Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War

"This book is different! Hummel’s Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men challenges both time-worn and current interpretations of the Civil War era. Not every reader will agree with his fresh interpretations, but they are thoroughly grounded in the facts and the literature of the period."

— ERIC WALTHER

Professor of History,

University of Houston

Author of The Fire-Eaters

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel has mastered an astonishing range of material in constructing his provocative interpretation of the Civil War as a watershed in shaping the meanings of freedom in the United States. Even veteran students of the conflict will find much to challenge their thinking in this forcefully argued and clearly written study. Apart from Hummel’s engaging text, the perceptive bibliographical essays alone make the book well worth reading.

— GARY W. GALLAGHER

Professor of American History,

Penn State University

Author of Stephen Dodson Ramseur: Lee’s Gallant General

"Hummel presents a very lucid history of the Civil War era, enlivened by his own subtle interpretation. Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men is immeasurably enhanced by the comprehensive bibliographical essays that follow each chapter, providing the scholar with invaluable historiographical information. The book should appeal to the general reader with its colorful quotes and anecdotes that capture the feel of the times it surveys so well. At the same time the author’s vast knowledge of the literature makes his work a priceless resource for students and professional historians."

— JANET SHARP HERMANN

Author of The Pursuit of a Dream and Joseph E. Davis, Pioneer Patriarch

This is a lucid, edifying account of the Civil War era. Mr. Hummel has an impressive command of the relevant contemporary literature. His interpretations are thoughtful, often provocative, always well worth considering. Civil War buffs will want this book on their shelves.

— KENNETH M. STAMPP

Morrison Professor of History Emeritus,

University of California, Berkeley

Author of The Peculiar Institution

In this fresh, provocative survey, Jeff Hummel combines synthesis and interpretation in admirable fashion. Not everyone will agree with his arguments, but they will stimulate discussion as they challenge orthodoxy.

— BROOKS D. SIMPSON

Professor of History, Arizona State University

Author of Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–1868

"Jeffrey Hummel’s book Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men is a very stimulating and original analysis of slavery and the American Civil War. Stimulating because it incorporates an exceptional blend of economic and political analysis; original because the bibliographic essays at the end of each chapter alone are worth the price of the book."

— DOUGLASS NORTH

1993 Nobel Prize in Economics for work in economic history of the United States

Author of The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860

"Hummel’s Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men is a work of importance. It will be of interest to general readers and to historians of the United States. Its command of the scholarship of the Civil War period is especially impressive and its insight is extraordinarily valuable."

— ROBERT MIDDLEKAUFF Professor of History,

University of California, Berkeley

Author of The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789

"Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men is an admirable achievement and all readers interested in this seminal period in American history owe Jeffrey Hummel a great debt. He has managed, in comparatively short compass, to distill the essential substance of this great conflict and the issues that surround it in an informative and arresting manner, and has provided insights that one is unlikely to find anywhere else on the broader issues at stake in this critical struggle between North and South."

— RONALD HAMOWY

Professor of History, University of Alberta

Jeffrey Hummel has masterfully shown how the coercive power of the state strengthened the institution of slavery and deprived African-Americans of the opportunities to share in the expanding American material bounty. He offers a provocative new vision of the antebellum South that cries for attention from scholars and laypersons alike.

— RICHARD VEDDER

Distinguished Professor of Economics, Ohio University

This book will take its place in the pantheon of Civil War books. A remarkable new synthesis.

— BARRY R. WEINGAST

Professor of Political Science, Stanford University

EMANCIPATING

SLAVES,

ENSLAVING

FREE MEN

To order books from Open Court, call toll-free 1–800-815–2280, or visit our website at www.opencourtbooks.com.

Open Court Publishing Company is a division of Carus Publishing Company, dba ePals Media.

Copyright © 1996 by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel

Copyright © 2014 by Carus Publishing Company, dba ePals Media

First printing 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Open Court Publishing Company, a division of Carus Publishing Company, 70 East Lake Street, Suite 800, Chicago, Illinois 60601.

ISBN: 978–0-8126–9844-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (for the First Edition)

Hummel, Jeffrey Rogers.

Emancipating slaves, enslaving free men: a history of the American Civil War/Jeffrey Rogers Hummel.

p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

(paper: alk. paper)

1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865. 2. United States—Politics and government—1815–1861. 3. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865— Causes. 4. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Influence. 5. State rights—History—19th century. 6. Reconstruction. I. Title.

E468.H94 1996

973.7—dc20

96–19332

DEDICATED TO:

Brevet Brigadier General James C. Rogers

Commander: 123rd Regiment, New York State Volunteers my great-grandfather, whom I never had the opportunity to meet

Tom Rogers

my grandfather, whom I was fortunate enough to know

and Susan Rogers Hummel

my mother, who has long awaited this book

CONTENTS

Foreword to the Second Edition by John Majewski

Introduction to the Second Edition

Preface

Prologue: America’s Crisis

Bibliographical Essay

1.Slavery and States’ Rights in the Early Republic

The American Revolution’s Assault on Human Bondage

Missouri—A Fire Bell in the Night

South Carolina Nullifies the Tariff

The Ideological Rift Over Slavery

Abolitionists—From Unpopularity to Politics

Bibliographical Essay

2.The Political Economy of Slavery and Secession

No Union With Slave-Holders

The Profitability of Slavery

The Social Cost of Slavery

Overworking the Slaves

The Enforcement of Slavery

The Runaway Slave

Black Resistance

Bibliographical Essay

3.The Slave Power Seeks Foreign Conquest

American Politics in the Age of Andrew Jackson

Texas and Slavery

The U.S. Acquires More Territory

Deadlock Over Slavery’s Extension

Temporary Truce Between North and South

The Book That Made the War

Attempted Expansion in the Caribbean

Bibliographical Essay

4.Emergence of the Republican Party

The Old Political Party System Unravels

The Race for Kansas

The Dred Scott Decision

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Fire-Eaters and Homesteaders

An Irrepressible Conflict

Bibliographical Essay

5.The Confederate States of America

The Election of 1860

A Rival Government

Abraham Lincoln Assumes Office

Fort Sumter and Secession’s Second Wave

Holding Maryland and Missouri

Kentucky and West Virginia

Bibliographical Essay

6.Mobilizing for Conflict

The Volunteer Militia

The First Battle of Bull Run

The Naval War

Early Confederate and Union Diplomacy

Bibliographical Essay

7.The Military Struggle

Confederate Strategy and the Eastern Theater

Default to Unconventional Warfare in the Western Theater

The Devastating Impact of the Rifle

The Toll of Disease

Bibliographical Essay

8.The War to Abolish Slavery?

Radical Republicans

Antietam and Emancipation

Black Soldiers Fight for the North

Europe Declines to Aid the South

Bibliographical Essay

9.Republican Neo-Mercantilism Versus Confederate War Socialism

Union Finance

Confederate Finance

Economic Mobilization in the North

Economic Mobilization in the South

Bibliographical Essay

10. Dissent and Disaffection—North and South

Confederate Conscription

Union Conscription

Political Opposition in the North

Political Opposition in the South

Bibliographical Essay

11. The Ravages of Total War

Grant Takes Command

Sherman’s March to the Sea

Rebels Abandon Slavery

Collapse of the Confederacy

Bibliographical Essay

12. The Politics of Reconstruction

The Prospect of Leniency

Subjugation Without Restitution

Struggle Over the Fourteenth Amendment

Impeachment of President Johnson

Bibliographical Essay

13. American Society Transformed

Reconstruction in the South

White Southerners Violently Resist

The End of Reconstruction

Southern Impoverishment—Black and White

One Nation Under Bigger Government

Bibliographical Essay

Epilogue: America’s Turning Point

Bibliographical Essay

Notes

Index

Foreword to the Second Edition

As the nation marks the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the literature covering slavery, secession, Civil War, and Reconstruction continues to expand rapidly. Whether detailed monographs or general histories, the outpouring of new studies adds to a huge body of scholarship that already consists of many thousands of books and articles. To write a truly original Civil War work is thus an extraordinarily difficult undertaking. Jeffrey Rogers Hummel’s Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men stands out as a particularly rich and creative interpretation of the War and its aftermath. I am delighted that Open Court is now reissuing Hummel’s work to make it readily available to a new audience of Civil War students.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men is its remarkable ability to imaginatively combine conventional genres of Civil War scholarship. On one hand, the book is a comprehensive account of sectional conflict, the war itself, and Reconstruction, which makes it something akin to a textbook. Most of the key events, personalities, and movements are covered, whether the politics of slave runaways or the advent of Confederate war socialism or the impact of the rifled musket. Such coverage makes Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men an excellent teaching book; I have assigned it with great success in an upper-level Civil War course. Yet unlike most textbooks, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men puts forth a series of provocative arguments that organize the extensive material, including the claim (highlighted in the new introduction) that slavery could have been abolished without the immensely destructive total war that engulfed the nation from 1861 to 1865. Even the very title of the book conveys a highly distinctive point of view.

One might fear that such an argumentative book would either be overly academic or overly tendentious (or perhaps a particularly unfortunate combination of both). Hummel’s work, however, is clearly written and easily accessible, as each individual chapter is short and lively. The highly readable prose, though, does not make this Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men popular history. It is also very much a scholar’s book, especially since Hummel ends each chapter with an extensive bibliographic essay that shows an encyclopedic command of the Civil War literature. Even though they are now more than fifteen years old, I still refer to these literature summaries in the course of my research. This makes Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men a rather remarkable combination of comprehensive coverage, fluid writing, historical argumentation, and excellent scholarship. There is nothing quite like it in the Civil War literature.

The book’s creative synthesis, I believe, stems from Hummel’s status as a trained historian who is nevertheless somewhat of an outsider to most of the academic profession of history. Hummel earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas, Austin, where he wrote a dissertation on the economics of slavery. He clearly understands how historians operate and has mastered their craft, but he is as much as an economist as a historian. Hummel’s economic background is readily apparent in Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, though it is tempered with the historian’s sensitivity to context, ideology, and contingency. This strong economics background makes Hummel somewhat of an anomaly among historians, who usually distrust the theoretical disposition of most economists. Hummel’s politics are even more unusual, at least for a historian. While most historians are left of center, Hummel is explicitly libertarian. That gives him a critical perspective on the growth of a large central state and the nationalistic impulses that often animate it. Whereas most Americans (and most historians) see the Civil War as a second American Revolution that was essential for the expansion of freedom and the nation’s survival, Hummel views the Civil War as an avoidable tragedy.

Hummel’s libertarianism makes him a great admirer of the abolitionist tradition, which rightly saw the American state as an essential prop for slavery. It also allows him to explore sometimes radical ideas, such as the notion that peaceful secession might have hastened the end of slavery. Unlike some neo-Confederate interpretations, Hummel does not see Southern slaveholders as noble freedom fighters who somehow would abolish slavery of their own accord. Secessionists, Hummel recognizes, left the Union to protect slavery. Yet in Hummel’s story, Southern secessionists got it wrong. If Northerners had allowed secession to proceed peacefully, it would have backfired. Hummel argues that runaway slaves and other forms of slave resistance would have eventually undermined slavery from within. With the North beckoning as a refuge, the slaves themselves would have made slavery too difficult to maintain and ultimately too unprofitable for Southern society to support. This argument is a radical break with mainstream scholarship, but it nevertheless reflects the general historiographical trend of focusing on the agency of slaves themselves. Hummel’s position also finds support (at least by way of analogy) in the relatively new literature on borderland regions. Throughout North American history, competing empires and governments created regions that no one single government could control, such as the Southwest or Spanish Florida. These borderland regions created opportunities that Native Americans and escaped slaves could exploit. It is entirely plausible that secession could create new borderland zones which neither the North nor the South could fully control, thus giving slaves more opportunities to defy their masters.

I ultimately disagree with Hummel’s argument. In my view, he underestimates the ability of strong central state—similar to the one that Southerners created during the Civil War—to prevent fugitives from undermining slavery. The greater effort need to enforce slavery would have indeed created greater deadweight costs for Southerners, but it is not clear that those costs would have been high enough to make the expropriation of slave labor unprofitable. As I see it, slavery would have survived for some time—perhaps well into the twentieth century—without some form of direct (and violent) action. But even though I ultimately disagree with some of Hummel’s interpretations, it is the sort of disagreement that is not the least bit disagreeable. Engaging and stimulating, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men has forced me to think more deeply about my own views and assumptions. Hummel’s book is an enticing invitation to think about the Civil War in new and interesting ways that few works have done.

JOHN MAJEWSKI, UC Santa Barbara

Introduction to the Second Edition

I am writing this new introduction in the midst of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial. It has been eighteen years since Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War first appeared. Aside from correcting a few typographical or otherwise minor infelicities, I have not changed or revised the text. The enormous scholarly literature on the subjects covered has continued to grow since then, perhaps as much as doubling. This explosion has filled in many gaps in our knowledge and immensely enriched our understanding of the details and the ramifications of these events. Updating the book’s bibliographical essays, even if within my capacity, would have made them unwarrantably long. Yet nothing that has appeared has caused me to alter significantly my interpretations and arguments.

I would now make only two changes worth mentioning. Historians had long recognized that the standard estimate of 620,000 military deaths on both sides during the Civil War, an estimate that I repeated, was somewhat crude. J. David Hacker has since performed the notable service of conducting a sophisticated demographic analysis that concludes this estimate is 20 percent too low. In a 2011 Civil War Times article, he raised the number of male deaths to around 750,000 (within an error range of 650,000 to 850,000). He finds the under-counting to be understandably more severe for the South than the North. Nor does his corrected number incorporate female civilian deaths, although Hacker finds reasonable James M. McPherson’s earlier back-of-the-envelope calculation of 50,000 total civilian deaths, male and female, white and black, and primarily southern. As McPherson concludes in a comment published with the article: The figure of 750,000 soldier deaths would translate into 7.5 million American deaths in a war fought in our own time by the United States. . . . Such a figure calls into question Mark Neely’s assertion that the Civil War was ‘remarkable for its traditional restraint.’ The Civil War did indeed result in more American soldier deaths than all the other wars this country has fought combined.¹ Moreover, if only half of the 130,000 uncounted casualties are assigned to the Confederacy, that raises Confederate military deaths to nearly 6.0 percent of its white population. This is higher than what I report in Chapter 11 (although still lower than the percentage for Germany during World War II, given that estimates of its military deaths have also been revised upward from those reported in Chapter 11).

The other correction I would make would be in Chapter 5, when discussing the Merryman decision of Chief Justice Roger Taney. Based on two secondary works that cited two apparently different original sources, I stated that President Lincoln wrote out a standing warrant that was never served for the Chief Justice’s arrest. The chapter’s bibliographical essay explained why I considered the claim reliable. Subsequent research (which my book helped inspire) by John Rhodehamel and Joseph Eros, as reported by the latter online, revealed that a notational error by the distinguished historian Harold M. Hyman had mis-identified his citation for this claim.² The only source turns out to have been Ward Hill Lamon’s unpublished manuscript recollection, located in the Huntington Library. Although Lamon was the U.S. marshal of the District of Columbia and Lincoln’s personal bodyguard, I agree that his single report is not entirely credible, a conclusion best explained in the most recent and exhaustive treatment of the Merryman case, Brian McGinty’s The Body of John Merryman: Abraham Lincoln and the Suspension of Habeas Corpus.³

I therefore devote most of this new introduction to remarks about the continuing relevance of my account, along with a few selective references to subsequent writing. I explicitly framed the book as a libertarian interpretation of the Civil War, sharply separating the questions of slavery and secession. This separation has both a positive and normative dimension. The book’s narrative unveils the positive dimension: that while slavery explains why the southern states seceded, it fails to explain why the northern states refused to let them leave the Union in peace. Indeed, with regard to slavery as the root cause of southern secession, I have frequently stated that there is hardly any historical causal explanation at that level of abstraction for which the empirical evidence is more overwhelming. On the other hand, a desire to preserve the Union was what initially united the northern suppression of secession, although a few Northerners saw the resulting war as a potential opportunity to end slavery throughout the United States. This dedication to the Union at almost any cost was in turn based upon an essentially mystical identification of Union and Liberty, the origin and development of which had yet to be fully explained, given the implicit nationalism of many American historians.

While recognition of this central Northern motive for war was commonplace among historical accounts before mine appeared, my book supplements it with an additional argument. If Northerners had been interested in ending slavery rather than preserving the Union, there is a set of alternative policies they could have adopted that would have brought down slavery within an independent Confederacy possibly within four years and certainly by the turn of the century. I was clued into this alternative by my study of the radical abolitionists, particularly William Lloyd Garrison, who coupled their calls for immediate emancipation with advocacy of northern secession from the South. To demonstrate the practical viability of this proposal as a means of ending slavery, the book takes an extended excursion into the economics of slavery. It concludes that most historians and economists underestimate the fugitive-slave question as a serious threat to the South’s peculiar institution, treating it instead as merely a symbolic issue with little practical significance. In fact, the runaway slave has always proved the Achilles heel of chattel slavery, as illustrated by its now well-recognized contribution to the collapse of southern slavery during the Civil War itself.

I realize, however, that Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men conflated two different ways of pursuing this argument. One leads to a policy claim, and the other to a historical claim, a distinction I now have the opportunity to clarify. The policy claim is that turning the North into a haven for runaway slaves, along with supplementary policies divorcing the national government from slavery, if enacted, would have created a domino effect that would have eventually undermined slavery within an independent Confederacy. This not only distinguishes my argument from the older revisionist belief that slavery was economically moribund and doomed to decay, a belief I rejected outright, but it also represents the kind of pervasive counterfactual that historians and economists indulge in all the time when evaluating government policies, whether arguing about the impact of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression or the necessity of Harry Truman’s use of atomic bombs to end World War II.

Of course, whether this alternative would have worked is distinct from the second, historical question: whether Northerners would have enacted these policies, if they had acquiesced in the lower South’s departure from the Union. The latter is obviously a far more speculative counterfactual, which I am prepared to put forward tentatively, although I readily admit that definitive evidence is well beyond our reach. But the likelihood of these policies being adopted does clearly seem greater than for another untried, peaceful way of ending slavery often brought up by historians: compensated emancipation. Slaveholders were almost always adamantly opposed to this option, even when President Lincoln offered it to the border states during the Civil War itself. Turning the North into a haven for runaway slaves, on the other hand, would have cost taxpayers a lot less than compensated emancipation; it would have obviated the need for slaveholder approval; and it actually became more politically feasible as the number of slave states remaining within the Union fell. Indeed, northern Republicans did eventually repeal the Fugitive Slave Act, and after their wartime abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, the runaway was decisive in slavery’s collapse throughout Maryland, one of the border states that had shunned compensated emancipation.

The book contains about half a dozen other provocative theses where my interpretations diverge from mainstream historical views. I will let the reader discover them for herself or himself without further comment here except for the one interpretation encapsulated in Randolph Bourne’s famous maxim, War is the health of the State. My account puts particular emphasis on the way government increased in scope, power, size, and intrusiveness in both the Union and the Confederacy during the war. It also illustrates the post-war ratchet effect, where despite significant demobilization and retrenchment, both the victorious national government and the state governments, North and South, failed to recede back to prewar levels and functions. These of course are universal features of nearly all wars fought by all States. But as I assert in the book’s epilogue, the Civil War additionally represents the great watershed in American history with respect to State authority. Prior to the war, successive ideological surges had brought about the long-term, secular erosion of coercive power at all levels of government. It was the Civil War that dated the reversal of this trend. As the last, great coercive blight on the American landscape, black chattel slavery, was finally extirpated—an achievement that cannot be overrated—the American polity did an about-face. In the years ahead, government power would wax and wane, but the United States had commenced its halting march to the modern welfare-warfare State.

To repeat, these are all purely factual interpretations, some more disputed than others, that imply no necessary value judgments. Whether one likes or dislikes government intervention, all must agree that it is more extensive today than in the antebellum era of Jacksonian laissez faire. When and how that transition began is surely worth exploring. Even so, a definite normative dimension arises from my book’s libertarian perspective. It partly comprises an undeviating opposition to all forms of State coercion—conscription, taxation, economic regulation, and violations of civil liberties—whether during war or peace, and whether perpetrated by the Union or the Confederacy. But the normative position that seems to have aroused the most severe disagreement is my making a moral distinction between southern slavery and southern secession. Like such radical abolitionists as William Lloyd Garrison, for whom I have nothing but unstinted admiration as one of the genuine heroes of American history, I see no inconsistency between passionately opposing slavery and simultaneously favoring secession.

The ending of chattel slavery within the United States was a momentous accomplishment, despite being an unintended consequence of the Civil War. I would go so far as to concede that if we knew with absolute certainty that the war, with its enormous bloodshed and suffering, inflicted in many cases on the entirely innocent, was the only possible way to terminate such a horrid and vile institution, then it was justified. But it is impossible to know that. As stated above, Northerners clearly had available other conceivable options with good prospects of bringing down the South’s peculiar institution, if that had been their primary goal. As a historical fact, no one denies that it was the war that brought emancipation. Yet if history is to be more than just a factual rendition of past events, if we hope to make history something from which we derive insights, lessons, and perhaps even moral sensibility, then why foreclose any consideration and study of untried alternatives to the carnage and destruction of war?

All this makes Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men very different from neo-Confederate treatments, which often tend to be blasé about the evils of chattel slavery, to deny its primary role in motivating southern secession, to be hostile to radical abolitionists, and to be fawningly apologetic about the despotic excesses of the Confederate State. Nonetheless, several reviews of or comments on my book ignored or downplayed this sharp distinction. Perhaps the most blatant case is David W. Blight’s essay in a collection entitled Our Lincoln, edited by Eric Foner. Denouncing historical writing on Lincoln and the Civil War that emanates from the right wing, some of it white supremacist and neo-Confederate and some of it staunchly libertarian, antistatist, even Utopian, where Lincoln hating is the stand-in for the hated ‘big government’, Blight accuses several works of constituting largely ersatz scholarship. This becomes his launching pad for a tirade against the current Republican Party, a tirade that conflates conservatives and libertarians. In Blight’s essay, my book comes in for just a mention with no actual consideration of its contents.⁴ At the opposite extreme is Daniel Feller’s fair-minded and lengthy discussion in Reviews in American History. Raising thoughtful challenges, Feller presents my arguments accurately and is very complimentary about my scholarship. Yet he surprisingly still lumps my book together with two others in a marriage of neo-Confederates and libertarians and indicts me along with the other two authors of the astonishing charge: they all hate Abraham Lincoln. Similarly, James McPherson, in a passing reference in the New York Review of Books, accuses me of being one of those historians who declaim from a neo-Confederate or libertarian platform.⁵

This tendency to misplace my work under the neo-Confederate rubric I attribute, at least in part, to the triumph over the past decade and a half of an orthodoxy that at its most strident insists that the Civil War was totally and only about slavery. Every other issue is dismissed as a smokescreen and anyone today who treats these issues as relevant or important is considered guilty of moral obtuseness at best. My book initially appeared at the end of an immensely diverse and vibrant period in Civil War scholarship, in which abundant alternative perspectives were respectfully debated. It was a time when even such pioneers of the neo-abolitionist interpretation as Kenneth Stampp and Eric Foner were quite explicit that the two questions of why the southern states left the Union and why the northern states refused to let them go were distinct.⁶ But the subsequent dominance of neo-abolitionism has, at its worst, descended into a presentism, back-dated from the Civil War, in which everything that happened prior in U.S. history was driven by slavery. Even the British Marxist and prolific historian of slavery, Robin Blackburn, finds this orthodoxy stifling, declaring that a willingness on the part of the United States to admit the possibility that the war was not the best response to Secession would be a healthy sign.⁷

The blurring of the distinction between secession and slavery has even spilled over into contemporary political discourse. No one has better exposed the resulting contradictions than University of Auburn philosopher Roderick T. Long. Have you noticed, he asks, "that whenever mention is made of secession, establishment types always say, ‘that issue was settled in 1865’? Even leaving aside the absurdity of the suggestion that military victory could settle a legal issue (let alone a moral one)—isn’t it another establishment mantra that the Civil War was solely about slavery? They seem to be trying to have it both ways. If the Civil War was solely about slavery, then the most that it could have settled is the illegitimacy of secession-to-protect-slavery, not the illegitimacy of secession per se." To put it another way, I wonder how many of those who celebrate the Civil War for preserving the Union would still consider the war to have been fully justified if it had failed to destroy slavery. Yet that was the precise moral stance of many Northerners.⁸

Fortunately, this full-throated Unionism, in the phrase of Andrew Delbanco, is finally facing some challenges.⁹ Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War, combines a religious history of the Civil War with a laudable attempt to apply just-war theory to the conflict.¹⁰ Just-war theory raises two questions: was going to war just (jus ad bellum) and was it fought justly (jus in bello). Stout ultimately evades answering the first question, but he recounts how both the Union and Confederacy eventually resorted to excesses that egregiously violated standards of just wartime conduct. With the increasing attention that historians have given to the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening in the antebellum U.S., it is no surprise that many Civil War accounts are allotting more attention to the role of religion in the war’s causes, course, and consequences. One other such work, David Goldfield, America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, starts out unabashedly proclaiming itself an anti-war account.¹¹ Yet despite its vivid narrative driving home the war’s horrors, the book ends up an amalgamation of traditional revisionist and cultural interpretations that at times can be careless about details. Goldfield blames the war on a blundering generation of politicians and on excessively zealous evangelicals without offering any alternative route for eliminating slavery except for a vague invocation of compensated emancipation.

A splendid book that puts cracks in the orthodoxy, without a focus on religion, is Amanda Foreman’s A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War.¹² Foreman inserts the wartime diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the U.K. into a much broader and far richer social, political, military, and economic context. In the process, she exposes why the North’s initial ambivalence about the war’s impact on American slavery led some British citizens to fight for the Confederacy and several of Britain’s antislavery liberals, notably William Gladstone, to flirt with recognition and support for the Confederacy. In passing, she also details the extent to which both the Union and Confederacy unjustly held in their armies British citizens who, while residing or arriving in the country, had been forcibly enrolled either by private crimps or conscription officers, despite the strenuous efforts of British consuls to secure their release.

One of the most telling works of re-evaluation is Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War, which demonstrates the primacy of Unionism as a northern motive straight through to the war’s end.¹³ Gallagher perceptively critiques several other studies for their disproportionate concentration on slavery and race relations, although he himself seems to slide from an empathetic historical understanding of northern motives to an endorsement of those motives. Gallagher also overstates the continuity of northern nationalism, underplaying the extent to which the Civil War reinforced and magnified it. How the war actually fostered a metamorphosis in American national identity on the home front is well illustrated in Melinda Lawson’s Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North.¹⁴ Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nation’s: America’s Place in World History, in his chapter on the Civil War, puts the development of American nationalism within the context of growing European nationalism.¹⁵ Bender moreover identifies parallels between Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and Otto von Bismarck’s unification of Germany through blood and iron, although he does not push these parallels quite far enough.

Four treatments that elucidate similar developments within the Confederacy merit mention. Mark E. Neely, Jr., has painstakingly reconstructed the civil liberties violations of the Rebel State in Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism, a work that hopefully puts to rest the claim that the South had a better record than the North.¹⁶ William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of Civil War, provides an excellent survey of dissent from Confederate nationalism throughout the slave states.¹⁷ John Majewski’s Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation expands our knowledge of the genesis and development of the Confederate State’s economic interventions.¹⁸ And Libra W. Hilde, in Worth a Dozen Men: Women and Nursing in the Civil War South, shows that the contributions of southern women to the war effort, much of it voluntary, were no less substantial than those of northern women.¹⁹

Scholarship on the economics of slavery has been surprisingly quiescent since my book was first published. The extensive and acrimonious two-decade-long debate inspired by the publication of Robert William Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s notorious Time on the Cross in 1974 is therefore long overdue for revisiting.²⁰ This is a project that has engaged my intermittent attention, and I have now made available online a working draft of my results, Deadweight Loss and the American Civil War: The Political Economy of Slavery, Secession, and Emancipation.²¹ Two basic questions have remained intimately intertwined throughout the history of economic thought with respect to chattel slavery. First, was it profitable? And second, was it efficient? Many classical economists, starting with Adam Smith and including many nineteenth-century abolitionists, contended that slave labor was inefficient and therefore usually unprofitable. The contrasting position of the new economic historians, argued by Fogel and Engerman, is that slavery was profitable and therefore efficient. I conclude that both polar positions are partly wrong (as well as partly right). The peculiar institution was indeed profitable but nevertheless inefficient. It imposed significant deadweight loss, in the jargon of economists, on the southern economy, despite being lucrative for slaveholders. In short, slavery was like other well-known practices, from piracy through monopoly to tariffs, where individual gains do not translate into social benefits.

On the subject of slavery more broadly, several works stand out. Seymour Drescher, a historian of British abolitionism, is the author of two. His earlier Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition— demonstrating the relative unimportance of purely economic motives in Britain’s abolition of first the slave trade and then colonial slavery itself—has become a classic I neglected to cite in my bibliographical essays despite its appearing years before my own book.²² In 2002 he published The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation, which includes a very useful study of the history of economic thought with respect to slavery, especially by raising from undue obscurity the work of Heinrich Friedrich Freiherr von Storch. Storch was the early classical economist who wrote the most on the subject, making him widely cited by other classical economists, and yet his writings have never been translated into English.²³ Unfortunately Drescher, not being a trained economist, muddies the distinction between profitability and efficiency, and thus his rendition of the views of classical economists is not always reliable. His misinterpretation is repeated in David Brion Davis’s otherwise outstanding overview, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World.²⁴

At the time I wrote Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, the southern system of slave patrols was an under-researched topic. Since then, the first and one of the most important works to correct that deficiency is Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas.²⁵ John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger have expanded our knowledge of runaways in Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation²⁶ while details on the history of the federal fugitive slave laws are available in two chapters of Don E. Fehrenbacher (completed and edited by Ward M. McAfree), The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery.²⁷ Barry R. Weingast and I have shown why the Fugitive Slave Act was of more than symbolic import for southern acceptance of the Compromise of 1850 in The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: An Instrumental Interpretation, an article in the Stanford University Press series, Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress.²⁸

As for the charge of hating Lincoln, I had actually hoped to distance my book from the simplistic Lincoln bashing that can sometimes issue, for different reasons, from both extreme neo-Confederates and extreme neo-abolitionists. Like so many successful politicians, the sixteenth president was a complex combination of lofty idealism and cunning opportunism. Few question his political genius. Although I obviously deplore many of his policies, why should refusing to exempt Lincoln from the sort of critical evaluation applied to other figures throughout history be construed as hatred?

I furthermore realize that the most deplorable of Lincoln’s actions, leading the country into a war with an enormous body count, is something that was required by the political dynamics of the emerging Republican Party. The war would have likely been prosecuted by any of the other potential Republican candidates of 1860 if any one of them had been elected president instead; and the northern Democrat, Stephen Douglas, if he had been elected and the lower South had still seceded (an admittedly doubtful counterfactual), would have been at least as implacable in trying to crush secession. At the same time, Lincoln had many admirable and likable personal qualities, including a self-deprecating sense of humor, a lack of vindictiveness that could extend into compassion, and a command of English prose that has led even a critic like Gore Vidal to put him into the same league as Shakespeare. He was also human with human foibles, and the common mistake of many critics and admirers alike is to reify his positions and ideas, as if they never exhibited inconsistency or altered during his lifetime.

Books about Lincoln continue to pour forth. Rather than surveying all of them, I would single out Sean Wilentz’s 2009 review essay appearing in the New Republic during the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth.²⁹ Wilentz strikes the proper balance, peering behind what he calls the fantasy Lincoln of the unalloyed worshippers and detractors to unveil Lincoln the politician. Of course, Wilentz reveres this trait more than I do and consequently underrates the crucial value of the ideological spadework done by the radical abolitionists, without which Lincoln’s political moves against slavery would never have been possible in the first place. Which leads me to close this brief historiographical foray with Henry Mayer’s All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery.³⁰ Mayer finally provides this premier American abolitionist with the superb biography he deserves.

I am well aware that this survey of works published after mine omits many subjects and slights many additional worthy contributions. To those scholars I can only apologize. No doubt the Civil War’s sesquicentennial will occasion the release of still more studies. That makes the timing all the more auspicious for this reprint of Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men. I hope that this book will continue to play its part in the ongoing conversation and debate about this defining event in United States history.

¹ J. David Hacker, A Census-Based Count of Civil War Dead, Civil War History 57 (December 2011): 310. McPherson’s quotation of Mark E. Neely, Jr., comes from Neely’s The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 108.

² https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/soc.history.war.us-civil-war/SELVKtxfHWg.

³ Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

⁴ David W. Blight, The Theft of Lincoln in Scholarship, Politics, and Public Memory, in Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, ed. by Eric Foner (New York: Norton, 2008), pp. 275–76.

⁵ Daniel Feller, "Libertarians in the Attic or A Tale of Two Narratives," Reviews in American History 32 (June 2004): 184–95: James M. McPherson, The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln, New York Review of Books 57 (25th November 2010), p. 12.

⁶ Kenneth M. Stampp, ed., The Causes of the Civil War, rev. edn. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 3, and Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 316.

⁷ Robin Blackburn, Why the Muted Anniversary? An Erie Silence, CounterPunch (18th April 2011): http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/04/18/an-eerie-silence/.

⁸ Roderick T. Long, Secessio Plebis. Austro-Athenian Empire Blog (9th August 2011): http://aaeblog.com/2011/08/09/secessio-plebis/.

⁹ Andrew Delbanco, The Abolitionist Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 41. After Delbanco’s initial essay, this book contains commentaries by John Stauffer, Manish Sinha, Darryl Pinckney, and Wilfred M. McCay. Both sides of the resulting exchange seem unaware that an unqualified admiration for abolitionists does not preclude doubts about the Civil War’s necessity or legitimacy.

¹⁰ New York: Viking, 2006.

¹¹ New York: Bloomsbury, 2011, p. 3.

¹² London: Allen Lane, 2010.

¹³ Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

¹⁴ Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012, p. 181.

¹⁵ New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.

¹⁶ Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999.

¹⁷ New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

¹⁸ Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

¹⁹ Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012.

²⁰ 2v. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974.

²¹ http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2155362.

²² Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977.

²³ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. For further information on Storch, see David M. Hart’s important but unpublished, Class, Slavery, and the Industrial Theory of History in French Liberal Thought, 1814–1830: The Contribution of Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1994), 75–81, 95–98, a work that is in an ongoing process of revision at http://www.davidmhart.com/Papers/CCCD-PhD/index.html.

²⁴ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

²⁵ Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

²⁶ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

²⁷ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

²⁸ The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: An Instrumental Interpretation in Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress, ed. by David W. Brady and Matthew D. McCubbins, vol. 2: Further New Perspectives on the History of Congress (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 379–95, 447–8. The published version was severely truncated from a more complete version of the article, The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: Symbolic Gesture or Rational Guarantee, posted online at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1153528.

²⁹ Sean Wilentz, Who Lincoln Was, and Was Not: The Images and Illusions of this Momentous Bicentennial Year, New Republic 240 (15th July 2009), pp. 24–47, and available online at http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/who-lincoln-was. The online copy provides links to comments from the authors that Wilentz reviews, along with his response.

³⁰ New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

PREFACE

Ken Burns’s eleven-hour PBS documentary, The Civil War, was first televised in 1990. It dramatically transposed to an exciting medium all the limitations of popular Civil War literature. Technically and artistically the documentary was brilliant, and there is no denying its vivid power to bring the conflict to life. Unfortunately, its presentation of the war’s origins was superficial; it unreflectively subscribed to the cult of Lincoln idolatry; it slighted the war’s broader political and social context; and even from a narrow military perspective, its focus was almost exclusively on major conventional campaigns, giving short shrift to such critical problems as logistics and guerrillas.

This book is a narrative history of the Civil War that transcends the confines of popular literature. It is short, yet comprehensive, covering both the war’s causes and consequences as well as its course, its political and social as well as its military aspects. The book is basic, so that someone unfamiliar with the subject can easily follow it. But it takes issue with prevailing interpretations in several respects.

Some of the most innovative of my challenges to established views arise from weaving the latest economic theory into the historical narrative. I have tried my best to make these arguments accessible even for readers untutored in economics. But those who find economic reasoning an irritating distraction from the story should feel free to skim lightly over the second through fifth sections of chapter 2.

The book’s organization is basically chronological but shifts to topical for important subjects at appropriate points. The reader will thus find that the second chapter steps out of the historical sequence to explore black slavery in detail. Or that chapters 6, 7, and 11 contain most of the book’s treatment of military events, but not all of it.

The notes are at the book’s end to make them as unobtrusive as possible. This also befits their relative significance. Those conscientious readers who hate flipping between text and endnotes can rest assured that the notes only cite sources for quotations and numbers. Except when discussing the derivation of certain economic statistics, they contain no textual matter.

Bibliographical essays, on the other hand, follow each chapter. Although general readers may prefer to skip these, the essays provide guides to further study and let scholars know on what works I relied. They also emphasize my own interpretations by contrasting my views to the many alternative interpretations of historians, past and present. Above all, they permit me to acknowledge my enormous intellectual debt to others. Even when I vehemently disagree with an author’s conclusions, I hope my profound admiration for previous scholarship comes across clearly. Without their arduous but loving labors to draw upon, a book such as mine would be impossible.

The personal debts I incurred while completing this project exceed even my intellectual debts. It is hard to imagine that any author has received more support and assistance from family, friends, and associates. Thanking them eventually became the part of the book I was most eager to write.

Gary W. Gallagher, Wendy McElroy, and Michele Schwartz commented extensively on earlier incarnations of this work. More complete versions of the manuscript were given scrupulous and thorough attention by Lois Allen, Shearer Davis Bowman, Cindy Cox, Williamson Evers, George B. Forgie, Buzz Grafe, Mike Grossberg, Janet Sharp Hermann, David Hoefer, Ross Levatter, Robert Middlekauf, Chuck Myers, Dyanne Petersen, Tom Reid, Theodore P. Savas, Kenneth M. Stampp, and Joe Stromberg. David Friedman, David Henderson, William D. Hermann, John Robbart, and Richard K. Vedder all offered their economic expertise in looking over chapters 2, 13, or both for me. Everyone mentioned tried his or her best to get me to make this an accurate and readable product; any remaining errors or infelicities are due entirely to my own stubbornness.

I also wish to express my gratitude to Charles W. Baird, Director of the Smith Center for Private Enterprise Studies at California State University, Hayward, and his assistants, Jenny Reid and Donna Mittelstedt, for providing me convenient access to that university’s library. Dolores Neese of the main library at Golden Gate University processed an inordinate number of inter-library loan requests. I did most of the actual writing of this book in Golden Gate University’s computer labs, and four successive directors—Lee Thompson, Mark Phillips, Harlan Bernhardt, and Siriporn Usanakornkul—along with their entire staffs, were courteous, cooperative, and accommodating beyond the call of duty.

Although he may not recall it, Milton Friedman first suggested this book idea to me. I wish to thank him for that and for indirectly putting me in touch with my agent, Tom Cole, who was instrumental in many ways, but particularly in molding the book’s concept. My editor at Open Court, David Ramsay Steele, was an intellectual delight to work with, as well as unusually sympathetic to an author’s perspective. I owe Michele Hubinger an extra debt for her proof-reading, while Fabbian George Dufoe III permitted me to test a program he was developing for creating indexes.

So many others were vital in maintaining my morale during rough periods while I worked on this manuscript that space and the reader’s patience would not permit mentioning them all by name. They know who they are. But I would be remiss not to give special recognition to Joe and Martha Fuhrig, an indispensable couple. Behind me almost from the beginning, with encouragement and confidence through it all, Joe and Martha more than anyone ensured that this book was completed.

Prologue

America’s Crisis

Towering genius . . . thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 1838¹

After little more than a month in office, Abraham Lincoln faced the most serious crisis that ever beset a President of the United States. Seven southern states had withdrawn from the Union even before he took the oath in front of the unfinished Capitol Dome on a brisk, sunny day early in March of 1861. Setting up a rival central government, they had proceeded to seize United States property within their borders. A rumored assassination plot required the humiliating precaution of having the President-elect sneak into Washington in the dead of night wearing a disguise. During the inauguration, the streets were lined with soldiers; riflemen watched from prominent rooftops and from windows in the Capitol wings; and four batteries of howitzers stood guard at City Hall. A Philadelphia newspaper reported that, for the first time, a President delivered his inaugural address "safely esconced [sic] out of the people’s reach, within a military cordon bristling with bayonets."²

Although long active in the rough-and-tumble frontier politics of Illinois, the fifty-two-year-old Lincoln was practically a novice in public office. His only prior elected posts involved eight years as a state legislator and a single term in the House of Representatives. This prairie lawyer of humble origins had absolutely no previous administrative experience. Leading members of Lincoln’s own Cabinet looked upon him as an indecisive upstart and crude buffoon, ripe for their adroit manipulation.

Then at 4:30 A.M. on the 12th of April, rebel guns opened fire. Their target: a small federal garrison besieged within Fort Sumter, on an island situated right at the mouth of Charleston harbor in South Carolina. Lincoln did not hesitate. The shelling of Fort Sumter brought forth an immediate presidential proclamation. Whereas the laws of the United States have been for some time past and now are opposed and the execution thereof obstructed in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings or by the powers vested in the marshals by law, it began, now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, in virtue of the power in me vested by the Constitution and laws, have thought fit to call forth, and hereby do call forth, the militia of the several States of the Union to the aggregate number of 75,000, in order to suppress said combinations and to cause the laws to be duly executed.³

The proclamation was an unprecedented exertion of presidential authority. Seventy-five thousand militia constituted