Stay Cool with Coolidge? The Real Legacy of "Silent Cal"

A Review of Amity Shlaes’ Coolidge (New York: HarperCollins, 2013)

Presidential biography season is well under way. The last several years have seen several new studies of George Washington, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. These and other Presidents have long been the recipients of copious attentions from biographers, but not all Presidents are so fortunate. Some, like Chester A. Arthur and William Henry Harrison, scarcely ever receive any book-long treatment at all. Most Presidents see a new biography every decade or so. And so, one of this year’s most talked about and, quite possibly, best-selling biographies, is now before us—Amity Shlaes’ Coolidge, a prequel/follow-up to her blockbuster reconsideration of the Great Depression and New Deal, The Forgotten Man (2008).[1]

 

Whenever any writer—historian or not—decides to write a long examination of the life of a man as famous as Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933), the thirtieth President of the United States, and a man about whom numerous studies and biographies have already been written—including Robert Sobel’s Coolidge: An American Enigma (1998), Robert H. Ferrell’s The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge (1998), and David Greenberg’s Calvin Coolidge (2006)—they must justify or explain what new needs to be said. Why now? Why Coolidge? Coolidge, of course, wrote his own discursive account of his life and work while leaving the Presidency—The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge (1929)—and his life and Presidency became the subjects of writers and biographers of all stripes as soon as his main achievements, economy in government and the booming economy, were blown to bits by his immediate successors. One such account appeared in 1938, from the Kansas newspaperman William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge. According to White, studying Coolidge was the fodder of a historical sleuth: “My hypothesis is this: That in the strange, turbulent years that brought an era to a close a man lived in the White House and led the American people who was a perfect throwback to the more primitive days of the Republic, a survival of a spiritual race that has almost passed from the earth. The reaction of this obviously limited but honest, shrewd, sentimental, resolute American primitive to those gorgeous and sophisticated times—his White House years—furnished material for a study of American life as reflected in American business and American politics, which I hope may be worth the perusal of readers who would understand their country in one fine, far day of its pomp and glory.”[2] Coolidge has remained an interesting part of American culture—playing the same role for most Americans’ conception of the 1920s that Eisenhower plays for the 1950s—that of the paternal quiet old man, trusted by most, liked by more, but not extremely well known.

 

Coolidge, despite the perception of being remembered by few, has never been long out of the spotlight. The New Dealers came to power—and stayed in power—largely on a strident critique of the 1920s and early 1930s—the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover years. The synthetic works of John Kenneth Galbraith are nothing if not a formalized and intellectual trashing of notions of “throwbacks” like Coolidge. An affluent society like the one Coolidge presided over had to be willing to “do more” not less, said the New Dealers. When Ronald Reagan seemingly dusted Coolidge off the floor of forgotten history, he was actually scooping him from a partially covered grave of remembered and much battered villains.

 

According to Amity Shlaes (syndicated columnist for Bloomberg View and winner of the Hayek and Bastiat Prizes for journalism—as well as a trustee of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation), a new biography of the Vermont born and raised Amherst graduate who became Governor of Massachusetts, national prominence from ending the first major attempt of an urban police force to strike, and then the Vice-Presidency and Presidency is warranted because of what we might learn of the possibilities for our own problems.

It is hard for modern students of economics to know what to make of a government that treated economic weakness by raising interest rates 300 basis points, cutting tax rates, and halving the federal government, so much at odds is that prescription with the antidotes to recession our own experts tend to recommend. It is harder still for modern economists to concede that that recipe, the policy recipe for the early 1920s advocated by Coolidge and Harding, yielded growth on a scale to which we can aspire today.[3]

Certainly, on the face of it, a man who directed—or helped direct—the reduction of the national debt from $28 billion to $17.65 billion (a 37% decrease that if replicated at this exact moment would bring the national debt of the United States from $16.74 trillion to $10.55 trillion) seems to have answers for today’s problems.[4] But the curious thing about Shlaes’ biography of “Silent Cal” is that there are virtually no answers. This is, I believe, not her fault, but rather is related to issues which she only peripherally examines but fundamental to explaining the very real oddity that White identified—that the same nation which elected Harding and Coolidge also elected Franklin Roosevelt to office more times than his three predecessors put together.

 

Part of the problem arises from a methodological issue prevalent among many modern biographers—David McCullough, Ron Chernow, and a great many other of the most able practitioners—a blurred chronological focus on nearly everything. Biographers, unless they purposely set out to write an intellectual biography or a “life and times” of their subjects, often try to give a Herodotean survey of all the facets of the men and women they examine. This means that often as much attention is paid to private personal incidents and relationships as are given to large public episodes and events. Only a brave soul will make the difficult editorial decisions in a one volume biography to pass over or minimize the truly less important events and incidents of a life and withstand the waves of criticism that will arrive from editors and reviewers. Also lost are the grand meta-historical issues related to the biography of a man—such as his philosophy and political thought, that require chronology to be sacrificed for the sake of thematic continuity and examination. These issues are not unique to Shlaes’ account of Calvin Coolidge by any means, but they are certainly not solved and make the answers she hopes her account can provide elusive, if not entirely absent.

 

A couple of examples from Coolidge’s life and times will illustrate why a purely chronological account of his life is insufficient for getting at anything resembling useful answers in today’s political climate—and also leaves any uninformed reader with surprisingly little understanding of what was going on in the 1920s (or 1910s and 1930s). Take just the language of political description: conservative, liberal, Progressive, Republican, Democrat, etc. The Republican Party, and Coolidge himself, were the primary incubators of late nineteenth-century Progressivism particularly under such party standard bearers as Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, James G. Blaine, Thomas Reed, and Theodore Roosevelt. It was not until Southern populism and Midwestern agrarianism under the likes of William Jennings Bryan offered the Democratic Party an avenue to outflank the GOP for the Progressive vote between 1896 and 1912. We see this in Shlaes’ writing, for instance in a passage on Coolidge’s self-conscious marshaling of his achievements as Governor of Massachusetts: “Many Republicans believed that for a politician to survive he must remain progressive. ... He asked his assistant, Henry Long, to compile a list of progressive legislation he had signed. The laws ranged from a plan regulating weekly pay for injured employees in case of partial incapacity to minimum wages for scrubwomen.”[5] How do we square this with later comments such as: “Then came another thought that was uniquely Coolidge: “It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.” He was, like McCall, beginning to see the extent of the damage that bad legislation could do;” or, “But when it came to the substance, Coolidge was ambivalent; he still considered himself a progressive. That spring he voted for women’s suffrage, the state income tax, a minimum wage for female workers, and salary increases for teachers, thereby preempting territory before Democrats or other new candidates might get to it;” or, “Price controls didn’t work now, either. In addition to respect for the reign of law, the law of markets. “Isn’t it a strange thing,” he asked Barton, “that in every period of social unrest men have the notion that they can pass a law and suspend the operations of economic law?””[6] The most Shlaes can muster for us as far as relates to Coolidge himself is an evolving attitude on economic regulation that was a cornerstone of early twentieth century Progressivism—and its modern analogue.

 

This evolution, we are told, is generally away from the regulatory state of Franklin Roosevelt and even Herbert Hoover, but then we have to deal with serious problems in that interpretation. One, not covered (or only very quickly) by Shlaes, is President Coolidge’s ease with regulating new technologies—airplanes, cars, and radio. Another is President Coolidge’s firm embrace of protectionism. This was not from lack of inquiry about the results of tariffs—in fact Shlaes keeps some of the leading thinkers of the period perpetually in the background of her narrative, as shown in this passage: “Coolidge rated (William Graham) Sumner “on the whole sound.” But Coolidge was not ready to sign on to Sumner’s philosophy: “I do not think that human existence is quite so much on the basis of dollars and cents as he puts it. ... He nowhere enunciates the principle of service.””[7] Shlaes, while offering an explanation for Coolidge’s adherence to protectionism rooted in his New England experience, is unsympathetic to his conclusions. But how did Coolidge and Republicans square protectionism—which Shlaes correctly points out hurt the farmers of the Midwest and drove increasing numbers of them into the arms of free-trading Democrats—with such notions of government as: “The most important thing now was to free the individual, for, as Coolidge said, “It is our theory that the people own the government, not that the government should own the people.””[8] The people own the government to partition trade advantages among regions of the country?

 

How about Coolidge’s signing of one of the worst legislative landmarks of the 1920s, the Immigration Act of 1924 (that excluded “undesirable” Japanese and Chinese immigrants entirely from legally moving into the republic and essentially ended most Eastern and Southern European immigration): “Coolidge was willing to go along with restrictionists. “I am convinced that our present economic and social conditions warrant a limitation of those to be admitted,” he wrote. But he was not hostile to immigrants already in the United States. And he was especially concerned at the widely supported Japanese exclusion provision that many congressmen hope to make law.”[9] Her take on this is that Coolidge was log-rolling in order to get his Republican majorities in House and Senate to go along with tax cuts and economizing in government—but lost is an explanation for why a disconnect existed between Coolidge and his majorities on that point in the first place. Why did Coolidge allegedly have to trade his signature on bills he might otherwise have vetoed—this is Shlaes’ implication, but only for the diplomatic danger of angering the Japanese, which is exactly what occurred—in order to secure passage of tax cuts and economizing in the wake of a war prosecuted and managed by Democrats? No clear or obvious answer emerges.

 

We might be further confused from the seeming bifurcation of the Republican Party in spite of the argument proffered from Shlaes of Coolidge’s immense popularity and of his policies. For instance, while Hoover swept into the Presidency promising to continue the Coolidge policies, it is clear from Shlaes’ recounting that many Republicans—including Hoover—had major disagreements with Coolidge, as we can see from this passage that makes obvious that Franklin Roosevelt’s activities were neither unpredictable nor even unique to his partisan identity: “Many Republicans, including [William] Borah, were plotting to move the party to the left; Borah had allowed he might back George Norris, who sought federal ownership of hydropower.”[10] Hoover, whom Shlaes argues Coolidge did not like—despite keeping him in his Cabinet and deploying him to advantage during natural disasters—was not adverse to these “elastic” notions of government power and intervention. That Robert La Follette (1855-1925) bolted the Republican Party in 1924 to run as the Progressive Party’s candidate against Coolidge did not necessitate a divorce between the GOP and Progressivism—which is why La Follette completely failed to replicate the split Theodore Roosevelt caused in the election of 1912.

 

What is truly interesting about Coolidge and the period of American politics that he inhabited and represented, the roaring twenties and Prohibition—it is nearly unaccountable how little discussion there is in this biography about Prohibition, the enforcement of which fell mostly heavily on Calvin Coolidge and that greatly expanded the pernicious tentacles of Federal power to every corner of the nation through the enforcement carried out by Federal agents largely under the authority of J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—was its transitional nature. The great “flip” in the roles of the political parties was occurring and maturing during this very period—though the truly interesting part of the tale was on the Democratic side and we get very little of that here. Coolidge, while a “throwback” in some regards, was mostly a “throwback” to what the Democratic Party used to be under the auspices of Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, and Grover Cleveland—and even there only in part. Coolidge’s record of cutting the Federal Budget, the debt, and the size of the Government workforce (there is a difference between that and restraining its power and scope, which Coolidge achieved very little towards) was and is admirable, but as Shlaes makes clear—as she must—this was ephemeral. Hoover blasted these achievements into bits immediately and Franklin Roosevelt so obliterated any trace of them that observers had to wonder how the same country had elected Coolidge and Roosevelt only eight years apart.

 

So what are the answers? How do we now take anything of value from the story of Calvin Coolidge and cutting the budget and debt—other than simply knowing it was once done? What did Coolidge cut and why? What did he see as government’s proper role and why? How did he square either of those answers with his own actions in office which sometimes tended toward greater liberalism and sometimes towards the greater statism on the horizon? Did he renounce the Progressive wing of his party or any of its standard-bearers? How did he square Theodore Roosevelt’s notions of government activism with his own? Or is the better question: Did he have to do so? The greatest reason why we cannot cut our humongous budget deficit (one of the book’s funnier passages relates to Coolidge’s angry frustration with the advent of a $37 million deficit at the end of his term) let alone reduce our mind-boggling national debt, relates to the widespread acceptance of a notion of government interventionism that Coolidge did, indeed, have issues with.[11] But does his story offer us an antidote to that acceptance—based in notions of “service” that Coolidge may have agreed with in large part? Did he ever articulate a full-throated case against economic interventionism? Or a defense of limited government—why it was necessary and what it was meant to do? So far as anyone can tell from Shlaes’ book, the answer is no—and that is the correct answer. Why, then, write a straight biography of such a person if the goal is offer some path to future prosperity and economic growth? The heavy lifting of the changes necessary to preserve liberty and fiscal sanity has to be done with ammunition a bit more potent than simply pointing to a brief transitional period in American political history—after a war and major military build-up (the disconcerting thing here is that Shlaes could have written a similar account of Harry Truman’s Presidency in more ways than just that point)—where the budget and national debt were reduced. Coolidge running for President today would lose because he would react in horror to the post-World War II welfare state consensus, the precise reason why Alf Landon, Wendell Wilkie, and Thomas Dewey all lost the elections of 1936, 1940, 1944, and 1948. Only when General Eisenhower moved the party progressively and firmly into the wake of Franklin Roosevelt’s “bold experimentation” did the Republican Party re-emerge. Even the great Coolidge booster, Reagan, was a Roosevelt man in the 1930s.

 

Americans are all New Dealers now. Coolidge’s encomium to Vermont recounted in the book during his visit to the State of his birth after a natural disaster is hardly understandable now: “I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all I love her because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who almost impoverished themselves for a love of others. If ever the spirit of liberty should vanish from the rest of the Union, it could be restored by the generous store held by the people in this brave little state of Vermont.”[12] If we are waiting for liberty’s defense to emanate from the state of Bernie Sanders, Pat Leahy, and Howard Dean we are in serious trouble. Coolidge, of course, did not live to see or offer an alternative to the New Deal—but he saw it coming and offered nothing to stop it except Herbert Hoover, whose rise could not have happened without Coolidge’s patronage and withdrawal from office.

 

That Coolidge was an interesting figure with laudable ideas, goals, and achievements is undeniable—and Shlaes’ biography reminds us all of that and informs those new to him of it—but that has always been the case while never promoting any of his ideas in contemporary policy debates. While the American people continue to demand their cake after the eating, on the dime of whatever despised minority getting the short-end of the stick, the good that Coolidge did will continue not to live after him. That disposition and attitude has to be countered by an antipode that did not exist in Coolidge’s day and one that Coolidge may very well have disagreed with—a bold defense of liberty, economic and personal. A defense of liberty and capitalism as the only moral system in the world—a system based on defending individual rights from the initiation of force as the reason, the only reason, for government to exist. Only as such ideas begin winning the debate for the consciences of the American people, can the role of government contract and, with it, our never-ending budget deficits and unfathomable sea of national debt.

-- A republican

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[1] Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008); Amity Shlaes, Coolidge (New York: HarperCollins, 2013).

[2] William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge (The Macmillan Company, 1938; Easton Press reprint, 1986), v-vi.

[3] Shlaes, Coolidge, 12.

[4] Ibid, 349, 419.

[5] Ibid, 177.

[6] Ibid, 110, 114, 191.

[7] Ibid, 192.

[8] Ibid, 318.

[9] Ibid, 268.

[10] Ibid, 395-396.

[11] Ibid, 428.

[12] Ibid, 430.

Nicholson Baker is Blowing “Human Smoke” Up Your ......

A Review of Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008)

If there is one common thread throughout Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, it is that Nicholson Baker is a pacifist. Baker is so pacifistic that he refuses to clearly state any thesis whatsoever, leaving the reader to wind their way through the chaotic and contradictory incidents he uses to make his point: simply, that “hurting people is bad.” Baker, and those who find Human Smoke moving or, in the case of atheist magician Penn Jillette, “devastating,” argue that this is a dramatic style, a way to engage the reader and provoke debate. I would argue that it seems to be a charlatan’s empty ploy to present their narrative as authentic, when it is actually a shallow and dishonest representation of complicated human events. In fact, the only stated argument found anywhere in the entire book is in the synopsis on the back, which claims Human Smoke is “a moving indictment of the treasured myths that have romanticized much of the 1930s and ‘40s.” Alas, Baker never provides us with the myths he is seeking to refute; only the juxtaposition of events he thinks demonstrates moral equivalency between Axis and Atlantic Allies. By doing so he is dishonest by omission and anyone with even a basic understanding of WWII history cannot help but wonder whether Nicholson Baker did so out of staggering ignorance or for the insidious purpose of denigrating those who fought to save Western Civilization.

 

Because Human Smoke has no clear written arguments - only insinuated ones - I am forced to try and explain what Baker is trying to say, rather than appeal to his own well stated aims. The primary argument of the book seems to be that pacifism is moral perfection. Those who refused to commit themselves to the folly of collective security agreements, arms races, and building planes, such as the pacifist outliers of pre-WWII, are not the cowering, naïve, and anti-Semitic masses that Baker believes historians have accused them of being. Rather, they are the Cassandra’s who fought against a tide of capitalism, governmental folly, and suicidal national pride. To prove this, Baker quixotically appeals to organizations like the Nye Committee or individual examples like Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Ghandi, who just so happen to have been naïve anti-Semites. Baker escapes this uncomfortable reality, in his own estimation, by pointing out that “warmongers” like Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt also espoused their own brand of patrician anti-Semitism. According to Baker, Churchill and Roosevelt followed the same logic as the pacifists. The agreed, he contends, that Germany was only trying to do something about its “Jew problem,” because there actually were too many Jews. What Baker fails to appreciate is that the moral difference between the two groups became apparent when Hitler began killing people. The “warmongers,” Churchill and Roosevelt were prepared to do something about it, while Ghandi suggested that the Jews should publicly sacrifice themselves to the fire.

 

Baker is correct to show that not all pacifists went around claiming that Jewish banking interests, or Jewish communists depending on which party line they towed, were the source of international tension. Some, like the members of the Peace Pledge Union, were so committed to peace they even signed up for a membership card—a membership card being the internationally recognized declaration that I care about this enough to fill it out and buy a stamp. But alas, Baker’s continued emphasis on showing that the sale of armaments between nations was tantamount to treason and that global capitalistic enterprise played a role in the making of the war itself smacks of the same inane logic held by the likes of those on the Nye Committee and Lindbergh. I hate to burst Baker’s bubble, (no, wait, I don’t), but the Soviet Union, which he glaringly leaves out of the first 200 pages of the book save for a reference to starvation in the Ukraine, was selling armaments to Germany as well. They also invaded Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, all of their own volition, without the encouragement of bankers or airplane manufacturers. At no point does Baker even attempt to make a critical appraisal of the Soviet Union and its murderous campaign of purges. It is only spoken of as a looming menace that leads Winston Churchill into saying positive things about Benito Mussolini.

 

Ironically, none of this compares to Baker’s maniacal dishonesty and apologist nonsense as it pertains to his claims that the blame for the war lay with the Allies and Axis equally, and that neither held any moral high ground. Serious historians have argued that had the Allies been more committed to their collective security agreements, or if the United States had used more diplomatic savvy, war might have been averted. Baker, on the other hand, has decided that the keys to avoiding war were the very same arguments made by fascist apologists at the time and since. For the Germans it was the mystical attraction of Hitler. The German people, degraded by a savage blockade of Winston Churchill’s design, driven to desperation by punitive inflation, and seeking to restore a sense of pride in themselves, decided to embrace Nazism and, with it, the crazed plans of Adolf Hitler. Left out and forgotten is that millions and millions of German citizens joined the Nazi party of their own volition, chose repeatedly to do nothing about its excesses, that millions of others participated in the orgy of violence on both the Western and Eastern Fronts, and benefitted from racial subjugation and murder of their fellows.

 

The shear stupidity of moral equivocation between Germany and the Allies is only superseded by Baker’s malicious fraud as it pertains to the origins of the war in the Pacific. On this front, Baker repeatedly insinuates that the United States, by selling arms to China and displaying disrespect for the Japanese natural desire for security in their own sphere, invited Japanese aggression. While fanatical racists within the Japanese government have used this argument—claiming that the Naval Treaty between Britain, America, and Japan was a national insult—any secondary reading into the topic, outside of Japan, would reveal that this was merely propaganda meant to boil the blood of the fanatical Japanese officer corps. Were Baker not so obsessed with demonizing Winston Churchill for the naval blockade of Germany he might have mentioned that the Japanese had a history of attacking other countries in an effort to solve issues associated with their defective command economy and internal political problems. He might have mentioned the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 or perhaps the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, or their attack on the Soviet Union in 1939. Perhaps having some knowledge of these events might have offered perspective on the perceived need to prepare for further Japanese aggression by the United States. But this would require the sensible application of context, or the desire to mention it. As for selling planes to China up until the mid-1930s, the United States had been selling steel and oil to Japan at the very time they were massacring Chinese civilians. The Imperial Government only ever took issue when the materials stopped flowing, which did not occur until the United States government had had enough of supplying rampaging Japanese armies.

 

There is one positive aspect to the book, and that is Nicholson Baker’s frequent references to the tragedy of Jewish refugees as they struggled to extricate themselves from the clutches of the Nazis. He is right to portray the leaders of the Western world as craven and stupid for blocking the flight of people in mortal jeopardy. But, again, Baker contradicts himself by placing Ghandi and the pacifists as exemplars, all of whom argued that Herr Hitler could be reasoned with long after he had begun imprisoning and murdering his political and social enemies. Worse still is Baker’s suggestion that the Madagascar Plan was a reasonable thing the Germans considered for the nearly 4 Million Jews they held in the New Reich (Western Poland, Bohemia, and Moravia). There are no Holocaust historians who assert this was ever a realistic plan under any circumstance.

 

Baker’s primary, most inane, and asinine argument in Human Smoke is the notion that pacifism in the face of murderous Fascism, or Communism (there are very few differences), is something to be applauded. There is an apt poem that starts, “They first came for the Jews,” and ends with “then they came for me.” In the case of the Second World War, it is worth noting that while FDR might have let Hitler come for the Jews, he didn’t wait till the Fuhrer came around for the American people to start helping bomb Hitler’s sick regime out of existence, and for that he deserves at least some credit. But beyond Churchill and Roosevelt, Baker fails to realize that while Ghandi might laud the idea of men walking unarmed into bullets and gas chambers, he did so in the relative safety of waging a campaign for national rights against Churchill’s British Empire that would never even attempt exterminating India’s people. The Jews of Europe were struggling for their very lives against an enemy that sought to annihilate them.

 

In the end there is little that can be done to convince someone like Baker that it is better to kill than be subjugated, murdered, or suffer the murder of your loved ones and friends. All I can do is present an alternative stories to Baker’s bleak morally bankrupt universe. Although I find his style of hundreds of short snippets to be monotonous and boring, I think I can improve upon them and refute Baker with the right set of examples:

Marion Pritchard, a Dutch social work student who had been imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis joined the Dutch Resistance. She spent several years of her life rescuing Jewish children from almost certain murder at the hands of the Nazis. While hiding Jewish children, a Dutch Nazi led the Germans to their hiding spot. During the first inspection the children weren’t found, but the Dutch Nazi returned later to discover the children. Marion Pritchard shot the man dead to protect the young souls that relied on her. It was 1942.[1]

*          *          *

Private Angelo Antonelli was born a peasant and found himself drafted into the Italian Army in WWI. He served in Libya, Italy’s colonial possession. His service was a miserable experience, where he was subjected to poor pay, draconian discipline, and insulting classism. Rather than join the popular Socialist and Fascist movements that plagued Italy in the wake of the First World War, Angelo moved to the United States to make a home for his wife, and new born son. In 1924 he suffered the loss of his entire life savings, then deposited in the Dresdener Bank. In the wake of a personal catastrophe that drove many middle class Germans to Nazism, Angelo continued to work tirelessly to bring his family to America. When the Great Depression hit, he worked harder, all the while emphasizing the promise of America, its culture of freedom, naming his second son Americo in 1930. He never made excuses and never demanded that his fellow men be subject to the whims of the state.

*          *          *

In 1945, Paul Tibbets flew the B-29 bomber Enola Gay for the express purpose of dropping the single largest explosive ordnance yet known to man, the Atomic bomb. After millions of man-hours of work, years of research, infrastructure construction, and the creation of new and unheard of technological advances, the scientists in Los Alamos, New Mexico, discovered how to split the atom, releasing unheard of amounts of heat, light, and energy upon the surface of the Earth. Tibbets was widely recognized as a hero already, having flown 25 missions during the early stages of WWII over Germany. There he saw hundreds of his fellow American bomber crewmen and fighter pilots killed trying to disrupt the sophisticated industrial machine being used by the Nazi empire to murder its neighbors.

 

On August 6, 1945, Tibbets found himself on a similar mission, but free of much of the danger he and his fellow bomber crewmen faced early in the war. His B-29 flew higher and faster than anything the Japanese employed. It was the uncontested master of the skies in the Pacific and had been for much of 1945.  The Japanese Army still controlled enormous swaths of land, still held millions of slave laborers in a state of starvation, and after weeks of unrelenting bombing by the B-29, still refused to surrender. That morning Paul Tibbets and the crew of the Enola Gay dropped a bomb that produced heat found only on the surface of the Sun on the people of Hiroshima, Japan. He did so not out of cruelty, nor some desire to benefit from the production of arms. Paul Tibbets dropped the bomb for the same reason he dropped every other bomb he had ever been ordered to, in the hope of bringing swift completion to a conflict that killed over 100 million people, a conflict started by gangs of murderers and thieves for the purpose of enslaving humanity.

 

Every day, a pacifist, believing that it is morally right to accept slavery, mass murder, and tyranny, calls Paul Tibbets a psychopath, a cog in a conspiracy of morally ambiguous violence, and a mass murderer. I would only tell that person that when they find themselves staring down the barrel of a gun, their family and friends subject to the whims of madmen, they should consider that were there more men like Paul Tibbets, madmen would find no quarry and far fewer victims. 

 

-- Daniel P. Roberts

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[1] Deborah Dwork, Voices and Views: A History of the Holocaust (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 45

Putting the small "r" back in republican

For those of you who have loyally or critically followed the ups and downs of "Alexander Marriott's Wit and Wisdom" for any of the past ten years, first let me extend my sincerest and most heartfelt thanks. I am glad that you found some value, however irregularly, in my occasional musings and, I like to think, occasional insights. Second, I will keep all of the old posts up in the archives of this new blog so that anything of the previous writings that were of use or interest can continue to be of use and interest to you and any new readers who stumble along and get bored with the issues of the day.

For everyone, this blog has been reconceived and reborn under a new name and a new mission. Whereas before I blogged mostly to vent or for my own studied amusement, now I am transitioning into something mostly, if not completely, different. This blog, now called "THE rEPUBLICAN OBSERVER," (more on that in a moment) will feel and sound very similar to the old blog (I have not changed my philosophical, moral, or political outlook in any major respect), it will take on a more regular, professional, and high-toned voice. Why? Well, the previous blog was a child of an undergraduate imbroglio and remained afloat as an avenue to occasionally pursue ideas or thoughts in the manner common on many blogs--occasionally well thought out and composed, but just as often poorly executed and managed.

The new mission is to apply my expertise as a scholar, researcher, and thinker to various problems of the day--focusing particular attention on issues that involve the cross-section of history and ideas. These are more numerous than you might, at first, think and many of my most recent posts in the old blog give an indication of the sort of work you should expect in the new blog. Why the small "r" in "rEPUBLICAN"? Simply, first and foremost, so that this blog is neither confused with, nor assumed to be sympathetic to, the modern Republican Party. There was no easy way to invoke this meaning (without using a different, less precise, word) than to simply capitalize every letter except the "r." Republicanism was, and is, a set of radical ideas and ways of thinking that predominated briefly in 17th century England, before refinement in the American colonies during the 18th century Enlightenment, famously eventuating in the American Revolution and the American Constitution. That is, of course, the severely truncated and simple version of the story, but it will suffice here.

Those who know me, and the old blog, know that my politics would not be called conservative by Rick Santorum, the late Robert Bork, or Sean Hannity; they would also not be called liberal by Al Gore, Harry Reid, or Chuck Schumer. No libertarian in a movement largely dominated by the acolytes of Ron Paul would be interested in my affiliation either (and the feeling is very mutual). The best way to describe the political philosophy that will come through in this blog is to reference at least two traditions--one very old and largely dead, the other relatively new, alive, and very controversial. The first is what is now called "classical liberalism" (it was once, simply, "liberalism") and was the social, economic, and political thought of men like William Graham Sumner, David Ricardo, William Gladstone, etc. Liberals were once the dominant force in the Western world--the heyday of the 19th century. At their best, they pushed for freedom of trade, freedom of the seas, peace, commerce, and enlightenment--also the fair and free government of men and the honest and equal application of law. Civil society reached its apex under their tutelage. Sadly, today, it is largely saddled with the prejudices of an era that it had no more to do with than you or I and that, more than any other single force, it was concerned with destroying. Liberalism did not invent racial prejudice and imperialism (those existed in the 16th and 17th centuries, if not earlier) but because some putative liberals were racists and/or imperialists, latter-day Marxists of all stripes have never stopped castigating the movement as moribund and fundamentally unjust.

The second tradition relates to the philosophical elucidation and correction of classical liberalism's real and myriad deficiencies and errors (what is the moral case for self-interest and capitalism, for example? John Stuart Mill spent a life trying to make "utility" the answer to that question and died a defeated fatalist muttering the bromides of socialism). This was achieved by the twentieth century's most unique, provocative, and ingenious philosopher, Ayn Rand. More critical for this blog than the moral case for capitalism and free government, however, are the epistemological insights to be gained from a study and understanding of Objectivism. Reality exists whether we gouge out our eyes to avoid seeing it or not--and we can, with our senses and our reason, evaluate it, categorize it, know it, and understand it. This is a truism of the modern world as regards things like medical science--a fact so implicitly acknowledged that every post-modernist in the country is clamoring to make the certainty of life-saving great technology their own undeniable "right" by the fiat of the state. But it is no less true in the world of the human sciences--the humanities. As much as we hear--and if you listen, the chorus is deafening--that certainty is impossible, that everything is a social construction, that opinions are all there is, this is not the case. Ideas and institutions either comport with evidence and the one and only reality from which all evidence derives or they do not. A is A. If Rand did nothing else for humanity, saving reality and reason from an epistemological dungeon would be enough to enshrine her in the pantheon of great thinkers.

Now that you have some, albeit rather vague, idea of where this blogger comes from and what he is doing, the stage is set for commencement. At least once a week, a new essay will appear here, exploring and documenting some major issue of note and concern. Any and all comments are welcome and appreciated. Please feel free to recommend the blog to any and all comers. If anyone would like to discuss running any of these writings elsewhere, please feel free to contact me at alexandermarriott@hotmail.com. Also, if an issue arises or you think there is a story I would like to write about, feel free to contact me for those as well.

One final thing. As an homage to the men whose pictures border the words of this blog, the revolution they began and won, the republic they founded and protected, I will sign all of my own writings as, "A republican." To adopt a pseudonym familiar to the readers of 18th and early 19th century letters--Cato, Junius, Publius, etc.--would be off putting and forced. To modernize the names from their classical source material, instead opting for Gibbon or Darwin or Edison or Galt, would similarly ring hollow in the modern ear and offend the modern eye. Rather, in keeping with the simplicity of life, form, and the political ideal of the early days of the American experiment--as well as the common bedrock of a people's limited consent that was (and is) the foundation of all legitimate government--"A republican" hits all the correct and proper notes. My identity is well enough known for anyone to suspect me of trying to stay mysterious or affecting a disguise. Owning and running this blog, and being responsible for producing everything on it will, I hope, allow a minor indulgence from my readers for one inoffensive and minor conceit.

To another ten years, at least!

-- A republican

Getting the Civil War Right and Wrong, A Reply to Jeff Schweitzer

By Alexander Marriott

As we approach the sesquicentennials of the Battle of Antietam (17 September), Lincoln’s provisional emancipation proclamation (22 September), and the Emancipation Proclamation (1 January), people are taking time to consider what the American Civil War was all about, it’s outcome and immediate (unfulfilled) legacy, and the continuing relevance it has in American life and politics today. One such person, scientist and former White House advisor to Bill Clinton, Jeff Schweitzer, recently penned a short essay for the Huffington Post entitled “Slavery and the Civil War: Not What You Think.” In the essay, Schweitzer (without one quote or appeal to supporting primary source evidence) tells us that “what we are all taught in school,” that “slavery was of course the central point of contention” is not accurate and is, at best, fundamentally misleading. While slavery was, indeed, a prime example of what motivated Southern anger and morally destroyed any and all sympathy one could reasonably have for the Confederacy then and now, it was not, argues Schweitzer, “the issue...per se.”

Then what was the war all about? “The war was fought over state’s rights and the limits of federal power in a union of states,” says Schweitzer, “The perceived threat to state autonomy became an existential one through the specific dispute over slavery.” Of course, historians and Americans hear this argument all the time—it is neither new nor original. What makes this particular appeal odd is that we usually hear this argument in a delimited and obvious number of places. First, many of the Confederate leaders—Jefferson Davis for instance—downplayed slavery as only a point of conflict in a larger more principled disagreement: “The right solemnly proclaimed at the birth of the States, and which has been affirmed and reaffirmed in the bills of rights of States subsequently admitted into the Union of 1789, undeniably recognize in the people the power to resume the authority delegated for the purposes of government. Thus the sovereign States here represented proceeded to form this Confederacy, and it is by abuse of language that their act has been denominated a revolution. They formed a new alliance, but within each State its government has remained, the rights of person and property have not been disturbed. The agent through whom they communicated with foreign nations is changed, but this does not necessarily interrupt their international relations.”[1] You would almost think there was no slavery.

Why did they do this if they were not sincerely correct (as most credible historians, myself included, maintain)? The first and most obvious reason had to do with foreign relations. The Confederacy’s surest path to independence was recognition and assistance from Great Britain—something that would have been quite out of the question had the chief public claim to the world for why the Confederates should prevail been the exaltation of human slavery. This is one of the reasons why historians focus so much on the contemporaneously embarrassing and revealing extemporaneous speech delivered by the Confederacy’s Vice President, Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia in Savannah on 21 March 1861. At the end of explaining all the ways in which the new Confederate Constitution had allegedly remedied the errors of the Constitution of 1787 they had so recently abandoned, Stephens ended his elaboration in a remarkable indictment of Thomas Jefferson and full-throated defense of the Confederacy’s truly great innovation (it is a long speech, this is a long excerpt, but every utterance of it is absolutely essential):

But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other though last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.

This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.

In the conflict thus far, success has been on our side, complete throughout the length and breadth of the Confederate States. It is upon this, as I have stated, our social fabric is firmly planted; and I cannot permit myself to doubt the ultimate success of a full recognition of this principle throughout the civilized and enlightened world.

As I have stated, the truth of this principle may be slow in development, as all truths are and ever have been, in the various branches of science. It was so with the principles announced by Galileo it was so with Adam Smith and his principles of political economy. It was so with Harvey, and his theory of the circulation of the blood. It is stated that not a single one of the medical profession, living at the time of the announcement of the truths made by him, admitted them. Now, they are universally acknowledged. May we not, therefore, look with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests? It is the first government ever instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society. Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature's laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material-the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made "one star to differ from another star in glory."

The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws. This stone which was rejected by the first builders "is become the chief of the corner" the real "corner-stone" in our new edifice.

I have been asked, what of the future? It has been apprehended by some that we would have arrayed against us the civilized world. I care not who or how many they may be against us, when we stand upon the eternal principles of truth, if we are true to ourselves and the principles for which we contend, we are obliged to, and must triumph.[2]

Stephens’s elaborate and euphoric exaltation of the new era his government heralded was a public relations nightmare internationally. Great Britain, the world’s leading power and arch-foe of international slavery could hardly make any moves against Lincoln on behalf of a power that purported to be ushering in a new millennium of chattel slavery.

Of course, after the war was over and lost, Confederates for the most part began to clean up their historical legacies. Stephens went so far as to claim that his famous speech was not actually his at all. Jefferson Davis, till the end, pretended the whole effort had a larger more grandiose purpose and sympathetic historians have, ever since, taken him at his word.

The next group, outside of bona fide Confederates, one usually sees this argument from are late 19^th century reconciliation historians whose ideas—Civil War a tragedy with heroes on both sides, Reconstruction a horrible social experiment that did not end soon enough—lingered well into the 20^th century (they are still with us in a marginalized, angry, and perniciously belligerent form). Why such people would endorse the notion that slavery was not the actual motivator behind the Confederacy and the Civil War is rather obvious given the aftermath of the war. While the North remained surprisingly committed to policing the South with an occupying army and guaranteeing the citizenship and voting rights of the freedmen, that effort eventually collapsed and white Northerners were all too willing to quickly slide back into a racially indifferent hands-off policy toward the Southern States—all of which were quickly “redeemed” by former Confederates completely uninterested in the civil rights of their poor black neighbors. Since whites nationally where not sufficiently outraged by this development to exercise federal power to do anything to stop it, the temptation to reconcile with Southern whites and share a common heritage that downplayed the festering problem of Black civil rights proved too good to resist. Slavery moved to the background—the war, indeed, was fought over States’ rights (right to do what precisely was left to the murky libraries that professional historians were content to ignore for decades).

The only people today that one usually sees this argument from are modern Southerners who, contrary to Schweitzer’s claim, are not taught the notion in schools that the war was all about slavery. One also sees it in “Politically Incorrect” histories published by hack historians looking to cash in on prejudice rather than scholarship and facts. It’s odd to see a modern Democrat on the Huffington Post repeating these tired lines from those whose motivations are typically soaked or tinged in racial animus.

I do not believe Jeff Schweitzer is a dupe or a racist. Instead, I think his essay has a very obvious contemporary political purpose that is revealed quite plainly to anyone familiar with the primary sources surrounding the Confederate theory of the Union and Constitution, as well as the intellectual justifications for nullification and secession. According to Schweitzer (and this is rather original, though it has been repeated by many on the Left, like Chris Matthews and Michael Lind), what was actually motivating the South was not some long gone moral crime like chattel slavery but something eerily familiar: “Specifically, eleven southern states seceded from the Union in protest against federal legislation that limited the expansion of slavery claiming that such legislation violated the tenth amendment, which they argued trumped the Supremacy Clause. The war was indeed about protecting the institution of slavery, but only as a specific case of a state’s right to declare a federal law null and void.” Now here is a claim that, surprise!, links a modern political agenda—the affinity of modern Conservatives, from Clarence Thomas to Ronald Reagan, for the tenth amendment as a tool to put the breaks on the federal government—to a cause that “was unjust, ... unseemly,” and “treasonous.”

But, since Schweitzer provides absolutely no evidence for this claim, what—if any—evidence is there that the Confederates believed the tenth amendment trumped the Constitution’s supremacy clause and allowed them to secede, and that this is why the war came? According to Schweitzer, the war could just as easily resulted from the Federal government passing a law to do anything that Southern states decided was beyond the pale (in the case of the war, of course, they seceded largely before Lincoln was even inaugurated into office, the rest after he called for volunteers after Sumter). This is a very large claim. Now, I, of course, believe that it is quite plain, historically, that the doctrines of secession and nullification were inventions of political expediency, first to try to scare off interference with slavery within the Union and finally as a way of getting out of the Union “legally.” That is, without a war that Southerners had known for nearly a century would destroy slavery entirely. I have covered this development broadly in a post entitled “The History of Nullification: Origins, Context, and Dangers (Part One)” and which will be completed shortly in a concluding essay.

As Mr. Schweitzer has provided no evidence to substantiate his claims, he is somewhat at my mercy, so I will be brief. First, let us consider the South Carolina declaration of why they were seceding. There is one, non-specified mention of the tenth amendment but that was not the linchpin of the South Carolinian argument. In fact, mention of the tenth amendment (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”) was quite unessential for Confederates. They grounded their theory of secession on the nature of the Union as a compact between co-equal states. Much of the South Carolinian declaration thus hinged on the notion that if any of the parties violated the compact—in this case, Northern States hampering enforcement of the constitutionally legitimate Fugitive Slave law of 1850—the offended parties were free to exit: “We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted the open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.”[3] Yet, Schweitzer claims that us reading these documents is simply tunnel vision: “We understandably focus on this specific while ignoring the broader issue in contest. But a subset of a set is not the set. An example of an issue in not the issue. Slavery was a specific issue of a perceived violation of a state’s rights, over which the country went to war. Claiming the Civil War was about slavery alone is like saying that the recent revolution in Egypt was about unseating Mubarek and nothing else.”

I will come back to this central claim about slavery in relation to the constitutional arguments that Confederates came up with to try to save it within the system and then from war outside the system in a moment. First let’s take a look at another state’s formal declaration of what it was doing and why: Mississippi. “Our position,” said the seceding delegates, “is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.” Here there is not one iota of tenth amendment talk—the entire salvo is slavery top to bottom. Mississippi purported to leave the Union as a harried fox pursued by ruthless dogs: “Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.”[4]

So, slavery was merely a “specific issue”? Did those in the North reject the tenth amendment or believe that the Constitution’s supremacy clause was in conflict with it? If we take Lincoln’s first inaugural address as evidence, that seems entirely unlikely: “One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute. The fugitive slave clause of the Constitution, and the law for the suppression of the foreign slave trade, are each as well enforced, perhaps, as any law can ever be in a community where the moral sense of the people imperfectly supports the law itself. The great body of the people abide by the dry legal obligation in both cases, and a few break over in each. This, I think, cannot be perfectly cured; and it would be worse in both cases after the separation of the sections, than before.”[5] The only substantial dispute. Either Schweitzer believes Lincoln improperly diagnosed the problems of the Union—his perspicacity is one of the things for which he was and is most famous—or decided to gloss over the “real” issue at stake in the most important speech he had ever given in his life up to that point.

The constitutional filibustering of the Confederates, before and after the war, as well as their historical apologists, should not blind us to the plain truth that slavery—and its feared death through restriction to the States where it already existed, perpetually under real and moral assaults from the North—was what agitated Calhoun, Toombs, Stephens, Davis, Ruffin, Hammond, and all the rest of the intellectual leaders of the Old South. The Constitution first served Calhoun as an aegis through which he might carve out a space for slavery’s perpetual protection. In the decade after Calhoun’s death, most of his legatees gradually abandoned that notion and instead embraced an alleged Constitutional corollary of nullification that would allow them to legally break up the government while—hopefully—avoiding a war that was sure to destroy slavery. It was a long shot, but after Lincoln’s election provided evidence that the South could be forever dominated by a more dynamic, wealthier, and more populous North whose inhabitants had no interest in the peculiar institutions of the South, many Southern leaders felt it was a gamble they could no longer afford to ignore. And the war came. But the issue was—and always was, from Missouri, through the Nullification fight, and the crisis of 1850—slavery, slavery, and slavery. The rest was nefarious and obscuring subterfuge, and still is to this day.

---

[1] Speech in Montgomery, Alabama (Inaugural Address as Provisional President), 18 February 1861, Jefferson Davis: The Essential Writings, ed. William J. Cooper, Jr. (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 199.

[2] Alexander Stephens, “Corner-Stone” Speech, Savannah, Georgia, 21 March 1861, American Speeches: Political Oratory from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Library of America, 2006), 721-724.

[3] South Carolina Declaration of the Causes of Secession, Charleston, 24 December 1860, The Civil War: The First Year Told By Those Who Lived It, eds. Brooks D. Simpson, Stephen W. Sears, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean (New York: Library of America, 2011), 153-154.

[4] Mississippi Declaration of the Causes of Secession, Jackson, 9 January 1861, The Civil War: The First Year, 183-185.

[5] Abraham Lincoln: First Inaugural Address, Washington D.C., 4 March 1861, The Civil War: The First Year, 216.