This is only a valid point if you believe that the South’s criteria for citizenship was legitimate.
It wasn’t, by the way. Counting all adults, it’s very unlikely that anything close to an overwhelming majority wanted to secede.
LOL, the Mythology of the Lost Cause is alive and well among the Straight Dope apologists.
There’s enough of a technical distinction that the Constitution considers them two different things. The federal government was granted explicit power over international trade.
The Anarchists would bitterly dispute that.
That’s obvious to us; but they were so invested in their master/slave mentality that they simply didn’t see it. It wasn’t just hypocrisy- they apparently really believed that Africans were a sort of sub-human, more of an australopithecine than a human. They didn’t care that African-Americans didn’t have citizenship any more than they cared that horses, cows and dogs didn’t.
It simply is.
These aren’t. What Lincoln said and what Will Farnaby described as his statement are.
Please provide a cite that demonstrates that most libertarians don’t care about slavery.
Regards,
Shodan
Anyone who claimed to believe that was either lying or stupid. Otherwise there wouldn’t be laws against education. Can you educate a cow?
George Cuvier was a leading naturalist in the early 19th Century. He examined the body of Sarah Baartman, known as ‘The Hottentot Venus’, and determined that she was ‘the missing link’ between humans and animals. People did believe that Blacks were sub-human, and they had ‘scientific evidence’ to back them up.
I’ve provided a rather compelling explanation as to why he’s wrong, which you’ve elected not to address, so I guess that’s that. Why you’re arguing in favour of such a bizarre and easily falsifiable claim I can’t imagine, but it’s your loss.
I didn’t say most libertarians did. I said that libertarians who celebrated the Confederacy did.
You have to admit that the central question is a good one; why do so many libertarians have it in for the one President out of 44 who did more to provide people with freedom than any of the other 43?
They certainly did see it on some level; that’s why they warped their entire culture into an excuse and justification for slavery. That’s why they became so invested in a master/slave mentality in the first place.
. . . had absorbed the remnants of the Whigs. Lincoln began his career as a Whig and was always all for Henry Clay’s American System – central bank, protective tariff, and “internal improvements,” i.e., federally-funded transportation-infrastructure projects such as roads and canals. All of which seems like plain common sense in hindsight, but to Farnaby’s kind of libertarian I suppose it would make one a “statist.”
Some libertarians (and not they alone) appear to equate “liberty” with “local autonomy.” What they appear to hold against Lincoln is that no one is more responsible for the survival – and consolidation – of the Union.
It is not satire, it is history. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Any libertarian defense of the Confederate cause should suffice, agreed?
No, the anarchist tradition is different, and older, and more European, and closely associated with Marxism. Libertarians oppose the state because they see it as a threat to private property; anarchists oppose the state because they see it as a defender of private property.
One-pronged test: It was widely known at the time that eastern Tennessee was a hotbed of pro-Union feeling (as was the Piedmont area of Virginia, know known as West Virginia).
Did the Confederacy allow those people to secede “back” to the Union?
No, it sent Robert E. Lee into West Virginia (where he fared badly on his first campaign), and it never voluntarily relinquished its hold on eastern Tennessee. Both regions were pried away by military force.
So it’s not a “Union wouldn’t allow secession…” question so much as it is a “neither side would allow secession…like the vast majority of nation-states in history.”
No. I have yet to hear any self-identified libertarian actively applaud the Confederacy. Denigrating Lincoln and the Union is not ipso facto defending slavery, even if a Union defeat would have had that effect. A libertarian would have let the southern states go, and then helped as many slaves as possible escape or revolt. Give the rebels’ “property” guns, and then leave them to uphold their rights as best they may.
But then that amounts to adjudging biggummint worse than slavery, and I fairly call that an apologia for slavery – and, in fact, one of those several apologia the slaveholders would have made and did make.
It’s easy to say that now when opposition to slavery is virtually universal. But I have strong doubts it would have been the libertarian position back in the 1850’s.
Libertarians have always taken a strong stand on property rights - and that was the same stand slave owners were claiming. Abolitionists were the equivalent of the people who want to criminalize drugs or firearms - they wanted to make it illegal to own a certain type of property. And, of course, libertarians are strong opponents of these current movements to criminalize property.
So I think if libertarians had been around in the 1850’s, their position would have been “If you’re opposed to slavery, don’t own slaves. But don’t force your beliefs on the people who do want to own slaves.”
The cornerstones of libertarianism are voluntary association, political freedom, and individual liberty. These are not reconcilable with slavery.
If libertarians had been around in the 1850’s, their position would have been that slavery was a monstrous evil. What means they’d advocate to deal with it would vary greatly, everything from invasion to passive non-compliance.