All right y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And our next guest is Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, he is a professor of economics at San Jose State University, I believe it is, and he's the author of the book I hold in my hand, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, A History of the American Civil War.
Welcome to the show sir, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine, how are you doing?
I'm doing great, nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
I know we have a very good mutual friend in common, so I feel like I already know you.
Actually a couple of very good mutual friends in common.
Including an earlier guest, David Henderson.
Yes, indeed.
And including my high school history teacher, who stuck me this way, where I hate the state so much.
Good for her.
Yeah, well, and good for you.
This is really an incredible book, I've been meaning to read it forever, and I finally got a chance to put current events aside and do some revisionist history study in here.
And boy, you sure have revised the history of the American Civil War here, haven't you?
To a certain extent, yeah.
I mean, there's nothing in there that a mainstream historian wouldn't recognize.
It's just my interpretation is different in a number of areas.
Well and speaking of that, I kind of want to keep this on my to-read list just to go back and go through all the bibliographical summaries that you do of all the best history that you used as sourcing for the book and all that.
It seems like an interesting read in itself just to go through that stuff.
Yeah, well, the problem with the Civil War is that it's a very popular subject.
So those bibliographical essays were written in 1996, and in the intervening more than a decade, my guess would be that the number of interesting books has doubled on most of those topics.
But on the other hand, the ones that I focused on are really great books, and very few of them have been completely superseded.
All right, well, so let's get to this.
You basically start your argument off, or at least the portrait that you're trying to draw of the history of this era, beyond just asking the normal question, why was there an American Civil War or something, you say it's more instructive to break it into two questions.
Right.
Why did the South secede, and then why did the North refuse to let them go?
That's right.
And is it right that in a nutshell, the South seceded because they wanted to spread slavery into the West, and they didn't think the Northern states were going to let them get away with it?
Well, I would say even more generally, the South seceded over the issue of slavery.
They wanted to protect slavery, and states' rights was a means of protecting slavery.
And spreading slavery into the West was a means of politically protecting slavery, because it would give them more congressmen and senators.
So there were other issues.
Like any event in history, it's complicated, and the motives of different people vary.
But I would say that at that level of abstraction, what caused secession, I don't think that you could find another proposition for which the empirical evidence is more overwhelming.
I mean, Southerners were concerned about slavery, and that's why they seceded.
But that had nothing to do, or that's too strong, that had very little to do with why the North refused to let the South go.
And for that, you have to turn to Northern nationalism, and the identification of liberty and union that had taken place in the North, which is still, I think, an underexplored topic in intellectual history.
Northerners had come to think of the union and liberty as synonymous, and the example I sometimes use in trying to explain the Northern reaction, particularly after the initial secession, Northerners were actually divided as to how to respond to it.
And there were some Northerners who wanted to let the South go in peace, which was why both Buchanan and Lincoln had to be careful initially in how they handled the South.
But once the firing on Fort Sumter took place, that had a strong polarizing effect on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.
And the reaction of Northerners, especially in the Upper North, New England, was similar to the reaction of Americans to 9-11.
Or the reaction of Americans to Pearl Harbor.
Well, and I guess this might be an opportune time to point out that only the Gulf states had seceded and South Carolina at that point, right?
Well, the Gulf states, including South Carolina, yes, there are two waves of secession.
The first wave, following Lincoln's election, merely took out the Gulf Coast Confederacy.
And so there were, at the time of Lincoln's inauguration, there were still more slave states in the Union than out of the Union.
And only in South Carolina did secession pass by overwhelming majorities.
Even in some of the other states, secession that had already seceded, there was opposition.
But after Lincoln's call for troops, following the attack on Fort Sumter, you had Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, all immediately joined the Confederacy, which essentially doubled the size and the material resources of the Confederacy.
Well, and now, there's so many complicated questions here when it comes to even the nature of the Constitution and all that.
Actually, I guess I'd first like to ask you, before we get into the so-called right of secession and all those things, about what you think of Charles Adams' thesis.
Is it even partly right?
You think that a major part of the attitude of the politicians in the North was that if the South seceded, they would lose so much tariff revenue that they wouldn't be able to finance their railroad in the Pacific Ocean that they wanted to build so bad, and that kind of thing?
I think that played a role.
I mean, there were certain...
If you want to try to do a public choice explanation or a vested interest explanation of why the North suppressed secession, you can find various vested interests, and losing tariff revenue from the South played a role in not just losing tariff revenue from the South, but the fact that the South would be a free-trade competitor with the North also had an impact.
Concerns about whether the Mississippi would remain open to Westerners was important, even though the Confederacy had promised to leave it open.
But as much as I would like to be able to say that the Northern response was based entirely on special interests, I don't think the evidence supports that.
I think you have this underlying chord of nationalism, you know, that just this...
As I've said, it's a mystical or virtually mystical attitude that automatically identified liberty with union, and anything that threatened the union was seen as undermining liberty and the experiment in democracy.
I think that was the most important factor.
Oh, and I should mention, as long as you've brought up the subject of tariff, I think that concern about tariff revenue did motivate some Northerners, but sometimes that thesis gets way, way overstated, implying that the South seceded over the issue of tariffs, when in fact tariffs had been going down since about 1833, and they were at their lowest level practically since the adoption of the Constitution at the time the South seceded.
If I remember right, in Charles Adams' book, When in the Course of Human Events, he says that the tariff issue was the answer to the second question, why did the North refuse to let them go, right?
And I think it was part of the answer, but not the entire answer.
And now, so let's talk about this whole issue of secession and the Constitution, and after all it was ratified by these conventions of the states rather than the state legislatures, and Daniel Webster says that you can never go back again, and yet William Lloyd Garrison and a lot of abolitionists wanted the North to secede from the vile, slave-owning South, because it was corrupting their society, and in fact I think you go on at length, and I'll go ahead and mention this now, about the economics of slavery and how if the North had seceded from the Union, that would have automatically nullified, there would have been no more fugitive slave law, which would have meant that there could have been a railroad for escaped slaves right out of the South, no problem, and that would have bankrupted the entire industry right off the bat.
Yeah, well that, in a slightly...
All right, I'm full hyperbole today, pardon me, you can back off of that however you like.
You've captured the essence of the argument, basically, actually when I wrote, after I wrote the book and I began presenting the thesis to audiences, I realized that when I wrote the book, I didn't, in my argument, and it's partially because it's a historical narrative, you know, the interpretations are embedded in the narrative, but if we're going to bring the interpretations front and center, I should have made a distinction between the policy question and the historical question.
In other words, I was making two sets of arguments, and one's easier to make than the second one.
The policy question is, if the North had been interested in abolishing slavery rather than preserving the Union, was there a set of policies that they could have adopted that would have brought down slavery within an independent Confederacy?
And my answer to that question is an emphatic yes, but in other words, if the North had abolished the Fugitive Slave Act and pursued a number of other policies, slavery would have ended within an independent Confederacy, certainly by the turn of the century, and possibly within four years, which was how long the Civil War lasted.
But then there's the historical question, which is a trickier one, which is, if the North had let the South go in peace, would they have adopted those policies?
And I'm willing to try and argue that case, but I'm willing, I also concede that that argument is more difficult to demonstrate, to support.
Sure.
Well, I mean, I think anybody can see that, and certainly in reading the book, you can see that there was a lot of resentment in the North, the fact that they were mandated by, I think, the second law that George Washington ever signed, that they had to kidnap people and send them back to the South to be slaves, after they'd escaped!
Right, and not only was it legally required, it was right in the Constitution.
Yeah.
Although, there were other parts of the Constitution that contradicted that.
I would think that the parts that guarantee equal protection of the law, you know, the Fifth Amendment and all that, due process of law, and all those kinds of things, would supersede any power granted to the state.
Well, I mean, they are amendments, after all, that was what Lysander Spooner said, right?
That the Constitution made slavery illegal.
Well, the role of the Constitution with respect to slavery was actually a much-debated question prior to the Civil War, and it was particularly debated by the abolitionists, the anti-slavery individuals in the North who wanted immediate, uncompensated emancipation.
And so, you have the William Lloyd Garrison's interpretation of the Constitution, which essentially saw it as a pro-slavery document, because of the Fugitive Slave Clause and other clauses, and publicly burned a copy during a 4th of July demonstration, which was an unpopular act at the time.
And then you have the interpretation of Lysander Spooner, who, you know, making a kind of textual argument, saying that the words have a certain meaning, and arguing that, therefore, slavery was unconstitutional.
So, it's a debate that you could carry on for a long time.
I would win it!
No, I'm sorry.
I'm just kidding.
Well, my whole attitude about these constitutional issues is, I think, as much as I think constitutional guarantees are important and helpful, I don't want to push them to the point of what I call constitutional fetishism, where we think of constitutions as self-enforcing documents that transcend politics.
In other words, another issue that comes up is, was secession constitutional or not?
And my answer is, well, it depends on which interpretation of the Constitution you prefer.
The document was a political document.
It was deliberately ambiguous from the outset.
It wouldn't have gotten passed.
It wouldn't have been ratified by the states if there hadn't been this built-in ambiguity.
So, from the first moment the Constitution emerges from the Philadelphia Convention, you end up with two competing interpretations, or at least two competing interpretations.
The consolidated union interpretation, and the compact-between-the-states interpretation.
Well, you know, it's interesting to me, a friend brought up that if you accept the whole notion of popular sovereignty and the right of people to throw off government and secede, then certainly the southern states would have to ask their black population, free and slave and otherwise, and of course their opinion was never consulted on whether they wanted to secede or not.
So how could that possibly be legit?
Right, right, right.
Well, my view is that secession is always legitimate, and that the solution to a minority that's oppressed by a seceding majority is further secession.
In other words, I'm in favor of secession.
I think, see, I don't want to debate the constitutional issue of secession, because I think the moral right of secession is a much more important issue.
If you have a moral right to secede, then it's irrelevant whether it's constitutional or not.
And my view is that states have a right to secede from the union, counties have a right to secede from states, cities have a right to secede from counties, and individuals have a right to secede from everything.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying, too.
I like that attitude.
And of course, it goes to what you say, you know, when you talk about constitutional fetishism, too, it goes in common parlance that, you know, freedom of speech is our First Amendment rights, as though the Bill of Rights is like some kind of land grant to us, instead of a list of declaratory and restrictive clauses meant to protect natural rights from state encroachment.
Right.
Right.
Exactly.
But, you know, with respect to the Constitution, this I don't go into in detail in the book, but my view is that the Articles of Confederation were a far superior document to the U.S.
Constitution, and that to a certain extent, the adoption of the Constitution was a mistake in American history, and that the problem with the Articles of Confederation was not that it created a government that was too weak, which is, you know, the standard interpretation.
The main problem with the Articles of Confederation was that it created a government that was too strong.
Right.
That was where all the conflicts were coming from, was the power that was being delegated away from the state legislature.
Yep.
Yeah.
Exactly.
That's what I always said, too.
And you know what's interesting to me, too?
I think it was Richard Mayberry pointed out that, you know, the French, I think, are on their fifth republic, or whatever.
France is still France.
Paris is still Paris.
The wheat fields outside, out in the countryside, are still the wheat fields.
And, you know, we could have the Articles of Confederation again, or we could have, you know, no Articles of Confederation at all, and this could still be the USA.
Right.
It could still be our country.
We shouldn't all have to be married to Alexander Hamilton's executive here.
Well, one observation I'd like to make is that if you look at the relative populations of the Confederacy and the United States at the time of the Civil War, the population of the United States at the time of the Civil War was approximately the current population of Canada.
And the Confederacy, if you just look at the initial states that seceded in the first wave, they had a population slightly less than that of Quebec.
And then when you add in the states that seceded in the second wave, they had a population slightly more than that of Quebec.
So the permitting a peaceful secession of the Confederacy would have been approximately the same as today, Canada permitting peaceful secession of Quebec, at least in terms of the demographic numbers.
And people think, well, there would have been two independent nations, or maybe even more if other states seceded, and that would be a terrible outcome.
But of course, there were attempts to conquer Canada prior to the Civil War, both during the American Revolution and during the War of 1812.
And then there were other more clandestine attempts similar to what happened in Texas of encouraging revolts that would have incorporated Canada into the United States.
And if any of those had been successful, historians would have written the story as if having Canada as part of the United States was absolutely necessary and ordained, and any other result would have been catastrophic.
Right, like taking possession of New Mexico.
Right, right.
But North America has gotten along fine with two independent Anglo republics, and if there had been three or even four, I don't think the history of the world would have been different, but it wouldn't have been catastrophically different.
All right.
Well, so let's talk about the actual war itself and the evolution of the governments of the North and the South.
You have a chapter in here, I forget if there's the title of the chapter, the sub-headline, Republican Neomercantilism, Southern State Socialism.
Right.
It sounds like any sort of limited articles of a federal republic completely went out the window in order to save this union, which in fact, it wasn't even a union by the time it was over.
They quit calling it the union.
It was the nation after that.
Right.
Yep, yep.
Yeah, well, war is the health of the state.
A theme that I'm sure comes up very often on your show.
And so you had a huge increase in the power of government, both in the Confederacy and in the union during the Civil War.
In fact, in many respects, they were mirror images.
I mean, they both adopted conscription to push bodies into the military.
They both had to finance the war with heavy taxation, a lot of borrowing and printing of money, which resulted in inflation.
Since the Confederacy was poor, it had a hyperinflation, whereas in the union, they only printed up enough greenbacks to approximately double the money supply and the price level.
And you have this depression of civil liberties in both the North and the South to maintain loyalty in order to fight the war and the mobilization of the economy.
And I would say the mobilization of the economy is where you have the starkest difference because, I mean, they're both using government intervention.
Both sides use government intervention to mobilize the economy.
The difference was that the North, having most of the country's industry at the beginning of the war, adopted, as you mentioned, a kind of neo-mercantilism, where you had a partnership between business and government, whereas the Confederacy, not having that much native industry, had to build it from scratch.
And therefore, you had Confederate war socialism, where the government was actually running many of the wartime.
Well, what kind of consequences for their effort?
For the Confederate effort?
Yeah.
In the book, I compare it with some exaggeration to the collectivization of the economy and the industrialization of the Soviet economy under Stalin, because it was essentially a forced industrialization that left the South on the verge of starvation by the end of the war.
Yeah.
Well, and you talk about how all their military efforts were essentially planned by a bunch of know-nothings.
There's this obvious strategy, the same one that the Americans finally used to defeat the British, which is retreat and then shoot at them and then retreat some more, which is kind of like what the Taliban is doing to the U.S. Army in Afghanistan right now, as our army has become the Redcoats around the world.
And instead of going ahead and letting the Union Army invade deep into their territory and then guerrilla sniping them and wearing them down, they went out like George Washington, marched all the soldiers out into open grass field to have everybody slaughtered by fancy new machine guns.
And this thing was an absolute nightmare.
Right.
Well, in terms of casualties, it was an absolute nightmare.
You didn't quite have machine guns, but yeah, I think the military strategy adopted by the Confederacy was a mistake.
But then on the other hand, it may have, given that they were protecting slavery and they only abandoned slavery toward the end of the war, it may have been a necessary mistake given their war aims.
In other words, it's true that guerrilla warfare was used during the American Revolution and in the slave states as well.
But as a result of that, South Carolina, which at the time of the American Revolution had the largest proportion of slaves out of its total population, lost about one third of its slave population to flight or migration during the American Revolution, during that guerrilla irregular warfare.
And the Confederacy was aware, you know, the leaders of the Confederacy were aware of that experience.
And so that was working against the adoption of irregular, decentralized warfare.
Well, and I guess machine gun is a bit overstating it, but they had these Gatling guns, right?
It's a hand crank, basically a machine gun in practice, right?
Well, those weren't used very much during the Civil War.
They came in later.
I learned too much of my history from TV.
What the hell do I know?
No, still, what they did, the one innovation that did come in that was used on the northern side more was the breech-loading repeating rifle rather than the muzzle-loading rifle.
But most of the forces up through the end of the war, the infantry forces were still using muzzle-loading rifles, which meant that, you know, even if you were really good, you could only get off about three shots a minute.
But the impact was devastating.
I mean, the casualties were astonishing.
More people died at the Battle of Gettysburg.
More soldiers died at the Battle of Gettysburg, counting both sides, than had died in all previous American wars combined.
Well, now, some other history I've learned from TV is that all the people who died at that battle were big, fat, old, gray-haired men, the very people who had gotten the people of America into this mess, and it was their war, so who cares, right?
Or was it a bunch of 14-year-old kids?
Yeah, it was a bunch of 14-year-olds.
Well, there were a few 14-year-olds, but yeah, lean, young people, definitely.
I mean, those armies, you know, they fought pitch battles, but the pitch battles came with long intervals during which they did a lot of marching.
So being overweight in the Civil War military, unless you were a privileged officer, wasn't going to last very long.
All right, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jeffrey Rogers Hummel.
He's the author of Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, A History of the American Civil War.
So let's talk about some of that, emancipating slaves there.
Civil War ended privately-owned slavery in this country, but is it really the case, then, that all the free men were just as enslaved by the time it was over?
What exactly do you mean by that?
I don't want to denigrate the abolition of slavery.
I mean, I think even though it was an unintended consequence of the war, it was a huge improvement in the status of African Americans.
And despite all of the oppression that they faced afterwards, you can't deny that eliminating a system where your wife or children can be sold away from you at the whim of someone else is not a huge improvement in human welfare.
One of the things that's unique about my book is that it combines a very strong aversion to slavery, a rabid hatred of slavery as an evil, vile institution, with a defense of secession.
And so I try to make a practical argument about how you could have ended slavery without all of the bloodshed that was associated with the war.
If I was convinced that the war was necessary to eliminate slavery, then I might conclude that it was worth it.
But the whole point of the book is to argue that the war wasn't necessary.
Let's talk a little bit more about that.
We mentioned the Fugitive Slave Act was a great subsidy for Southern slave owners, but you even said that you think it might have even, if the North had let the South go and adopted the right policies your way, you know, magic time machine style, that it could have even ended the institution of slavery within the same time frame of the Civil War itself.
Right, right.
And to understand the argument, you have to appreciate that runaway slaves have always been the Achilles heel of slave systems throughout history.
In other words, most slaveholders owned slaves because they provide, well, especially in an economy like the South, where most of the slaves were production goods.
You know, they weren't household slaves.
There were household slaves, but most of the slaves were production goods.
They were producing cotton.
They were generating an income stream for the slaveholders.
And so the attractiveness of slavery to the slaveholders is the value of that future income stream.
And if a large number of slaves can run away, that affects how much income the slave is going to generate, and that affects the price of the slaves.
One of the accomplishments of the work of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross, that came out in 1974, was making us appreciate the economics of slavery and the pricing of slaves was in many respects similar to the pricing of shares of stock or other financial and real assets.
Shares of stock, you buy them because they generate a future income stream.
And how much are you going to be willing to pay for shares of Microsoft stock if a critical number of them can get up and run away at some point in the future?
So runaways always affect the value of the slaves and the stability, the future of the slave system.
And one of the features of slavery throughout history that people don't think about is, why were slaves such an important part of commerce in the ancient world?
Why are slaves moved from one location to another?
And the answer to that is that you've never had a successful example of enslaving a population.
And by enslaving, I mean the strong sense of slavery, chattel slavery, where one person owns another.
That's never been done to a population en masse in situ, in other words, where they live.
The reason being, it's too easy to run away.
And so one of the things that makes slavery viable is moving the slave from one location to another, and that reduces the opportunities for running away.
Colonial South Carolina had a huge Indian slave trade, where they actually, in the 17th century, the white South Carolinians would buy slaves from the neighboring Indian tribes, Indian slaves, and then they would sell them to the West Indies, and then use the proceeds to buy black slaves.
Now, the only reason you would sell slaves in order to buy slaves is if, for some reason, you think that the work you're going to get out of the slaves you're selling is less than the work you're going to get out of the slaves that you're buying.
Well, so do I understand you right that you're basically saying that if, say, William Lloyd Garrison had had his way, and the North had just seceded, and left the South to their own devices, and refused to enforce any runaway slave type provisions, that that would have been it, or do you have a whole wish list of things that would have had to fall in place?
Well, I have a wish list of other things, but I think that's the critical one.
The critical one is that allowing slaves to run away makes the value of slaves fall, and by making the value of slaves fall, it makes the system less viable in the long run.
And runaways can eventually bring down a slave system.
They brought down the Brazilian slave system.
Brazil was the last place in the New World to abolish slavery, and they first, in the 1870s, adopted a gradual emancipation law, but it was a law that freed no living slaves.
It was only applied to slaves that were born after the passage of the law, and they would only be freed when they reached their 21st birthday, and it was designed to sort of protect the assets of existing slaveholders.
But it turns out that Brazil had a very, very active abolitionist movement, in part because it had a very large free black population.
And in 1884, the northern province of Ceará, Brazil, not only abolished slavery, but became a haven for runaway slaves.
Now, Brazil had a fugitive slave law on the books, but it became unenforceable, and as a result of the activities of runaways, within four years, the slave system had collapsed in the plantation-growing regions of Brazil.
So, in other words, what you're saying is, in the United States of America, during the era of King Cotton and chattel slavery of stolen black Africans, that the whole thing basically was a giant mercantilist enterprise, and that without the state mandated, basically the cost being socialized onto the entire population on behalf of this very small number of slave-owning planters, the whole enterprise could not have existed.
Could not have survived, yes.
I agree.
Yep.
That's the argument.
And it's in the book.
It's Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, so let's talk about enslaving free men.
Is that hyperbole?
You don't mean that we're all today as bad-off as black Africans on the plantation?
Right, right.
There I'm using the term slavery metaphorically, the way Lysander Spooner used it when he talked about the results of the...
And the point is, the transformation of the form of the American national government, right?
Right.
Transformation of the form of the American government, change in the secular direction in terms of government power, and also setting all kinds of precedents for future government intervention.
Abraham Lincoln did it.
Abraham Lincoln did it.
Right, yeah.
I've heard that one a million times, and I'm only 33.
Yep, and there are a lot of comparisons invoking Lincoln's precedents, yes.
Yes, always when doing the wrong thing.
Well, so I guess go ahead and elaborate on some of this.
I mean, what are people to understand are the before and after effects of what is still presumably the same government mandated by the same constitution from 1789?
Right.
Well, one of the most important effects is something that I think has been missed by historians, and it has to do with the fiscal arrangements of the Union.
And this goes back to the debate over the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.
In my opinion, one of the reasons that the Articles of Confederation were superior to the Constitution is because under the Articles, Congress had no power of taxation.
And I don't think it should have been given any power of taxation.
But at the time, most of the opponents of the Constitution were willing to give the central government the power to collect import duties, tariffs, but they wanted internal taxes to be completely under the control of state government.
And so one of the major objections to the Constitution was that it gave the central government the power to collect internal taxes.
And so what happened is that you get the Constitution adopted, the Washington administration comes into power, Alexander Hamilton begins to spin out his entire financial program.
And part of it is a whole slew of internal taxes, including the infamous whiskey tax, which set off the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794.
And even though the Whiskey Rebellion was suppressed, part of the success of Thomas Jefferson and the Republicans, who managed to sweep into control of the central government in 1800, an event which they referred to as the Revolution of 1800, part of their success was based on opposition to the internal taxes.
And what is often not recognized is that Jefferson implemented the policy that the anti-federalists had always wanted in what I would call an implicit constitutional bargain.
He repealed all of the internal taxes, so that, except briefly during the War of 1812, from Jefferson's first term until the Civil War, the federal government only had two sources of revenue, tariff and sale of public land.
No income tax, no excise taxes, no internal taxes paid to the federal government whatsoever.
As a result, most American citizens would have no contact with the central government throughout their entire lives, except through the post office.
And during the Civil War, of course, to finance the war, a whole slew of internal taxes, including the first national income tax, are imposed by the Lincoln administration.
Now, after the war ends, there's demobilization, and some of those taxes are repealed, including the income tax, which then goes through an off-again-on-again history until you get the income tax amendment.
But one of the things that the Civil War decisively changed was, from then on, the central government collected internal taxes of one form or another.
So the excise taxes, particularly the sin taxes on alcohol and tobacco, were maintained after the Civil War.
And so you have an important change in the fiscal structure of the Union, in which now the central government has much more direct impact on the lives of everyday citizens.
So that's one example.
Another example is subsidizing business.
Now, it is true that prior to the Civil War, there was some subsidization of business.
Some of the steamship companies got mail subsidies, and there was one federal subsidy to railroads that was actually passed prior to the Civil War.
But the real heavy subsidization of business by the central government begins during the Civil War with the promotion of loans and land grants to the transcontinental railroads.
And of course, during the Grant administration, the subsidization of business in various ways, especially railroads, becomes so scandalous that one historian has referred to it as the Great Barbecue.
And so that's another important change.
Would it be fair to say that before the Civil War, there was still sort of an ongoing debate?
Obviously, I think, you know, being the radical decentralist that you are, you'd agree that the bad guys were winning it.
But would it be fair to say there was still a debate between the doctrine of enumerated specific powers, Tenth Amendment-style government, and the doctrine of, you know, implied powers and everything in the world is necessary and proper before the Civil War, but that since the Civil War, that argument has been over?
Well, as always in our discussion, I would make it a little bit more complicated.
Good, good.
My thing is oversimplifying stuff.
I would say is that that debate takes place before the Civil War, continues after the Civil War, and you can still see echoes of it today.
But the argument trying to restrict the national government was much stronger before the Civil War than after the Civil War.
And then, of course, World War I, the New Deal, and World War II really, I think, decisively undermine the notion of enumerated powers to the point where it's, you know, it's virtually a dead letter.
Even during the Civil War, in the midst of the war, Congress still made concessions to the nowadays quaint notion that there were certain things that it didn't have the power to do.
So, for instance, one of the things that was done during the Civil War was setting up the national banking system, which is a precursor to the financial troubles we're having today.
And the national banks, they wanted to give the national banks a monopoly on the issue of banknotes.
In other words, they wanted to suppress the issue of banknotes by state banks.
But because of constitutional qualms, they didn't feel confident enough to pass a law outlawing state banknotes.
So what they did was they passed a prohibitive tax, which prevented state banknotes from being able to be issued profitably.
So they accomplished the same goal with a tax, but it still shows that they had some constitutional qualms.
What makes that interesting is, you know, of course, much later in the World War I progressive period, and then under the New Deal, the first federal drug laws and the first federal gun control laws were framed as revenue measures because of constitutional concerns.
Initially, when the federal government wanted to outlaw private machine guns, they didn't actually outlaw them.
They just placed a huge transfer tax on them.
And when I was an undergraduate, if you were willing to pay that tax, which I can't remember now, $300, $500, in states which allowed it, you could still buy and own a fully automatic machine gun.
Well, I know it was sort of the same thing with the first federal marijuana law was a tax act.
Only there it was later, I guess in the 70s, ruled double jeopardy because it was always a trap where you can't get the stamp unless you show the pot.
And then you're right there, you're confessing to having pot without a stamp, and so you're busted.
And the judges said you can't do that.
But of course by then, I guess the same as with the machine guns, the doctrine of limited powers is much further eroded.
And the idea that Congress can't outlaw everything in the whole world that they don't like was kind of quaint in itself.
Yep, yep.
It seems completely gone now, an era where we're talking about, you know, the national government is talking about how people drive and where they smoke cigarettes and who knows what.
Yep, and we're going to have legislation about weight, obesity.
I share your concern.
One other point I want to make, my general view of the course of the relationship between government and the economy, liberty and power in U.S. history is that, you know, you have ebbs and flows, you have gains and losses, but it's like the business cycle.
You also have a long-term trend.
And prior to the Civil War, you know, from the colonial period up through the Civil War, I would contend that the long-term trend had been to steadily reduce government power, not just at the federal level, but at all levels.
So that prior to the Civil War, with the major exception, of course, of slavery, which is a major exception, prior to the Civil War, you had reached a low point in the coercive extent of government.
And, you know, federal spending was less than 2% of gross domestic product.
And total spending was probably around 5% of GDP, where, you know, total government spending today in the U.S. is over one-third of gross domestic product.
Total taxes at the time of the Civil War, federal taxes, or total federal expenditures, pardon me, federal expenditures at the time of the Civil War were about $2.50 per person per year, which, if you translate into today's dollars, is maybe about $60 per person per year.
Can you imagine a central government that spends $60 per person per year?
I sure can.
I sure can.
All right, now listen, we're almost out of time.
Jeffrey Rogers, Hummel, the book is Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men.
I wanted to ask you one more thing about, in the last couple of minutes here, about the idea that from now on, I know people often call it states' rights or whatever, but even the broader kind of metaphysical conception of local authority ought to trump distant, bigger authority when it comes to dealing with people's problems on the day-to-day level.
Like you say, people, you know, back then, the only time they ever dealt with the national government was the post office or something like that.
That all means you just want to get away with oppressing black people nowadays.
I mean, that's basically, in our public kind of discourse in America, it's all just cover for either enslaving or at least Jim Crowing minorities in your community.
That's the only reason anyone would oppose federal power, at least when Democrats are in charge.
Right, right.
Yeah, well, that's one of the unfortunate legacies of the Civil War, because the defense of states' rights and decentralized government became associated with the defense of slavery.
We've been stuck with that stigma, which of course is not valid, and you can find plenty of instances in which states' rights have been invoked for other reasons that are completely unrelated to slavery.
Like protecting victims of the federal drug war in California, for example.
Yes, protecting victims of the federal drug war in California.
I mean, it does make us conscious that states' rights and decentralized government are not a perfect solution to all problems, and therefore we have to be aware of that.
But I think that other things being equal, the greater the decentralization you have, the more competition you have between different government regimes, the more competition you have, the ability of people to exit is greater, and I think that encourages greater liberty in the long run.
In other words, if you take my argument about runaway slaves and extend it to runaway tax evaders, and I think that one of the advantages of decentralization in the United States was the intense competition between different state governments, which I think, while it could lead to local oppression, on net was beneficial in terms of bringing about less oppressive, less coercive policies.
All right, everybody, that's Jeffrey Rogers Hummel.
The book is called Emancipating Slaves and Slaving Free Men.
You can look him up on the internet at sjsu.edu.
All right, thank you very much for your time today.
It was great talking to you.
I really enjoyed the book.
Well, thank you.
It was a pleasure.
