Reading List for Those Wishing to Counter the Non-Historical Propagandistic Ramblings of Tom Woods, Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Kevin Gutzman, et al.


The deceptive fraud that is the neo-Confederate school of American history and its radical "Libertarian" ugly brother begins with the American Revolution and culminates largely with radical Reconstruction in the 1870s. After that both schools simply break down and glom onto the general critique Austrian economists and classical liberals of all sorts have of the New Deal and the 1930s revolution that transformed the political economy of the United States.





In terms of the Revolution, this bizarre sub-culture of historians attempts to recast the tale in a couple of ways. First, the Revolution merely becomes a conservative secessionary movement from the British Empire (and thus a precursor to the attempted secession of the Southern states in 1861). This interpretation actually has a long and unrelated pedigree amongst certain European liberals and American conservatives stretching back to Friedrich Von Gentz's 1790's treatise "The Origin and Principles of the American Revolution Compared with the Origin and Principles of the French Revolution," translated into English for American audiences in 1800 by John Quincy Adams. But for the likes of DiLorenzo & co. the secession argument about the revolution and the concurrent State origin of the Union myth that goes with it are mere foundational work for the sleight of hand that occurs later in the story. For an excellent tutorial on the actual radicalism of the American Revolution, the works of Gordon S. Wood are generally an excellent place to begin. Readable, they offer the general consensus of the majority of American historians about the importance of ideas to the Revolution and its many demonstrable impacts on all of American society. Wood is also perhaps one of the most well versed people alive in the available primary source materials of the period, so his evidentiary base is always rich and meticulously detailed. This is always hilariously lacking amongst the neo-confederate historians and their various intellectual allies among more mainstream conservatives and libertarian writers and historians. This should not be taken as a blanket endorsement of everything Gordon Wood has argued or written, I have some serious disagreements with his underlying theory of history as well as his lifelong attempt to save a modified form of the old Beardist school of economic determinism (but Wood is at least upfront and honest in this, neo-confederates repeat Beard's theory of the civil war without even giving the dead man credit).











Next in line is the Constitution. Here there are some disagreements among this small group of pseudo-historians with one group, mostly the neo-Confederates, misconstruing the Constitution as some manner of State created League and then fetishizing it--much in the manner the actual Confederates did--for more on this see Jefferson Davis's opening volume of "The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government." Radical libertarians, on the other hand, view the Constitution as a big government assault on the spirit and legacy of the American Revolution foisted upon the people by a cabal of reactionaries--Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Wilson, et al.--and destroying the truly libertarian and successful Articles of Confederation. This view, of course, also goes back to the very events themselves. Anti-Federalists would have recognized and partially endorsed this view--though they may have been puzzled by the modern libertarian forgetfulness of just how arbitrary and tyrannical the individual state governments could be and sometimes were. The Constitution is best understood, in the words of perhaps the greatest historian on the period in the 20th century Bernard Bailyn, as the fulfillment of the revolution's hopes and promises. But for an excellent tour through the best scholarship on the matter, see the books below, all of which have some flaws, but all of which are very readable and closer to being accurate than anything found in the hackneyed screeds of Gutzman, Woods, and others.






Now the 1790s, when the new government had to be run and operated. Think on it a moment. The first national republic of any size in the history of the world since Rome, cast adrift in a sea of monsters, bordering two--possibly three--foreign empires that had designs on the American continent and surrounded by hostile tribes of Indians who could quickly become auxiliaries in a foreign war against a republic that also housed an unstable and dangerous population of human slaves that might also rebel at any moment. It was a historically unprecedented and potentially quite dangerous moment and everyone knew it. What they didn't know--and had limited control over--was how to deal with the world's problems, internal finance, debt retirement, and diplomacy dominated by overbearing mercantilists. The neo-Confederates frame the whole period as Jefferson later would: as America's first brush with centralism where the country was saved by a Jeffersonian return to State supremacy and decentralization. The story is actually, however, far more intriguing and complicated. Jefferson's call for State importance fell entirely on deaf, if not enraged, ears. Even he balked at the notion of the secession in the tumultuous and, in his eyes, dangerous 1798-1799 period. Few decades in American history are as important as the 1790s, so a true and full picture of them is important. The following books get one started in that direction.









The next way-station on the way to turning the Confederacy into a noble last chance for liberty in America is, typically, the fight over nullification. The curious thing about this is that these historians simply treat nullification as a fait accompli cooked into the system from the beginning and not a provocative invention of the moment by the most provocatively dangerous mind of the period, John C. Calhoun. The bizarre thing about this is that few controversies have as many wonderful monographs devoted to them as the nullification controversy. Some of them are below, but the truly outstanding accounts are William Freehling "Prelude to Civil War," Richard Ellis "The Union at Risk," and Drew R. McCoy "The Last of the Fathers."








Next is the run up to the Civil War at the conclusion of the Mexican War in 1848 until the shots fired at Fort Sumter in 1861. Here the neo-confederate and radical libertarian historians tend to see the North confirming the later doctrines of the south--nullifying the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 for instance (though they don't see the South similarly confirming the "later" doctrines of the North, arguing for Federal supremacy and military enforcement of the laws on reluctant Northern states)--while also building up the climactic narrative of an unchecked Lincoln running roughshod over the Constitution and the rights of the people (or, curiously in this interpretation, the States, which are apparently endowed by something with penultimate "rights"). The actual story is quite a bit different, which is to say familiar and obvious. But neo-confederates and radical libertarians let the facts be damned if they're presented by politically left of center historians, so go figure. The literature here is vast, but below is the best of the best.








As always, try to read as much of the primary source material as you can and use the secondary literature as much as reference tool as possible. This is generally what real professional historians aim at—there are exceptions of course for excellent historical writers—and it’s not really all that difficult. It takes application and effort and, of course, curiosity.