Contrary to the popular assumption that centralized political power was necessary to destroy slavery, federal power spent much of its history protecting and enforcing the institution. This privatized costs for a privileged few and socialized and diffused the costs onto others in society. This is a common reality with any state intervention, indeed, it is the point of state intervention.
It should be noted that slavery was historically normal (not just) and free labor was the true “peculiar institution.” As this author has argued on numerous occasions, slavery can exist wherever one person can overpower another and forcibly expropriate production from him, but—being economically costly to maintain—slavery usually required the legal protection of state power to privatize gains to a slave oligarchy and socialize costs onto others.
The Constitution accommodated slavery, Congress protected it, federal courts upheld it, and federal officers enforced fugitive slave laws. Only after certain slaveholding states attempted to leave the Union—explicitly citing slavery as a principal cause of secession—did the federal government cease acting as slavery’s protector and begin acting as its destroyer. The American nation-state was willing to abandon its decades-long legal protections of chattel slavery in exchange for keeping the Union together by force. In the sharp assessment of Lysander Spooner, the Civil War was,
. . .a war carried on, upon one side, for chattel slavery, and on the other for political slavery; upon neither for liberty, justice, or truth. And these crimes have been committed, and this war waged, by men, and the descendants of men, who, less than a hundred years ago, said that all men were equal, and could owe neither service to individuals, nor allegiance to governments, except with their own consent.
Regarding the American story, progressive and mainstream conservatives share some common presuppositions and common strategies for different goals. Progressives attempt to disavow and delegitimize American history and the American political tradition as irrelevant or morally problematic in favor of a modern, powerful nation-state equipped with extraordinary power to achieve “equality.”
Similarly, mainstream conservatives—wanting to rescue the American tradition for their political ends—will draw a direct line from the American Revolution to the Constitution, then to the Civil War’s ending of slavery, then to the modern Civil Rights regime. According to the conservatives, like the progressives, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed an unmet ideal—egalitarian equality—which could only be achieved by a centralized American state, complete with a bloody war of unification and modern civil rights legislation.
In short, the progressives want you to feel bad and embarrassed about problematic aspects of American history and thankful that the modern state and more enlightened elites were given enough power to begin to achieve egalitarian equity. On the other hand, the mainstream conservatives want you to feel proud of America and overlook its historical flaws because the state and more enlightened elites were given enough power to begin to achieve egalitarian “equality of opportunity.” Both prioritize egalitarianism and the big government necessary to achieve it over liberty.
Underlying both views is the presupposition that big government and centralization entail enlightened, just regimes willing and able to end slavery and discrimination. Conversely, decentralization, state independence, and individual liberty are portrayed as allowing for unacceptable outcomes that benefit systems like chattel slavery.
Always in search of oversimplified and symmetrical historical narratives, people often come unwittingly to conclusions about history that are both imprecise and inaccurate. For example, if the Federal-Union side of the Civil War fought to prevent secession and this eventually played into ending slavery, then: 1) ending slavery must have been the goal all along; 2) ending slavery provides post-hoc moral justification for the war of unification; 3) all or most on the Federal-Union side must have supported the ending of slavery via war; 4) all in the seceding slave states must have equally supported slavery; and, 5) all proponents of decentralization and secession must have also been pro-slavery.
The above short list are superficial, imprecise, and inaccurate conclusions many draw about the Civil War because of ignorance and/or for failure to make careful and logical distinctions. It has been assumed that all pro-secessionists in America prior to the Civil War were also pro-slavery, however, not only were many pro-secessionists not pro-slavery, but many were actually staunch abolitionists. This article provides a sample of just a few of them besides Lysander Spooner (quoted above).
William Rawle (1759–1836)
William Rawle was the founder and president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, so an ardent opponent of slavery to say the least. Rawle was an accomplished lawyer and, in 1791, George Washington appointed him to the attorney general of Pennsylvania. His View of the Constitution was widely read.
What did this widely-read Northern abolitionist—possibly even read by the military leadership of the Civil War—argue concerning state secession?
Among the several quotes from Rawle on the subject, Rawle wrote,
The secession of a state from the Union depends on the will of the people of such state. . . . To withdraw from the Union [secede] comes not within the general scope of their delegated authority. (emphasis added)
The states, then, may wholly withdraw from the Union, but while they continue, they must retain the character of representative republics. (emphasis added)
William Leggett (1801–1839)
William Leggett was an American poet, fiction writer, and journalist. He was a laissez-faire populist Jacksonian Democrat. He also became an outspoken opponent of slavery. Leggett argued that the Union was not worth preserving at the expense of liberty and justice. If maintaining the Union required continual concessions to slaveholding interests, Leggett contended that dissolution would be preferable.
He wrote,
If, however, the political union of these states is only to be preserved by yielding to the claims set up by the south; if the tie of confederation is of such a kind that the breath of free discussion will inevitably dissolve it; if we can hope to maintain our fraternal connexion with our brothers of the south only by dismissing all hope of ultimate freedom to the slave; let the compact be dissolved, rather than submit to such dishonourable, such inhuman terms for its preservation. Dear as the Union is to us, and fervently as we desire that time, while it crumbles the false foundations of other governments, may add stability to that of our happy confederation, yet rather, far rather would we see it resolve into its original elements tomorrow, than that its duration should be effected by any measures so fatal to the principles of freedom as those insisted upon by the south.
William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879)
By the 1840s, William Lloyd Garrison and the Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement had made disunion a central part of their program. Convinced that the Constitution and Union protected slavery, they adopted “No Union with Slaveholders” as a rallying cry and urged Northern separation from the slaveholding South.
The relevant statement read,
Resolved, That the Abolitionists of this country should make it one of the primary objects of this agitation to dissolve the American Union.
Garrison also said (December 2, 1859),
I tell you our work is the dissolution [separation] of this slavery-cursed Union, if we would have a fragment of our liberties left to us!. . .
By the dissolution of the Union we shall give the finishing blow to the slave system; . . .
Horace Greeley (1811–1872)
Horace Greeley—another Northern abolitionist—believed that the Southern States had a right to secede in peace based on the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
He wrote in the New York Tribune (February 23, 1861),
We have repeatedly said, and we once more insist, that the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of American Independence, that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed, is sound and just and that, if the Slave States, the Cotton States, or the Gulf States only, choose to form an independent nation, they have a clear moral right to do so. . . . Whenever it shall be clear that the great body of the Southern People have become conclusively alienated from the Union and anxious to escape from it, we will do our best to forward their views. (emphasis added)
Wendell Phillips (1811–1884)
Wendell Phillips—another American abolitionist—explained the abolitionist strategy in advocating for secession even if he did not entirely agree that that method should be pursued,
Disunion is a course, by which a man or a state may immediately disconnect themselves from the sin of sustaining slavery. The distant hope of Constitutional amendment not only allows, but makes it necessary, that we should remain in the Union, performing its sinful requirements while they continue the law of the land, in order to effect our object.
In a pamphlet entitled, “Can Abolitionists Vote or Take Office Under the United States Constitution?” (January 15, 1845), Phillips wrote a section with the heading “No Union with Slaveholders.” In it, he wrote,
The history of our Union is lesson enough, for every candid mind, of the fatal effects of every. . .compromise with evil. The experience of the fifty years. . .shows us the slaves trebling in numbers slaveholders monopolizing the offices and dictating the policy of the Government—prostituting the strength and influence of the Nation to the support of slavery here and elsewhere—trampling on the rights of the free States, and making the courts of the country their tools. To continue this disastrous alliance longer is madness. The trial of fifty years only proves that it is impossible for free and slave States to unite on any terms, without all becoming partners in the guilt and responsible for the sin of slavery. Why prolong the experiment? Let every honest man join in the outcry of the American Anti-Slavery Society. NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS. (emphasis added)
Conclusion
While it is impossible to know exactly how a counterfactual history might have turned out, and it would be irresponsible to give too much weight to speculations, it would also be irresponsible not to seriously examine alternative courses, especially ones entertained at the time. The anti-slavery disunionists and the abolitionists were some of the most critical of slavery and the most serious about ending it. For them, decentralization and secession were potential solutions not problems in ending slavery. Right or wrong, their strategy was to weaken slavery by removing some of its key legal protections.
Instead of being offered this aspect of American history to carefully consider, all too often we are offered a narrative in which the basis of human freedom and justice is the powerful, modern Hobbesian nation-state, able to maintain union by force. As long as slavery was not a threat to national power, it could be tolerated and even legally supported, but when it threatened national power (as a stated reason for secession), the US state was willing to eliminate chattel slavery in order to maintain power by force. On this basis and in terms of liberty, the god-like state giveth, and the state taketh away.
