Something like a libertarian system that’s ever worked in the real world. Or even evidence that a libertarian system could work in the real world. Most libertarians seem to just spout slogans. And if you ask them what they would do in an actual situation, they just repeat the slogans. If you push the point, they get hostile - because you’re asking them for answers they don’t have.
Locke’s Treatise doesn’t advocate treating human races as morally unequal.
That’s also problematic, many Confederates owned no slaves and weren’t fighting because they wished to support those who did. Civil War Soldiers is a good read on the subject of who the soldiers were and why they fought.
“American Civil War” is a perfectly fine name.
He’s saying that slavery is acceptable as an alternative to a death sentence for a capital crime (“having by his fault forfeited his own life, by some act that deserves death”), because the condemned can always opt for death at any point. He doesn’t support a class of people being slaves by virtue of being kidnapped and sold. You can call that a defense of slavery if you wish, but it’s certainly not a defense of slavery as it was practiced in the U.S.
That has nothing to do with your claim about what libertarians believe and value re: property rights versus all other human rights.
But, what about post #111?
I don’t know know much about it, but this source indicates that it was a collaboration between Locke and Lord Ashley, and details how the document is a strange mishmash of liberal, representative government and feudalism. It seems reasonable enough to suppose that the liberal ideas came from Locke, the regressive ones from Lord Ashley. It’s also possible that Locke simply changed his mind in the 20 years separating the documents.
Further, a political document like this (it had to be ratified by the eight Lords Proprietor of Carolina, which it was, as well as its Assembly, which it was not) is a poor showcase for the (co) writer’s ideology, because it must be written so as appeal to enough people to get it passed. One may as well point to the ACA as proof that Obama is opposed to single-payer UHC. By comparison, Two Treatises of Government is pure Locke, and a much better source.
Also, I overlooked this bit:
In fact, there is: the argument that the slave hadn’t been convicted of a capital crime, but rather kidnapped and subjected to the absolute, arbitrary power that Locke decried.
Being as this is supposed to be a thread about the American Civil War, I’ve started a new thread so we can discuss libertarianism.
Oh, Jesus K! :rolleyes:
If he’s trying to say that abolitionism existed as a movement before there were government actions ending slavery, ie “a lot of the move to free the slaves came from the people”, that’s true enough. Of course, it couldn’t have been achieved without the federal government, but if he’s referring to the root of abolition, he’s right (but in a pointless way, all government policy changes are preceded by social changes).
Or, he’s profoundly ignorant.
The Civil War makes a lot more sense if you think of it as the Union fighting against states rights and the Confederacy fighting against abolition.
OTOH, the Union was fighting against no “state right” but that of secession. At least, that’s how it started out.
You won’t find “states’ rights” in the Constitution, BTW, not even in the 10th Amendment. States have certain constitutional guarantees – a republican form of government, and no reduction of territory or Senate representation without the state’s consent – but no rights in the sense individuals have rights.
That’s not accurate, though. Abolition wasn’t on the table, the immediate concerns of the slaveholding class were things like the expansion of slavery into new territories, their rights over their slaves being honored in free states, and the mandatory return of escaped slaves in free states.
BG covered the states’ rights angle…the Union wasn’t fighting, at least at the outset, to impose their rule on the CSA in any aspect beyond collecting tariffs and delivering the mail. At most, you can say they were fighting to stop the secession.
Mainly because Lincoln feared that if the Union broke up, we’d have a continent of ever-squabbling states, each being used by some Euro power or other to play their games here by proxy. And in hindsight, he was probably right; consider what Napoleon III did in Mexico while the American Civil War was going on.
When South Carolina seceded they issued an official explanation of why they were doing so. And they mentioned the subject of states rights. They said the federal government was allowing states too much autonomy and needed to crack down on the states.
I’ve read one interesting theory. It’s that what the southern states really feared was patronage.
The Republican Party had won the Presidency and a majority in the House and Senate. Under the system of the time, that meant the Republican Party would be free to appoint Republicans to government jobs throughout the country. It wasn’t Lincoln the southerners feared so much as it was these local officials. They might not be as understanding as past government appointees had been about the way things were done down South. Postmasters might start delivering abolitionist literature. Judges and marshals might start treating lynching like a crime. Tax collectors might start enforcing the tariff in Southern ports.
Was there much antebellum lynching? I thought that was a Jim Crow thing.
Nitpick–The Republicans didn’t win a majority of the full membership of either House in the election of 1860. They ended up with majorities, but only because the South seceded.
Lynching was virtually nonexistent before the Civil War. Ninety percent of Southern blacks were enslaved, and you didn’t lynch somebody else’s property. Free blacks were scorned and mistreated in many ways, but lynching was generally not one of them. Even if lynching had been an issue, there were no federal laws against it.
Tariffs were enforced even under Democratic administrations; Andrew Jackson had been rather anal about it.
More broadly, although I disagree with your specific examples, yes, the appointive power was part of a Lincoln administration that the South feared. He would have appointed territorial officials unfriendly to slavery, Supreme Court justices unfriendly to slavery, and Northern marshals less willing to rubber-stamp return of fugitive slaves.
Patronage within the South would have presented a problem for Lincoln, one that he was spared having to address by secession. There was no Republican Party in the South from which to draw appointees. He may have had trouble finding Southerners even willing to accept appointment from a Republican. Lincoln referred to this in his inaugural address:
Which explains why the Union was the one willing to accept Kentucky’s neutrality while the Confederacy felt the need to invade it. After all the Union was fighting ***against ***states’s rights, right?