![]() ![]() Beyond that, however, he contends that America’s decisive transition toward government intervention over the free market and personal liberty at every level and in every sphere started during the Civil War. One aspect was the odious abuse of civil liberties and democratic processes in the North, usually dismissed by Lincoln idolators with what Hummel refers to as the not as bad as Hitler-Stalin-Mao excuse. Although he does not believe that economics necessarily ensured slavery’s extinction, he persuasively argues that slavery was doomed politically even if Lincoln had permitted the small Gulf Coast Confederacy to depart in peace.įinally, Hummel emphasizes the centralization of power that occurred during the Civil War. Of more than a score of slave societies, only America and Haiti used violence to uproot the peculiar institution. Only the abolition of slavery could conceivably provide such a justification-had that been the purpose, as opposed to the outgrowth, of the war, and had war been the only way to end slavery. Thus, argues Hummel, As an excuse for civil war, maintaining the State’s territorial integrity is bankrupt and reprehensible. Hummel rises above the usual Lincoln hagiography to contest the sixteenth president’s claim that the break-up of the union would have been disastrous. Their willingness to do so adds moral complexity to what is normally presented as a simple crusade against slavery.Įven more important, Hummel asks whether the war was necessary. Writes Hummel, Previously unwilling to secede over the issue of slavery, these four states were now ready to fight for the ideal of a voluntary Union. The outer four, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, left only after Lincoln called out the troops to coerce the others into submission. The deep seven went out over their fear-exaggerated, but real-about the future of slavery. One is the significance of the South’s two waves of secession. What really sets Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men apart is not new facts, but invaluable insights usually absent from more mainstream accounts. Hummel tells the standard story of the war though with less attention to the battles and a greater focus on economics than is customary. Other issues, particularly the tariff, were acrimonious, but only slavery was a union-breaker. But while emancipation spread across the North, it halted in the South.īecause large slaveowners, who dominated the South politically, would bear the greatest cost of emancipation, observes Hummel, the slavocracy was willing to invest considerable political resources and eventually fight tooth and nail to preserve a system that in the long run benefited very few Americans. ![]() Explains Hummel, the Revolution’s liberating spirit induced many white Americans to challenge slavery. Many Americans understood the contradiction. The hundreds of thousands of blacks kidnapped in Africa and enslaved in the new world were, of course, the glaring exceptions to the founding of a nation of free men. Hummel begins his book where the story of the Civil War properly begins-slavery. The book should be read not only by Civil War buffs, but by everyone who has been force-fed the victor’s tainted history of a conflict that killed 620,000 people, devastated a large section of the nation, and began the long process of centralization of power in Washington. ![]() No other episode of American history can match the bibliographic output of that one four-year period more than a century ago.īut Jeffrey Rogers Hummel has produced a volume that offers both an accessible history of the war, along with its causes and aftermath, and a thoughtful interpretation that breaks with the usual idolatry of Lincoln and the unified nation state. The Spanish-American War inspires no nostalgia for the lost cause. Is there anything new that could conceivably be written about the Civil War? No other conflict so enthralls U.S. He is the author of several books, most recently, Tripwire: Korea and U.S. Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and columnist for The Freeman. ![]()
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