I consider them cranks. Their views on the Civil War era, reconstruction and slavery are not in tune with modern scholarship. They live in their own little world with their own little ideas. He was a featured speaker at the Libertarian forum during the Conservative Political Action Conference.
As previously indicated, Ron Paul, the once and future Libertarian Party presidential candidate, often denounces Lincoln. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. Every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach. DiLorenzo and Paul both try to make Abraham Lincoln appear to be a racist. Fortunately, Lincoln has left us hundreds of pages of his writings and speeches.
He saw slavery as a form of tyranny and condemned it over and over again. He believed it was an unequivocal moral evil. The libertarans simply ignore the evidence. I hate it for the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. This equality clause was a central focus of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which were reprinted as a best seller in Lincoln was a product of the 19th century and he made statements which did not reflect perfect treatment in all social situations.
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps save the Union.
The expansion of slavery to new states and territories, however, was a wholly different matter, and Lincoln consistently opposed all such efforts, believing that the containment of slavery would lead to its eventual extinction. Lincoln realized that this was at best a repulsive compromise, but to have usurped the states' constitutional rights, even in order to outlaw slavery, would have amounted to destroying democracy in order to save it.
Lincoln understood that as long as slavery was considered a "moral right," as opposed to a baneful historical "necessity," no one's liberty was safe. In an letter to his friend Joshua Speed, Lincoln stressed his contempt for the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party on grounds that make this clear. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics '" emphasis in original.
Slavery, for Lincoln, was not merely a negative condition that might be extended indefinitely to ever-larger portions of the country. The main reason it was evil was that it fixed an individual's economic and social status forever, even across generations, due to accidents of birth. Lincoln championed a free-enterprise system partly because it provided the means by which people could advance their desires and opportunities.
In , responding to a defense of slavery on the grounds that it was a more efficient arrangement of labor and capital than a market system, Lincoln said scornfully that slave owners "insist their slaves are far better off than Northern freemen…. They think that men are always to remain laborers here--but there is no such class. The man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him.
The moral aspects of imperialism are only complicated when the practical considerations of an empire are confronted. What was a republic to do about the newly acquired territories in its realm? These territories were opened up and migration to them from the seaboard was heavily encouraged. It was only a matter of time before these migrants began to clamor for representation. The major problem that arose from imperial expansion was slavery. Were these new states to become slave-friendly or abolitionist?
The Senate problem. The senate is one federal institution that libertarians should be, but are not, more amiable toward. It is a body of elected representatives that balances out the democratic recklessness of the House of Representatives with the monarchical ambitions of the presidency.
Prior to , when the 17th Amendment was ratified, senators were elected by state legislatures so as to give the commonwealths that gave up some sovereignty for federation a voice in federal politics. This is a tough pill for many libertarians to swallow because it removed an impediment between the American people and the federal government, and reckless democracy is just as bad for liberty as monarchical ambition. Nevertheless, the senate is still a useful political body when it comes to taming power.
James Bryce, an eminent English legal scholar famed for his work on the United States , pointed out that the senators from the south, in the 30 years leading up to the Civil War, were adamant about adding new pro-slavery states to the union so that they would not lose equality of representation in the senate.
The act of forcing slavery upon populations in the newly opened west bred deep social resentments and led to a stalemate about the future status of these territories that was only, finally settled four months before the advent of the Civil War.
Shout-outs to Alexis de Tocqueville and Joseph Smith. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the best book on America, ever. Both men also saw that the north-south divide in the United States was bound to lead to future calamity. The French, who had lost Tocqueville just two years prior to the beginning of the Civil War, approach to the American bloodbath was to remain neutral after consulting with the United Kingdom , and instead invade Mexico.
Napoleon III invaded Mexico, in the name of free trade, late in and established a puppet monarchy, which angered the United States as it violated the Monroe Doctrine. However, there was not much the U. The French preferred normalized relations with the American republic to a puppet monarch in the Mexican one. The Mormons, for their part, largely sat out the Civil War.
The affiliated Free Town Project set its sights on Grafton in because of both its small size—about 1, residents—and its long history as a haven for tax protesters, eccentrics, and generalized curmudgeons. The Free Town Project leaders figured that they could engineer a libertarian tipping point by bringing in a few dozen new true believers and collaborating with the resident soreheads.
But eventually, the Free Town leadership splintered and the haphazard movement fizzled out. H ongoltz-Hetling presents the Grafton experience as a rollicking tale of colorful rural characters and oddly clever ursines. For years now, reporters and pundits have chosen to focus on the style, rather than the policy substance, of the growing libertarian right.
Again and again, we read stories of rural rubes clad head to toe in MAGA swag, hunched over chipped cutlery in dingy diners, wielding biscuits to wipe the last of the sausage gravy from their oversized plates while vociferously proclaiming that taxation is theft and inveighing against the nanny state.
In choosing to shoot these red, white, and blue fish in a barrel, Hongoltz-Hetling is in very good company. But had the author not chosen snark over substance, his book could have served as a peculiarly timely cautionary tale, because the conflicting philosophical principles that drive this story are central to understanding American politics today. The differences between the libertarian stumblebums who moved to Grafton and the staff of the Koch-funded Cato Institute are mostly sartorial.
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