Defending Dixies’s Land: What Every American Should Know About the South and the Civil War
Isaac C. Bishop
Published by the author, 2023
Isaac Bishop has in recent years become one of the ablest advocates of the Southern cause in the War Between the States, but this was not always so. Bishop (whose name actually is Jeb Smith) tells us that “even though I am a native of Vermont and have lived in New England all my life, I have always loved the South.” But, aside from admiration for Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, this love did not lead him to a defense of the South during the war. To the contrary, he accepted the conventional story that Lincoln fought the war to end slavery and therefore regarded the great loss of life and devastation that the war brought about as a regrettable necessity.
Reading Walter D. Kennedy’s Myths of American Slavery woke him from his dogmatic slumbers, as Immanuel Kant said about reading David Hume. The book “challenged everything I ‘knew’ about slavery and the civil war, and the origins of this country. I was left wondering, this cannot be correct; why would I not have been told this?”
He devoted several years to studying the war and its antecedents, and he has concluded that Kennedy was correct. The key issue in the war was not the Union’s battle to end slavery against the South’s defense of it, but rather the North’s pursuit of a despotic centralized federal government versus the South’s battle to preserve America as a confederation of autonomous states, leaving the federal government only a few limited functions.
The point that Lincoln did not wage war in order to free the slaves will be familiar to many libertarians, but what will surprise them is Bishop’s cogent argument that the South did not secede in order to defend slavery. Although Bishop readily acknowledges that the Cotton States—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—noted slavery as an important issue in their secession declarations, he thinks it a gross mistake to infer from this that slavery was the prime concern of the South as a whole. And even for the Cotton States, Bishop observes, “although slavery was an issue, it is inaccurate to say that the Cotton States left the Union in order to preserve slavery. It would be more accurate to say that the federal government’s intrusion into the states’ rights over the issue of slavery led to withdrawal.”
Whatever one might think of the Cotton States’ reasons for secession, Bishop points out that the reasons differed for the Upper South—Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee. All of these states initially voted against secession. They changed their minds only after Lincoln wrote to the governors of all the states that remained in the Union asking for volunteers to put down the Southern rebellion. Nothing in the Constitution authorized the federal government to use force against the government of a state. This was the prime reason these states, which constituted the bulk of the Confederacy in terms of population, adduced in their secession declarations. To the Upper South, if Lincoln could make such a demand, it was evident that he sought centralized despotism. As James Henley Thornwell, one of the foremost Southern theologians, wrote during the war, “If they [the North] prevail, the whole character of the Government will be changed, and instead of a federal republic, the common agent of sovereign and independent States, we shall have a central despotism.”
Bishop goes further. He sees in the rise of the Republican Party, culminating in Lincoln’s election, the beginning of a Marxist revolution. After the failed revolutions of 1848 across Europe, many German followers of Karl Marx, who was himself a vigorous proponent of the Union cause, moved to the United States, and Bishop contends that had it not been for their efforts at party organization and campaigning, Lincoln would not have been elected.
The South’s fears of Lincolnian despotism were amply confirmed by the North’s conduct during the war. Bishop aptly quotes Murray Rothbard’s 1994 essay “Just War”: “Sherman’s infamous march through Georgia was one of the great war crimes, and crimes against humanity, of the past century-and-a-half. Because by targeting and butchering civilians, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman paved the way for the genocidal horrors of the monstrous twentieth century.”
Considering Lincoln’s enormities, it is easy to understand why Lord Acton, perhaps the greatest of all historians of liberty, defended the Southern cause. Acton builds his case on the premise that a free society cannot be run by an absolute power but must make room for the rights of individuals. In saying this, he condemns not only absolute monarchy but unlimited majority rule as well. If anything, he shows that majority rule is worse because it is much harder to resist. Many of the Founders, in particular those in the Federalist Party, recognized the dangers of democracy. As Acton explains in a lecture given in 1866:
“The authors of the most celebrated Democracy in history esteemed that the most formidable dangers which menaced the stability of their work were the very principles of Democracy itself. With them the establishment of a Republican government was not the result of theory, but of necessity. They possessed no aristocracy, and no king, but otherwise they inherited our English laws, and strove to adapt them as faithfully as possible to a society constituted so differently from that in which they had their origin. The earliest interpreters of the Constitution and the laws strove to be guided by English precedents, and to approach as nearly as they could to the English model. Hamilton is the chief expounder of these ideas: ‘It has been observed that a pure Democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position in politics is more false than this. The ancient Democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very character was tyranny, their figure deformity. If we incline too much to Democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy. Those who mean to form a solid Republican government ought to proceed to the confines of another government. There are certain conjunctures when it may be necessary and proper to disregard the opinions which the majority of the people have formed. There ought to be a principle in government capable of resisting the popular current. The principle chiefly intended to be established is this, that there must be a permanent will.’”
When Thomas Jefferson came to power, the principle of democracy moved to the fore, but the endeavor to limit democratic absolutism was not lost. Now the hope lay in the independent power of the states that formed the Union. Acton takes John C. Calhoun to be the great theorist of federalism and agrees with him that a state should be able to nullify laws that promote the interests of one section of the country over another.
“The philosopher of the South, Mr. Calhoun, of whom it was said, to describe his influence, that as often as he took a pinch of snuff all South Carolina sneezed, put forward what was called the theory of nullification. He maintained that if an interested majority passed a law injurious to the settled interests of any State, that State had a right to interpose a veto. He was answered by Daniel Webster, the most eloquent of Americans, who asserted the absolute right of a legislature where all were fairly represented, to make laws for all. Then Calhoun insisted that if a State could not prevent the execution of a law which it deemed unconstitutional and injurious, it had the right to withdraw from the Union which it had conditionally joined.”
In a November 4, 1866, letter to Robert E. Lee, Acton says:
“I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics.” The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and his policy of waging war on the South meant the triumph of mass democracy over liberty. The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, though it left the former slaves in bad conditions, but the result of the war was a disaster for liberty. In a striking formulation, Acton says:
“Slavery was not the cause of secession, but the reason of its failure. In almost every nation and every clime the time has come for the extinction of servitude. The same problem has sooner or later been forced on many governments, and all have bestowed on it their greatest legislative skill, lest in healing the evils of forced but certain labour, they should produce incurable evils of another kind. They attempted at least to moderate the effects of sudden unconditional change, to save those whom they despoiled from ruin, and those whom they liberated from destitution. But in the United States no such design seems to have presided over the work of emancipation. It has been an act of war, not of statesmanship or humanity. They have treated the slave-owner as an enemy and have used the slave as an instrument for his destruction. They have not protected the white man from the vengeance of barbarians, nor the black from the pitiless cruelty of a selfish civilisation.”
I must confess that I prefer Lord Acton, Murray Rothbard, and Isaac Bishop to the anti-South “libertarians” of our own day.
