the United States. And this was the first Bank of the United States. It was a quasi-private corporation but government money went into it and then using the government's specie, you could then do credit expansion. You could then issue paper currency in effect or bank notes three or four times the number of amount of specie you had. It's a rather complex system but it's very much similar to the English system and Hamilton thought that this is the way you brought a country together in the form of a highly centralized government. He also favored and was very strong advocate of high protective tariffs as a method to spur large industry. He was a very strong advocate of internal improvements which meant using tax money to build things like canals and roads and such. In short, Hamilton in the Hamiltonian scheme was the model of what we later see under Theodore Roosevelt in the Progressive Era and Roosevelt was an explicit admirer of Hamilton of that close alliance between government and big business. Now the strange thing about Hamilton is he's often called by historians an advocate of capitalism. He was the strong proponent of capitalism. Well if you're going to call capitalism this alliance between government and business then it's capitalism but obviously that is not what libertarians generally mean by capitalism. If anyone represents capitalism during this era it is not the Hamiltonians it is the Jeffersonians. Those people who wanted the government to stay out of the economy for the most part altogether. So it's important that you not be misled by the sort of terminology you might read in history books regarding the schemes of Alexander Hamilton. And Jefferson for that matter was not particularly anti-industry. He just did not want the government through taxes to give special privileges to industry, to business. Now what happens as all of this goes on under Washington is Jefferson becomes convinced that Hamilton is plotting to establish a monarchy in America. Jefferson actually starts sending memos to Washington saying I have had private conversations with Alexander Hamilton and he has told me that he does not expect this form of government to last and once it falls he expects to see a monarchy established. Now some historians have ridiculed Jefferson claiming he was just a paranoid old man when he wrote this and he didn't really understand Hamilton. I frankly think that Jefferson was telling the truth. From everything I've seen of Hamilton it certainly is a very plausible story. Plus there's a good deal of evidence. Hamilton, the secretary of the Treasury position was very significant for Hamilton because you remember when I mentioned Walpole like he was the first Lord of the Treasury which was equivalent to being prime minister. Historians have pointed out that Hamilton very clearly saw himself as a prime minister in a prime minister role equivalent to the first Lord of the Treasury in England. Therefore he saw himself as setting policy for many departments other than the department of the Treasury and indeed one of the complaints Jefferson had against Hamilton is Hamilton Hamilton kept sticking his fingers in all these other departments that he had no business in. He kept negotiating in foreign policy on his own. He did all kinds of strange things and obviously he was thinking in terms of George Washington being the figurehead king. George Washington was now kind of a national figure getting a little on the senile side in his second term anyway at least Jefferson thought so and he was supposed to be just a figurehead and Hamilton would really run things. So this intense rivalry begins between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton and it's in the process of this rivalry that we see the formation of the first political parties in America or what historians called the first political system or the first electoral system. And what we have are the strong Hamiltonian types who were known as even to this day were known as Federalists versus the Jeffersonians which were known as Republicans. Now I should mention that neither the Federalists nor the Jeffersonians really had a theory of parties in a government. They were both against parties. They believed that parties were factions and that factions were destructive of a Republican government. This is rather a long story in itself, I won't go into it. There was really not a concept of legitimate opposition parties. Parties were seen as potential revolutionary cliques that were dangerous. This is why incidentally when Jefferson took over in 1800 after forming an effective political party he regarded it as a revolution. When Jefferson won over Adams in 1800, Jefferson wrote in a very famous passage that the 1800 election victory was in its own way as much of a revolution as the American Revolution had been. And historians have not taken him very seriously on this but when you understand that there was no concept of legitimate party opposition, that change of government in Jefferson's eyes and in the eyes of his opponents, the Federalists was a revolution. It was an overthrow of government. The Federalists were kicked out, the Republicans were put in, although it was done by peaceful means, relatively peaceful means. There were threats of force from time to time. Now what happens is Jefferson and Hamilton end up resigning from Washington's cabinet. They're both running things from kind of behind the scenes in their own parties. I'm gonna go very quickly here. With the election of John Adams with Thomas Jefferson as vice president, Hamilton finds that he can't run things as well with John Adams. John Adams, although he's a Federalist by this time kind of a conservative, nevertheless is his own man and things don't work that well with John. You can't push him around quite like you could Washington. So although he does, Adams does regard the Republicans as a threat at this point. A lot of things are happening. Now we're talking about the 1790s now. A lot of things happened during this turbulent decade of the 1790s. I can't do much more than just very briefly touch on them. There is a war in Europe at this time between Napoleonic France and England. There is a problem with neutral shipping of America to France and to England. There is the specter of the French Revolution, the Jeffersonians having supported it and the Federalists having condemned it. There's a question of if America has to side with either France or England, which side should it be? The Jeffersonians believe that if that came to that they should side with France against England. The Federalists were very sympathetic to England for reasons that I explained before, Hamilton's admiration for England. And the hatred the Federalists had for the French Revolution. A lot of things were going on. There occurred in the late part of that decade something known as the Quasi War with France. This was a number of fights at sea when the French were trying to stop American neutral shipping from taking place. It never erupted into a declared war but there was fighting at sea that took place. In reaction to this, the Federalists started to raise an army, started to appropriate money for a large navy anticipating a war with France. The first standing army that America has seen. They started implementing certain types of direct taxes. In fact, even before that, I think it was in 94, they had put some of the first direct taxes in the form of a whiskey tax, an excise tax on whiskey. That led to the so-called whiskey rebellion in Pennsylvania, in Western Pennsylvania because the Western farmers in Pennsylvania had to convert their grain into whiskey for easy shipping. They couldn't ship the grain in mass itself. The shipping was too expensive. It was an onerous tax on these people. They organized and they ended up in kind of the old style of the Sons of Liberty threatening a few tax collectors and so forth. And I'm telling you this so you get an image of how Thomas Jefferson and his group saw Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton was not only in a very powerful position politically, he was virtually second in command of the American army. So Hamilton gets a stride of his horse, says we have to crush this terrible rebellion of these backwoods farmers, raises 15,000 militia and marches at the head of an army to crush the Pennsylvania rebellion. By the time this army got to Pennsylvania, the farmers had disappeared, the rebellion was over, they managed to catch a few stragglers and take them back and try them for treason. I believe Adams gave them a pardon after they were found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. But here you have the worst fears of the Jeffersonians coming to pass. You have Hamilton putting together his state system, his national bank, his high taxation. You have them raising a standing army which was feared and despised by the Jeffersonians all along. They were unalterably opposed to a standing army. A standing army, by the way, is an army maintained in peacetime. You have a large naval establishment being started by the Federalists which again was despised by the Jeffersonians. The Jeffersonians were very anti-militaristic and very isolationist. You have, and then on top of that, you have Hamilton leading an army to crush a domestic rebellion against taxes. So they really saw Hamilton as an extremely dangerous character and Jefferson thought it was essential that the Federalists be kicked out of office. Now the real climax of this was in the Alien and Sedition Acts passed under the Adams administration, I believe it was in 1798. These acts were basically attempts to make it much tougher for foreigners, particularly French foreigners because that's who they were directed at from gaining citizenship in the United States because a lot of the French radicals were coming over to America. They also, and more relevant to Jefferson himself, they also made it possible to clamp down on so-called seditious libel against the government. And a lot of the Jeffersonian newspaper editors were imprisoned under the Seditious Libel Act. That is to say, you could not libel, you could not in effect criticize the United States government, the Adams administration, without facing a prison term under the Sedition Acts. And there was an intense newspaper war going on at this point with the Federalist papers fighting against the Jeffersonian papers and the Jeffersonian editors found themselves imprisoned under the Sedition Acts. So things are getting very, very tense. Jefferson and Madison collaborate and they pan what are now known as the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions. Very important documents, the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions. Madison, I think did the Virginia and Jefferson did the Kentucky one. Basically, these doctrines said, one was a bit more radical than the other, that should the federal government become oppressive and try to push through unjust laws, it was the right of the state government to nullify those laws and to act as a buffer between the federal government who tried to enforce them and the citizens of their own state. The Virginia and Kentucky resolutions become key documents in later American history during the so-called notification controversy with John Calhoun in South Carolina under the Jackson administration and during the Civil War period when they were referred back to by the Southerners in defense of their right to secede. But at this point, the Federalists become convinced that there's about to be a revolution perpetrated by the Jeffersonians. And indeed, there was even talk about that among some Jeffersonians, the need for an armed revolution against the Federalists. The keeps getting more tense and more tense. Finally, you have the election in 1800. You have, due to some brilliant political work by Aaron Burr in New York, who was a Republican, you have the key state of New York going for Jefferson, making it clear that Jefferson will win the presidency over the Federalists. There are then some other irrelevant things that go on for our purposes, this tie between Burr and Jefferson that takes place and the Federalists were trying to get Burr in office because they thought they could buy him out and so forth, but that's really irrelevant to our purposes here. The key thing is to understand that once Jefferson got in office, what he did and how he saw things. As he took over the administration in 1801, he was clearly convinced that a revolution had occurred, another revolution, another American revolution. And perhaps with that brief sketch I gave you of what had happened, but after that point you can understand why he had that perspective. Now, what was the government that he was taking over? This was a government which Jefferson, this Federalist establishment, which Jefferson had called, quote, too complicated, too expensive, where offices had been, quote, unnecessarily multiplied. He's taking over this huge Federal bureaucracy, right? Well again, this shows you a bit of the 18th century perspective. Just how huge was this Federal bureaucracy? Well, let's take one department, the War Department. The War Department had one secretary, one accountant, 14 clerks and two messengers. That was the War Department. That was, for Jefferson, a bloated bureaucracy. The Attorney General of the United States did not even have a clerk, didn't even have one clerk for the Attorney General. But by 18th century Jeffersonian standards, this government was far too large, far too oppressive and far too dangerous. By the way, I should mention these people were not fools. I mean, it's not like this is kind of funny in a way. But one central tenet of Jeffersonian way of thinking, and it was all throughout the revolutionary writings as well, is the importance of precedence. That is to say, you have to stop something at the very beginning. This was believed very strongly by the colonial radicals, that if you allow a government to get its foot in the door, no matter how small that opening is, it will use it to widen and widen its sphere of intrusion. So these people insisted over and over that when a government gets out of line, you have to stop it right away. You cannot let it get larger and larger and larger until it becomes unmanageable. And Jefferson firmly believed this, along with a lot of other radicals, that you have to stop these things immediately. What did Jefferson do in his first term? He did a number of things. He severely reduced the number of federal officers. For example, he eliminated all tax collectors and tax inspectors. He eliminated all taxes that had been put in place by the federalists. There were no taxes anymore. There were only customs duties, which were a form of indirect taxation. He reduced the diplomatic corps of the United States to three missions, one in Britain, one in France, and one in Spain. He cut the military budget in half, if Ronald Reagan is listening. And he virtually gutted the army, the standing army, and he canceled all plans to build large frigates for the Navy. He just cut the military almost out entirely. Now, it was at this point that after Jefferson got through with this, that most people didn't have much contact with the federal government at all. If you've heard of the federal government, it was through mail delivery or something. By the time the Republicans had finished in 1810, by this time Madison was in power, the Republicans had reduced the national debt by one-half. Now, Jefferson was convinced that the national debt should be done away with as quickly as possible, unlike Hamilton who wanted not only a national debt, but a perpetual debt, one that went on forever. The Jeffersonians were convinced that a national debt was an albatross around the neck of taxpayers, and it had to be slashed and eliminated as quickly as possible by cutting across the board, domestic spending, foreign spending, military spending, and so forth. Now, unfortunately, the record of Jefferson in office is not all that good in some respects. In his first term, for example, the major problem he had, and here you begin to see the problems of office, the problems of political office, the major contradiction in Jefferson's first term was the Louisiana Purchase. The United States really didn't have really any intention or desire to double the land space of the United States through the Louisiana Purchase. It almost fell into their lap. Their main concern was that when Spain turned over Louisiana territory to France, that the shipping rights, the navigation rights down the Mississippi, ending out to the sea, that these rights not be in any way impinged upon. And in other words, the port of New Orleans had to be kept clear because the shipping was very important, obviously, to the merchants and farmers in that part of the country, the Mississippi was. But it turns out through a series of circumstances that France wanted to get rid of that territory and America bought it for relatively little money. But Jefferson realized that he had no constitutional authority to do this. And basically he just blinked. He just said, well, it's not constitutional, but he thought it was a good thing to do, so he did it anyway. So there you have a strict constructionist in effect, simply ignoring the Constitution when he thought it was necessary to do so. Now in Jefferson's second term, unfortunately he becomes even worse for good motives in a sense, but with disastrous results. The European War continues between England and France, the problem of neutral shipping continues, and Jefferson, deathly afraid that through the depredations of by the French and the British on American shipping that it will draw American into that European War, decides to impose an embargo on all foreign trade, all foreign trade. It devastates New England merchants. I mean, if it was trouble getting your ships through before, now you had no shipping at all. And it was absolutely devastating to the economy. There was a good deal of resistance to it. There was a good deal of smuggling. Jefferson becomes more and more authoritarian in his feudal effort to enforce this embargo, even to the point of at one point where some individuals had been smuggling some goods from Canada, their raft was confiscated and they recaptured it, suggesting these individuals should be hanged as an example to other smugglers. So here you have Thomas Jefferson, the apostle of human liberty and rights, calling for in this case, the death penalty for smugglers. That's what can happen to someone even as good as Jefferson. Okay. Now I'm not gonna really go through the administrations of Madison and Monroe and so forth. It's simply not enough time. They are, in a sense, extensions of the Jeffersonian philosophy, but there's a lot of contradictions. The Jeffersonians begin to sell out. The worst mistake they make is involvement in the War of 1812, which was unnecessary. The ostensible reason for the War of 1812 were these depredations by the British on American shipping and the impression of American seamen into the British Navy. Some more cynical historians have suggested that the intense desire by many Americans to long-standing desire to conquer Canada had a lot to do with that war. And I think those people are probably right. Because if you look at the record, the people most affected by British interference with American shipping were the New England merchants who were largely Federalist in orientation. They were intensely opposed to the War of 1812. It was the War of 1812 that led to the famous Hartford Convention in 1814 by the Federalists, where the Federalists actually threatened to secede if the war were not brought to an end. And this effectively destroyed the Federalist Party in 1814 because now the Federalists were branded as anti-patriotic because they opposed the War of 1812. So it doesn't make much sense on the one hand to say that the real motivation for the War of 1812 was English depredation of American shipping when, in fact, those most affected by it were the anti-war party. So I think you have to take a somewhat more detailed look at that. The thing I want to jump to, really, I want to go through the, what we have at the end of the Republican era, we have John Quincy Adams, who's the son of John Adams being elected. And at this point, you have the emergence of very nationalistic in the ascendancy of a Federalist school again. Adams has very elaborate programs for internal improvements, high taxes, high tariffs. It becomes a repetitive theme throughout the history of this way of thinking. It's sometimes called federalism. A better term would be nationalism. It's in the Hamiltonian tradition, the Hamiltonian finance tradition. But more importantly, in 1828, a man comes into office named Andrew Jackson, and thus begins a so-called Jacksonian era. Now, Jackson is an interesting character personally. He's a very complex and contradictory character. You can find many libertarian aspects in the period of Andrew Jackson's presidency. His most famous and most heroic act was refusing to renew that vetoing the rechartering of the Bank of the United States, the second Bank of the United States, under Biddle. This is a very heroic act on his part. It brought a lot of condemnation. But he was very much opposed to state banks, and he vetoed the rechartering of this bank, and it was allowed to collapse into a state bank and Pennsylvania and eventually died in bankruptcy. He also withdrew the governmental deposits from this bank before it expired to prevent it from getting any attempt to bring it back to life. So Jackson was a good hard-money man. He was against paper money. He distrusted state banks. He had good economic sense, and he had some very good advisers, including Martin Van Buren, who was one of the better political figures of this period. Martin Van Buren, who was the next president after Jackson, was his right-hand man politically, a very astute politician from New York who ran the political machine there, and also very well-schooled in the ideas of classical liberalism and ideas regarding hard money and so forth. I can't go through Van Buren's presidency. We just don't have the time. But let me say about Jackson that on the bad side, Jackson, perhaps only the fact that he was a military hero and an ex-military man, had a very authoritarian streak in him. He was a slave owner, as for that matter was Jefferson. What he did, though, that was particularly disturbing is he was responsible in some ways for this infamous Indian land removal policy that was devastating to thousands and thousands of Indians. You may have all heard of the Trail of Tears. Jackson was primarily responsible for that. What had happened was you had these Cherokees living in Georgia. The white settlers wanted the land, and you had Indian land removals from other states as well. But the case of the Georgia Cherokees was particularly poignant because the explanation given for these Indian land removals was that the Indians could not assimilate into American culture and therefore had to be moved further out west to make room for white settlers. But the Georgia Cherokees had, in fact, assimilated very well. They had adopted, for the most part, American styles of living. They had become civilized. They had gone to school. They had learned English. They could read and write. In fact, they were so civilized that many of them were even slaveholders. They achieved the pinnacle of American civilization by becoming slaveholders. And that was certainly a good sign that they had grown up and matured from their state of barbarism and savagery. Now, regardless of that, and in spite of a Supreme Court decision, which would have prohibited their removal, Jackson called for their removal and thus took place the Trail of Tears, where these people, poorly supplied, were forced marched to the west, and thousands upon thousands of them died on the way, from starvation, from plague, and all sorts of things. But that's a dreadful story in itself. And you also have Jackson supporting things like the censorship of the males, prohibiting abolitionists or anti-slavery propaganda from going through the males. You have a number of aspects of Jackson that are really reprehensible. So he's certainly a mixed figure. But what we do have during this period are, if not among the top politicians, we have a number of lesser-known figures who are emerging at this period who are really quite good on a number of issues. Among these are the group known as the Locofocos, a rather silly name that I'll explain. These are the radical Jacksonians who emerge in the 1830s, 1840s. And their best-known proponent was a journalist named William Leggett, who wrote, I believe, for the New York Post under William Cullen Bryant, a poet and newspaper editor. Now, the Locofocos were very good, hard-money, laissez-faire radicals, far more consistent on every issue than was Jackson himself. They were stationed primarily in New York, and they were good across the board. The only thing I can find in Leggett that isn't good is his advocacy of some form of state education. But on everything else, they were against all forms of government monopoly and privilege. They were against all forms of paper money. They wanted a totally free market, a totally competitive market. So in that regard, these people were excellent. And I can indicate how good they were by quoting actually from an article from their opponents. This was an article that appeared in a Whig newspaper. I'll explain the significance of Whig here in a second, but the Whigs were the opponents of this time of the Jacksonians. And this was reviewing a pamphlet called Locofocos displayed. And this pamphlet featured a dialogue between a Whig and a Locofoco. And it was reviewed in the New York Tribune in 1845. To the Whig's question, quote, then I suppose, of course, you think that all legislation for morality alone is useless. The Locofoco replies, quote, not only that, but that all legislation having any other object with protection of rights is not only injurious to morality, but is in itself immoral and wicked. Close quote. So here in the mouth of a Locofoco, we have a very clear statement that any legislation, except for the protection of individual rights, is itself immoral and wicked. Now the Tribune, representing the big government position of the Hamiltonians now in the form of the Whig party, replied, quote, governments have no rights and duties beyond the prevention and punishment of palpable invasions. They're characterizing, I'm sorry, the local focal position. They say that the local focals believe that governments have no rights and duties beyond the prevention and punishment of palpable invasions of one man's rights by another that consequently all laws against gambling, grog selling, debauchery, bigamy, brothel keeping, et cetera, et cetera, are gross usurpations. To such victimless crimes, the Tribune contested the claim that the perpetrators, quote, injure nobody but themselves. This is really, as you can see, an early debate on victimless crime laws. On the contrary, this paper argued, those who commit such acts bring scandal upon their relatives, neglect their family and social duties, and, quote, they corrupt and demoralize those around them. Hence, they are a proper subject of social legislation, an early form of what economists might call an argument from externalities, I suppose. So here you have a very clear statement of the radical local focus, on one hand, being very extreme laissez-faire types, totally opposed to any sort of victimless crime laws. And you have what became known as the Whig Party, on the other, advocating a much stronger paternalistic type of government. So let me just say a few words about the Whig Party. The Whig Party, now you see, we've gone out of the first electoral system with the demise of the federalists after the Hartford Convention. And we enter now what historians call the second electoral system. And here you have the Jacksonians who were known as Democrats, the Democratic Party, which are an extension, really, of the Jeffersonian Republicans. Don't ask me about the name changes. And we have the emergence during the Jacksonian period in the 1830s of the Whigs. Now, who were the Whigs? Well, the Whigs were a coalition of old parties. They included the Die Hard Federalists. They included some of the Anti-Masonic Party. I can't really explain, unfortunately, what the Anti-Masonic Party was. And they included, finally, some state's writers, like John C. Calhoun, who, when he tried to push through the right of South Carolina to nullify a tariff bill, was rebuffed by Jackson. Now, do you all know about the nullification controversy? Calhoun, of course, the Southerners were always opposed to high tariffs, because as an agricultural part of the country, they always suffered from it. And the northern manufacturers benefited. And they pushed through this nullification idea in the South Carolina legislature, which said that they would refuse to recognize that tariff and would refuse to enforce it and would not allow the federal government to enforce it. Andrew Jackson, in his typical subtle way, threatened to invade South Carolina with an army and hang Calhoun. This did not endear the Calhoun state's writers to the Democratic Party for a while. Consequently, they formed one part of the original Whig coalition. The important thing to understand about the Whigs is that they didn't have a lot of political success. But the only person they were able to elect was a creaky old war hero from 1812 named William Harrison. Harrison had the good sense to die after a month in office. So after one month and all this work they had done, this great victory, this guy named Tyler comes in. And Tyler, one of our great presidents, did nothing in vetoed practically everything, much to the chagrin of the Whigs. So all their electioneering efforts did very little for them. So the Whigs weren't very successful politically, but how they were successful was what we might call culturally. The Whigs had an enormous cultural impact. And here I can give you a little bit of background on this because it's important to understand it. There has been, in recent American historiography, an interest in what is now called ethno-cultural history. The title is important, but the idea is significant. Ethno-cultural history. That is understanding political history along ethnic and cultural lines. That's all that means. Now what these historians argue, and the best known of these is probably Paul Klettner in a book. He's written a number of excellent books, the ones I would recommend, the two important ones are the Cross of Culture and the Third Electoral System. What Klettner argues, if you look at the competing parties in the Second Electoral System and later the Third Electoral System, the Democrats and Republicans, you find distinct and clearly demarcated cultural and ethnic differences in the parties. The Whigs represent a certain cultural and ethnic bias as opposed to the Democrats. And in order to understand these political battles, it's not enough just to look at the political ideas of each party, you have to understand the cultural battles that were going on underneath the surface. It's a very important insight, and a number of students of Klettner have picked up on this and virtually spawned a whole new area in American history, which is sometimes called ethno-cultural history. And to understand the Whig party, you have to understand something of this ethno-cultural history. Many of the Whigs came out of what is called the Second Great Awakening, which started in the late 1700s and went through the early 1800s. It was a religious revival. It was an enormous religious revival, a fundamentalist revival in the United States. Particularly in New York, around the 1820s, there was a great religious revival, and upstate New York became known as the burned-over district. It was burned over because so many religious revival preachers had gone through it, they had virtually just burned it with the religious revivals. That's the idea of the burned-over district. Charles Finney, the really key revivalist minister, really starts this going in upstate New York. Now, this revivalist, the Protestant revivalism, spawns a number of different reform movements. It spawns a sabbiterian movement that is restricting activities on Sundays. It spawns a temperance movement that is prohibiting liquor, various forms of spirit of strengths, as they were called. It spawns a very strong movement for state education to instill proper Protestant values in young children, particularly immigrant children and Catholic children. It spawns the abolitionist movement, in some respects, the anti-slavery movement. So it's a mixed movement. Some of the things they were doing were quite laudable, like the anti-slavery part. But many of them were very oppressive. They were attempts to impose certain cultural values on the rest of the country. And the Whigs really were the representatives of this whole way of thinking. They represented what Kleptner calls the pietistic strain in American history. That is, the idea that in order to be saved, you have to go out and save the whole country. It's not enough to have your own religion and keep it to yourself that your religion demands that you go out and save other people. So there's this moral pietism that pervades this resurgence of reform movements in the early 1800s in America. And this is embodied better than any other group by the Whigs. The Democrats, on the other hand, form what Kleptner calls, well, we'll call them the ritualists. That's one term he uses. The ritualists believed, on the contrary, that your religion was pretty much your own affair. The ritualists were oftentimes Catholics or German Lutherans, certain Protestant sects, that did not emphasize salvation of other people that much. They emphasized more just having to go through the rituals of your own church. That was all that was necessary for salvation. I'm simplifying this somewhat. And it really wasn't essential that you go out and propagandize or evangelicalize in order for yourself to be saved. Now, in other words, they didn't see, as the pietistic types did, America as a vast potential, you know, missionary ground to convert America. So you have two different worldviews and the ritualists tend to congregate in the Democratic Party. The pietistic types tend to congregate in the Whig Party. As the Whigs die out later on and the Republican Party is formed in the 1850s, the Republican Party then becomes the party of the pietists. Now, it's important that you understand because of the Democrat-Republican split today that in the 19th century, and when the Republicans get going in the 1850s, the Republicans are the big government party. It's crucial that you understand this. They are the ones advocating high tariffs, high taxes, an expensive war budget, all kinds of intervention in the economy. The Democrats, although this isn't universally true across the board, the Democrats tend to be more of the laissez-faire types. They want as little government intervention as possible. Now, that sounds fine, but here, as in many cases, is a very important exception and really a fatal flaw that eventually destroys the Democratic Party, divides it sectionally and leads to the Civil War, ultimately. And that was the fact that the Democratic Party, for all of its good points, tended to be the party defending slavery. The Southern faction of the Democratic Party were very strong defenders of slavery for obvious reasons. And it's really a tragedy in American history that strong defenders of laissez-faire of property rights mixed in their defensive property rights with the defense of slave holding as a form of property. It's one of the great tragedies that the strong party, in principle in so many ways, was also the party defending slavery. Now, this isn't to say that all Democrats believed in slavery, they didn't. A lot of Northern Democrats subjected to slavery, but there was a very strong Southern contingent in the Democratic Party. In fact, what held the country together as long as it did, because of the sectional strains, because of the slavery controversy, is the fact that the Democratic Party enjoyed bi-sectional support. That is, it had support from both the North and the South. And it was in the 1850s, when for various reasons like the Kansas-Nebraska bill and so forth, when the Northern Democrats became upset with the Southern Democrats and the party split along sectional lines, that unity that the Democratic Party had then disintegrated and the Democratic Party could then divide it along sectional lines, and it was just a matter of time until bloodshed erupted in the form of a civil war. That's a bit of an oversimplification, but I'm getting short on time so you're gonna hear a lot of simplifications. Let me mention briefly, without going into detail, a few of the other movements that are taking place around the Jacksonian period, they're extremely important for libertarians. We have, first of all, the rise of the abolitionist movement, which I mentioned briefly before. I won't say much about it, except to give you the essential name here, which is William Lloyd Garrison. Although Garrison came from a pietistic, quick background, he soon developed into a good libertarian. In fact, he was called by his critics a no-government man. It was some justification. He started in 1831, a paper called The Liberator, which became the premier abolitionist paper. And it's with William Lloyd Garrison and The Liberator, and later the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1933, that we see the rise of a radical abolitionist organization that is a radical anti-slavery group who calls for the immediate abolition of slavery. Now, the history of the anti-slavery movement is a very important history for libertarians because it was populated largely by libertarians. But it's also a very complex history, and I can't really go into it much, except to say there were several different factions involved and a lot of different people. I think it's safe to say that we can divide the anti-slavery movement roughly into three different groups. There were, first of all, why I would call the Moral Swasion Group, headed by William Lloyd Garrison, who believed that the power of morality, the power of conviction would eventually convert slaveholders to give up their slaves. That would be ultimately the way slaves would be freed. That was condemned as being extremely naive, as indeed it probably was. Garrison, aside from being an abolitionist, was also a pacifist. He was one of the founders of the New England Non-Resistance League, and he did not believe in the right of violent self-defense. Therefore, he believed it was wrong to incite slaves to rebel. He thought it was wrong to use force even in legitimate self-defense. That did not allow him therefore to align with other abolitionists, and this would be the second major group, which advocated some form of slave insurrection. Now, there are a number of people involved in that way of thinking, the best known to libertarians. In fact, I think you had a reading by him as Lysander Spooner, who was a very important figure in the abolitionist movement, widely, widely read and respected. Spooner did not go along with Garrison on a lot of things. He believed in the right of self-defense, of violent self-defense. In fact, Spooner's idea of a way of liberating slaves was to foment slave insurrection in the South. Now, you've all heard of John Brown's raid, I think, in 1559 on the armory at Harper's Ferry. It's widely believed, although it's hard to prove it down to the instant degree, that Lysander Spooner provided the inspiration for John Brown's raid. There's reason to believe that Brown had read a pamphlet by Spooner, wherein Spooner outlined the possibility of freeing enough slaves and then raiding certain plantations, freeing up more slaves, retreating into the hills and conducting these guerrilla raids on slave plantations until you have a large slave army, kind of a Spartacus type of army, freeing continually more slaves. The John Brown raid was a fiasco. There were a number of associates of Spooner who were implicated in it in the North. Garrett Smith was one who financed Spooner on a lot of his projects. So I needn't go into all the details there, but here we have a different way of thinking about anti-slavery. I should mention also that William Lloyd Garrison, as Spooner, would not participate in the political process. On the masthead of the liberator, the slogan of Garrison's liberator read, the U.S. Constitution is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. Now he said that because he regarded rightly the U.S. Constitution as the primary legal basis for slavery in the United States. There are a couple passages, clear passages in the Constitution where slavery was sanctioned, the two-thirds rule and voting, and there's a sanction of kind of a fugitive slave act in there as well. So no one really denied that, although the word slave was not used, it was pretty clear that slave was meant. Spooner later hatched a very elaborate technical argument arguing from the fact that slave was never mentioned in the Constitution to argue that slavery was in fact unconstitutional, but I don't think he ever convinced anyone because everyone knew that it was. But anyway, that left the possibility for a third group of agitators, and this is what we might call political antislavery. There was a split from the Garrisonians led by certain groups, for example, at Lewis and Arthur Tappan in New York in the 30s. They were financiers of some of these radical antislavery movements. There were a lot of people who became disillusioned with the moral Swazian argument, and they believed that the way to end slavery was through legislative means. And these people then formed in the late 30s the Liberty Party, which was an explicitly abolitionist political party. In 1840, they ran a man named James Burney on the Liberty Party ticket. They got precisely nowhere. The Liberty Party folded very quickly. It was politically ineffectual. Later, some of the refugees from the Liberty Party formed part of a coalition in something which became known as the Free Soil Party. The Free Soil Party, which emerged in the 40s was somewhat more effective in that it could not win elections, but it could by withholding or voting for some character, possibly sway elections somewhat. Now, I should mention that the Free Soil Party was not an abolitionist party. Had they been an abolitionist party, they couldn't have gotten as many supporters as they did. The Free Soil Party was devoted only to restriction of the extension of slavery into the territories. That is, it did not advocate the abolition of slavery. It simply said that we should not allow slavery to extend any further than it now is. In the belief that if it were stopped from expanding it would eventually die out on its own. Okay, that is pretty much all I can say about the abolitionist movement. Let me mention a couple other characters very quickly. I won't write their names on the board. Very significant for libertarians, but again, little known, is a man named George Henry Evans, who was writing primarily in the 30s and the 40s. And Evans put out a paper called The Working Man's Advocate. The significance of Evans is that when he was one of the most libertarian and earliest proponents of homesteading, homesteading of land, he worked assiduously for many years trying to push homesteading legislation or getting legislators to sponsor it in the United States Congress. And eventually his work paid off. He did influence some people and there was some homesteading legislation put through. The motto of Evans was, vote yourself a farm. And he believed that land should be free to the settlers who homesteaded and should not be kept and owned by governments. So another important character on unfortunately very little work has been done on Evans. Finally, the last character that I want to mention in this sense of a radical libertarian type is the very important libertarian. In fact, the father in some sense of American libertarianism, certainly 19th century libertarianism, and this was Josiah Warren, W-A-R-R-E-N. Warren's dates were 1798 to 1874. I won't spend much time on Warren either except to say that he was initially involved in some of these communitarian experiments, especially the English socialist Robert Owen set up one of these utopian communities in America called New Harmony that you may have heard of. Warren was an early participant in that but became disgusted with it because it was so collectivist. And he set out to set up his own utopian communities based on a principle he called self-sovereignty, the absolute self-sovereignty of the individual. Now I can't go through the whole history of the things he set up. He found that a number of different communities and some of them are quite successful. But there are some rather endearing things he had to say if I can find them here. In 1833, Warren founded a periodical called the Peaceful Revolutionist. This is really the first anarchist American anarchist periodical in America. Now in 1847, he established a community called Utopia along the banks of the Ohio River, south of Cincinnati. And he reissued the Peaceful Revolutionist and he spoke proudly of his new community in the following terms. He said, quote, not one meeting for legislation has taken place. No organization, no delegated power, no constitution, no laws or bylaws, rules or regulations, but such as each individual makes for himself in his own business. No officers, no priests, no prophets have been resorted to. Nothing of this kind has been in demand. We've had a few meetings but they were for friendly conversation for music, dancing, or some other social and pleasant pastime. Not even a single lecture upon the principles upon which we were acting has been given on the premises, close quote. So there you get an idea of the extreme sort of individualism that Warren was promoting. Warren is extremely important because in later years, although he himself didn't have that much impact in terms of being widely read, he was very influential on certain disciples. Eventually it's people like Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner who become familiar with him and they then go on to carry on the radical libertarian tradition later on in late 19th century America. I may be discussing that in the next lecture if I have time. Now the last thing I want to say and I will just have to cut this off arbitrarily I'm afraid and that's to say a few words about the Civil War itself. Perhaps there's not much point in spending a lot of time on the military aspects of the Civil War anyway but it might be worthwhile to spend at least the last five minutes speculating on what were the causes of the Civil War. Now I obviously can't give you my reasons in five minutes but I can give you my conclusions. Okay was the Civil War fought over slavery or was it fought over the tariffs? What were the causes? Well there's a lot of problems involved in this sort of thing but let me just say that in my judgment I can't get too excited about either side of the Civil War. I mean I have a lot of sympathy with the individuals who were the innocents who were harmed but from a libertarian point of view it's difficult to assess the southern movement for secession. Libertarians generally support the right of secession and I certainly would support it. The problem with the southern move for secession is that it was a secession explicitly aimed at setting up a competing state. That is they simply want to set up their own state. The confederacy did not admit the right of individuals to secede or did not admit the right of smaller political units within itself to secede. So I don't think we should be overly sentimental those libertarians who like to talk about secession in defending the confederacy just because it happened to be the seceding state. And although there certainly were injustices committed against the south in the form of tariffs and such, nevertheless many of these seceders, many of the fire readers as they were called, were very hopped up about the issue of slavery and there's no question that from their point of view they were protecting the institution of slavery. But that's not to say that that was the northern motive or that was the real reason that for example Lincoln wanted to get involved in the war. I don't have a lot of time to give you a lot of quotes from Lincoln but let me just say that Lincoln made it very clear that the issue in the war was nationalism. It was to deny the right of secession. It was not the issue of slavery. This was explicitly stated by Lincoln on many, many occasions and no serious historian anymore really wants to argue that Lincoln got us into the civil war to free the slaves. That just borders on balderdash. The Emancipation Proclamation, let me remind you, was not even issued to a good year and a half or so until after we were in the war. It did not take effect until about two years after and for those of you who don't realize this, the Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves. It freed the slaves in the southern rebel states. There were in the Union five slave holding states. Missouri, for example, was one of them. There were five slave holding states in the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves in those Union states. The reason for giving the proclamation in advance, a preliminary proclamation, was to give those southern states who wished a chance to rejoin the Union with the guarantee that were they to rejoin the Union they then would be allowed to retain their slaves. So for all this sort of mushy stuff you hear about the Great Emancipation Proclamation, let's not fool ourselves. Lincoln was very clear about why he issued it. He issued it precisely because he thought it was an effective war measure. In fact, in a very famous passage, which I had with me, he stated very clearly that had he regarded it as furthering the war not to free the slaves, he would not have freed them. And it's only because he saw it as a war measure that in fact he issued the proclamation. Now this is not to say that Lincoln was pro-slavery. He wasn't. He was anti-slavery, but he was first and foremost a politician. In fact, at one point in 1858, before the war broke out, before his election while he was campaigning, Lincoln made a prediction. He was an extreme gradualist. When did Lincoln realistically think that if he had his way the slaves would get freed? He told an audience in 1858 that he thought that if things went the way he thought they would go, the way they should go, the slaves would probably be freed in about 100 years. Now according to Abraham Lincoln's timetable, we would have had the end of slavery in America in 1958. So Abraham Lincoln was not exactly your flaming abolitionist radical. He was generally despised by the abolitionist as being a sellout on slavery. So let's first of all get clear about the political realities of Abraham Lincoln. There's also the question of how Abraham Lincoln conducted the war. Abraham Lincoln became a virtual war dictator. He had more power. He assumed more power during the war than any president before him had ever assumed. And he was roundly denounced by foreign and domestic observers as well. For example, a German diplomat in Washington, DC, observed concerning Lincoln, quote, one of the interesting features of the present state of things is the unlimited power exercised by the government. Mr. Lincoln is in that respect the equal, if not the superior of, Louis Napoleon, close quote. James Bryce, an English observer, wrote, Abraham Lincoln wielded more authority than any single Englishman has done since Oliver Cromwell, close quote. For those of you familiar with the war, that without the authorization of Congress, Abraham Lincoln did such things as try to implement a draft. He suspended habeas corpus. He tried to raise taxes. All of this on his own presidential authority without the authorization of Congress. There were many violations of civil liberties, both in the North and in the South. And we shouldn't glorify the South in this regard. They were equally as bad. The South instituted national conscription. It was terrible with its own currency, its paper currency, which virtually destroyed its economy. In fact, one historian has described the attempt of the Confederacy to regulate its economy as a form of state socialism. The South more than the North probably centralized its economy in an effort to win the war. So both of them resorted to very draconian measures in order to try to win the war. There's not much to choose among Jefferson Davis on the one hand and Abraham Lincoln on the other in that respect. It's particularly ironic in the case of the South because in some respects, excepting slavery, of course, they had stronger traditions of liberty there. Now in terms of why the North won, well, you can go through the usual list of figures. You'll find that there were 22 million people living in the North versus 9 million in the South. You'll find that the manufacturing capabilities of the North was greatly superior to the South. 111,000 manufacturing establishment versus 18,000 manufacturing establishments in the South. 1,300,000 workers in the North compared to 111,000 workers in the South. This goes on and on, numbers of local motives. It's generally agreed that the South, the longer the war lasted, the less chance the South had because it would simply not be able to sustain itself. And that the northern blockade of the South really cut it off from Europe and European trade and created severe economic difficulties. Now, well, I see we're already a little over time, so I think I may spill a little bit of this into the next lecture. So let's break for lunch then. Thank you.