 In the struggle for liberty, the symbols that we choose matter a lot. It matters how people perceive us. It matters what those symbols really mean. And that's why I'm here today to talk about how libertarians should think about the Civil War and particularly how they should think about the Confederacy. One of the most common claims that you'll hear about the Civil War is that it was about states' rights. And frankly, the historical record just does not bear this out. The South did not leave for the sake of states' rights. They left to protect slavery. We know this because they said so. As Alexander Stevens, the vice president of the Confederacy, said, our new government is founded upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man. That slavery, the subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. Obviously this isn't libertarian. I mean, it doesn't take any great genius to point this out. It doesn't take any particular courage to point this out. It does, however, take some amount of courage to point out that when people use the Confederacy or use the Confederate flag as a symbol for states' rights, they're at least to some degree either missing the point or being a little bit disingenuous with you. Confederates weren't your friends. We have more than just one speech to prove this. We also have the reasons for secession, as given by four separate Confederate states, given by Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas. These were the only four states that bothered to give anything other than just a legal ordinance of secession. They listed their reasons. They were very clear about them. This is what they had to say. South Carolina, a geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the states north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. That's the reason they left, because they lost an election. Or Texas. In all the non-slaveholding states, people have formed themselves into a great sectional party proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color. They also added, in our government, however, all white men are of right and ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights, and the servitude of the African race as existing in some states is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the common experience of mankind and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator. The South was dominated by slaveholders politically, and they loved federal power when it worked to their advantage. So in 1850, they asked for and received one of the toughest fugitive slave laws that had yet been seen. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act put federal power in the service of capturing accused escaped slaves in the north. Federal marshals were paid bounties when they apprehended accused slaves. They were paid $5 if the individual walked free, and they were paid $10 if the individual ended up getting sent back to slavery. The result, as you can probably imagine, was a lot of free blacks from the north being sent back south as slaves. This was, by Northern accounts, a tremendous imposition on their states' rights. The Northern states often held to the common law doctrine, which held that the presence of someone on their soil was enough to set them free. That slavery was fundamentally incompatible with the common law, and that as a result you had become emancipated by living in a state such as, for example, New York. Now, this was not something that the South ever wanted to have anything to do with, and instead they asked for federal power to protect the institution of slavery. They did much the same when they broke away and formed their own constitution. The Confederate Constitution mentioned slavery by name. It forbids states from entering the Confederacy as free states, and I believe, by my reading at least, it forbids any of the states in the Confederacy from ever abolishing slavery. It guarantees the right to property in Negro slaves in so many words. So what to make of the claim that the South protected states' rights? Well, only when those states' rights were about owning slaves. A lot of people will agree with me up to this point and then say, well, yes, but let's take a look at the union. And I'll agree. Let's take a look at the union. What did Lincoln do? What did the Northern States do? And to be honest, I can't say that they were heroes either. Lincoln's primary purpose was to save the union. The outset, it was not to free the slaves. Lincoln said that if he could save the union by freeing all the slaves, by freeing none of the slaves, or by freeing some of the slaves, he would do it. He would do whatever it took to save the union. This isn't something that I would say most libertarians could sign on to. We tend to believe that if you wish to exit a political republic, you ought to have the right to do that. The North was to be blamed for other things as well. It was not a clean war. It was a very, very dirty war. Lincoln was no saint when it came to civil liberties. He censored the press. He established the censorship of the males. He suspended habeas corpus. He instituted an income tax, which later proved to be illegal. He instituted a wide variety of other taxes. If you're a stamp collector, the Civil War is actually a great time for revenue tax stamps. You can get stamps for powers of attorney, for bills of sale, for bills of lading, for inland exchange. I'm not exactly sure what that entailed, but there's a wide variety of new taxes that Lincoln instituted. Then on top of all that, he also instituted the paper money, known as the greenback, which proved to be very inflationary. The Union made all kinds of mistakes, including in its war conduct. Union atrocities were real. Sherman's March to the Sea was one of them. How might we run the war differently? Well, that's a question that historians ask themselves a lot. And unfortunately, we don't get a do-over in history. We can, however, use incidents like this as a springboard to think about proper political conduct today. We can also use them as a way of illustrating principles, if only by their violation. What might I have done if I were the one invading the South? I tend to favor something that Murray Rothbard explained very clearly, I think, in The Ethics of Liberty. He wrote on the question of slavery as follows. There was only one possible moral solution for the slave question. Immediate and unconditional abolition with no compensation to the slave masters. Indeed, any compensation should have been the other way to repay the oppressed slaves for their lifetime of slavery. This is not to say that the Confederacy was so much better on any of these points. In fact, on every one of the things that I've just mentioned, the Confederacy was as bad or, in some cases, even worse. They were the first ones to have a conscription, for example. And the inflation of the Confederate money ranged from around 10% to 40% per quarter during the Civil War. So, there aren't any heroes in this struggle. There really aren't. The impulse to try to find a hero is understandable, but it's going to be frustrated here. Now, I would also add that whatever libertarian principle you're looking for in the Civil War, whatever libertarian principle you'd like to make an example of, you can find a better example somewhere else. If you want to talk about secession, do it. That's important. I think our Constitution would be much improved if states or regions were allowed a mechanism of succeeding peacefully without anyone else's say so. But secession, as Jefferson put it, should not be for light or transient reasons. And still less should it be for reasons like the ones that we began this talk with, that is to say reasons that are opposed to individual liberty. The mere fact that a secession is legally permitted or allowed doesn't make it morally justified. It doesn't mean that we have to necessarily pass a favorable judgment on it. But some secessions, of course, we can say are very, very good. Our country itself began as a secessionist movement. The 13 colonies broke away from Great Britain. We can also point to other secessionist movements that were either peaceful or, at the very least, were morally justified. The secession of Slovakia from the former Republic of Czechoslovakia is a good modern example of that. And a good historical example, one that has happened hundreds of times all across the world, is that of Maroon societies. These were former slaves in places as diverse as Jamaica, Virginia, even places such as India or the Far East, where slaves simply seceded from the political authority that held them in bondage and formed their own independent communities. These are secessions for a clearly libertarian reason. Now, why does all this matter for us? Why is this important? It's important because there has been a lot of talk about the importance of secession as a libertarian principle. And it has been very often mentioned, and I think correctly, that smaller, more local governments are often more protective of liberty than distant governments that have to oversee very many people and they get lost in the shuffle or they get treated with contempt. And I think those are reasonable claims, but as principles, they're not inviolable. They are general rules. And at times, local governments can be quite oppressive of individual liberty. If we pick the wrong examples, we end up distorting our own message. We end up confusing our listeners and we end up bringing contempt on libertarianism. That's something we ought to avoid. Could the Confederate flag work as a symbol of rebellion, maybe just by itself, doesn't have to mean anything more than just that? Well, probably not, I would say. Wearing this emblem, waving this flag, is a lot like the campus leftists that we all like to make fun of when they wear their Che Guevara t-shirts. That too is a symbol of rebellion. And if you ask someone, well, do you really support the Cuban Revolution? Do you support the firing squads? Do you support this guy who is ready to drop nuclear weapons on America during the Cuban Missile Crisis? They'll probably tell you no. But if that's the case, then they're making a pretty bad mistake in their tactics. I think that this mistake is similar. I think that flying the Confederate flag is a very similar act. If you don't look into the implications of your political symbols, someone else will, and you probably won't like the results.