Trump and Nearly Everyone Else Are Wrong about the Civil War

Memo to just about everyone: secession does not equal war. The Lower South of the United States seceded over slavery, but Lincoln's war was about holding the Union together no matter how many deaths it took. He said that he had no legal authority to end slavery and that if keeping the Union intact required the freeing no slaves, that's what he would do.

Thus had the Lower South been allowed to leave, no war would have followed. Logically, then, the Civil War was not about slavery, as everyone on TV is saying. It was about compulsory perpetual union. (For details see Jeffrey Rogers Hummel's Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War.)

Slavery was abolished in many places peacefully. How many times was a national union preserved peacefully?

It's so funny to listen to the ignorant lecturing the ignorant.

Rand Paul, Jack Hunter, and All That

I cringe every time libertarianism is associated with the Confederate States of America. Read Jeff Hummel's Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men to see why you should too.

The Freeman, April 2011

The Freeman marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War with articles by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Burton Folsom, Bradley Birzer, and Joseph Stromberg.

See the issue here.

TGIF: Can America Afford an Empire?

The fiscal question is whether, in the face of the huge national debt and multiyear trillion-dollar budget deficits, we can afford a “defense” establishment more befitting an empire than a republic. That’s not the only question, however. We must also ask if a society that claims to value free enterprise can long endure the economic disfigurement that inevitably accompanies a large military-industrial complex?

The rest of TGIF is here.

Lincoln

My friend Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, a Civil War scholar as well as an economist and economic historian, has written a spot-on op-ed about Abraham Lincoln in the Chicago Tribune. I highly recommend it.