 When I started this podcast, I really didn't know exactly what it would be like. I decided I'd start with the war on drugs and then do the antebellum period through reconstruction and then go from there. But I wasn't really sure what kind of format the podcast would be and in my mind, to begin with, I was thinking more like audio lectures, something you would find in a classroom. But as I got to working on the scripts, I found myself really enjoying diving into the details, the minutiae and the context that you don't ever really get from lectures because it's just too much. The podcast has taken on more of a storytelling narrative and I found that I like this format a lot and I hope the rest of you do as well. But it means that the six episodes I had originally planned for the drug war turned into twelve episodes. And the twelve episodes I had originally planned for the antebellum years turned into twenty-four episodes. Because I've been able to maintain my one episode per week rate of production so far, that's nine full months. When I started outlining the series on the Civil War itself, I realized what a big project I was about to try to take on. I mean, of course, I knew that this was a pretty historically dense four years, but sometimes you don't really think about how true that is until you start diving into the details the way I have been over the past few months going over the 1850s. There really is no other period in United States history, I think, that is quite as dense as the four years of the American Civil War. If I ever do a series on World War II, that could easily prove much more enormous, but that's only because I would want to include the relevant history of all the other countries involved. But the war from 1861 to 1865 is pure United States history. So I found myself in a dilemma. If I wanted to do the war, it was going to be a big project. I could definitely expedite it by reducing it all to lecture format, giving the bullet points of the more significant events, Gettysburg and Antietam and all that. But that's the kind of thing you can find anywhere. Just as I hope I demonstrated in the previous series on the 1850s, what I tried to do anyway was show that there is so much more to this history than we are normally taught. And I would like to do that again with the Civil War, at least to the best of my limited ability. If I'm going to tackle a major event like the Civil War, I want to do it justice. I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to fail. No matter how much I include, there will always be things left out. Since the Civil War ended in 1865, there have been so many books published about it that they amount to more than one book a day, something like 65,000 books to date, just on those four years of American history. There are still questions to be answered and questions that can never be answered and questions that still have yet to be asked. No matter how much I or any of us learn about this conflict, there will always be so much more that we don't know. And mix this with the tremendous emotional attachment people have to this history that still rages into the present. There are still people who take sides in the conflict, almost as if the war is still being waged, and people feel the need to defend the Union or defend the Confederacy and this certainly colors the history that's being told. I don't want to do this, but I certainly have my views on things biased by my own value judgments about secession and aggression and war and government, and I've no doubt that my personal judgments will seep through at times, no matter how much I try to avoid it. I've no doubt I'm going to leave something out that other people consider of great importance. That's just the nature of tackling the history of the Civil War. You just can't get it all. There are wonderful single volume and multi-volume histories of the Civil War, but there will never be a definitive history and this series will certainly not be a definitive history either. But the enduring controversy of the Civil War is exactly what makes it a topic worth taking on in any historical podcast, let alone one whose title embraces controversial history. But for me to do this series as much justice as my limited abilities will allow, it's going to be a long run. I've already made a basic sketch for the war from Fort Sumter to Lincoln's assassination, and without me finding new things or realizing that there's a bigger story about some event than I previously realized, this is the kind of thing that led me to adding a six-week foray into the Nicaragua in the last season, for instance. Even without any of that, I believe that this season will take me at least a year to get through if I'm going to dive into the details that I enjoy. So I appreciate everybody who listens to the show regularly and who enjoys the historical minutiae the way that I do, and I hope that you all find this investment in time to be worth it. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Misesense to Toot podcast historical controversies. This season is pretty much going to pick up right where the last season left off. Since I'm not taking breaks between seasons, it almost seems weird that I'm dividing these two up the way that I am, and I get that. Part of it is just because dividing them up helps me to organize the history when I'm outlining the episodes, but that really isn't the primary reason I'm treating the Civil War history as a separate story than the antebellum years. Obviously they're related, but there is a very significant divide between the two things, which is the difference between secession on the one hand and war on the other. People treat the antebellum years as a lead up to the war, and in a broad sense, that's obviously true. Chronology alone makes that true. But in a more substantial sense, the antebellum years were only the build up to secession. William Freeling's famous two volume history, The Road to Disunion, aptly demonstrates this recognition in its title. It is not the road to war. And that's because war is certainly not an inevitable outcome of disunion. Whatever opinion we may have about southern secession, whether it was good or bad, justified or unjustified, regardless of what their motivations for secession were, none of that makes war the inevitable outcome of secession. Ludwig von Mises in his great book Theory and History, as well as in Human Action and the Ultimate Foundations of Economic Science, Mises reminds us that history is a science of human action. He says there are two sciences of human action, praxeology and history. Praxeology being the a priori logical deductive science of human action, which includes economics as its most developed sub-discipline, is the one most people are familiar with if they're familiar with Mises at all. The other science of human action is history, employing the empirical method Mises called thymology. In his earlier works such as Human Action, he just calls this understanding. But Mises' assertion that history is a science of human action seems pedantic when we state it that plainly. Of course, history is a study of human action. It seems so obvious, but in practice this is not commonly how history is treated. Whether consciously or not, historians often treat history as mechanical. We have the benefit of hindsight and it makes it seem so obvious that what occurred must have occurred as a result of the events that came before it. This is true in the sense that human beings do not exist in a vacuum and the actions we take are influenced by our environment, our culture, our ideas. Our actions are influenced by what happened in the past to some degree or another. But the point that Mises was making is that our actions are still choices that we make. They are choices that we make even though we could have made other choices. Sam Harris in his essay Free Will talks about philosophical determinism. Basically he's arguing that Free Will is an illusion. He uses the example of his choice to drink coffee the morning that he wrote the essay and he says sure I could have chosen to drink tea but I chose to drink coffee and it's meaningless to say that I could have chosen otherwise. Mises would entirely disagree. When looking at history or any science of human action, Mises would say that it is incredibly meaningful to say that human beings could have made different choices than they did. And when studying history we want to know why they made the choices they did. We can hardly answer the question of why some historical figure did something if we consider it meaningless to say they could have done anything else. Because our question relates to what influence they're reasoning. What were the ends they sought? Why did they value those ends? What were the means they chose in pursuit of those ends? And why did they think those means would be the most effective? Were their decisions correct? Did they successfully achieve their desired goals? These are the broad questions of history and they are empty if we consider human beings to be acting without some conception of Free Will. Ludwig von Mises rejected Sam Harris's notion of Free Will. Mises called it fatalistic determinism but this is the concept that we typically just call determinism. Mises said that instead historians should adopt the philosophy of activist determinism. This would be one that acknowledges that there are things in reality outside of our control. The laws of physics operate regardless of the choices we make and as a result our environment and our perception of the world is something that human beings take into account when making their decisions. The goals they pursue and the means they employ in pursuit of their goals. But and this is key. In Mises' activist determinism human beings still have Free Will or at least Mises says that we should assume they do. He doesn't take a hard philosophical stance on the doctrine of Free Will but he believed that as long as we couldn't perfectly explain human volition we can understand the world better if we assume that Free Will exists. So with this notion of activist determinism the historian has to consider the context of the episode. The events unfolding around the historical figures, the cultural environment in which they lived, the state of their knowledge of the universe and so on. All of this exerts an influence on the decisions people make but human beings still possess their own volition and their actions are determined by their own personal ideas and for historical change to take place at all ideas must have some degree of originality. So to bring this back around to the division between secession and war and why I think it's important to divide the two seasons is because the previous season on the antebellum history is a lengthy attempt to answer the question of why secession took place. Why did the south finally decide to break away from the union? Fundamentally I believe that it's silly to contend that anything other than slavery was the primary reason for the first wave of secession. There may have been other variables involved. Monocosal historical explanations are almost certainly incorrect in any situation but slavery was quite clearly the primary element. But historian Eric Foner, pretty much the leading living scholar on the reconstruction era, he reminds us that the question of what caused secession is different than the question what caused the war. These are separate questions and they have separate answers because human beings make choices regarding the actions they take and because it is not meaningless to say that they could have chosen otherwise because we do consider it important to understand what options they rejected and why they rejected them as much as it is to understand what options they acted upon and why. We have to attempt to understand why people in the north and the south made the decisions to fight. Why did Lincoln and his administration decide to go to war? It is not meaningless to say that he could have let the south secede in peace as many people in the north thought he should have done. Why did poor non-slave holding whites fight on behalf of the Confederacy? I've already covered in previous episodes the fact that it is entirely plausible and quite clear from the evidence that even southerners who did not own slaves believed that the institution should not be abolished for various reasons and as such many non-slave holders supported disunion because they valued the continuation of slavery. This is empirically true from the records even though it is not universally true. But the answers to questions like why did Lincoln wage war and why did poor Confederate soldiers fight cannot be answered by pointing to slavery and that is because the decision to go to war as a response to southern secession is a very different thing from the decision to secede in the first place it is a different decision made by different people for different reasons. The simple answers which are not complete answers by virtue of their simplicity are found in the very words of the people involved. Lincoln made clear that he considered secession to be illegal and that he was not fighting to free the slaves but to maintain the union. Those are his words that can be placed in the context of the time with an understanding of Lincoln's personal history northern sentiment and his wartime actions that can demonstrate that his stance on unionism seems to be the honest motivation behind his actions. Whatever Lincoln's personal views on slavery and I'll be talking about the complexities of trying to pin down Lincoln's personal views versus his political views in later episodes it does seem clear that he was willing to fight and preservation of the union and professional historians are pretty much in consensus about this. The idea that Lincoln fought to free the slaves is the product of public school education more than it is professional researchers despite their possible generosity to Lincoln in their own value judgments and the answer to why did poor non-slave holding Confederate soldiers fight is even more difficult to answer because each soldier can have his own personal motivations but the oversimplified generality that seems to best explain this question is the off-quoted story of one early Confederate prisoner of war. This anecdote is found in the two most highly read Civil War histories Shelby Foote's three volume history of the war as well as James McPherson's one volume history the battle cry of freedom. Shelby Foote is generally considered to be more sympathetic to the South and McPherson is probably more sympathetic to the North but both agree on this motive. I'll read the passage from Shelby Foote's answer to this question. I don't usually quote anything that isn't a primary source but Foote put it well. He wrote quote perhaps the best definition of the conflict was given in conversation by a civilian James M. Mason of Virginia. Foote quotes Mason. I look upon it then sir as a war of sentiment and opinion by one form of society against another form of society. Foote then goes on to write. No soldier would have argued with this but a few would have found it satisfactory. They wanted something more immediate and less comprehensive. The formulation of some such definition and identification became the problem of opposing statesmen. Meanwhile perhaps no soldier in either army gave a better answer. One more readily understandable to his fellow soldiers at any rate than a ragged Virginia private pounded on by the Northerners in a retreat. What are you fighting for anyhow? His captors asked him looking at him. They were genuinely puzzled for he obviously owned no slaves and seemingly could have little interest in states rights or even independence. I'm fighting because you're down here. He said. End quote. I'm fighting because you're down here. This is one simple statement from only a single soldier but these words hold powerful meaning and that's one reason why this is such a commonly cited anecdote. Secession was primarily driven by slavery. The second wave of secession as we will see had greater motivations at play but the first catalyzing wave of secession was clearly motivated by slavery above all else and non-slave holders supported this for various reasons. Some enjoyed the higher status of a free but poor white over an enslaved black and many Southerners were afraid of living among free blacks even though there were already free blacks in the south. Many people in the south weren't so much concerned with the abolition of slavery per se but they saw it as a slippery slope. The first history of Fort Sumter was written by a man who had been stationed there named Wiley Crawford. He was a unionist but he despised Lincoln and he despised abolitionists. He believed that Lincoln would be a puppet of abolitionists and they would free the slaves and this was dangerous he thought because the next step after abolition was equal rights for blacks. He wrote quote any proposition to lift the Negro to the social level of the white man is to me monstrous and insane. End quote. Some non-slave holding Southerners simply believed that slavery was a right, a constitutional right and any attack on slavery was by extension an attack on rights in general. The reasons for non-slave holders supporting slavery are numerous and complex and vary from person to person and of course there were Southerners who opposed slavery such as the abolitionist South Carolinians, the Grimke sisters and more moderately the Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton but slavery was the primary motivation for secession nonetheless but for somebody to pick up a gun and risk their life for slavery that's a much harder argument to make even for somebody who owns slaves and the records left behind by soldiers give us very different reasons for their willingness to fight James McPherson in a less well known work from the battle cry of freedom studied the personal letters and diaries of civil war soldiers from both armies this is his book for cause and comrades why men fought in the civil war and in that book he found that two-thirds of the soldiers from both sides genuinely believed that fighting was their patriotic duty they believed that they were upholding the legacy of the revolutionary war heroes the northern soldiers believing they were preserving the government that the founding fathers established and the Southerners believed they were upholding the right of secession of independence of self-government that compelled the revolutionary war veterans to fight so many decades before the idea that the war was fought over slavery is simply not true sure there were a handful of union soldiers here and there who genuinely did enlist in the union army because of their opposition to slavery but these people would be outliers they were not representative of the union cause and the war could not have been fought at all if this were the only motivation for participation in the south there were politicians and other wealthy slaveholders who were more concerned with the preservation of slavery than anything else but even among this demographic slavery is not a driving motivation that explains the question of why the war was fought very well as the war went on as we will see in much later episodes there were plans to offer slaves the opportunity for freedom in exchange for service in the military there was recognition that a Confederate victory might require the ending of slavery or lead to it at the very least these ideas were never a matter of consensus they were matters of debate but the fact that they were debated is meaningful other people the most prominent example being Robert E. Lee believed that slavery was not a cause worthy of fighting a war and Lee said he would rather free all the slaves in the south than fight the war but he fought for the Confederacy because he like many Southerners considered himself duty bound to his state first he fought as a Virginian more than he fought as a Confederate and he was not fighting to preserve slavery though he was a slave owner himself I say all this not because I want to make a definitive argument as to why the war was fought today this is a question that will be present throughout the series and it will change and evolve as the war progresses so it's a question to keep in mind but not one that we should consider settled by this or any other single episode you may or may not find my answers convincing at the conclusion of the season but these are among the questions that I will have in mind as I'm telling this history because it involves the motivation for the actions that the various historical figures took over these four years so secession in the war involved distinct questions with distinct answers and all too often people including historians let this mechanistic deterministic narrative of history seep in with the logic that because slavery triggered secession and secession triggered the war it is logical to say that slavery triggered the war this interpretation is simply bad history this is effectively algebraic thinking it's the transitive property of algebra if a equals b and b equals c then a must logically equal c that's true in math but it's nonsense in history because it negates the complicating element of human volition individual autonomy free will choice making ideologies and so on so I split these seasons up partly because I want to highlight the division between these events and abandon this mechanistic algebraic view of the history of secession and the civil war there's another misconception in the history that I want to address as well before we start talking about the war and that's the term civil war as a label for this conflict I often hear people argue that calling the American civil war a civil war is a misnomer it's an accurate the war these people argue was not technically a civil war at all and then of course other people disagree so is the term civil war a misnomer? in this case I will speak in greater absolutes because we're dealing with a precisely defined term which makes the question definitively answerable yes the term is absolutely a misnomer the term civil war refers to a war for control of a specific government that is the technical definition of the term regardless of which side of the conflict you might favor and regardless of which side you favor it is beyond dispute that the confederacy was not fighting for control of the union government this is simply the objective facts of the matter I've heard people try to defend the term civil war in the context of this technical definition some people have pointed out that the confederacy could have marched on Washington DC in this case in which we're debating the semantics of the word rather than the motivation for human action it actually is meaningless to say that the confederacy could have done this the fact is they did not attempt to invade Washington DC there was at one point some officers advocating this but the idea was rejected by Jefferson Davis and even their idea wasn't actually take over the union government it was just to take control of all territory in which slavery was legal and Washington DC was included in this but even had this taken place it would have been a territorial war not a civil war but regardless the war was not fought over control of the same government and calling the war a civil war is indeed inaccurate but the most common alternative to the term civil war is also inaccurate among people who do not want to use a technically inaccurate term I typically hear the alternative the war between the states this is just as much of a misnomer as civil war it was not a war between the states it was a war between two distinct confederations two distinct central governments in which various states were members it was not a war between Georgia and New York and Arkansas and Maine it was a war between the union government and the confederate government calling it a war between the states is at least as much of a misnomer as calling it a civil war another common alternative is the war of northern aggression this is pretty much a blatantly pro-southern term the problem I take with it is not one of historical accuracy but one rather of subjective value judgment the term assumes that the north was the aggressor now that may be true but it's a value judgment whether it's true or not and as we will see in the next episode the matter of who the aggressor was is a lot more complex than people realize the standard interpretation is that the south fired the first shots which is technically historically true and therefore they're the aggressor but most people when defining aggression will consider the threat of violence to be legitimately classified as aggression and therefore a legitimate threat is the initiation of aggression in the legal world this is the distinction between assault and battery right assault is the cocking of your fist and battery is landing the punch if I understand these concepts correctly so the question of who was the aggressor cannot be answered according to most definitions of aggression by simply saying who fired the first shot that's clearly an oversimplification the response to the accusation that the south fired first is usually met by people pointing out that Fort Sumter was in confederate territory and by having union soldiers in the fort southerners felt threatened this is also historically true but this brings up the more complex question of what constitutes a legitimate threat we can't define aggressive threats on the mere notion of somebody feeling threatened because any individual can feel however they want about anything this is the same fallacy of making laws against offensive things since anybody can be offended by anything it doesn't mean that offense or threat are non-real it just means that they are subjectively felt by an individual so there is some necessary gray area and questions about legitimate threats Fort Sumter was on union-owned land and of course some libertarians will counter that the land wasn't legitimately owned because of Locke and Homesteading principle but that isn't helpful historically because the people involved in Fort Sumter were not basing their actions on these modern libertarian interpretations of John Locke but it's also true that the federal land was in confederate territory it's true that confederate appointees attempted to meet with the cabinet of the Buchanan and Lincoln administrations to arrange a peaceful sediment of the territorial dispute regarding union-government lands in confederate territory and it's true that Lincoln would not allow the negotiations to take place because he believed it would be seen as a tacit admission of the legitimacy of secession it's true that Lincoln allowed the troops at Fort Sumter to be resupplied and it's true that he informed the confederate officials that he would not be supplying them with any weapons or ammunition but it's also true that this was a lie and the ship was carrying a secret cache of weapons and they were also carrying 200 troops that the confederacy knew about so did this constitute a legitimate threat? well that can still depend on the personal views of the person judging it but the historical details should be enough to demonstrate that the question is much more complicated than people typically make it out to be and again in the next episode I'm going to go much deeper into the story and we'll see even more complications but my point here is that there is an element of subjectivity in calling either side the aggressor and for that reason calling the war the war of northern aggression is a value laden title meaning that it depends on your personal views of legitimate aggression there's nothing wrong with that as a personal matter but if you're wanting to argue that this is a better objective name for the war being the name that everybody should adopt you're necessarily saying that your personal value judgments should apply to everybody and I don't believe that's a good approach to history so I don't like the term war of northern aggression regardless of whether or not I believe the north to have been the aggressors the final common alternative I hear is the war for southern independence at first glance many people also take this one as a south-centric value laden title for the war but I think this one actually is the most objectively accurate the reason it seems at first to be value laden is because people have a tendency to view independence as a positive thing they tend to have a pre-existing value judgment on the idea of political independence in other words but whether or not something constitutes political independence is not a matter of subjectivity this can be objectively defined and apply to the concept of southern secession and the war that followed the reality is even if you personally don't believe that southern secession was a right you might believe it was unconstitutional or that because it was motivated by slavery it was wrong or simply that you're a patriot who hates the idea of our nation being split in two regardless of any of these views it is still true by definition that what the confederacy was fighting for was political independence from the union government that is a simple clear historical fact so it may be the case that the people who use that term tend to be more sympathetic to the south but that's a matter of happenstance it is still true that on technical definitional grounds the war for southern independence is the most accurate term for the war that I've yet heard proposed but as you've probably noticed if you've been listening to this podcast I don't use the term war for southern independence I use the term civil war that has actually been the merit of some criticism I've seen on articles I've written in comments on some earlier episodes so it may be something that I should have addressed earlier why do I choose to use the technically inaccurate term the civil war the simple answer is because the term serves the function I need which is to communicate to people what military conflict I'm referring to when talking to people who are raised in the United States if you say the civil war they aren't going to be confused about what war I'm referring to some people who like to harp about the misnomer which I find to be often a way of avoiding the actual history will fame credulity but this is just a silly argumentation tactic griping about the misnomer serves no historical significance it can be instructive I think to talk about the misnomer as a way of bringing up questions about aggression and motivation as I hope I've done here because those are all legitimate questions but at the end of the day if I want to talk about the history of the conflict I choose the term that people in this country are universally familiar with fixating on the technical semantics of the word as a distraction from the history it's also worth mentioning on this point that the adoption of the misnomer civil war is not as far as I can tell a matter of propaganda as some people have given me the impression they believe the term civil war was on people's lips a decade before the war actually started it was just the term of the conflict that people anticipated as a result of the slavery question in my episode on the resistance at christiana I cited a newspaper headline from 1851 that claimed that the resistance marked the first shots fired of the civil war being the first instance I know of that the term civil war was used obviously historically we do not mark that as the starting point of the actual war but it does demonstrate that usage of the term and how it got misapplied to this conflict furthermore even though I don't think the term civil war is a propaganda title the north did have a term for the war that was a matter of propaganda employed to drum up support for the union but that term was war of rebellion this is what the Lincoln administration was calling the war trying to underscore their argument that secession was legally impossible and the actions of the southern states constituted rebellion which they wanted to paint the conflict as because it opened up legal arguments for certain actions that they took such as the suspension of habeas corpus though there were still constitutional problems with the suspension of habeas corpus and other actions by Lincoln under the pretense of suppressing rebellion but I'll cover all that in later episodes so in short the term civil war came about as a matter of history and the title stuck simply because that's what people knew it as it serves the purpose we need in history not because it's technically accurate but because it is the name given to the conflict that people are universally familiar with at least in this country so it is technically true that the civil war as a proper noun was not a civil war as a lowercase general noun but the technical language in my opinion is of relatively little importance and I will continue to refer to the war as the civil war because I consider that the best term for communicating this history to a general audience so I'll wrap this episode up and the amount of time I spent simply prefacing the history of the civil war probably represents the lengthy history we are about to undertake this is a dense four years with a great deal of contentious historical questions as well as a lot of compelling stories that are worth telling just for the entertainment value and I want to do this history the justice it deserves so we should be prepared for a long run the story of course begins usually with the bombardment of Fort Sumter but before the bombardment of Fort Sumter which took place in April of 1861 there was a great deal going on in the politics of the Union, of the Confederacy and even for several weeks of South Carolina which stood as a lone new nation and it is that nation of South Carolina when it succeeded before other southern states joined it that we will start discussing in the next episode for more content like this visit mesus.org