If libertarians had been around in the 1850s, though, they would not be the same as libertarians today. Political movements are inherently a part of context. Of course today’s libertarian put in a time machine and emerging in 1855 would say “gosh, slavery is awful,” but that is true of pretty much all sane people living in 2014, no matter their political position.
That’s fair to say, I reckon, and leads to a question: on what basis could an 1850s pro-slavery libertarian be called a libertarian? Libertarianism has never been private-property absolutism, nor considered humans to be property.
The cornerstone of libertarianism is property rights. Put a libertarian in a position where he has to pick between voluntary association and property rights and he’ll pick property rights. Put a libertarian in a position where he has to pick between political freedom and property rights and he’ll pick property rights. Put a libertarian in a position where he has to pick between individual liberty and property rights and he’ll pick property rights.
As noted numerous places in this thread support for secession wasn’t by anything close to the overwhelming majority (of white males) in most places, and in those places where it happened to be in the significant minority (Appalachian Virginia - what is now the state of West Virginia, eastern Tennessee, etc) the CSA wasn’t about to allow them to secede back into the Union regardless of the wishes of the people. I’d also like to point to events in Kentucky. Kentucky tried to remain neutral and hoped to mediate an end to the madness and amazingly was able to remain neutral throughout the spring and summer of 1861 before finally falling prey to Northern Aggression and Lincoln’s invasion. Hmm, wait, that doesn’t seem quite right. Oh yeah, I mean it was able to stay neutral until September 4, 1861 when it was invaded by the Confederacy when Leonidas Polk ordered Gideon Johnson Pillow to occupy Columbus. That doesn’t play so well with the idea of the war being about state’s rights and Northern Aggression though, does it?
Indeed the CSA sent troops to occupy eastern Tennessee throughout most of the war. There was active resistance to the Confederacy from the residents of the area. and some rather prominent politicians from that area supported the union.
Having grown up in that area I learned a more nuanced view of the Civil War. There was no magical transition that occurred the moment you stepped across the Mason-Dixon Line.
And then, without any irony at all, he’ll redefine individual liberty as deriving from property rights.
It’s all logically self-consistent…so long as we accept new definitions of words like “rights” “liberty” “individual” and “property.”
If a libertarian believes in “self ownership” then it would be hard for him to accept slavery. But if someone owns a slave, the libertarian is stuck, because he has to defend property rights, no matter what. A compromise might be struck, of the public buying out that property and emancipating the slaves. But the slave-owner is the only one who can fix the value of his property. “Sure, I’ll sell: two billion dollars each, and that’s in gold.”
Before I put in work to rebut this absolutist caricature, can you tell me what sorts of evidence to the contrary you’d accept? For instance, how about the work of major libertarian writers? Libertarian party platforms? Personal experience?
Libertarianism has never had to address those questions; it did not emerge as a named movement until the 20th Century. But it claims classical liberals like John Stuart Mill as forerunners, and those did tend to be abolitionist. Mill was, at any rate, and not a Cornfed sympathizer on any other grounds, either.
John Locke was another:
That, ISTM, could be read as a condemnation of slavery or as a defense of it.
Here’s a hint. Locke went on the write the Constitution for the Province of Carolina, which as you probably could guess is a document noticeably lacking in its condemnation of slavery.
No, I don’t want to hear theories. I want empirical evidence. Come back when the libertarians produce any.
Does John Randolph of Roanoke count as a proto-libertarian? His most famous quote: “I am an aristocrat. I love liberty, I hate equality.” (You can guess his position on slavery.)
Really? Locke states that freedom from absolute, arbitrary power is so fundamental to human life that humans do not, and cannot, consent to it. Slavery is thus not a common rule for everyone in a society to live by, and is morally wrong.
Empirical evidence that this:
…Is not true? That’s a strange request to make of a question of ideology. What sort of empirical evidence did you have in mind?
Likely not, but if you have any writings of his at hand, I’ll take a gander.
You seem to be forgetting that slaves were considered not quite human, which is why the Declaration and the Constitution could say things about liberty while still condoning slavery.
And btw, if we need to call the Civil War something else that is more from the Southern perspective, how about the War to Preserve Slavery?
But, he also says:
I.e., masters get to make slaves do whatever they want and slaves have only one way out, suicide-by-master. Now, a black slave of that century in America was usually not – sometimes, but usually not – a person who “by his fault forfeited his own life, some act that deserves death,” i.e., was condemned to servitude in punishment for crime (some had been condemned and sold by their local kings, but most were simply abducted by bandits – or born slaves, of generations of slaves, Africa always had them, and then unfortunately sold abroad). Nevertheless, it seems hard to find an argument there that could have been used in a slave’s favor.
Like this:
Well, let’s be clear: When Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal,” he was not suggesting all are of equal intelligence, education, wisdom, common sense, moral character, physical prowess, refinement, wealth, or anything else that might be judged to make one person better than another; and he certainly was not making an anthropological statement about the equality or inequality of human “races.” He was making an assertion in ethics, and like all such it cannot be proven or disproven the way an assertion of fact can be, you either accept it or you don’t. His assertion was that all humans are equally ends-in-themselves, with their own lives to live and their own needs to serve first and foremost. That alone was a radical notion in a civilization that for centuries had assumed some – the wellborn – are to enjoy the good things and the others merely to minister to them. Or, as Thomas Paine put it (quoting from memory), “The mass of mankind are not born with saddles on their backs, nor the rest booted and spurred to ride them.”
That said, the hypocrisy does remain: Jefferson, however uncomfortably, kept slaves all his life, and did not even free them before his death* or in his will; they had to be sold off to pay his vast debts – dude always had a problem with handling money – and apparently he’d rather screw his slaves than his heirs/creditors. Of course he was a Virginia gentleman, one had to have servants and fieldhands, and there was no local market in free domestic labor or farm labor. Of slavery in general he was disapproving, but took the “holding the wolf by the ears” attitude – dangerous to hold on, even more so to let go. (If that sounds silly, remember what happened in the Haitian Revolution – at one point, rebellious slaves simply killed every white person they could catch, regardless of age or sex. Easier to pull off in a country already 95% black. But all whites in American slave states, even the majority who could afford no slaves, lived every day with the fear of something like that happening.) It has been said of Jefferson that his life was a constant war between his principles and his appetites . . . Be that as it may, certainly slaves are never regarded as ends-in-themselves, but only as tools to minister to their masters’ needs.
- Actually, I think he freed some favorites before his death. Sally Hemings’ four surviving children went free. Sally herself served in Jefferson’s household until she died.