[Spouter]

Okay, you got me on my first de Tocqueville quote. It has been years since I read it. It was actually one of the first serious books that I ever read. Before that, I consumed trashy conspiracy theories, such as those expounded in The Creature from Jekyll Island, by some kook named G. Edward Griffin.

I did not use my de Tocqueville quote accurately, and now I can see that your reading is better. I was just grabbing something real quick off the net, and I did not look it over in enough detail.

In the spirit of honest debate, I would like to repeat the contested quote (this way, you will see that my retraction is sincere).

When I contemplate the condition of the South, I can only discover two alternatives which may be adopted by the white inhabitants of those States; viz., either to emancipate the negroes, and to intermingle with them; or, remaining isolated from them, to keep them in a state of slavery as long as possible. All intermediate measures seem to me likely to terminate, and that shortly, in the most horrible of civil wars...

I was looking for something else. I thought there was a part where de Tocqueville describes the attitude of ordinary Americans, who could already anticipate a horrible war on the horizon, because of Southern slavery. Instead, I latched onto the first quote that contained the phrase "civil war." You know, I thought there was something wrong with the phrasing--I am glad you pointed this out. I can see that it is not a complete waste of time to argue with you. Well done.

I have to revisit this masterpiece it seems, and soon. I think you should also, however.

I actually found de Tocqueville's sentiments to be supportive of my position. The fact that slavery was inefficient marked its end.

Perhaps that was indeed his view. He seems like someone who was optimistic about the continued progress of mankind. All decent people can hope that progress will be brought about without unnecessary pain. And the tension had not reached an intense enough pitch to make war seem inevitable at this point, I suppose. That is what deeper reflection tells me, anyhow. In the section following the one I quoted above, I find comments that are also relevant to our sub-argument on the Civil War. It is titled "What Are The Chances In Favor Of The Duration Of The American Union, And What Dangers Threaten It." (Part VI of "The Present And Probable Future Condition Of The Three Races Which Inhabit The Territory Of The United States." I had previously quoted from part V.)

De Tocqueville does not see such a war as likely, and if it occurs anytime soon, he predicts that the Union will lose. The editors have added a few notes preceding this chapter, to draw attention to the facts that make de Tocqueville's opinions here less than authoritative (I quote the version that wikipedia links to).

In 1831, when [de Tocqueville] visited America, the anti-slavery agitation had scarcely begun; and the fact of Southern slavery was accepted by men of all parties, even in the States where there were no slaves: and that was unquestionably the view taken by all the States and by all American statesmen at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, in 1789.

You have clarified my error, with your polite and accurate criticisms. I was letting historical hindsight creep back into my memory of de Tocqueville's original evaluations. Obviously, he could not have foreseen such a war, in any of its specific details.

Nobody could have predicted such a war over 20 years in advance, I guess. We are talking about something that had never happened in the history of the world, to my knowledge. There had been wars over slavery, of course. The Spartacus uprising jumps to mind. But that was a revolt of the slaves themselves. Never before had there been a war caused by slavery, in which the combatants themselves were not slaves. There had been slave uprisings, of course. There had been legal abolition of slavery by kings and government. But not one other example (as far as I know) where neither side in the conflict was a party of revolting slaves (there was some marginal contribution by former slaves in the Union forces, but not at high enough levels to be significant to my current argument).

It is not surprising that de Tocqueville's vision fails at this point. We are talking about something unique and unprecedented, something that could only be barely glimpsed with the most penetrating insight. Don't get me wrong: de Tocqueville had such insight. But, even the most penetrating intellect can be expected to fail at certain points. All humans, even the most talented, suffer from limitations.

Which brings me back to the original point: de Tocqueville's failure to completely grasp the nature of the coming Civil War. The individual states were too powerful at this point, and the Union was too weak. It was hard to imagine how such an inherently weak Federal authority could muster the energy and resources to combat a confederation of seceding states. He also failed to anticipate the ascendancy of a strong anti-slave party in the North.

Regardless of his inevitable intellectual failures (inevitable, because no matter how inspired, he was still human), it is still impressive to see how much his vision did encompass. He doesn't seem to think that slavery would peacefully melt away, like ice in the sun, without effort or pain, as you suggest it would have.

Slavery... cannot survive. By the choice of the master, or by the will of the slave, it will cease; and in either case great calamities may be expected to ensue.

It is quite obvious that he sees only two real possibilities: a legal abolition of slavery, or a violent uprising of the slaves themselves. That White people who didn't own slaves would bear arms for this cause is hard to imagine in 1831. He didn't think the Union could levy sufficient troops for any cause, let alone for this one. Blacks fighting Whites over slavery was imaginable; Whites fighting Whites over such an issue only really became conceivable in 1861. But, in any case, he knew that this progress would be accompanied by "great calamities"

More importantly, he also managed to express the fact that Southerners were not amenable to reason on this issue. I understand that you "found de Tocqueville's sentiments to be supportive of [your] position," but I have provided evidence to the contradictory. I know how easy it is to experience errors in one's memory, when you are quoting from a book that you haven't read in a long time. Once again, here is the quote I wanted you to reflect on:

...they hold their lives upon no other tenure.

Your assertion that slavery in America would just peacefully disappear, because the Southerners would gradually come to accept that it was inefficient, is contradicted by these other statements (which you also failed to address directly):

The instruction which is now diffused in the South has convinced the inhabitants that slavery is injurious to the slave-owner, but it has also shown them, more clearly than before, that no means exist of getting rid of its bad consequences.

...whilst the principle of servitude is gradually abolished in the North, that self-same principle gives rise to more and more rigorous consequences in the South.

These were Southern attitudes in '31. In thirty years, these attitudes had only hardened. Perhaps that was because anti-Slavery attitudes had solidified in the North. In any case, I think that if de Tocqueville's observations are correct, it is unlikely that the South would have changed their slave-mongering ways under the mere force of reason. What history shows us is that it required the force of arms.

Sure, whites held on to it to preserve their way of life (and the narrow interests of elite plantation owners). But I do believe such efforts were doomed.

Hindsight being 20/20, yes, these efforts were doomed. What doomed them was the military victory of Union forces. We can speculate about alternative scenarios, in which slavery was peacefully wiped out by "advances in industrialisation and automation... increasing international pressure" and so on, but these speculations have precisely the same authority as any science fiction novel.

It was also the belief of de Tocqueville that "slavery... cannot survive." But, he was not naive enough to imagine that this would happen in a peaceful way. I find your faith in the smooth and painless progress of mankind to be touching--you obviously have a lot of faith in your fellow man. History shows us that progress is always accompanied by violence and/or coercion, however. A social injustice does not just go away when people first begin to recognize it. Many examples could be cited to show that the people who benefit from these injustices always fight back with coercive methods, in order to secure their position of privilege. In order to overcome these defenses, coercive countermeasures must be deployed.

The slavery issue is a perfect example. Progress on this question was quite retarded in America. It was recognized by many enlightened people, even in the South, to be a great injustice. All enlightened parties acknowledged this, in the abstract, but no concrete measures were ever enacted (in the South). There was no political will to solve the problem, in 1831, even if Southern slavery made us an object of international disdain and embarrassment. The secondary problems that would inevitably arise seemed insurmountable; de Tocqueville does a good job of enumerating them. For example, anti-slavery measures in the North, preceding 1831, were also accompanied by the most virulent racism (much worse than in the South, in its way). Other forms of discrimination, primarily on the non-legal social plane, drove the recently freed slaves to emigrate to other places--mainly the South. If legal forms of discrimination were abolished in the South, de Tocqueville expected a corresponding rise in social discrimination. The Northern Blacks at this time could make their exodus to the South, but the Southern Blacks had no such line of retreat. Stuck where they are, with the tension continually rising in their neighborhood, something bad was bound to happen. A war of extermination, perhaps. Maybe the forceable deportation of former slaves to other nations. In 1831, he could not imagine free Blacks and Whites living together on an equal footing.

So, sure, de Tocqueville anticipated an end to slavery in the South. It was only going to take the forceable removal of almost all the Blacks, or their outright extermination. That sounds even worse than what actually did happen. A Civil War against the South sounds like a humane alternative, compared to the solution that de Tocqueville envisioned. In any case, the change would be accompanied by "great calamities."

Look, I am sure that you can indeed find support for your own positions in de Tocqueville. He is a complex thinker, and not a rigid ideologue, so I am sure that modern ideologues of all sorts can find supporting material for their own point of view in his seminal masterpiece. I certainly find such support, despite the fact that my first use of him in this debate was incorrect, because I didn't familiarize with the necessary context (I hope you can excuse this mistake, which was made in good faith, because I was in a rush... I certainly didn't consciously intend to distort de Tocqueville's position).

To further demonstrate my good faith, I will quote a passage that does seem to support your position.

If the Union were to be dissolved, the commerce of the States which now compose it would undoubtedly be checked for a time; but this consequence would be less perceptible than is generally supposed... Even if the South of the Union were to become independent of the North, it would still require the services of those States. I have already observed that the South is not a commercial country, and nothing intimates that it is likely to become so. The Americans of the South of the United States will therefore be obliged, for a long time to come, to have recourse to strangers to export their produce, and to supply them with the commodities which are requisite to satisfy their wants. But the Northern States are undoubtedly able to act as their intermediate agents cheaper than any other merchants. They will therefore retain that employment, for cheapness is the sovereign law of commerce. National claims and national prejudices cannot resist the influence of cheapness.

In other words, if a confederation of Southern states were to secede, the Union could tolerate this, without any significant threat to the material prosperity of the whole. In fact, he speculates that this would even enhance the naval power.

I am convinced that the dismemberment of the Union would not have the effect of diminishing the naval power of the Americans, but that it would powerfully contribute to increase it. At the present time the commercial States are connected with others which have not the same interests, and which frequently yield an unwilling consent to the increase of a maritime power by which they are only indirectly benefited. If, on the contrary, the commercial States of the Union formed one independent nation, commerce would become the foremost of their national interests; they would consequently be willing to make very great sacrifices to protect their shipping, and nothing would prevent them from pursuing their designs upon this point.

It seems to me that you hold to these exact same opinions. Here's the catch, he wrote these things in reference to the world of 1831. We now have three decades of historical development to look at, which de Tocqueville did not have access to. Even if his evaluations were valid in 1831, they may not hold in 1861.

And so what has changed? Here is my estimation (certainly not the most authoritative... I haven't even gotten around to the second reading of Democracy In America yet!):

1) The ascendancy of Union power. The central power was more consolidated in '61 than in '31. De Tocqueville thought civil war unlikely, but even if it broke out, he seems to think that Union efforts would be anemic and easily repelled. This had changed completely in the 30 intervening years. History shows us, that by the time the war actually broke out, the Union was now able to hold its own against even a powerful Confederacy under competent command.

2) The growth of industrial manufacturing in the North. He is aware that there is already a disparity with the South, but it was only to grow after that. In '31, the South still received her manufactured goods predominantly from Britain. By '61, as we already know from a previous chapter in this debate, the North had appropriated this trade to herself. In '31, if the South had seceded, then Britain would not have had such a strong motive to launch aggression against the North, using a newly established toehold in an independent South. She would not have wanted to disrupt her lucrative trade to the South. However, in '61, her manufactured goods were in more direct competition with those of the North. Now there was an incentive for aggression. In other words, an independent Confederacy of Southern states, in 1861, backed by the power of Britain's navy, would have been a significant threat to the rest of the continent.

3) The rise of a strong anti-slavery party in the North. This was something that de Tocqueville failed to anticipate completely. Who could have seen this coming, in 1831? He tells us how racist they were, up in the North. They were quite willing to abolish slavery from their own states, but not because of any high minded ideals, and they were confident that racist discrimination on the social plane would drive the newly freed Blacks into other territories. They cared nothing about the injustice of slavery, and were only interested in the practical side of the question. By 1861, this had changed. Now there was strong agitation in the North against Southern slavery, not for vulgar reasons of sheer expediency, but more as a matter of principle. Another way to put this: before, in '31, there were political motives that went against this, but now, in '61, there was an ideological motive. This ideology crystallized around Lincoln in the 1860 campaign, and it drove the South into an absolute panic.

4) The consolidation of pro-slavery sentiment in the South. De Tocqueville describes an attitude in 1831 that is already almost completely intransigent: "they hold their life upon no other tenure." This attitude had only hardened by 1861. In all likelihood, this was in response to the abolitionist movement in the North, which was steadily growing in power. Then again, maybe the Northern sentiment for abolition crystallized in response to an escalation of pro-slavery sentiment in the South.

It is clear to me that I should read more about the origins of the Civil War, but even with my limited knowledge, I can see that the crisis was driven by the South's intransigence on the issue of slavery. Beginning the narrative (somewhat arbitrarily) in the year of de Tocqueville's visit to America, all of the economic and social forces that you think would have destroyed Southern slavery by 1870, without a war, or apparently without any real pain or effort at all, all of these forces were already active at this time, in 1831. Three decades went by, and still these forces had not brought the South to reason. They refused to be coerced by these "soft" methods. This made the force of arms necessary, I think.

We can speculate about what the South would have done about slavery, if they had won the war, if the Union had capitulated to their secession, or according to the dictates of any number of "alternative history" scenarios from science fiction novels. I myself can envision a scenario in which the South, now free from Union pressure, suddenly and dramatically abolishes slavery, almost out of spite, to show the North and the rest of the world that it was not slavery that made them rebellious, and now that they were not being directly forced to it, they were willing do the right thing, under their own volition. This scenario does not seem likely to me, however. More likely, inspired with confidence by their victory over the North, they would have clung to their "way of life" even more. The victor in any military contest always feels, whether it is true or not, that his victory came about through some kind of moral superiority. If the Union has just capitulated without a war, this was would have inspired an even greater feeling in the South for the moral superiority of their "venerable traditions." For all you know, a successful rebellion of the South might have secured the existence of state-sponsored slavery in the western hemisphere well into the 20th century.

Now, none of these science fiction scenarios are very relevant, because we should focus on what actually did happen, instead of what your ideology says should or could have happened. But you still seem resistant to the established facts of history.

Setting aside whether they can legitimately be blamed at starting a war...

By all means, set it aside! This is not an open topic of debate, among the minimally literate. They almost immediately seceded upon Lincoln's election, which is in itself an act of aggression. They knew full well that this would trigger a war; they showed no willingness to avoid the catastrophe. Lincoln might have been willing to capitulate on certain issues; we will never know, however, because of the South's eagerness to fight. On top of this political aggression, they were the ones who initiated military aggression, at Fort Sumter. The South picks a fight, and then you blame the North for accommodating them!

You would like to equate my justifications for the Union to the excuses that are made by propagandists for Israel. It seems to me that that is precisely what you are doing: making excuses for a bunch of murderous slave-mongers.

...I believe the Northern aggression, especially given their initial motivation, was wholly unjustified.

What aggression? I know what you mean, of course. You mean the Union should have just ignored all military and political aggression from the South, like a bunch of weaklings--just capitulate to every demand, like a wimp. I have been upset by a lot of recent elections in my country. What if I begin conspiring with a group of like-minded neighbors, and then start shelling the police station down the road? After all, if I "perceive" this station to be an aggressive military outpost, then my actions are justified, by your reasoning. When the violent counter-reaction inevitably comes, I will complain incessantly about the "unjust aggression" of "invading" forces. According to your libertarian logic, anyone who is dissatisfied with a presidential election can initiate violence against police, military personnel, or anyone at all that is "perceived" to be a threat.

If the aggression of the Confederacy at Sumter is to be justified, then you ought to show that it was in response to aggression from the Union. But in early 1861, there was no such aggression. It isn't good enough to demonstrate that they expected this aggression at some unknown point in the future. I expect a lot of things to happen, but that doesn't mean I can preemptively shoot at anyone I feel like, does it? Here is the "aggression" that you think justified so much violence: Lincoln's election. In other words, they were angry at the North because they freely cast their vote for a candidate that the South disliked.

...this was a war of defence by the South, and a war of aggression by the North.

I have already made the following point, but it bears repeating. All war boils down to defense and offence. One side is defending themselves, and the other is on the attack. The defenders should not automatically receive a normative justification, for the simple fact that they are defending themselves. But I should correct myself here. On a certain level, they do receive an automatic justification. The principle of self-defense is the central feature of all normative justifications for war. But, this principle is complex in its applications. For example, I am sure that you will admit that an offensive attack can be justified, if it is sincerely intended to defend against an imminent threat. That is your excuse for the South's violence, in fact. They anticipated an invasion, and so they acted preemptively.

But the principle of self-defense also covers the case of Union "aggression" against the Confederacy. After all, a secession by the Confederacy would have destroyed the Union as it currently existed. How can you claim the right of self-defense for the Confederacy, but not extend this to the Union as well? The Union had as much right to exist as the Confederacy.

But there is another principle we should consider as well: All wars have a political objective. Beyond the simple fact of who is attacking, who is defending, in order to evaluate whether or not a war is just, we have to ask, what were the political objectives? I have already pointed out that Germany was defending her own national territories in the second phase of WWII. Does that mean these defensive efforts were just? On a certain simplistic level, yes, everyone is allowed to defend themselves, if it is a case of national survival. But, two facts allow us to reach a more adult judgment. One, they started the war--the invasion of Germany was launched in response to their earlier aggression. And two, their political objectives were wrong--a totalitarian empire covering all of Europe and Russia. You don't get to start a war under these motivations, and then claim self-defense when you begin to lose.

This is not an exact analogy. The aggression of Germany was a great threat to all of Europe, and even the world; the Confederacy's aggression was not quite so threatening to the security of North America. I have already drawn your attention to the potential threat posed by an independent Confederacy, allied with Britain, and supported by her naval power. This was serious, but not nearly as serious as the threat posed by the Nazis. On this scale of comparison, the danger posed by an independent Confederacy ranks more as an annoyance.

But, that is not the point of the analogy. The point is, even when a nation is defending their own territory, they should not receive a blanket justification. Especially if, one, they started the aggression in the first place, and, two, their political objectives were unjust. The Confederacy did in fact initiate the violence (stop trying to hallucinate it away!), and part of their motivation was to preserve slavery. Therefore, their cause was unjust.

I know that it sounds childish to talk about "who started it," but you are the one who is trying to press a normative justification for the Confederacy. If we are trying to determine if a war is just or not, we have to ask this question. You may not like the answer, but it is a matter of fact: the South started the war.

* * *

I've got to break it off at some point. I told you I would become captivated by the subject of the Civil War, and leave the original thread behind. I find this war to be deeply interesting--so many things changed in this era. One thing that did not change was the subjugation of Southern Blacks. The Southern Whites, despite the outcome of the war, continued to force the Blacks into a quasi-feudal state of abject dependency. I believe that the North went along with this, for reasons of political expediency, and it created a serious problem for future generations.

As you point out, all other races emigrating to America managed to assimilate. The Irish were subject to all kinds of discrimination early on, but after a while, they found their "nitch," and began to enjoy the rights and privileges of full citizens. The Italians experienced difficulties, the Jews, but all eventually assimilated. The Blacks, however, continued to be oppressed well into the 20th century, making us an international embarrassment. It took truly strenuous efforts to correct this situation.

In fact, it took the heroic contributions of a true political genius, Martin Luther King. He campaigned hard for the Civil Rights Act, and one of his central goals, the main purpose of all those marches and demonstrations, was to solicit positive action from the Federal government. I find it frankly appalling that politicians and other talking-heads who follow the libertarian ideology try to claim King as one of their symbolic mascots. His methodology was completely at variance with their own. To claim King as a "libertarian" hero is to violate the facts of history. It is Orwellian.

Do us both a favor, in your future post, and distract me from the subject of the Civil War. Please expound on the "practical harm caused by Title II." I will admit that I don't see it.

[Eran]

That White people who didn't own slaves would bear arms for this cause is hard to imagine in 1831.

It was also hard to imagine in 1861. In fact, it never happened. The above is the clearest expression from you of the common error to which I was previously alluding. White people from the North didn't go to war to free slaves. They went to war to save the union. Freeing the slaves was a fortunate though unexpected consequence of the war, not its goal.

I don't doubt that some northerners were abolitionists who felt that freeing the slaves was a goal worth fighting for. But their political leaders (Lincoln) and, as far as I know, most of the fighting men, didn't fight for abolition.

Btw, Jefferson Davis foresaw a voluntary end to slavery, while Robert E. Lee objected to it altogether.


What de Tocqueville noticed was increasingly harsh laws in the South designed to protect the white population against the risks of both a slave rebellion and escaping slaves. The political support for such laws is a function of the power of plantation-owners. With reduced economic viability of slave-holding (e.g. with the gradual introduction of mechanisation and automation, giving advantage to higher-paid skilled labour), the political support for such laws would have gradually eroded away.

It is likely (and consistent with de Tocqueville's observations) that slavery would have been replaced by exactly the kind of Jim Crow legal environment that followed the Civil War. While de Tocqueville couldn't have known about the shape of such laws, they are perfectly consistent with his insight that the whites would want to protect themselves from freed blacks.

What history shows us is that it required the force of arms.

No, it doesn't. History tells us nothing about what would have happened if the South was allowed to peacefully secede. Slavery was peacefully abolished (almost) everywhere else in the Western Hemisphere.

We can speculate about alternative scenarios, in which slavery was peacefully wiped out by "advances in industrialisation and automation... increasing international pressure" and so on, but these speculations have precisely the same authority as any science fiction novel.

No more so than the suggestion that absent the Civil War, a 21st century South would still contain slavery. Either scenario is speculative, and neither one can be ruled out merely because it is so.

History shows us that progress is always accompanied by violence and/or coercion, however.

It wasn't in Brazil, for example. And violence comes with varying degrees. The slaughter of 600,000 people in 1860s America appears to be on the high-end of violent scenarios.

Many examples could be cited to show that the people who benefit from these injustices always fight back with coercive methods, in order to secure their position of privilege. In order to overcome these defenses, coercive countermeasures must be deployed.

Indeed. But mechanisation and automation would have gradually reduced the degree to which people benefited from the institution of slavery, while a free and non-cooperating North would have made the cost of maintaining the institution progressively higher.

It was recognized by many enlightened people, even in the South, to be a great injustice. All enlightened parties acknowledged this, in the abstract, but no concrete measures were ever enacted (in the South).

Indeed the power of moral arguments against entrenched economic interests is limited. My claim is that slavery would have disappeared primarily with the diminishing economic viability of the institution, rather than through moral persuasion. But once it was no longer viable, whose interests would it have served?

1) The ascendancy of Union power. The central power was more consolidated in '61 than in '31. De Tocqueville thought civil war unlikely, but even if it broke out, he seems to think that Union efforts would be anemic and easily repelled. This had changed completely in the 30 intervening years. History shows us, that by the time the war actually broke out, the Union was now able to hold its own against even a powerful Confederacy under competent command.

This is correct at two separate levels. Once is that industrialisation of the North made it militarily more powerful. As important (and more interesting), public sentiment in the North has continued to evolve, with people's political loyalties gradually shifting from their state to the Federal union as a whole. I believe it is that development that de Tocqueville particularly failed to foresee. While I don't have access to an exact quote, I seem to recall his impression regarding the state-level loyalties of Americans, a situation which would have prohibited the ability of the Federal government to impose itself at the local level.

It is the pro-Union views of Northerners that gave Lincoln the political backing to go to war to preserve the union.

Another way to put this: before, in '31, there were political motives that went against this, but now, in '61, there was an ideological motive. This ideology crystallized around Lincoln in the 1860 campaign, and it drove the South into an absolute panic.

I am yet to see any evidence that anti-slavery was a dominant motivation for either Lincoln or the North citizenry to support the war. Everything I heard suggests it was union-preservation rather than slavery-abolition that motivated the North. I do accept that anti-slavery sentiments in the North (especially as those applied to new territories) played a major role in motivating the South's secession. But the South's motivation to secede is different from the North's motivation to prevent it.

Beginning the narrative (somewhat arbitrarily) in the year of de Tocqueville's visit to America, all of the economic and social forces that you think would have destroyed Southern slavery by 1870, without a war, or apparently without any real pain or effort at all, all of these forces were already active at this time, in 1831. Three decades went by, and still these forces had not brought the South to reason. They refused to be coerced by these "soft" methods. This made the force of arms necessary, I think.

I don't think I ever claimed that Southern slavery would have been destroyed by 1870. In Brazil it wasn't abolished until 1888. In comparing the South with Brazil, I believe the South would have abolished slavery sooner - due to the proximity of the more industrial and anti-Slavery North (exerting economic pressures favouring non-slave labour, projecting social/moral/cultural anti-slavery sentiments, and, as a safe haven to runaway slaves, increasing the cost of retaining slaves, especially in the more northern Southern states).

For all you know, a successful rebellion of the South might have secured the existence of state-sponsored slavery in the western hemisphere well into the 20th century.

That seems quite unlikely, given the economics of slavery. If slavery ceased to be economically viable, its political support would have gone away as well. I can see it being replaced by a harsh regime of Jim Crow laws - precisely the regime that followed the Civil War anyway. But at some point between 1870 and 1900, I have no doubt, slavery would have peacefully been abandoned.

They almost immediately seceded upon Lincoln's election, which is in itself an act of aggression.

How so?

You mean the Union should have just ignored all military and political aggression from the South, like a bunch of weaklings--just capitulate to every demand, like a wimp.

What demands? As far as I know, the only thing they demanded is to be left alone. How does allowing a large, democratically-controlled territory to govern itself make you a "weakling"? And if it does, just how many hundreds of thousands of people's slaughter does showing your macho-ness justify?

What if I begin conspiring with a group of like-minded neighbors, and then start shelling the police station down the road? After all, if I "perceive" this station to be an aggressive military outpost, then my actions are justified, by your reasoning.

As a matter of principle, I support unlimited right of secession, down to individual land-owners. As a matter of practice, the seceding territory should make a viable political entity - which the South certainly did.

Forcing a large territory of which the vast majority wants independence to remain politically subject to a greater political entity is tyranny. It is precisely the reason the original 13 colonies revolted against British rule in the first place.

If the aggression of the Confederacy at Sumter is to be justified, then you ought to show that it was in response to aggression from the Union. But in early 1861, there was no such aggression. It isn't good enough to demonstrate that they expected this aggression at some unknown point in the future. I expect a lot of things to happen, but that doesn't mean I can preemptively shoot at anyone I feel like, does it? Here is the "aggression" that you think justified so much violence: Lincoln's election. In other words, they were angry at the North because they freely cast their vote for a candidate that they disliked.

Fort Sumter controls the sea route to Charleston. To quote Wikipedia:
"On December 26, 1860, six days after South Carolina declared its secession, U.S. Army Major Robert Anderson abandoned the indefensible Fort Moultrie and secretly relocated companies E and H (127 men, 13 of them musicians) of the 1st U.S. Artillery to Fort Sumter on his own initiative, without orders from Washington....

Over the next few months repeated calls for evacuation of Fort Sumter[12] from the government of South Carolina and then from Confederate Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard were ignored."

If South Carolina's secession was legitimate (a controversial point I would love to explore further), the union force in the Fort was trespassing on its land. Refusing repeated calls for evacuation would certainly have justified firing on those forces, which presented credible risk to the security of marine transport into Charleston.

Thus IF the secession was legitimate, the union forces were aggressive in maintaining military presence on South Carolina territory despite repeated calls to evacuate.

For example, I am sure that you will admit that an offensive attack can be justified, if it is sincerely intended to defend against an imminent threat. That is your excuse for the South's violence, in fact. They anticipated an invasion, and so they acted preemptively.

No, the South's violence had a better justification. They were shooting at a hostile military force located on a strategic location well within their territory. This is very different from, say, Israel's 1967 pre-emptive attack against Egypt (which could arguably be justified on preemptive grounds).

But the principle of self-defense also covers the case of Union "aggression" against the Confederacy. After all, a secession by the Confederacy would have destroyed the Union as it currently existed. How come you claim the right of self-defense for the Confederacy, but you do not extend this to the Union as well? The Union had as much right to exist as the Confederacy.

No! The Union had a right to exist as a political entity controlling the territory of the people who desire to belong to it. The North could have continued to exist as a political entity, and that existence was never threatened (either in word or in deed) by the South. The very same logic would have de-legitimised the American Revolutionary War as threatening Great Britain (which, at the opening of the war, included the 13 colonies). There is no way to legitimise the Revolutionary War (as all Americans by 1861 must have) and not legitimise Southern secession.

In the spirit of good-faith you so amply exhibit, I'll acknowledge one difference, namely that Southern citizens had representation in the Union parliament (Congress), while the colonies enjoyed no similar representation in the British Parliament. Imagine, however, an alternative history in which the colonies were afforded representation in Westminster. As a small minority, those representatives could not have averted the various taxes issued by Westminster and so resented in America. It is easy to imagine an American Revolutionary War erupting despite such representation.

But there is another principle we should consider as well: All wars have a political objective. Beyond the simple fact of who is attacking, who is defending, in order to evaluate whether or not a war is just, we have to ask, what were the political objectives? I have already pointed out that Germany was defending her own national territories in the second phase of WWII. Does that mean these defensive efforts were just? On a certain simplistic level, yes, everyone is allowed to defend themselves, if it is a case of national survival. But, two facts allow us to reach a more adult judgment. One, they started the war--the invasion of Germany was launched in response to their earlier aggression. And two, their political objectives were wrong--a totalitarian empire covering all of Europe and Russia. You don't get to start a war under these motivations, and then claim self-defense when you begin to lose.

You are certainly making a valid point. While traditional just-war theory (and international law in general) gives almost unlimited deference to the existing government of a country, my moral code gives very little such deference.

I am happy to hold conversation over the moral aspects of the Civil War at two separate levels. One respecting conventional notions of international law, according to which invasion of another country is very rarely justified. Assuming the legitimacy of Souther secession (which I am aware you may not), the North was clearly the aggressive side, both when the war is viewed as a whole, and even in its refusal to evacuation Fort Sumter.

Alternatively, we can "see through" national governments, and consider the war from a libertarian perspective. From that perspective, slavery is a great evil, an aggression which justifies the use of retaliatory force. But that justification is conditional upon the retaliatory force being both proportionate and aimed at the actual aggressors. In the Civil War, the North did neither.

You focus your judgement almost exclusively, it seems, on the uncontroversial good associated with elimination of slavery following the war. I have not seen you address the question of cost. If slavery could have been eliminated by murdering each and every plantation owner and others involved in the slavery institution, I wouldn't have objected. But the war caused the deaths of over 600,000 people, the vast majority of which had no personal responsibility for slavery.

And that, in practice, is the problem with wars. Even relatively-justified wars (say the first American invasion of Iraq) are problematic because they inevitably cause massive deaths of innocents. Death is worse than slavery.

Do us both a favor, in your future post, and distract me from the subject of the Civil War. Please expound on the "practical harm caused by Title II." I will admit that I don't see it.

I will, though not today. Let's focus on the Civil War first. As I see it, we have identified two core issues. First, the legitimacy of secession (irrespective of slavery). The second is whether the benefit of ending slavery justified the cost of the war, particularly (though not exclusively) in innocent lives.

I will try and find references to the harm of Title II. Such harm (which I will not try to overplay) has to be weighed against any benefits. The benefits cannot be assessed merely by looking at the state of discrimination against blacks in 1964 vs. today. My claim is that most of that benefit would have come even without Title II, thanks to both the other titles in the Act (specifically elimination of Jim Crow laws) with which I have no issue, and to evolving sentiments towards blacks in the South, all over America and internationally.

As evidence to my claim that the benefits of Title II, if any, are very limited, I suggest looking at one area to which Title II doesn't apply, namely racist speech. Racist speech is constitutionally protected. Moreover, racist speech is much cheaper than discrimination by commercial establishments. After all, a discriminating commercial establishment loses a willing customer. A racist columnist, newspaper or Internet blog suffers no such consequence.

By all reason, the amount of racist discrimination with the Act (but without Title II) would have thus been lower than the amount of racist speech. It is easy to see that while racist speech can be found, it is by any measure incredibly marginal in today's America. Hence, I conclude, even without Title II, racist discrimination by private commercial establishments would have been even more marginal in today's America.

[Spouter]

Let's focus on the Civil War first.

Cool. But I was starting to wonder if we hadn't reached an impasse on this question (the legitimacy of each side in the conflict). I had started another post in which I was going to propose a stalemate, just so we could return to 20th century questions that are more directly relevant to the Civil Rights Act. However, it would be supremely unreasonable to ignore your warnings that the Civil War discussion is a "distraction," badger you with a series of lengthy posts expounding on my opinions about this war, and then at the exact moment that you express a desire to enter into this question in greater depth, propose a stalemate. Besides, this will give you time to marshal your resources for the central question: Title II.

So absolutely, let us explore the Civil War. I only wanted to avoid the "Just War" debate, which is so complex. But, I am sure that you can list some basic definitions and principles that will help simplify these things. You are fairly talented at that.

In the meantime, I must make an effort to address your two questions.

First, the legitimacy of secession (irrespective of slavery). The second is whether the benefit of ending slavery justified the cost of the war, particularly (though not exclusively) in innocent lives.

I. The Legitimacy of the War.

Would it be fair to say that this is the normative question, because it deals with abstract ideals like Justice, whereas the second question of Costs approaches things from the positive side, because here we are more concerned with concrete facts (600,000 dead, etc.)? In either case, they are both fair questions.

Obviously, I do not find the secession of the Southern states to be "legitimate." But I can not immediately justify this opinion in terms of abstract principle and reductive definitions. The phenomenon of war seems so varied and complex that it is difficult to imagine one standard of measure that could capture all of the vicissitudes. A war might seem unnecessary and unjust to our modern eyes, but seem completely legitimate to the people of the time, and who can we say is really right? Also, the political objectives might be laudable, and the conduct of the war still itself be reprehensible. If the objective is more legitimate, does that justify a higher level of violence?

I can not immediately answer these questions in a general way, and so I must follow a more discursive method. I will try to sharpen my own concepts and categories through a criticism of yours, by examining a series of your comments and assertions, as they relate to the subject of legitimacy in war.

But first, on second thought, I can imagine one fundamental principle that I think you would agree with. What makes a war just is the political objectives that motivate it, and not the conduct by which it is carried out. In short, the end justifies the means. The Revolutionary war was just, in your opinion, not because of the particular tactics by which the fighting was carried out, but because the fighting was for a just cause.

The Union had a right to exist as a political entity controlling the territory of the people who desire to belong to it. The North could have continued to exist as a political entity, and that existence was never threatened (either in word or in deed) by the South. The very same logic would have de-legitimised the American Revolutionary War as threatening Great Britain (which, at the opening of the war, included the 13 colonies). There is no way to legitimise the Revolutionary War (as all Americans by 1861 must have) and not legitimise Southern secession.

There is a formidable knot of assumptions encapsulated in this thought. I have to pick it apart piece by piece.

The Union had a right to exist as a political entity controlling the territory of the people who desire to belong to it.

In principle, I am sure you would fail to recognize the legitimacy of the Union if even ten men object to it. Did you not say that you "support unlimited right of secession, down to individual land-owners"? However, you seem to recognize the problematic side-effects of such a policy, and you wish to mitigate the more disturbing implications: "As a matter of practice, the seceding territory should make a viable political entity - which the South certainly did." Fair enough. I am impressed that you are willing to admit the legitimacy of government under any conditions. It shows that your position is not completely inflexible.

You express the legitimacy of government in terms of "of the people who desire to belong to it." This is an old conception. Vox populi, vox dei. This concept is also known as popular sovereignty, or as wikipedia defines it: "the principle that the legitimacy of the state is created and sustained by the will or consent of its people." A dubious principle, no doubt, according to your thinking. Even I find it somewhat dubious.

What makes it suspect is that such a government will always follow the will of the majority, and as an inevitable side-effect will almost always trample over minority rights. However, sometimes we should trample over the minority, in my opinion. If we are talking about a hardcore minority of slave-mongers, who are attempting to violently form an illegitimate Confederacy as a haven for their moral perversions, then I say, yes, by all means, trample all over their rights! But, just because someone is in the minority, does not mean they should have to conform to the will of the majority, in every single case. That would not be in accordance with strict principles of normative justice.

I look at "popular sovereignty" not as an absolute principle, but as a good rule of thumb. The majority is right most of the time. We can argue this point later, of course, but let's just adopt it as a fundamental principle, for the sake of argument. According to this rule, we are forced to condemn the Confederacy. Their desire to secede from the Union was in clear contradiction to the will of the majority of Americans. This is proven by the outcome of the war itself. Lee was as competent a general as Grant was. Grant only had one real advantage: numerical superiority. The previous commanders appointed by Lincoln showed reluctance to use this weapon, and they prolonged the war unnecessarily as a result of their squeamishness and loss of nerve. Grant was able to effectively disarm the Confederacy, because he had more men to work with, and he was willing to use them.

The North could have continued to exist as a political entity, and that existence was never threatened (either in word or in deed) by the South.

Your assertion is phrased very carefully. Of course, the North would not have been destroyed by a successful revolt by the South. North, south, east, west--that is just abstract geography. Here is the concrete fact that you wish to avoid: the Union would have destroyed by the secession of the Confederacy. I understand that you consider the Union to be illegitimate, but in the 1860's, a majority of Americans thought it was legitimate, and they were willing to shed their blood on the battlefield in order to prove this point. Why does their blood weigh less in the scales of Justice, when compared with the sacrifices of the Confederacy?

The very same logic would have de-legitimised the American Revolutionary War as threatening Great Britain...

Perhaps. I am willing to question the motives behind the American Revolution. I know that there were vast tracts of timber that the British wanted to control exclusively. The enterprise doesn't sound so just and wholesome, when you phrase it in terms of timber rights, instead of "freedom" and "democracy." Also, the motives of the Founding Fathers were more complex than is usually assumed. They weren't fighting for more personal freedom, necessarily. Many thought that British authorities were too weak in their control over the mob, and that certain vices were allowed to flourish because of an atmosphere of moral laxity that is endemic to all monarchies, and they desired the power to suppress these problems directly, without having to wait for formal permission from the "crown." In the tradition of the Puritan revolutions, they fought, not for more, but for less freedom. Or rather, they fought for freedom from external parties, in order to more effeciently suppress the freedom of internal parties.

There is no way to legitimise the Revolutionary War... and not legitimise Southern secession.

This is where I turn to Paine. Jefferson gives a good sketch of the reasons for Revolution in his Declaration, but that is just another legal document really - dry and boring, almost, when compared to Common Sense. It took a British dude to effectively articulate the popular rage of the burgeoning American masses. His legacy faded in America somewhat, once the Revolution was over, but he certainly captured the imagination of the British working class after that.

I can think of a few major distinctions between the two wars which you would like to equate so closely to each other. In the Revolutionary War, the political object was the control of a colony on the other side of the Atlantic. In the Civil War, the objective boils down to a dispute between immediate neighbors. If it can related to British history at all, it must be closer to the wars with Ireland and Scotland, or perhaps to Cromwell's wars against the monarchy. Your historical analogy is not valid, in my opinion.

Paine points out that in the case of some national disaster, it would be highly inconvenient to wait for the arrival of orders by sail from Britain, before we act. For reasons like this, it was inconceivable that the then current state of affairs could survive for very long. American self-government was inevitable - the only question was whether to fight for it at that moment, or to put it off for another twenty years. To delay the inevitable would only allow the British to strengthen their position, leading to a more destructive and costly war. The moment for decisive action had arrived, and it was imperative to seize it promptly, to save everyone unnecessary pain and suffering.

From this I infer another basic principle. Not only does the end justifies the means, but it is always better to employ these means decisively. If the end justifies it, then we must strike first with overwhelming violence. If we allow our enemy to marshal his forces, when we had an opportunity to end the conflict earlier, that is nothing but ineffective use of means, and does no one any good. If our objective is a worthy one, then there is a moral imperative to use decisive violence. If a terrible injustice is artificially propped up beyond its expiration date, then far greater calamities can be expected to ensue.

So to your thought quoted above, I answer: by the standard of "popular sovereignty," we must judge the Union to be more legitimate, because more Americans gave their consent to it, which outweighs the claims of one rebellious minority. We have an objective way to measure the popularity of the Union: they were consistently able to field more troops than the Confederacy, and that is the only reason they won the war. Never forget that the Confederacy were the first to issue an act of conscription. As to your contention that Southern secession was not aggression against the "north," I agree. But it was aggression against the Union. The existence of the Union and the Confederacy were mutually exclusive, and could not be reconciled (except through war). To support the cause of one is to support the destruction of the other. As to your contention that there is a valid analogy to be made between the Civil War and the Revolutionary War, I completely disagree. The frontier separating the two warring nations in the former example was the Mason-Dixon line. In the latter, it was the Atlantic Ocean. There is a big difference.

Forcing a large territory of which the vast majority wants independence to remain politically subject to a greater political entity is tyranny. It is precisely the reason the original 13 colonies revolted against British rule in the first place.

First, some definitions. All government is tyranny, in some way, on some level. Even the most humane and enlightened governments that we have ever seen - democratic republics on the Western model - practice some form of coercion against their neighbors and even against their own citizens (routinely practice it, in fact: taxes, conscription, and so on). The only thing that justifies this coercion is that it is based on the will of the majority (popular sovereignty). But we have seen that the majority will sometimes unfairly impose their will on a minority, despite the safeguards of republican institutions. That is what you believe happened in the Civil War. I can agree that this is a case of the majority imposing their will on a minority by force. I do not agree that it was unfair.

I have learned something interesting about your position, through the course of this debate. I wonder if it is representative of libertarianism in general? In a nutshell, it is this: although you argue that all coercion is illegitimate, there are certain forms of coercion that you do accept. This is an unavoidable implication of your defense of the Confederacy. If some wars are more legitimate than others, such as the Revolutionary War, then that means that it is legitimate to enforce one's will on others through violence. All war is the attempt to impose your will on an adversary through the force of arms. If any war can be considered legitimate, then that means that it is sometimes legitimate to use force to obtain your objectives. It does not matter that you are seeking a defensive objective, or if you are pursuing a "just" revolution. The objective, for our purposes, is immaterial, because the means are the exact same in all cases: violence. War is nothing but organized violence.

If that is indeed your position, I agree completely. As I have said, the ends justify the means. If your objective is truly just, it would be almost illegitimate to not use extreme violence in its pursuit. Perhaps we can agree on principle here, but I totally disagree with your application of this principle.

One mistake, as I see it, is that you already have the Union split into two in your mind's eye. The Confederacy did not come into existence until 1861, but it is almost as if you imagine it already as an independent nation in the 1850's or something, and then this aggressive foreign power, the Union, swept down from the North and tried to conquer them. Now, I agree that the two wars are comparable, because in both cases a smaller power was trying to make itself independent of a larger power through military violence. Both were attempting to forge a new nation through bloodshed.

The analogy ends there. In the one case, we have a colony fighting against their imperial masters from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. In the other case, we have a conflict between the states of a constitutional federation and the central authority of that federation. In other words, a war between immediate neighbors. It is more analogous for that reason to the war of Britain against Scotland or Ireland, rather than the war of Britain against the American Revolutionaries. Now, just because your analogy is false does not mean that the secessionary cause was automatically illegitimate. I can imagine a scenario in which the cause of a rebellious Confederacy is justifiable - there is certainly no normative law that dictates that it is always illegitimate to secede from a Federal Union. Earlier, you wanted to disregard the question of who fired first. I can agree that, if the secession was legitimate, then it doesn't matter who fired first. In fact, if the cause was truly just, then the Confederacy was under a normative obligation to fire first.

As I have indicated, the conduct of the war is immaterial, when it comes to the legitimacy of the political objectives. If the objective is just, then that justifies almost any measure, including an unprovoked attack against Fort Sumter. But, the question then obviously becomes, was the secessionist cause legitimate? You would like to examine this question "irrespective of slavery." I can not follow you there. To me, that is like trying to examine the principles of the combustion, irrespective of oxygen. If we fail to consider slavery, then we fail to understand the secessionist cause. It was predicated on slavery.

What demands? As far as I know, the only thing they demanded is to be left alone.

Exactly! They wanted to be left alone to practice slavery.

How does allowing a large, democratically-controlled territory to govern itself make you a "weakling"?

The Union had already demonstrated weakness, at its very inception, when they failed to address the problem of slavery in a meaningful way at the Constitutional Convention. The Constitution, like the Declaration of Independence, is predicated on a fundamental respect for man's inalienable rights. If the Founding Fathers had truly believed in this, then they should have never accepted slavery, because there is no institution of social control on Earth that alienates man from his "God given" rights like slavery. For reasons of political expediency, they compromised. It shows a certain weakness of faith in the reality of these "inalienable" rights - an unwholesome willingness to embrace exceptions, like slavery. They knew it was wrong, that it went against all of their republican ideals, but they went ahead with it anyway. That shows that their ideals were fairly weak. They were not strong enough to enforce these ideals against the slavemongers - especially not with powerful empires like Britain and France lurking about, waiting to exploit the first sign of dissension.

By 1860, the situation had changed. Now the Union was in a position of strength, and could afford to enforce our ideals throughout the land. In 1860, 1 out of every 7 Americans belonged to another American. 4 million in total (my source here is the Ken Burns documentary). In a nation whose rapid industrial growth was based on free labor, this was a constant source of irritation. It was also in conflict with our fundamental republican ideals. How can you take any pride as an American in our political ideals, when 4 million Americans languish in undeserved servitude?

Slavery could have been abolished in America peacefully, I agree. But the Union had compromised at the inception - now it was the slavemongers' turn to compromise. The South, if they had behaved more like adults, would have foreseen the inevitable end of this evil institution, and they would have begun to prepare themselves for a difficult and painful transition to a new type of society, free of slavery, long before the conflict had reached the boiling point. The writing was on the wall, after all. The population was 21 million in the North, 9 million in the South, in 1860. The South knew that their stagnant rates of growth were an effect of a slave economy. Until this point in history, they had been able to obstruct strong abolitionist measures in the Legislature. They were even able to force through positively favorable measures, like the Fugitive Slave Act. But when Lincoln was elected, their minds became inflamed by paranoia. Now they knew, or strongly suspected, that they would no longer be able to obstruct national abolition through the legitimate democratic process.

And so they turned to the less legitimate method of military force. It was all in defense of slavery.

Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone 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.

I am always suspicious when the rebellious party tries to make their case by the non-violent means of moral suasion, in the legislature, in the press, and then when they fail (because all intelligent and open minded people were against slavery in 1860), they drop the pen, and take up the sword. They can't change people's minds by rational argumentation, so they resort to brute force. They had "four score and seven years" to try to convince people that slavery should be preserved. When their arguments seemed to be failing, they tried to gain their objectives through violence. Highly illegitimate.

One last note on legitimacy. In Common Sense, Paine urges Americans to act immediately, because delay will cause an irreversible deterioration of the situation. This relates to my second principle, that if the end justifies the means, then the means must be employed decisively, for the greatest effectiveness. That doesn't just refer to the level of violence of the action, but to the timing of the action. In the 1770's, the time for action on this issue had arrived. Now, de Tocqueville in the 1830's thought that a secessionary Confederacy could triumph over the Union. That was the time to act, right then. But, de Tocqueville also points out that this was unlikely at the time, because all of the states, including those in the South, benefited from the Union. So when they had an opportunity to act with success, they chose to wait. Then, after they had reaped all of the benefits, when it was too late, they finally decided to press their normative rights with more forceful methods. In other words, their timing was bad, which shows bad faith. If you value your freedom so highly, why did you not strike with decisive action at the moment when you could have won, in the 1830's? Why did you wait until the exact moment when the cause became truly hopeless, in the 1860's? Since you have already consented to 30 years of cooperation with Union, why not bend a little further?

I am trying to follow a more organized method, but I still find myself rambling. I have not yet begun to bring my arguments to a close, but I have still not addressed the question of costs that you introduced earlier. And so...

II. The Cost of the War.

...just how many hundreds of thousands of people's slaughter does showing your macho-ness justify?

First, let us review the numbers. Over 600,000 died, which was 2% of the population. It was not as bad as Haiti, however:

It has recently been estimated that the slave rebellion resulted in the death of 350,000 Haitians and 50,000 European troops.

I admit that 350,000 is a smaller figure than 600,000, but I invite you to consider the size of Haiti relative to the States. In such a smaller society, each death has a wider impact.

To suddenly and violently lose 2% of your population indicates a very destructive war - one would be hard pressed to find any one family that wasn't directly impacted. If the impact of 600,000 is so extensive in a populous nation like America, to cull 350,000 humans from such a smaller society boggles the mind. Haiti must have been a true slaughterhouse! I am quite sure that the security of noncombatant civilians were respected by neither side.

Now, despite the apocalyptic scale of destruction suffered by Haiti, this was certainly a just war. The political objective was above reproach: freedom from slavery. That is what the rebels were fighting for. It is impossible to impeach these motives. Because of the desperate, almost genocidal conditions at the time, it is difficult even to criticize their tactics. But the question of tactics is immaterial, when we seek to determine whether a war was just or legitimate.

Now, of all your statements, I found this the strangest:

Death is worse than slavery.

That obviously depends on your value system. If you value survival over freedom from humiliating servitude, then yes, death is worse. But many people would prefer to fight and die. The people of Haiti, for example. Napoleon suffered the loss of an entire army in the attempt to bring Haiti back to discipline. The general who led this disastrous expedition wrote back in one of his last dispatches, "We must destroy all the mountain negroes, men and women, sparing only children under twelve years of age. We must destroy half the negroes of the plains..." This would take a much, much larger force than Napoleon could spare. It proves the zeal and determination of a slave army, the willingness to endure any hardship. Slaves, once they have successfully fought for their freedom, can never be brought back into the same chains, even by the most extreme coercion. They will gladly die first, and inspired with confidence by the memory of their previous rebellion, they will remain combative forever. Even if you repress them by the most extreme violence, even if you bribe their leaders and demoralize them by every conceivable measure, every peace still turns out to be a temporary lull, and the slave masses will inevitably rise again, until every vestige of their former servitude is abolished. They may be bought to heel by new masters, but they will never wear the old chains again. Even the measures advocated by general Leclerc, quoted above, may not have proven adequate.

We can measure the determination of our adversary by the price he is willing to pay. Because Leclerc was advocating a policy of extermination, I take that as evidence of his enemy's willingness to fight to the death. The large number of fatalities also indicates the refusal to submit, even under the threat of death.

It is not only rebellious slaves who demonstrate this intransigent combativeness and contempt for death. We also find it also among the rebellious subjects of a seceding colony, as you are well aware: "Give me Liberty, or give me Death!"

I am proud of these 600,000 dead - on the Union and the Confederate side! I am still astounded by Confederate efforts. Their generals were energetic and aggressive; their troops were obstinate, daring, and murderously competent. The energetic and competent efforts of the enemy make the Union invasion seem even more impressive. They were opposed every step of the way, but still they continued to slog on.

Every one of my nation's wars ends with a number of dead and crippled Americans. But if the goal is a worthy one, then the cost is legitimate. This 600,000 dead is an acceptable cost, if it preserves a Union free of slavery. The Haitians were willing to pay with the blood of 350,000 of their own people in order to secure the complete removal of this evil institution from their territories, which must have a much higher proportion of their population. At least we got off lighter than the Haitians. In fact, considering the end result, 600,000 seems like something of a bargain. I actually consider the Union cause in the Civil War to be more legitimate than that of the American Revolutionaries in the 1770's.

I understand that you want to cast aspersions on the Union's motives in this war. The central motive was to preserve a fragile Union, torn apart by slavery. Aside from this, there were economic motives, and these do indeed call into question the purity of the Union's original motives, somewhat. However, the Confederate cause was completely illegitimate. They selfishly plunged the nation into disaster in order to preserve slavery. Even if you can not see the Union as the good guys, surely you can admit that the Confederacy were the bad guys.

* * *

I am sure that my arguments have failed to convince you. I find this kind of "Just War" debate to be highly complex, and it seems to me that I have barely even begun to sketch the foundations of a solid argument. In abstraction, it should be easy to determine which side is more legitimate in the conflict, but in concrete reality, the complexities of the historical record are difficult to unravel. I will admit that the Union did not selflessly launch a war to end slavery. They launched a war to preserve the Union, which was seriously threatened by slavery. It is easier in a way to sympathize with the Confederacy, because they bravely opposed an overwhelming force with defensive tactics. The normative benefit of the doubt usually goes to the defender. But, it doesn't take much effort to cast the Union cause in defensive terms. Secession was act of aggression against the Union, which Lincoln tried to defend by force (requiring an invasion of the rebellious territories).

There is no way I can complete these complex arguments, however, without some feedback from you. I need to know what you think of the general principles I have proposed: 1), the end justifies the means, and 2), the means should be decisively and even ruthlessly employed for maximum effect (assuming the end is legitimate). Am I right to draw a distinction between the objective behind a war and the conduct by which it is pursued? I see this as analogous to Clausewitz's distinction between strategy and tactics. If the strategic goals are legitimate, then that justifies all of the tactics by which we attempt to realize these goals.

To attempt one last tangential look back at the original topic of debate, I will point out that we both agree that discrimination against Blacks in the 1950's and 60's ought to have been opposed. The use of the word "ought" implies that this is a normative imperative. In other words, you agree in principle with the objective behind the Civil Rights Act, but you take issue with the tactics through which this objective was pursued. I think I understand your position now. It is similar to my position on drug prohibition. I agree with the prohibitionists that drug abuse is scourge to society, and should be opposed by effective tactics. Legislation that criminalizes the sale and use of recreational drugs is not effective. By providing a strong incentive for smuggling, it actually causes the black market to expand, and makes the problem much worse.

But then again, I don't think you are arguing that the Civil Rights Act actually made the problem of racist discrimination worse. In the true spirit of honest debate, you seem to admit that it might have actually helped a little. But, we will return to these questions at our leisure, after we have exhausted our current debate on legitimacy in war.

Am I at the edge of a slippery slope here? In my attempt to define what constitutes a just war, have I already begun to adopt the position that "might makes right"? I am of course open to criticism on this point.

From the mass of disorganized rambling above, if I had to pick one assertion that I believe would advance the debate, it is this - that the existence of the Confederacy and the Union were diametrically opposed by their fundamental nature. The Confederacy, by definition, was predicated on secession from the Union. If any state secedes from the Union, then the parts are no longer unified, are they? In that case, it is no longer a Union. The objectives of each side in the conflict were mutually exclusive. To affirm one implies the negation of the other. When I affirm Lincoln's goal to preserve the Union, that automatically puts me in opposition to the goals of the Confederacy. Similarly, to declare oneself in a favor of an independent Confederacy, is to declare oneself for the destruction of the Union.

Is my reasoning sound here? I probably need some intelligent criticism to help me calibrate my own thinking on these questions. I am sure you will give everything an attentive reading, as always. You have already helped me with some occasional errors, such as my misuse of de Tocqueville. I do not fear a just rebuke from a thoughtful critic; in fact, that can only make my reasoning more sound. As always, I appreciate your efforts.

[Eran]

Before going into details, I owe you an explanation.

In discussing of the legitimacy of the South's position in the Civil War, I have deviated from my normal position and adopted a more mainstream one so as to facilitate discussion.

As a matter of principle, I am sorry to disappoint you, I don't believe any government can ever be fully legitimate. Having said that, however, it would be silly to suggest that all governments (or all government actions) are equally illegitimate. Clearly, 2012 Denmark is better than 1939 Germany, and the American Revolutionary War is more justified than WW I.

It is with the aim of facilitating a meaningful discussion of the relative merits of North and South in the War that I adopted a more conventional line.


There are at least two different ways of transitioning from a conventional, government-ruled society to "my" anarchist vision. One is through gradual diminution of the scope of legitimate action of a central government. One example is Tomasi's Free Market Fairness suggestion that property rights are elevated (re-elevated?) to the same level as freedom of speech and other civil liberties. Not inviolable, but requiring compelling government interest before they can be violated. A next step would be the erection of a wall of separation between state and economy (akin to state and church separation in the US) and elimination of victimless crimes and government provision of most public services (education, roads, police protection, etc.).

An alternative is to see "balkanisation" whereby government functions and sovereignty are transitioned to more and more local level. The US, for example, could return to its original Federal model, perhaps even to the Articles of Confederation. Allowing secession would be an important component in disciplining higher levels of government.

The end-state of unlimited secession is the same as the end-state of reduction in scope of legitimate activities of a central government - a market anarchy.

Thus I can consistently advocate an act of secession as moving us "in the right direction", just as I would support a move from public schools to a voucher-based system (despite my ultimate objection even to vouchers).


On the question of whether the end justifies the means, and allowing for the very broad scope of the question, I would answer in the negative. The context in which that question is usually applied, "means" means assaulting innocent people, while "ends" means, at best, eliminating injustices done (or threatened against) other people.

As a matter of principle, I reject such calculus. But being a reasonable person, I acknowledge that certain emergency situations (understood quite narrowly) allow a temporary violation of some people's rights to prevent great and irreversible harm to others.

Again, as part of facilitating a discussion of the relative merits of the Civil War, I am willing to adopt a more mainstream position comparing the retrospective benefits and damages caused by the war.

What makes it suspect is that such a government will always follow the will of the majority, ...

Before you go further, I'd like to draw an important distinction between a government that follows the will of the majority, and one that is considered legitimate by the majority. I am arguing (again, from a temporary "mainstreamed" position) that a government perceived as legitimate by the majority is much more legitimate than one which isn't.

The American government today is considered legitimate by the vast majority of Americans, even if 50% or even more object to any specific government policy or action.

The Union government was considered illegitimate by a large majority of the people in the South. Therein lies the justification of secession.

I look at "popular sovereignty" not as an absolute principle, but as a good rule of thumb.

Popular sovereignty is a secondary principle to the question of legitimacy. If government is accepted as legitimate by the vast majority of society, a majority-based mechanism for determining specific government policies makes sense. But if the primary condition doesn't hold, majority is tyranny.

How else can you condemn, for example, an Iraqi takeover of Kuwait or a German take-over of Belgium? How else do you justify the American Revolutionary War? In each case, the majority (viewed across both political entities) favours the take-over. Historic accidents (prior to the move, the two entities were politically separate) doesn't seem to have any normative relevance.

No - with the vast majority of Southerners refusing to accept the legitimacy of the Union government, using guns to force them to stay in the union is tyranny, pure and simple.

We can separately discuss whether the existence of slavery in the South eliminates the legitimacy of the Southern government. To some extent, the more "criminal" a regime, the less legitimate it is. And I can accept an argument that the South was, due to slavery, less legitimate than the North. But the difference is one of degree. The North, throughout the war, allowed slavery in the border states. The North instituted conscription which is akin the slavery (worse, as the life of a conscript are placed in danger). Further, and this will lead us to the second point, the North engaged in a war of aggression that resulted in the loss of some 600,000 lives!

Why does their blood weigh less in the scales of Justice, when compared with the sacrifices of the Confederacy?

Blood carries no weight. Germans gave their blood during WW II. What of it?

The difference between North and South is that Northern troops invaded Southern territory with the purpose of imposing their political rule over the people of the South. The people of the South merely wanted to be left alone, and run their own lives.

Let me ask you the following key question. If the South didn't have slavery, and merely wanted to secede due to differences over taxation or tariffs, would you still have supported the North's war aims as legitimising hostilities?

If you answer in the affirmative, please explain how the South's secession is normatively different from the American declaration of independence. If your answer is negative, i.e. if only the existence of slavery makes the South's secession illegitimate, how is the North, which allowed slavery in the border states, in principle, more legitimate than the South?

Also, the motives of the Founding Fathers were more complex than is usually assumed.

The motives of the majority of Americans who supported the War of Independence are quite clear - they wanted to "rule themselves" rather than be ruled by London.

Your historical analogy is not valid, in my opinion.

How is the question of geography normatively relevant? If the Americans had the right to seek independence from London, why was that right dependent on the existence of an Atlantic Ocean separating them?

Paine points out that in the case of some national disaster, it would be highly inconvenient to wait for the arrival of orders by sail from Britain, before we act. For reasons like this, it was inconceivable that the then current state of affairs could survive for very long.

That is a very poor normative argument. It argues for a level of autonomy, but not of complete independence for the colonies.

If our objective is a worthy one, then there is a moral imperative to use decisive violence.

A big IF, which we will explore below. However, the logic of the argument assumes that the passage of time will tend to (1) increase the cost of the war, and (2) NOT diminish its justification.

When we come to discuss the justification for the war in terms of retrospective abolition of slavery (which we both agree wasn't part of the original aims of the North), we would have to consider the second point, namely whether or not it was reasonable to expect that slavery will, sooner or later, be abolished even without the war. If that was a reasonable expectation, we would have to conclude that the passage of time would tend to diminish the justification for the war, and thus the argument that striking sooner is better than striking later is wrong.

Additionally, delay in starting a war can allow for non-military solutions to be developed, clearly a normatively superior outcome.

The frontier separating the two warring nations in the former example was the Mason-Dixon line. In the latter, it was the Atlantic Ocean. There is a big difference.

Why is it a normatively-relevant difference?

All government is tyranny, in some way, on some level.

I couldn't agree more. I am looking forward to a discussion in which you will explain why, in light of the above, you still support the legitimacy of some (necessarily tyrannical) governments.

I can agree that this is a case of the majority imposing their will on a minority by force. I do not agree that it was unfair.

What is your definition of "fairness"?

In a nutshell, it is this: although you argue that all coercion is illegitimate, there are certain forms of coercion that you do accept. This is an unavoidable implication of your defense of the Confederacy. If some wars are more legitimate than others, such as the Revolutionary War, then that means that it is legitimate to enforce one's will on others through violence

My initial remarks above should have clarified the real contradiction between the views I present in support of the South's side, and my principled objection to all governments.

It is legitimate, in my opinion, to use violence defensively. I view the Revolutionary War as well as the South's war efforts during the Civil War as precisely that - violence used defensively.

"Coercion" and "Forcing your will on others" (synonymous?), while sounding negative, aren't normatively deterministic. We would normally say that a rapist is forcing his will on his victim. But one can equally say that the woman is using force (as she struggles) to force her will (not to be raped) on the rapist.

We can only tell who is right by noting that the woman and not the rapist has a right to determine what to do with her body - she is a self-owner.

Similarly, when I use a gun to scare away prospective robbers, am I not "forcing my will" not to be robbed on them?


Thus the key question is - who has better claims over the territories of the South?

From my principled perspective I would claim that individual land-owners (assuming they justly acquired the title to their land) are the ones having the best claim. But surely a government viewed as legitimate by the majority of such landlords has a better claim to that land than does a different government which doesn't enjoy that legitimacy.


Here the issue of slavery, I have to admit, becomes relevant again. Arguably, the slaves may have had, at the start of the war, a better claim for the land than did their owners. But reducing the question to the individual level only hastens the second part of our discussion - did freeing slaves justify killing innocents?

If any war can be considered legitimate, then that means that it is sometimes legitimate to use force to obtain your objectives. It does not matter that you are seeking a defensive objective, or if you are pursuing a "just" revolution. The objective, for our purposes, is immaterial, because the means are the exact same in all cases: violence. War is nothing but organized violence.

I hope by now you understand my position. The use of defensive force is, in my opinion, justified, even as the use of aggressive force isn't. The objective is far from immaterial. It is critical to the justification of the use of force.

The position you cite above will find an aggressor and a defender equally guilty in the use of force. This may be the pacifist position, but it isn't mine.

But, the question then obviously becomes, was the secessionist cause legitimate? You would like to examine this question "irrespective of slavery." I can not follow you there. To me, that is like trying to examine the principles of the combustion, irrespective of oxygen. If we fail to consider slavery, then we fail to understand the secessionist cause. It was predicated on slavery.

OK - you seem to have answered my previous question. You would have had a very different attitude towards Southern secession if the secession wasn't motivated by the desire to maintain the institution of slavery. How does that reconcile with your previous arguments about "popular sovereignty"?

A more detailed examination of the historic circumstances shows that the native narrative whereby the South fought to maintain slavery while the North fought to abolish it is highly misleading.

Slavery in 1861 wasn't immediately threatened. The threat to the institution was long-term, due to the expected gradual increase in the weight of non-slave states with the introduction of new territories as "free states". Nor, as I keep stating, did Lincoln fight the war to abolish slavery. As you recall, we started this debate with my claim that slavery was an indirect cause of the war. Long-term concerns over the maintenance of the institution of slavery motivated (in part) the South to secede. The direct cause of the war was Lincoln's desire to maintain the Union. Does that distinction not make a difference, in your eyes?

Exactly! They wanted to be left alone to practice slavery.

Yet Lincoln made it clear that they would be free to continue and practice slavery even if they stayed in the Union. The border states continued to practice slavery even after the Emancipation Proclamation!

The most you could argue then was that they wanted to be left alone so as not to risk a much later imposition of abolition. Not quite the same, is it?

And so they turned to the less legitimate method of military force. It was all in defense of slavery.

Again, your narrative would have been much more compelling had Lincoln declared a war to free slaves. Or had the secession come after a comprehensive Emancipation Proclamation (not one limited to the rebel states).

Earlier you mentioned the weight of numbers of Northern troops. The Northern troops decidedly didn't risk their lives to free slaves. They did so to preserve the union.

We can judge the war in two ways. Either based on the intentions of the warring sides, or based on the ultimate outcome.

In terms of intentions, the North didn't intend to free slaves. It merely intended to maintain the Union.

In terms of ultimate outcome, the positive outcome of abolition came at a horrific cost. Was it worth it?

Why did you wait until the exact moment when the cause became truly hopeless, in the 1860's? Since you have already consented to 30 years of cooperation with Union, why not bend a little further?

The balance of power was shifting in favour of the North over the South. The South has attempted to use diplomatic / political means to maintain Union policies with which it could be tolerably comfortable. When that failed, and fearing further deterioration (from their perspective) following Lincoln's inauguration, they moved.

Given the shifting balance in power, isn't your logic supportive of the North waiting 20-30 years?









Moving on the the cost of war, I don't understand why you bring Haiti as a relevant example. Why not look at Brazil instead?

That obviously depends on your value system. If you value survival over freedom from humiliating servitude, then yes, death is worse. But many people would prefer to fight and die.

And that is their right. As long as the life their risk is theirs, or that of their masters. It isn't their right to risk the lives of innocent so as to secure their freedom.

When I said "death is worse than slavery" I made an obvious statement. Any slave who preferred death to slavery could have, at almost any time, commit suicide. Very few (if any) did. By their choice they showed that they valued their own lives over slavery.

Slaves, once they have successfully fought for their freedom, can never be brought back into the same chains, even by the most extreme coercion.

Spartacus and the Third Servile War.

I am proud of these 600,000 dead - on the Union and the Confederate side!

This is a horrible statement!

It is one thing to risk your own life for a just cause - indeed a cause to be proud. It is a different thing altogether to take the lives of innocents who didn't choose to die in pursuit of your cause, no matter how just.

This 600,000 dead is an acceptable cost, if it preserves a Union free of slavery.

How can you tell? What if the cost was 6,000,000? Or 20,000,000?

What if you knew that slavery would have been abolished anyway 20 years later? 10 years later?

Is ANY cost in life a price worth paying for shortening slavery by ANY period? If not, how can you judge whether 600,000 was a worthy cost at the time?

Even if you can not see the Union as the good guys, surely you can admit that the Confederacy were the bad guys.

The Confederacy's motivations were also mixed. In part, they fought against tariffs imposed by the Union - a perfectly legitimate cause. In part they fought to preserve their local culture, only part of which was based on slavery. Much of it was a replication of English land-based aristocratic practices which, in England, survived for centuries without slavery (though based on illegitimate acquisition of land titles).

Secession was act of aggression against the Union, which Lincoln tried to defend by force (requiring an invasion of the rebellious territories).

Herein lies the crux of the matter. Let me ask you a hypothetical. Imagine slavery was already abolished in the South, and the South still wanted to secede for other reasons (e.g. tariffs). Clearly, the normative argument for the Union's justification would have been the same - the South would still have been viewed as an aggressor against the North. Under such a scenario, would you still have backed the North?

I need to know what you think of the general principles I have proposed: 1), the end justifies the means, and 2), the means should be decisively and even ruthlessly employed for maximum effect (assuming the end is legitimate). Am I right to draw a distinction between the objective behind a war and the conduct by which it is pursued? I see this as analogous to Clausewitz's distinction between strategy and tactics. If the strategic goals are legitimate, then that justifies all of the tactics by which we attempt to realize these goals.

I am wearing, as it were, two hats. One of a market anarchist, and one as a more traditional "Just War" advocate. Let me answer your questions twice, wearing each of those hats in turn.

1. As a market anarchist, I don't see government as morally privileged. An act by a government action should be judged by exactly the same standard as that of a private citizen. As a rule, it is impermissible to initiate force against innocents. Period.

The means have to be as legitimate as the end. One cannot justify killing innocent people as means towards the end of freeing slaves, for example. The rights of people (including, most importantly, but not exclusively, their right as self-owners to resist physical harm to their bodies) are side-constraints limiting the boundaries of legitimate action, and cannot be weighed against the benefits of such right violations.

I may accept rare emergency exceptions when relatively minor and temporary right violations are morally (though not justly) justified. But the victims of such exceptions are still owed compensation when the temporary emergency is over.

If the means are legitimate, i.e. only target the guilty, I have no issue with their decisive and ruthless deployment. A great example is political assassination which, if targeting exclusively those guilty of murder, can easily be justified.

2. As a Just War theorist, I would insist on both just cause for the war (the imminent danger to innocent life) AND the just prosecution of the war, based on differentiated treatment of active combatants on the one hand, and all others on the other. Means falling outside the just conduct parameters do not justify the end of winning the war.

I think I understand your position now. It is similar to my position on drug prohibition. I agree with the prohibitionists that drug abuse is scourge to society, and should be opposed by effective tactics. Legislation that criminalizes the sale and use of recreational drugs is not effective. By providing a strong incentive for smuggling, it actually causes the black market to expand, and makes the problem much worse.

The ineffectiveness of most forms of government intervention is only one part of my objections. True, the drug war caused much more harm than good. Drugs are still available, but at higher prices and lower quality than they would have otherwise. At the same time, huge number of people have become victims of the war.

The same reasoning can be used to object to the Civil War - 600,000 casualties is too high a price to have paid for what I consider likely shortening of the institution of slavery by a few decades.

However, I do not subscribe to the "end justifies the means" in public policy generally. I would object to drug prohibition even if such prohibition could be effectively (and with reasonable cost) enforced. People have a right to do dangerous things, provided they don't violate other people's property rights in the process.

The same logic applies to my objection to Title II. People have a right to act immorally, as long as the immoral act doesn't extend to violating other people's property rights (including property rights in their own bodies). It is legitimate to use non-aggressive means to dissuade them from acting immorally (education, persuasion, social pressure, consumer action, boycotts, etc.), but it is not legitimate to initiate force against them (since they didn't initiate force themselves).

Is my reasoning sound here? I probably need some intelligent criticism to help me calibrate my own thinking on these questions.

True - the objectives of the Confederacy and the Union were mutually exclusive. As are the objectives of slave owner and his slaves. The point is that mutually exclusive objectives can still allow identification of a clear right and wrong side in a conflict.

And just as you would never justify a slave-owner using force to restrict the escape of his slave, so I think you should acknowledge that the desire to maintain the Union cannot justify the use of arms to restrict the secession of an unwilling section thereof.

[Spouter]

My Civil War posts are becoming longer and more elaborate, but probably with less and less relevance to the immediate topic at hand.

The more I play out this line of attack, the more I lose faith in my ultimate objective. Like the Americans in Vietnam after Tet, I find myself simply going through the motions. There does not seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel.

You have expressed an interest in this subsidiary subject, so if you want to see my new Civil War arguments, they will be posted below. Because it is embarrassingly long, I will give you the abstract here, in case you would prefer not to read the entire thing.

I try to reduce our respective positions to their most elementary foundations. I propose that the difference is to be found on an emotional level. We are both working from the same basic set of facts, our concepts are connected through the same basic process (logical thought), so the difference can only be idiosyncratic characteristics of a personal nature - we both look at the same facts, and we each make a different emotional assessment, or evaluation.

Reaching this point, I would call it a stalemate. A strong emotional attachment to a certain ideal can not be swayed by arguments or facts. In effect, all of our deeply entrenched evaluations (convictions) flow from our inner nature, which is in each human absolutely individual and unique. Because the difference can only be reduced to individual peculiarities, not of thought, but of feeling, that is the same thing as calling it absolutely irreducible. If the basis of the argument is irreducible, then further debate may be a waste of time.

But I can't help but probe your outer defenses a little bit, although your position seems impregnable. I try to inspire you with the same horror of slavery that I feel, but on a second read-through, all it seems that I do effectively communicate is my indignation. I attack your dependency on hypothetical reasoning, which I believe confuses verisimilitude with probability. I try to demonstrate my own sincere appreciation for the tragedy and injustice of the Civil War (which suggests in a backhand way that you fail, on the other hand, to appreciate the true horrors of slavery). There is a cursory review of a few other of your comments that have been neglected in the course of my ramblings. I add a lengthy postscript, in which I try to simplify the terms of debate (in favor of my own position, of course).

Add any comments or criticisms you would like, if you care to proceed on the Civil War debate. I think the positions are hopelessly deadlocked, but the topic is interesting. Probably any topic we debate will become hopelessly deadlocked. If you think I have missed something important, if you have anything at all to say on this subject, then by all means, fire away. I will try to give everything a fair reading. But, I would like to explore some other directions, in the meantime.

Your last post began with some interesting ideological disclosures. I would like to discuss these.

As a matter of principle, I am sorry to disappoint you, I don't believe any government can ever be fully legitimate.

I never said you did. Did I? Why would I, since I hold the same opinion? How many times do I have to say it? All government is unjust. There are varying degrees of injustice, but in all forms of government, there is some. Even under the most benign forms of government, someone somewhere is being forced to do something (or not do something) against their own will - pay taxes, serve a prison sentence, something. It might be something as benign as a zoning ordinance that requires you to mow your lawn regularly. That ordinance is a coercive measure. All coercion is unjust, in some way.

All I meant was that I am happy to see you admit the legitimacy of government, or war, under any conditions at all, in any degree whatsoever. This is further proof that you are not an absolutist about these things. I understand that you reserve the right to claim that one government is more just and legitimate than another in practice, and still condemn government as unjust and illegitimate in principle. In fact, that describes my own position exactly.

So why not break out some more definitions? There are two types of legitimacy: relative legitimacy and absolute legitimacy. I thank you for your ideological disclosures, but they are not really necessary. I had already inferred that, when speaking of the legitimacy of Southern secession, you were speaking of the relative form, and not the absolute (at first I was confused on this point, but I have had it straight for the last two or three exchanges).

I believe that the sub-debate on the Civil War has served its purpose. From this point on, we can simply agree to disagree - call it a stalemate. We can both agree on the following: the war aims of the Union fall short of absolute legitimacy, as do the motives for secession. On the relative scale, you rate secession as closer to the absolute ideal; I say the Union cause comes closer. The important thing is that we agree that both sides fall short.

If we are going to continue the Civil War debate, then I think we should first have the Just War debate, so we can straighten out our definitions. The language of "ends" and "means" is critical for such a discussion. You seem to have some confusion here.

On the question of whether the end justifies the means, and allowing for the very broad scope of the question, I would answer in the negative. [In the] context in which that question is usually applied, "means" means assaulting innocent people, while "ends" means, at best, eliminating injustices done (or threatened against) other people... As a matter of principle, I reject such calculus.

You claim to reject the "usual" calculus, as a matter of principle, but you employ it yourself, in practice. War always injures innocent parties.

This is more true today than it ever was in the past, but it has always been true in one way or another. The antagonists do not hold their contest in a safe, artificial space, like the athletes assembled in an arena. In war, the combatants fight it out in the real world. In the past, the armies were not rooted so much to one particular locality, as the grunts in WWI were rooted to their trench and their mechanized supply chains. The armies used to roam more freely through the countryside. Urban combat on the scale of Stalingrad or even Hue was unheard of. The belligerent parties both wanted room to maneuver their massive columns and other unwieldy formations. To effectively maneuver a mere regiment of soldiers, quickly, under fire, with any semblance of order, is supremely difficult in an open field. It is virtually impossible in a densely populated area. That, and the limited range of their artillery, made war in the 18th century more humane than war in the 20th century. A shot fired in an 18th century battle was less likely to hit an unarmed civilian. Also, it was easier for the combatants themselves to escape from such a battle. In modern warfare, you are trapped in your trench, and the only escape is insanity and/or death. But even in a halfway modern battle, like Shiloh, a significant portion of the Federal force had "voted with their feet" - most of these could be found swarming along the banks of the landing zone, in perfect disorder, completely oblivious to the pleas and threats of their commanding officers, recognizing no authority on Earth except their own desire to survive. A more enterprising deserter could get miles away from the battlefield before he was even counted as missing.

For all these reasons, modern warfare is further away from the ideal of absolute legitimacy, when compared with warfare in the past. The Revolutionary War is almost automatically to be considered more humane and legitimate than WWII, just because of the century in which each occurred. But still, "assaulting innocent people" is a natural part of the process. Everywhere an army moves, it devours the countryside. Lee's army was as a great strain on the people of Virginia, and even though this was a friendly force, everywhere they moved they ravaged the countryside and consumed everyone's property. Injury and injustice will always follow in the wake of such an army, by an inexorable law of nature, even when it moves among sympathetic civilians. Lee's army of 60,000 in northern Virginia in 1864 must be much larger than those massed by the American Revolutionaries in the late 18th century, but the same rule still applies. To assemble such an army, however small, and to move it in any direction or for any purpose, whether defensive or offensive, is to commit a great injustice. Innocent third parties will be insulted and injured. In all likelihood, some will die.

You seem willing to accept this deviation from absolute legitimacy in the motives of the American Revolutionaries. I am inclined to agree with you. This cause, while not absolutely perfect, was a relatively close approximation to the acceptable minimum. But I arrive at this through a kind of calculation, in which I weigh the means against the end. The forces necessary to beat the British must be assembled and moved onto the battlefield. The only way to do this is to cause pain and suffering to innocent third parties. But the goal is a worthy one. Ergo, justified. Have you not made the same calculation? Why then do you reject the calculus?

But being a reasonable person, I acknowledge that certain emergency situations (understood quite narrowly) allow a temporary violation of some people's rights to prevent great and irreversible harm to others.

I suppose then that you count the American Revolution as an "emergency situation"? This does not give a very narrow reading to the concept, however. The Americans did not revolt because their very survival depended on it; they revolted because the British were violating their "rights." The taxes did not make them angry because they were too high. What made them mad is that they had minimal input in the legislative process that created the taxes. A question of survival should tip the scales in its favor when weighed against a question of "rights."

By this standard, there is an even more "legitimate" conflict to consider : the second American Revolution, in Haiti. Here it was a question of survival. The murderous slavery imposed on the people of Haiti was much worse than the symbolic obeisance to the King requested of the American people - by many orders of magnitude it was worse.

If we really are to have the Just War debate, then we have to examine all of the big wars and try to rate them on the scale of relative legitimacy. How does the first big war of Revolution in America (USA) compare to the second (Haiti)? Although we can both agree that WWI was a great injustice, which side should be held most responsible - Germany, Turkey, Britain, France? Where do you rate the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars which followed in its wake?

The question of legitimacy in the Civil War is a sub-argument in the question of legitimacy in any and all war. If you want to pursue this direction, then we must first settle the larger question. There is much in favor of this approach. I wish to build my defense of Title II on the idea that it is relatively legitimate. Does it violate the absolute ideal? Of course! Is the end a worthy one? I think you and I can both agree that it is. How do the means look, relative to the end in question? The war question might clarify these concepts. To bring clarity into the confusion of ideas in the Just War debate might bring clarity to the questions of legitimacy in non-war legislation, like Title II.

I am more than willing to pursue that. Indicate the desired direction, and I will follow it. Any progress on the Civil War question is predicated on prior examination of the Just War concept. If you are ready to have this debate, open the appropriate thread. I think it should probably be placed in the "History" section. Please try to describe in the opening post your idea of a Just War, and which real war from history most perfectly conforms to this ideal. Do not forget to notify me when your opening salvo has been launched. Or, I could write the OP for this topic. It should be edifying, either way.

Or, we can discuss Title II. In that case, agreeing that it is unjust by all absolute standards, how does it measure up on the relative scale? Where is the practical harm? How does this injustice compare to the subjugation of the Negroes in the first half of the 20th century?

[Spouter]

Eran,

You have offered a lot of interesting comments and observations, and I am unsure exactly where to begin. At each comment I pause, and I perceive so many assumptions and faulty suppositions, that it is difficult to foresee how I can bring the criticism to a close. I do not want to simply atomize your post into a series of quotations, and then to each affix a separate counter-argument, because with that method I am likely to miss the forest for the trees. I am trying to clarify the overall scope of your position, to understand it in the broad strokes, and I will admit that I am experiencing difficulty.

...to maintain the Union cannot justify the use of arms to restrict the secession of an unwilling section thereof.

That is your position, in a nutshell. The following is what you are willing to concede to my position.

...the objectives of the Confederacy and the Union were mutually exclusive.

So far, I can follow you. You admit that the objectives of each side were mutually exclusive. To preserve the Union means the destruction of an independent Confederacy, and vice versa. If you support one side, then you are automatically against the other. I choose the Union - you choose the Confederacy. Each of us occupies a distinct position in the debate.

And then everything goes pear-shaped.

As are the objectives of slave owner and his slaves. The point is that mutually exclusive objectives can still allow identification of a clear right and wrong side in a conflict.

Who said they do not? The main reason that I stressed this point, that the goals of the Confederacy and the Union were mutually exclusive, was precisely because I thought that would help us identify which side was right, which side was wrong. If they are mutually exclusive, then that simplifies the question. Otherwise, it would be possible that both sides were right in some way, and that, on the other hand, would greatly complicate the discussion.

You cite slavery as an example of a human relationship in which the "objectives" of each side are also mutually exclusive. I can agree with that for the sake of argument, but instead of objectives, let's lay it out in terms of interests: The slave has an interest in being free, and the master has an interest in preventing that. The two interests are mutually exclusive. They can not both be right; if you assert that one party is right, then you automatically imply that the other party is wrong. Elementary logic.

...you would never justify a slave-owner using force to restrict the escape of his slave...

Quite right. However, I would justify the slave, if he uses violence against his master in order to escape, or actually, for any reason at all. If, out of the clear blue, with no hope of escape, with no plan of rebellion, he suddenly splits the slavemonger's head open with an ax, then I am willing to excuse this as an act of justifiable revenge. If you keep a slave, then you do not really deserve to live. Slavery is that bad.

Here is what I am willing to concede to your position: To maintain the Union through the force of arms is to commit an injustice. War always involves an element of injustice - innocents will suffer. I can respect the opinion that says that war is always illegitimate, and that no injustice can ever justify military violence, as was the position of many American Quakers during the Revolution. Two wrongs do not make a right, turn the other cheek, and all that. I do not agree with it, but I can respect it (although, like Paine, I would counsel these pacifists to just get out of the way, and if our military goal is a worthy one, their direct obstruction of the war effort should be prevented by coercive measures, such as imprisonment).

That is not your position, however. Like me, you think that military violence is sometimes justifiable, if it is motivated by a worthy objective. You give two examples - the cause of the American Revolutionaries, and the abortive secession of the Confederacy. It confuses me that you justify the use of military violence only if it is for a worthy end (independence from Britain or from the Union), and at the same time, you reject the doctrine that the means are justified by the end.

War is always the occasion of great injustice, because it always injures innocent parties. Those who are not strict pacifists are willing to admit this, but they also assert that there are even greater injustices in the world that sometimes make war necessary and legitimate. When it comes to the goals of the American Revolutionaries, you agree with Jefferson that it was their right and even their duty, to violently throw off the British Government, "and to provide new Guards for their future security." I am inclined to agree with both of you. In this case, the end justifies the means.

In the case of slavery, I think that the slave has a blanket justification for any violent act against his master, against the master's family, against any guest in his house, against another slave who supports the master, against any master of any slave whatsoever, and their families, friends, and loyal servants, against the overseers and other white employees of the slavemonger, their friends and family, against the banker with whom the slaver deposits the proceeds of slavery, his friends and family... basically almost anyone. And I do not think the slave needs to have any special "goal" or "object" to justify his violence. If he is trying to escape or acting in rebellion, that is okay. If he is having a bad day and he just wants to lash out at someone, that is also okay, in my book.

Any slave who preferred death to slavery could have, at almost any time, commit suicide. Very few (if any) did. By their choice they showed that they valued their own lives over slavery.

What are you talking about? Do you have some evidence to cite in support of these ridiculous assertions. I am not aware of any reliable suicide statistics. But I know human nature. When subjected to humiliating servitude and dependency, when deprived of any hope of freedom, when your children can be sold off and scattered to the four winds, increased levels of depression and ultimately suicide would not be an entirely surprising result. Do you really find it so hard to believe that slavery could cause suicidal despair?

The humiliation and despair of slavery is the reason I support the slave's right to violence. When forced into this abject and hopeless condition, many will succumb to the temptation to take the easy way out. Rather than just quietly kill yourself, why not take a few white people with you? The master himself would be the ideal target, but if the slave in seeking revenge decides to rape and murder the master's daughter, I will not be found weeping over it. If it is too difficult to get at the slavemonger and his family, why not kill the first random white person you come across? Slavery is so bad that it caused the most destructive war on the American continent - ever (*please take note of final postscript*). It is so bad that I believe there is a kind of collective guilt involved in it. I do not weep over the Confederate dead, because they were fighting in defense of slavery (although I do admire their bravery and resolve).

We may have to simply agree to disagree on this question of the Civil War. The disagreement is not on the level of facts or logic, but stems from the primitive level of mute emotion. These pre-articulate emotional reactions are always at the root of our evaluation of something as disgusting, noxious, or "horrible."

This is a horrible statement!

Allow me to repeat the statement you found so horrible.

I am proud of these 600,000 dead - on the Union AND the Confederate side!

I still affirm this. I still feel pride. You will not be able to dissuade me from this feeling with facts and logic, nor is it likely that I can persuade you to abandon your feeling of horror. We are both working from the same basic set of facts; neither side routinely makes assertions that are grossly illogical. The disagreement is probably not to be found on these levels.

The following sums up my position perfectly.

Ask all our millions, north and south, whether they would vote now (were such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out.

Do you take no pride in the military accomplishments of your own nation? When you read about the bravery and determination, when you visit the ancient battle fields, do you honestly feel nothing but horror? You are certainly entitled to your eccentric evaluations, but do not presume they are the only valid ones.

My position should now be a little clearer. Even if I could alter the structure of space and time, if I could magically replace the war with a peaceful transition to national abolition, I would not choose to do this. But, putting that aside, I am willing to discuss the probability of such a peaceful transition, if the Confederacy had won, if the Union had submitted to secession without military efforts, if Lincoln had been assassinated before the election of 1860, or according to almost any other science fiction scenario. You seem to enjoy these thought experiments, so I will play along.

If the South didn't have slavery, and merely wanted to secede due to differences over taxation or tariffs, would you still have supported the North's war aims as legitimising hostilities?

Probably not. I agree with the Union's war aims, because I disagree with those of the Confederacy, which were tied to the effort to preserve slavery. If secession had had a different motivation, then I would perhaps have to evaluate it differently.

Which moves us on to your next question.

If your answer is negative, i.e. if only the existence of slavery makes the South's secession illegitimate, how is the North, which allowed slavery in the border states, in principle, more legitimate than the South?

So what if slavery was still practiced in some of the border states? Are you saying that slavery outside of the South made the Union morally equivalent to to the Confederacy? 5 out of the 25 pro-Union states had slavery - 20%. 11 out of the 11 seceding states had slavery - 100%. And the South did not just "have" slavery. They clung to slavery through decades of economic stagnation, political isolation, and declining rates of population growth. They preserved their crooked ways through eighty years of this kind of pressure. Their full commitment to slavery is proven by the fact that they were willing to formally secede over this issue. Please do not nitpick me here. You already know that I am aware of the secondary issues, but slavery was the primary issue (see footnote).

So, because 20% of the Union had slavery, their war goals are to be automatically judged completely illegitimate? On the other hand, you assert that the war goals of their enemies were legitimate, even though 100% of the Confederacy practiced slavery! Talk about a double standard!

Allow me to play your game. What if only one state in the Union had had slavery (5%)? What if that one state was the least populous one, and slavery was only practiced in 2 or 3 counties out of 100 in total (1%)? Let's take it to the ultimate conclusion - what if, in all 25 states of the Union, there was only one legally recognized slave (0.00001%)? Does that one slave really nullify the legitimacy of all Union war aims? And yet, you take the legitimacy of the Confederate cause on faith (100% slavery). Why is that?

I will go you one further - in those states that did effectively abolish slavery, racist discrimination was truly appalling. It may have actually been worse for Blacks in the North, in many ways. There was a lot of injustice in the Union. But, that does not translate into an automatic obligation to support everyone who opposes the Union. You have to make this evaluation based on the motives of the rebels, on a case by case basis. If they were rebelling against onerous taxes or tariffs, that would be one thing. If they were rebelling to abolish slavery, that would be even better - that would receive an almost automatic justification. But they were in rebellion to preserve slavery. That is the concrete historical reality.

Orwell believed that the British pacifists of his age were motivated by a "hatred of western democracy." You, I believe, are motivated by a hatred of all government. This makes you sympathetic to any secessionist movement, regardless of their motives for rebellion. The Union was a large and powerful government, the Confederacy was relatively small and weak. It is natural that you would support such a rebellion, no matter what the specific causes. Any time you can split one large government into two smaller ones, that is a blow struck against government in general. This Union still governs a significant portion of the American Continent - from an anarchist point of view, it would have been nice to break it up, even if this was accomplished by a bunch of slavemongering rebels.

So it comes down to this. If you think that the Union was so unjust that it deserves to be completely fractured, then it doesn't matter if one of the resulting smaller states is devoted to the practice of slavery. It doesn't matter that they rebelled in order to preserve slavery. All that matters is that one large government has been fractured. The fact that the newly established Confederacy would have preserved slavery is besides the point. Slavery is unjust, but government is even worse. Besides, all of the best hypothetical reasoning leads us to believe that an independent Confederacy would have abandoned slavery in a decade or two anyway, right? So we get an end to slavery anyway (as long as we are willing to wait a little longer), and as a nice side benefit, we get to end the Union, which is today the most powerful government in the hemisphere. That is your reasoning, correct?

I cannot follow you there. I am somewhat sympathetic to anarchism (not so much to its economic counterpart: libertarianism). I think that governmental power should be as decentralized as possible. Local governance is to be favored over large territorial governance from a distant and powerful seat of administration, like Washington. Ideally, there should be no formal government at all, and people should govern their own affairs as responsible adults. These are still my feelings, and before I achieved a higher level of literacy, these feelings led me to see the Confederacy as the more just party in the dispute, just as you do. If the South doesn't want to be part of the Union, why should they be forced to it? The acceptance of slavery in the North for reasons of political expediency made it seem hypocritical to condemn these practices in the South. My first discovery of the North's economic motives, as laid out in a paranoid screed titled The Creature From Jekyll Island, made me feel like I had been initiated into the true insider secrets that were concealed from the vulgar masses. This was a war of imperial conquest, I thought, under the hypocritical cover of a noble ideal - abolition. If they really believed in abolition, they would have cleaned up their own backyard first, and the Emancipation Proclamation would have been issued at the commencement of hostilities, rather than in the third year.

But then I began to reflect on the nature of slavery in America. Tocqueville asserts that it was much worse than the traditional forms of slavery practiced in the Old World, because, "amongst the moderns, the abstract and transient fact of slavery is fatally united to the physical and permanent fact of color." The implications of this innovation in slavery, unknown to the ancients, are profoundly disturbing. I read the Constitutional debates, and I saw that the founding fathers were just as concerned about this evil institution, and the "calamities" that would be caused if it was embraced by the proposed Union. I read the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and I saw that Lincoln was not a cynical hypocrite. He was genuinely concerned about slavery, and it seems unlikely that he would have launched an aggressive war of conquest solely in order to enrich Northern industrialists. I reflected on the order of events at the beginning of the war, and I saw that the Southern states began to secede without even attempting to negotiate some kind of compromise. Lincoln's paramount goal, as you are well aware, was to preserve the Union. It seemed he would do anything to preserve the Union - he was certainly willing to compromise on the question of slavery when it came to his political allies (the border states). As we can see from the Emancipation Proclamation, he was still willing to tolerate slavery outside of the South in 1863, and the only reason he issued the Proclamation at this time was to help win the war, i.e. to preserve the Union. That was the only thing he cared about. In other words, the mere threat of secession would have forced him to compromise. He would have gladly tolerated Southern slavery, I think, if it would have meant holding the Union together. Why then did they secede so instantly, without even waiting for Lincoln to take office, without even trying to negotiate?

I have already made this point before, but to little effect. As I stated at the outset of this post, I am now convinced that such facts and arguments are unlikely to sway you from your position, which is anchored in strong, primitive, inarticulate feelings (horror at the scale of destruction, hatred of all government institutions). My own position is similarly anchored in an emotional foundation (pride in the bravery and selflessness of American troops on both sides, gratitude for the efforts of Union troops, which led to an end to a slavery - whether that was their conscious motive or not). You recognize that Southern slavery was a great injustice. I can agree that there is something unjust about forcing someone to be governed by a Union they don't consent to, at least in abstraction (if even one citizen disagrees with it, then it is unjust, on some level). You hold that forced membership in the Union was more unjust than Southern slavery. I hold to the opposite. I do not think either position can claim to be more rational than the other, or more grounded in the evidence. We each see the same evidence, but we each have a different emotional reaction. I think my evaluation is better, but that is only because it is mine.

And so I am beginning to see the distinct outlines of our respective positions with clarity now. In abstraction, both positions can be reduced to the same basic term: Horror. I will leave aside all of my patriotic emotions for the time being, which are superfluous according to this abstraction - similarly I will discount all of your libertarian and anarchist ideals, and instead we will reduce everything to this one common denominator. Horror.

You feel horror at slavery in the South, just like I do. I hope you will believe that I also feel horror at the great number of casualties in the Civil War. When I read about all the horrible battles, from the endless series of almost pointless assaults against the Hornet's Nest at Shiloh, to Grant's final and truly merciless campaign against Lee in Virginia, please believe me, it isn't all just patriotic thrills. Some of it is profoundly disgusting. For each of those 600,000 dead, there must be at least one other person who was crippled (probably more). Then there are those who were emotionally crippled. Then there is the destruction of property, public and private. When we add it all up, a decent mind can not help but reel in horror. All wars are the occasion of injustice, but this war, fought on such a wide scale, was bound to involve a profound and deep degree of injustice (injury to the innocent - it is unavoidable in all war, but particularly in modern war, and the Civil War could probably be called the first truly modern war, and the most important precursor to WWI, in terms of scale, organization, and philosophy).

And so here is what it all boils down to: in your own mind's balance, you have weighed the horror of slavery against that of the Civil War, and while slavery is found to be truly horrible, the Civil War is found to be much, much worse. I admit that the Civil War was a horrible injustice, but when I compare this to my feelings about slavery, I find that the balance tips in favor of the Civil War, as the lesser of the two evils. I feel confident in asserting this without a detailed, formal justification, because the emotion comes first, and then the rationalization. I could try to rationalize this emotion, but why bother? Horror is a primitive emotion - there is no such thing really as rational horror. You feel more horror at the damage caused by this great conflict, I feel more horror at the institution of slavery. Can we really argue our way out of this impasse with logic and evidence?

Perhaps we can (see the postscript, however). I could take up one of your hypothetical scenarios, or make up my own. Let's say Lincoln was killed years before he rose to national prominence. Regardless of what you think about Lincoln's policies, he was a lightening rod for Southern paranoia. The mere thought of what he might do with the executive power was more than many a Southerner could stand, without reaching for his rifle. So maybe if Lincoln wasn't around to rile them all up, the conflict would not have immediately flared up in 1860. How long would slavery have lasted in that case? One more decade? Three? Four? It seems likely, in the face of all the economic, social, and political trends up to that point in history, that it would have to come to an end eventually (some time before the present, anyway). For the sake of argument, let's say it would have taken three decades. Are three decades worth 600,000 fatalities? What if slavery was destined to be completely extinct by 1870, absent war? Is one decade worth 600,000? What then is the upper limit? Is one decade worth a million lives? What about ten million lives?

These are the kind of scenarios you would like me to consider. I will elaborate a slightly more realistic one: what if the Confederacy had won the war? Grant could have been easily killed at Shiloh. Would the Army of the Potomac have been able to mercilessly grind their way into Virginia and finally cause Lee to be bottled up in Richmond, without Grant at its helm? It seems unlikely that Meade would have been able to pull it off by himself, against a military genius like Lee. Even if the South had won, it is still possible that they would have abolished slavery on their own, because of economic pressures or whatever. I will even admit that it is possible they would have abolished slavery quite rapidly.

Anything is possible. Here is the thing that I would like you to realize: all of these scenarios are more or less equally probable. If your hypothetical scenario is not completely impossible, then it is more or less equal to every other scenario you can imagine. It does not matter that one scenario is more realistic, more in line with what you think plausible, or more seemingly likely in light of our understanding of political trends and economic developments. As long as the scenario is even remotely possible, then it is just as likely as any other hypothetical scenario. If we are to judge these things according to the laws of probability, then one hypothetical can not be elevated over any of others.

Certain facts are susceptible to analysis according to the laws of probability. The flip of a coin is the simplest example. Throw a coin into the air, and there are only two possible outcomes. You can repeat this experiment a million times, and the coin will always come up either heads or tails. Because there is a finite number of possible outcomes (in this case two), we are able to assign a probability to each scenario (in this case, 50% likelihood for each of the two possible outcomes).

Historical facts are nothing like that. There is not a limited number of possible "outcomes" that we can safely define beforehand. If Grant had been killed at Shiloh, or something like that, who knows what would have happened? You have just created a new reality, and everything that happens in that reality will be a unique and irreversible event, just like in ordinary reality. It would be quite impossible to predict the outcome, with any degree of certainty. The only thing we can know with certainty is that it will be different, but to divine in what specific ways it will be different would require more than human intelligence. If history teaches us anything, it is this: events that seem improbable happen quite frequently. In reality, none of these unique and unrepeatable events are any more likely than any other possible event. Once the event has occurred, it has occurred. It is now a concrete and irreversible fact. Moreover, it is absolutely unique. There is no other event we can compare it with, and then say, this other event could have occurred with a 50% probability, or a 23% probability, or anything like that. When it comes to a specific event, like the outcome of a battle, we can say, for example, that it possible that Lee could have completely annihilated the Army of the Potomac shortly after they crossed the Rapidan river in 1864, if only Longstreet's divisions had arrived early enough. Grant also could have destroyed the Army of Northern Virginia, in this "Battle of the Wilderness," because he had a force numerically double that of his opponent, but the attacks on these bloody two days in May were poorly coordinated among his various divisions, for various reasons, and Grant could not bring his whole force to bear as he desired. As it was, the battle turned out a draw, and the war continued to drag on. Of the two hypothetical scenarios (one in which Longstreet arrives a few hours earlier and helps to completely rout the entire Union command, the other in which Grant is able to effect the necessary coordination of his troop movements, destroying Lee's command), neither is more probable than the other. It is just as likely that a comet could streak out of the sky and plow into both armies, destroying them completely. Reality does not allow us to travel back in time and fight the Battle of the Wilderness all over again, just to assess the probability of the different possible outcomes.

Which leads me to my nest scenario. It differs from what you think would have been the most probable course of events, perhaps, but unless you have a time machine, you can not prove that this scenario is any less likely than your own.

There was no Civil War. I can not imagine how it could have been averted, because the South certainly seems to have been solidly dedicated to their slavemongering traditions, but by some magical process, imagine the war averted. It would take more than an earlier death of Lincoln to avoid the war, in all "probability." The South seems to have been poised to freak out if any Republican at all had won the presidency in 1860. So, I suppose, in order to avert a war, it would have been necessary for some other party to win the office. Assuming that the Democrats were not in such a fractured state and that they were thus able to mount an effective opposition to the Republicans at the polls, let us say that there was some political compromise that averted catastrophe in 1860. Great! You have successfully avoided the Civil War!

Now let us say that, contrary to your expectations, slavery does not just painlessly fade away. It is possible (which makes it just as likely as any other scenario) that the South would have maintained fidelity to their precious "way of life," which was intimately connected to slavery. This could have extended Southern slavery well into the 20th century. Then the war comes along anyway (you can not say it is impossible), but because of the continuing development of military technology, the war is now much more destructive, and instead of a little bit of trench warfare around Richmond [latter edit: instead of Richmond, I should have said Petersburg], we have WWI-style trench warfare across the entire Mason-Dixon line, and instead of 600,000 dead, we have millions. We now know that when slavery is preserved in a republic like the USA, it is more than possible for that to cause a war with unprecedented levels of destruction (see footnote). You assume that slavery would have just quietly faded away, without a war. It is just as likely that slavery would not have gone away, as far as you know, which could have caused a much more destructive war, later down the road. We can not calculate the probabilities here. There are too many variables, and humans are too unpredictable, by their intrinsic nature. Even an omniscient super-intelligence might not be able to reliably predict the results you seem so confident in.

And if we are to judge the legitimacy of a war according to hypothetical scenarios, consider the following.

What makes the Revolutionary War so legitimate? Look at Canada - an independent democratic nation on the Western model, fairly prosperous, at least as just and liberal as the USA in its laws, and probably more so (they seem to have more respect for civil liberties, in any case, if we are to judge by their cannabis policy). Canada today is not being bossed around by some distant monarch, and they did not have to take up arms to achieve this result. If the founding fathers had been more patient, perhaps a lot of unnecessary bloodshed could have been avoided. Paine was not psychic. If the war could have been delayed for two or three decades, perhaps the fever would have broken, and Britain would have liberalized her own American policy, in accordance with the advice of her best statesmen, like Edmund Burke. Perhaps this would have checked some of the force of Western expansion, which might have mitigated the suffering of the Indians. One of the irritants that contributed to the war fever was the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Wikipedia says: "The purpose of the proclamation was to organize Great Britain's new North American empire and to stabilize relations with Native North Americans through regulation of trade, settlement, and land purchases on the western frontier." Many Americans chaffed under this obstacle to their aggressive exploitation of the West, and it is at least possible that if the political connection with Britain had not been so sharply broken, she may have influenced our Indian policy in a more humane direction.

This is the clincher, though. If the integrity of our political relationship to Britain had not been so rudely shattered by war, the following scenario seems likely. The growing abolitionist movement in Britain might have had a much stronger influence in America. This wholesome influence could have effected real progress on the issue of slavery, instead of the dangerous stalemate that had already taken root by 1830, because of the intransigence of the Southern States. Do we dare dream of a world in which the people of America, proud citizens of a new land, but also loyal subjects to the Crown, could actually abide by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833? Here is your ideal scenario: a peaceful end to American slavery, elegantly averting the Civil War, decades in advance of the final crisis. But the Revolutionary War made all of that impossible.

I believe that my scenario has more verisimilitude than many of yours. Novelists use this to give their works the appearance of reality. A really good novel pulls you into its little universe and makes it seem very real. To this end, the author requires a "suspension of disbelief." If the events of the narrative seem highly improbable, then the effect of verisimilitude may fail.

Perhaps it seems probable that a victorious Confederacy would abandon slavery on their own initiative. It does not seem so to me, but that is your only scenario with any verisimilitude at all, in my estimation. Your scenario in which the rebellion came about "for other reasons" is flatly ridiculous. Slavery was the reason for the rebellion (see footnote). I might as well try to imagine combustion without oxygen. No slavery, no rebellion. Your scenario in which Lincoln magnanimously concedes to Confederate demands, accepts reparations for their destructive violence, and officially recognizes their sovereign and independent status, without any military efforts at all - that also seems improbable and absurd. Any victorious candidate on the Republican ticket would have at least attempted some military action (perhaps not with Lincoln's effectiveness, however).

But the South could have easily won the Civil War, with talent like Lee and Longstreet in command of such heroic troops (heroism in the service of an evil cause is still heroism). It seems likely to me, anyway. That a victorious Confederacy would have freely emancipated its slaves, appears probable to you. But do not be fooled by a mere semblance of probability. We are fighting windmills in the shape of imaginary giants, when we confuse the appearance with reality.

I used a lot of space probing for the deeper flaws in your position, but now I am in danger of missing the trees for the forest. To prepare for future debate I will reflect further on the statement of your political beliefs at the beginning of your post. In the meantime, I can not close without addressing some of your other comments. Some are absurd, some are thought provoking, all are interesting.

I'd like to draw an important distinction between a government that follows the will of the majority, and one that is considered legitimate by the majority... with the vast majority of Southerners refusing to accept the legitimacy of the Union government, using guns to force them to stay in the union is tyranny, pure and simple... The North instituted conscription which is akin the slavery (worse, as the life of a conscript are placed in danger)... The motives of the majority of Americans who supported the War of Independence are quite clear - they wanted to "rule themselves" rather than be ruled by London... How is the question of geography normatively relevant?... What is your definition of "fairness"?... I view the Revolutionary War as well as the South's war efforts during the Civil War as precisely that - violence used defensively... did freeing slaves justify killing innocents?... The use of defensive force is, in my opinion, justified, even as the use of aggressive force isn't...

Your distinction between the will of the majority and the perception of legitimacy by that majority is a valid one, and I hope we can explore that in the future... It is true that a Southern majority supported the rebellion, but it is more important to note that a majority of American citizens in total did not. Why do you only count Southern opinion, and discard the majority opinion of all the other Americans?.... I agree that Union war aims were an expression of tyranny, but I feel that slavery is worse... In a textbook expression of double think, you condemn Union conscription, but you forget that conscription started first in the Confederacy. So that fact goes straight into the memory hole. Also, you have not made the proper distinction between slavery and conscription... Your description of the motives behind the Revolutionary War are grossly oversimplified (and yet your reading of the motives behind the Civil War are tortured in their complexity)... The normative relevance of geography: I don't know. I know that there is a difference between being ruled by a representative power centered in the capital city of your own nation, and being ruled by the power of an unelected monarch on the other side of the Atlantic. Hence, there is a different definition of legitimacy depending on the different enemy you choose to go to war with. There is no one universal rule by which to judge these things... Please define "normative determinism"... Your understanding of warfare is flawed. Lee showed true understanding of the art of defensive warfare, and he is one of the most aggressive and belligerent generals in all of history... Freeing slaves does justify killing the innocent, in my opinion. The Civil War resulted in the emancipation of the Southern slaves, and I believe that justifies the Union war efforts. On the other hand, you choose to justify the Confederacy. So it is wrong to fight against slavery, but it is okay for the South to fight for its preservation?...

Your comments deserve a better response than a simple one or two line comeback, but this post has already become embarrassingly long. I can not help but add a footnote, however.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Postscript: I have a small request for future debate. Eran, we are both aware of the economic context to the Civil War. But there is nothing wrong with saying that slavery caused the Civil War. Maybe some people say this, and because they are somewhat illiterate, they do not know what it means - they think it means that the North consciously and deliberately fought to end slavery. But you know I am not asserting something so simple minded. Notice the careful phrasing of my assertion: the Civil War was caused by slavery. There is nothing wrong with fleshing this out with an examination of the economic facts, but that only completes the picture, and does nothing to refute the original assertion. The South did not secede for economic reasons; it was to preserve the threat to slavery that was posed by the abolitionist movement. The economic factors may have added fuel to the fire, but to deny the central role played by slavery is madness!

A more detailed examination of the historic circumstances shows that the native narrative whereby the South fought to maintain slavery while the North fought to abolish it is highly misleading...

Allow me to state it explicitly. The North did not fight to abolish slavery. They fought to preserve the Union. That part of the popular myth is false.

But, the South did fight to maintain slavery. If that is part of the popular myth, then that part of the myth is true. I am not saying that the entire myth is true, but accurate facts can be used in a mythical narrative. Just because we reject the narrative as mythical does not mean that we should we reject the facts as inaccurate (unless they really are inaccurate). It is a fact that the South fought to preserve slavery.

Please do not exploit the obvious ambiguities in the verb "fight." I know that slavery had almost nothing to do with the motivation of the troops in the field, on either side. The motives of the troops are often different from the motives of the politicians that put them in motion. The motivation for secession, however, what was in the minds of the Southern politicians who decided to support secession, was to preserve slavery. The secessionist movement in the South was caused by the abolitionist movement in the North.

The Confederate troops were fighting to defend their homeland. Their homeland was being invaded by Union forces in order to prevent secession. Secession was caused by fear of the abolitionist movement in the North. Abolitionist sentiment had taken hold in the Republican party, and anti-abolitionist sentiment had taken root in the Democratic party. But, because population growth in slave states could not keep pace with free-labor states, the Republicans had an advantage at the polls. Because Democratic politicians anticipated failure to preserve slavery through ordinary politics, they chose to start a war. Not only did they fire the first shots, but they were fully conscious that secession would bring them to war with the Union. They hoped they would win, but history has shown different results.

Confederate troops fought to repel invasion -- Federal invasion was to prevent secession -- Secession was provoked by election of Lincoln, and fear that an executive headed by Lincoln would cause an end to slavery : the Civil War was caused by the attempt to preserve slavery.

Please do not make me go through this every time I asset that the Civil War was caused by slavery. It is a sound assertion, even if it has been exploited by unscrupulous debaters who are ignorant of the historical basis. I am not one of those unscrupulous debaters, am I? Stop acting like I am just another historical illiterate!

...we started this debate with my claim that slavery was an indirect cause of the war.

I know we started at this point, but I was hoping that we had progressed beyond it. Yes, it is an indirect cause, just as rigging a car to explode when started is an indirect cause of the resulting explosion. The direct cause of the explosion is the physical act of turning the key in the ignition. Installing and arming the bomb is an indirect cause of the explosion, technically speaking. But, our bomb-maker has created the conditions that will result in an explosion, even if he did not preform the precise physical act that will trigger the explosion.

I see no reason to stress the fact that slavery was an indirect cause of the war. At the very least, allow me to assert that slavery caused the Civil War, and that the Confederacy fought to defend slavery. You know it is true. Do I have to quote the same sources, draw the same conclusions, over and over and over again? How many times do you want me to quote the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, at the outset of the war? Do you want other sources? Do you really doubt that secession was motivated by the fear of an end to slavery?

Long-term concerns over the maintenance of the institution of slavery motivated (in part) the South to secede.

Why this prevarication? "In part"? That makes it sound like something secondary. In part, economic and legislative pressure, such as Union tariff-policy, was a cause of the war. In the most essential and important part, slavery was the cause. All of the other causes can be considered secondary to this. Please accept this fact.

The direct cause of the war was Lincoln's desire to maintain the Union.

Wrong. The direct cause of the war was secession. Lincoln's desire to maintain the Union was predicated on the Confederacy's desire to break the Union. If they had not taken action to end it, Lincoln would not have needed to take action to maintain it. These distortions are above you. Cease your attempt to blame the Union for directly causing the war, which is so blatantly in contradiction to the historical record! Fort Sumter! Secession! Those are the direct causes of the war.

I know you can do better, Eran. It is possible to rationally argue that Union policies may have contributed indirectly to the Civil War, just as much as the slavemongering policies of the South. But, the direct cause of the Civil War was the actions of the South. Perhaps the South was provoked by political pressure from the North. But to assert this was the "direct" cause is flatly wrong, and you know it! Perhaps the North really did wire the car-bomb to explode... I do not think so, but fine, we can debate that. Still, it was the South who turned the key in the ignition and set off the bomb, at the very least. I believe they did much more than that, but whatever.

How in God's name can you identify anything Lincoln did as the direct cause? The war had already started before he took office! Okay, fine, you seem incapable of imagining that the South could even be blamed as the direct cause (let alone be blamed for consciously creating the dangerous conditions that made the war possible in the first place, thanks to their steadfast commitment to slavery). Since you seem so willing to devise excuses for the Confederacy, we can push the "direct" cause further back in time - forget Sumter, forget Secession. Let us identify the direct cause of the Civil War as the electoral victory of Lincoln. This has nothing to do with "Lincoln's desire to maintain the Union." It has to do with the desire of those who voted in the 1859 election to see Lincoln made president. But before he even took office, the war had begun. You can not blame Lincoln. Blame a statistical majority of the American electorate.

Does that distinction not make a difference, in your eyes?

The Civil War was caused by slavery. You can call it an "indirect" cause if you want. Once more, here is the complete chain of reasoning:

Slavery created a condition of disparity between North and South (in terms of economy and population). Slavery also created the abolitionist movement (if there was no slavery, then there would be no movement for its abolition). Because of the above mentioned disparity (created by slavery), abolitionism took root in the North. In response, a secessionist movement began to grow in the South (also created by slavery). The crisis came in the election of 1859, and if you want to call the electoral victory of Lincoln the "direct" cause, fine. It is much more important to identify the general conditions which made the crisis possible in the first place, versus the specific event that directly triggered it.

Do not make me repeat these points over and over again, I beg you. Do not make me tediously spell out the full phrase, "although it may not have been the direct cause, it was the single most important factor in the creation of Civil War," every time I assert that "slavery caused the Civil War." Can you not just imagine the former chain of reasoning, every time I make the latter statement? Should we not use some kind of shorthand? Must we spell out every assumption in tedious detail?

Slavery created the conditions that made the Civil War possible. Of all the factors that helped create the Civil War, slavery is by far the most important. Do you really disagree with this? If not, then why make me explicitly spell it out every single time?

I am willing to give you some leeway on the question of "direct" cause. What I will not allow is for you to portray the Confederacy as some kind of anarchist revolution. You know as well as I do that there was one primary motive for secession, and it was not the desire to create an anarchist utopia. It was to create an independent nation, and the main reason they wanted this independence is because they feared that the abolitionist movement in the North would have compelled an end to slavery in the South. Do you doubt that they had this fear? Do you doubt that this fear was the main motive for secession? If not, then for the sake of brevity, allow me the use of these two assertions.

1. The Civil War was caused by slavery.

2. The Confederacy fought to preserve slavery.

You know I am not illiterate, Eran. There is no other assertion implied by the above. Lincoln wanted to preserve the Union, not destroy slavery. I know, I know. The average Southerner saw the Union as a foreign power, and they fought with brave and selfless obstinacy to defend their homeland. I know. But still, these two assertions, if defended by the basic train of the reasoning as outlined above, are unassailable.

I am not trying to expunge the crimes of Lincoln from the historical record. I am not asserting that the Union was perfect. I am willing to admit that there was some justice to the Confederate cause. How much may be a matter of personal evaluation. The ultimate cause of the Civil War, and the motives of the Confederacy, are not. Shorthand statements of these causes and motives should be accepting in good faith, as long as the person stating these things has demonstrated the minimum requirements of literacy and good use of logic.

[Eran]

Spouter,
I must start by expressing my appreciation for both the content and depth or your response, and its constructive tone. I will try to match the latter, without presuming to do the former.


Let me start by clarifying my general position on war, one which I think you slightly misrepresented. You write "Like me, you think that military violence is sometimes justifiable, if it is motivated by a worthy objective."

That is not my position, which suggests an "ends justifies means" approach. It isn't the objective that justifies a war, but rather the combination of objective and means. Specifically, I judge war actions as I judge all other human action involving force - it is only justified if applied proportionately and in retaliation for prior use of force.

As a rule, war can only be justified against an invading (or occupying) army. Both the Revolutionary War and, from the Southern perspective, the Civil War presented such circumstances - in both cases, military action (by the revolutionaries in the former, by the Confederates in the latter) was justified, not because of their ultimate goals (independence, in both cases) but because it was carried out in the main against an occupying or invading foreign army.

Force, in other words, was primarily applied against individuals who, by their nature as combatants and physical presence in a land not theirs (and not of people who sought their protection), have clearly marked themselves as aggressors.

So while I am not a Quaker-like pacifist, I am quite close - I would restrict legitimate military actions to those whose only likely victims are aggressors.

If you keep a slave, then you do not really deserve to live. Slavery is that bad...

In the case of slavery, I think that the slave has a blanket justification for any violent act against his master, against the master's family, against any guest in his house, against another slave who supports the master, against any master of any slave whatsoever, and their families, friends, and loyal servants, against the overseers and other white employees of the slavemonger, their friends and family, against the banker with whom the slaver deposits the proceeds of slavery, his friends and family... basically almost anyone...

The master himself would be the ideal target, but if the slave in seeking revenge decides to rape and murder the master's daughter, I will not be found weeping over it.

Here is where our moral views most clearly diverge. Sure - the slave owner and his overseers are clearly guilty. But his family? His guests?

I object to collective punishment (as does the Geneva Convention). I strongly believe people are innocent or guilty as individuals, not as group members. There is no "guilt by association". A child is always innocent, and killing such child on purpose is always murder, regardless of who the child's parents are, and what their guilt is like.

I have recently had an occasion to apply this principle on these forums to both the question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the question of the justification of dropping atomic bombs on Japan in WW II. It is a position I hold strongly and consistently.

What are you talking about? Do you have some evidence to cite in support of these ridiculous assertions. I am not aware of any reliable suicide statistics. But I know human nature. When subjected to humiliating servitude and dependency, when deprived of any hope of freedom, when your children can be sold off and scattered to the four winds, increased levels of depression and ultimately suicide would not be an entirely surprising result. Do you really find it so hard to believe that slavery could cause suicidal despair?

I don't. Are you aware of any suggestion that suicide was common among African-American slaves?

Ask all our millions, north and south, whether they would vote now (were such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out.

What if you restricted your question to those who lost a brother, a father, a husband or a son? What if you asked those who lost a friend or a leg and an arm? Do you really think they would also have preferred the glories of war over a peaceful transition?

I don't doubt that war presents many an opportunity for courage and valour. That it is a period of intense group-cohesive emotions, and that such emotions take hold in the national conciousness and far outlast the individual pain and loss associated with the war. Both William James and you seem to be under the spell of those emotions.

And while there are no objective standards against which to judge people's emotions, I believe I stand on firm moral ground when I state that that "scared spiritual possession", while being worth more than "all the blood poured out" for you and Mr. James, might not have been so worth to those whose blood was being poured out.

I must admit I also find your attitude troubling. While we seem to share a historic understanding, and your attitude towards war is otherwise mature and measured, you admiration of the glory of death and destruction, an admiration clearly shared by many, can easily lead people to choose or support war and war-like solutions to problems at hand, discounting the quickly-forgotten death, pain and suffering such wars invariably cause in abundance.

Do you take no pride in the military accomplishments of your own nation? When you read about the bravery and determination, when you visit the ancient battle fields, do you honestly feel nothing but horror?

Taking pride in military accomplishments is perfectly consistent with wishing strongly that history didn't cause the need for such accomplishments in the first place. You can understandably be proud of the courage displayed during, and national cohesion caused by a wa, while at the same time wish that events could have unfolded differently, making that war unnecessary.

Please tell me, are you also similarly happy for the two World Wars of the 20th century? Would you also feel that the "sacred spiritual possession" associated with those wars is worth more than "all the blood that poured out" during them? How about the Vietnam War? The recent involvement in Iraq? Do you feel robbed of further "sacred spiritual possession" because the Cold War never turned into an actual one?



Having established that we have no disagreements regarding historic facts (with which you are obviously much more familiar than I am), and avoiding questions of phrasing and interpretation (was slavery a "cause", or an "indirect cause"?), I wish to focus on two issues you raise and give an excellent analysis of. Both issues, I believe, will be relevant to what I hope will be many productive discussions between us going forward.

One is the question of probability and history. The second is my emotional attitude towards governments.

On the former, I have great sympathy to your view. In fact, it is a point that Ludwig von Mises and other Austrian Economists often speak of. The difference between determinable probability arising in situations in which all the relevant facts are known, and a situation is repeatable, and between unrepeatable historic events in which not all relevant facts are known.

In the former case, represented by a coin toss, quantifying probabilities is sensible. In the latter, quantification isn't possible with any rigour.

But just because we are unable to quantify probabilities doesn't mean that all potential events are equally likely. At the onset of the first Iraq war, one couldn't be absolutely certain of the outcome, yet still say with some confidence that the US was much more likely to win than was Iraq.

People, utilising their understanding of historic circumstances and relevant science and technology, major actors and societies behind them, can (in fact cannot avoid but) formulate opinions on which eventualities appear more likely than others. We do that all the time as we plan and conduct our future-oriented actions. We can do the same as we project our considerations onto historic circumstances.



As the subject touches the issue at hand, we would be facing at least to layers of uncertainty. One has to do with contemplating counter-factual history in which one of many factors differed. From my perspective, Lincoln's decision to use force to prevent Southern secession was the direct (last unavoidable) cause of the war. There are numerous causes that led to both the Southern secession (of which the issue of slavery is primary), and which supported Lincoln's decision. But none of them had to lead to war.

So I would root my counter-factual on a world in which the South chose to secede, but Lincoln accepted the South's decision, withdrew his forces from Fort Sumter, and proceeded to establish peaceful relations between the two halves of the former union (compare to the peaceful split of the former Czechoslovakia). In that scenario, many lives would have been saved (compared with actual history), but slavery would have definitely lasted longer (though it is impossible to tell quite how long).

So one point of uncertainty relates to the duration of the slavery institution in this counter-factual history.

The second point of uncertainty relates to the trade-off between the evils of slavery and the evils of war. It seems like you are not bothered by the trade-off. You clearly indicated that you prefer a world in which 600,000 died to stop slavery over one in which not a single person died to achieve the same goal. But you also clearly understand my perspective on the issue.

I made clear my view that slavery, while terrible, isn't worse than death (as those for whom it is worse than death could have and presumably did choose the latter). To be perfectly honest, the issue isn't as clear-cut as I presented it originally. People could have chosen life in slavery over death because of their hope that their personal slavery wouldn't last forever. They chose slavery with the hope of freedom over certain death.

But even if continued slavery in the alternative history represents a greater evil than the deaths of the war, that doesn't necessarily justify the war. I believe severe restrictions apply to the moral right of injuring innocent people to benefit other innocents. Both on moral and on prudential grounds, which should view with great reluctance any suggestion to kill innocents so as to save a greater number of lives.

You present a plausible scenario in which the Civil War is only postponed, rather than averted. Clearly under such a scenario, worse results could have been observed. But I disagree this is a valid argument. We are reviewing the North's decision to enforce union using military means. IF one is determined to do so (or, in the alternative view, use military means to end slavery), then the question of timing becomes relevant. However, it is that very choice that I am questioning. IF, conversely, the North's attitude was what I recommend, i.e. that neither the union, nor even the abolition of slavery is worth initiating a war, why assume that such war would start at a later date?






Finally, let me address my attitude towards government. I do believe all governments are inherently unjust. And as I do not accept the common view that government is necessary to prevent greater injustices than it itself initiates, I cannot view government as a "necessary evil", but rather purely as an "evil".

Having said that, I am perfectly capable of distinguishing different governments and realising that some governments are worse than others, some government decisions more justifiable than others. You (like me) categorically object to slavery, yet you indicated that some forms of slavery are worse than others. Being a slave in the sugar plantations of 17th century West Indies is very different indeed than being a Greek slave tutor of a Roman nobleman's children (or even a Christian bureaucrat or military officer slave in the Ottoman Empire).

My hatred isn't undiscriminatingly directed at all governments everywhere. If it were, I couldn't have supported the Confederacy any more than the Union. No. My objection and moral disapprobation is directed at injustice, regardless of who initiates it. Injustice (from minor fraud to mass murder) is wrong, and should be opposed.

What distinguishes government is not primarily the scale of injustice they are responsible for (though that scale is typically much greater than that to which non-government actors are responsible), but the fact that government-initiated injustice often receives society's approbation. That means that the forces of society cannot be mobilised against it. It means that government-initiated injustice tends to be persistent in ways that non-government injustices, being considered criminal or terrorist, aren't.

You hold that forced membership in the Union was more unjust than Southern slavery. I hold to the opposite.

No, I don't. I hold that the killing of 600,000 people was more unjust than the continuation of slavery for 20-30 years that I estimate it would have lasted. If slavery could have been ended at the cost of forced membership in the Union, but without a war, I would have chosen that. Imagine me repeating Lincoln's famous quote, but substituting "avoiding war" for "maintaining the union" is the most important goal, next to which the slavery question, while important, is secondary.

So it comes down to this. If you think that the Union was so unjust that it deserves to be completely fractured, then it doesn't matter if one of the resulting smaller states is devoted to the practice of slavery. It doesn't matter that they rebelled in order to preserve slavery. All that matters is that one large government has been fractured. The fact that the newly established Confederacy would have preserved slavery is besides the point. Slavery is unjust, but government is even worse. Besides, all of the best hypothetical reasoning leads us to believe that an independent Confederacy would have abandoned slavery in a decade or two anyway, right? So we get an end to slavery anyway (as long as we are willing to wait a little longer), and as a nice side benefit, we get to end the Union, which is today the most powerful government in the hemisphere. That is your reasoning, correct?

No, it isn't. Slavery is unjust, but war is even worse. Government's evil can be demonstrated by noting that it stood behind both slavery AND war. But that war (like most wars) pitted one government against the other. We don't have the luxury of picking a clear just vs. a clear unjust party, white vs. black. We can both agree that both governments (Union and Confederacy) were less than white.

My presumption is for the right of secession. That right doesn't absolve the ceding government from responsibility for its actions, but the act of secession in and by itself is legitimate, while the use of force to prevent secession (again, in and by itself) isn't.

Thus from that perspective, it was the Union who initiated hostilities (even if only through continued "trespass" of Southern territory in Fort Sumter). That doesn't doom the Union's moral cause. It is possible that the initiation of hostilities is justified, if its aim or outcome is to prevent a greater injustice. With that in mind, I move to consider both the aim and the likely outcome of the Union action.

The aim is clear - to preserve the union, rather than to abolish slavery. That aim (again, in and by itself) doesn't justify a war. The outcome was better - the abolition of slavery, but at a cost of 600,000 lives. Here the balance is much less clear, as we cannot know how long slavery would have lasted absent war. Clearly (to me, but maybe not to you), had we known with certainty that slavery would have ended two years later, the price of 600,000 would have been overwhelmingly excessive. Had we known that multiple generations would have been doomed to be born into slavery, I might have agreed that the overall price was justified (though I would still object to the price being charged of innocent people).


You proceed to consider a scenario in which the Confederacy won the war. Please don't mistake my view to mean that I would have applauded such an outcome. If the price of the war was already paid, we might as well have slavery abolished in the process. It wasn't Southern victory that I wanted. It was the prevention of the war.



To illustrate my position while neutralising the sensitive issue of government, imagine the following analogy. Two families, the Jones and the Smiths, live next to each other. Mr. Smith regularly abuses his wife. Mr. Jones is fully aware of that, doesn't like it, but for years has kept silence. Now one day Jones, coveting Smith's new car, comes over and proceeds to steal it. Smith objects, and a fight ensues. When the dust settles, each family's young child suffered injury, Jones gained the car, and Smith stopped abusing his wife.

Was Jones justified? Clearly not based on his initial intention (stealing the car - an illegitimate act). As for the actual outcome, one's judgement depends on two questions. First, there is the relative severity of the wife abuse on the one hand, and the children's injury on the other. If the injury was minor, the good exceeds the evil. If it was major (or if the wife abuse was relatively minor, or short in duration), evil exceeds good.

Even if the good exceeds the evil, the question is not resolved. Is it justified to steal from the rich and give to the poor? The benefit for the poor is arguably greater than the harm to the rich. So from a utilitarian perspective, the act is justified. But I am not a utilitarian. I think it is unjustified to steal (or rob, or injure, or kill) from one person, even if the benefit of so doing exceeds the harm. My position on this is not dogmatic. Unlike some (SecretSquirrel, for example), I do recognise circumstances under which such action, while unjust, is moral. For that to be the case, the good has to overwhelmingly, not just marginally exceed the evil. So stealing $1,000 from Bill Gates to give to a struggling family - wrong. Stealing $1,000 from Bill Gates to save the lives of 10 people - right (if still unjust).


I am fairly confident that by this point you understand me well. I certainly respect the view that slavery was an evil of such magnitude as to justify the use of violence towards its eradication. I am even willing to entertain that some injury to innocents was justified to eradicate that evil institution (though normally I only view the savings of lives as justifying injury to innocents). I am troubled by the suggestion that a "sacred spiritual possession" justifies the pouring of innocents' blood. Perhaps you can clarify your position by answering my questions above. I am also troubled by the ease with which you authorise the taking of innocent lives in the cause of a slave revolt. Since the principle involved is very general, I'd be happy to discus it further as well.

[Spouter]

Eran,

I thought we were at an impasse, but your last "communique" gives me hope. You have explored the basis of our disagreement in greater depth than I was able to achieve, in my last post. If you find my criticisms to be constructive, that is because you provide a lot of food for thought, and because your opinions are articulately stated. For example:

My presumption is for the right of secession. That right doesn't absolve the ceding government from responsibility for its actions, but the act of secession in and by itself is legitimate, while the use of force to prevent secession (again, in and by itself) isn't.

That is a clearly stated presumption. I used to share this opinion, myself. I am still sympathetic to the Confederate cause - not the slavery part, of course, but the secessionary part. The way I used to see it, the right of secession outweighed the evil of slavery. More recently, I lean towards the opposite conclusion. I thought these opposing positions were irreconcilable, but perhaps they are not. Your clear statements and logical arguments give the best possible defense to the opposition opinion. By opposing my own thoughts to your own, even if we cannot reach agreement, I can at least make my opinions better through the process of confrontation, because your opinions are worthy of consideration and even provide a good challenge to my own presumptions. If I fail to convince you, or you, me, then the debate will still be worth having, I think.

Once again, I do not know where exactly to start. I would like to isolate one comment which stands out, which defines your position with the greatest possible efficiency, and begin there - the core of the argument. But your position is complex and ambivalent enough that such a simple summery would appear to be impossible. I must choose more or less at random, but I will first direct my attention to your comments on slavery, because the defense of Title II that I conceive is intertwined with my ideas about slavery.

Are you aware of any suggestion that suicide was common among African-American slaves?

No statistical evidence, of course. I believe there are some fairly strong anecdotal indications which would allow us to infer high rates of suicide among Negro slaves (impossible to prove, of course). A simple google search for "negro-slave-suicide" gives me the following (1st hit):

"There was a girl named Lu who used to run off and go to the dances. The patrollers would try to catch her but they couldn’t because she was too fast on her feet. One day they got after her in the daytime... she went on down to the slough and drowned herself rather than let them beat her, and mark her up." - IDA BLACKSHEAR HUTCHINSON, enslaved in Alabama, WPA interview, 1938

"Aunt Adeline . . . hung herself on a black jack tree on the other side of the pool. It was a pool for ducks and stock... She hung herself to keep from getting a whooping." - T. W. COTTON [male], enslaved in Arkansas, WPA interview, 1939

"My mother was drowned years before when I was a little boy... I never knew the reason behind it, but it was said she started to lose her mind and preferred death to that." - MARTIN JACKSON, enslaved in Texas, WPA interview, 1937

We could go on and on like this, without proving anything really. Here is a particularly eloquent and moving example (my emphasis):

...as I afterwards repassed him he looked up with a happy, patient smile, that lighted up his whole countenance, which seemed to say plainly, I see a way of escape, and have decided on my course of action. His whole appearance was changed; his heart that before had beat so wildly was quiet now as the broad bosom of the Hudson, and he gazed after me with a look of calm deliberation, indicative of a settled, but desperate purpose. I walked hastily forward and turned around, when, Oh, my God! what a sight was there! Holding still the dripping knife, with which he had cut his throat! and while his life-blood oozed from the gaping wound and flowed over his tattered garments to the deck, the same exultant smile beamed on his ghastly features!

The history of the poor, dejected creature was now revealed: he had escaped from his cruel task-master in Maryland; but in the midst of his security and delightful enjoyment, he had been overtaken by the human blood-hound, and returned to his avaricious and tyrannical master, now conducting him back to a life of Slavery, to which he rightly thought death was far preferable.

I admire this man. He peacefully took his own life, rather than lash out at a random stranger, just because they were White. But if he had lashed out like that, who could blame him? Perhaps he restrained his violent impulses, perhaps he was a naturally peaceful man. In either case, he was forced to make a terrible choice - live as a slave, or die free.

Rather than assert that suicide was more prevalent among Negro slaves, I will simply assert this: one such suicide is a horrible thing. It is close to the most horrible thing I can imagine. You can draw my attention to the maimed and murdered innocents of the Civil War, and that does upset me (especially the children). But, the suicide of this one slave upsets me equally. To force someone to make this choice, death or slavery... words fail me. To do this to just one human would be bad enough, but to single out an entire race and establish this terrible choice as a semi-permanent part of their cultural genetics... once again, words fail me. It strikes me as a 1,000 times worse than what the Nazis did to the Jews. At least the Nazis did not try to breed a new race of Jews, as man created Chihuahuas or corn, as if the Jews were animals or plants. At least they had the decency to kill the Jews outright, like something at least roughly equal to themselves, unlike a strain of soybean that you would prefer to be more resistant to a certain pesticide.

As you can see, I feel strongly about this. I believe we still have the same fundamental differences in our basic evaluations, but you are bringing clarity to these differences, and illustrating them with some good examples, at times. The following hurdle may be truly insurmountable, don't you think?

...while terrible, [slavery] isn't worse than death (as those for whom it is worse than death could have and presumably did choose the latter).

I disagree. To force someone to make this choice is worse than just killing them outright. It is more sadistic, more cruel. Once they choose a life in bondage, you win a moral victory over them - it will be a source of shame and habitual feelings of inferiority, through which they can be manipulated. To tie this evil institution to race is the ultimate perversion of all. You no longer merely experience personal shame as a slave - the problem is no longer that you are not brave enough, or that you are not strong enough, to effectively fight for your freedom. Now you are manipulated into believing that your inferior status is racial in origin. You are imagined to be naturally servile and dependent, by some genetic predisposition. As the years grind on, the subject of this great experiment in mind control, the Negroes themselves, they actually begin to resemble the image that is being forced on them. They begin to believe themselves to be naturally lazy and fearful, servile, sex obsessed, moved more by passion than reason, more like animals than men, just as the slavemonger wants them to be. It helps the slave himself to believe these things, because his condition is humiliating and oppressive, and he needs some kind of justification, something that he can tell himself, just to get through it, just so he can keep his spirits up, keep from losing his mind, cutting his own throat, or attacking some random White. "Hell, it isn't my fault personally that I am a slave. I shouldn't be too hard on myself. As a negro, I was born to be a slave, by nature. Why beat myself up about it?"

I sense an opening here. You seem to be a man of good, liberal sensibilities, genuinely moved by injustice past and present. I believe that you fail to appreciate the true depths of the damage caused by slavery. This epic disaster still effects us today. I am sure that I could inspire a sense of righteous indignation, that I could move you to feelings similar to my own, if I merely entered into this sub-topic, the horrors of slavery, in a little more detail. And to follow this line of attack would be more directly relevant to the originating topic.

But, you made many other interesting comments which I would prefer not to neglect. And besides, this has long since evolved into a wide ranging discussion, and we have no particular need to remain strictly rooted to the originating topic, do we? A glance back now and then will suffice, for the time being.

I object to collective punishment (as does the Geneva Convention). I strongly believe people are innocent or guilty as individuals, not as group members. There is no "guilt by association". A child is always innocent, and killing such child on purpose is always murder, regardless of who the child's parents are, and what their guilt is like.

Let's clarify our difference here to an even sharper degree.

I also object to collective punishment, generally. But I object for tactical reasons, and not for reasons of principle. The bombing campaigns against Nazi Germany are a classic form of collective punishment. The main motive really was revenge. They tried to justify it with tactical objectives, but they never really achieved these objectives. Germany's industrial output remained strong throughout these brutal campaigns. The industrial base was just too big and distributed to decisively smash through air power, I suppose. The other stated objective was to break the spirit of the German masses, to compel them to turn against the war (in other words, it was terrorism, pure and simple). The Allies failed here, also. In fact, these brutal tactics only added weight to the propaganda of Goebbels, which claimed that this was a fight for absolute survival, that no quarter would be offered by the barbaric enemy, and that every energy must be strained to the absolute limit, in one last epic struggle. The bombing may have actually helped solidify their grim determination to fight to the very end - it may have actually extended the war. I object to this bombing, not because it was wrong, but because it did not seem to work.

Try as I might to say that it is wrong to cause death and injury to the innocent, I cannot bring myself to believe that it is absolutely wrong, across the board, in and of itself. If I asserted that, then I would be maneuvered into rejecting all war, like a Quaker. I cannot stop short at the point where only defensive warfare is justified, as you seem willing to:

As a rule, war can only be justified against an invading (or occupying) army. Both the Revolutionary War and, from the Southern perspective, the Civil War presented such circumstances - in both cases, military action (by the revolutionaries in the former, by the Confederates in the latter) was justified, not because of their ultimate goals (independence, in both cases) but because it was carried out in the main against an occupying or invading foreign army.

Even in the Revolutionary War, which you agree was a just cause, an army of some sort had to be assembled. There must be a general, officers, and troops. They must be stationed somewhere, in some physical location. An army needs certain things in order to even exist as an army. The men, horses, and other pack animals need food. Local structures will be useful as command posts, hospitals, and so on. Fresh troops, ammo, and other supplies must be brought in, wounded and prisoners must be brought out, so you need to have open lines of communication. If a local citizen, even a sympathetic one, would like to use these roads and rivers for his own private needs, then his needs are made secondary to the military needs - he might have to wait hours to use these clogged pathways, or be denied their use completely; he might be harassed or even physically injured by the security patrols. It is important to note that an army has no normative right of way over the local citizens in the use of these roads and waterways. The army did not build these roads. In a normative sense, the local citizens have more rights. Imagine the example of a river-dock. It was probably constructed and maintained in order to facilitate local commerce. If you imagine that an army has a normative right to use this dock, just because they are acting defensively against a foreign invasion, then I remind you of the fact that the thousands of men assembled in this army are armed, and their rights are bound to take precedence, for that fact alone. By the way, when you assemble such an army, even if they are armed with nothing but one-shot muskets, there is bound to be some kind of accident. Some innocent people will be hurt. At least one will be killed, but more on that shorty.

In order to supply these absolute physical necessities (absolute in the sense that, without these things, the army cannot exist), you must appropriate the land and property of private citizens, against their will (if necessary). If you refrain from appropriating the land of others, then you will be at a decided disadvantage with respect to the enemy. An invading army will not respect the property rights of your citizens with such scrupulousness. They will seek natural advantages in the terrain, and if you want to beat them, you must seek the same or better advantages, even if the strategic parts of the terrain are owned or occupied by unsympathetic parties. You are not conducting an opinion poll, however, but fighting a war.

Not just that - innocent parties will suffer. This is axiomatic. If you choose to fight a war, offensive or defensive, then you will cause the death of at least one child. Probably many more than that, but the statistical probabilities are not the important thing. The important thing is that every general or political boss who has ever chosen to go to war has also chosen to cause the death of children. I don't care if you are George Washington or Josef Stalin. When you choose to resolve your problems through war, then you consent to the death of at least one child. Has there ever been a war in all of recorded history in which an innocent child was not killed? When Washington was moving his troops about, occupying this ground here, fighting the British on that ground there, I guarantee you that at least one child was murdered (accidentally or otherwise, by his own troops no less... I would be willing to wager money on this). And furthermore, Washington knew this would happen. He had experience in war, right? In that case, he knew beforehand, with full consciousness and resolve of will, that his defense against the invading army would directly cause the death of at least one innocent child. If he did not realize this, then he was intellectually impaired.

This is true in all war - past, present, and future. Injury to the innocent is inevitable. Can you think of an end that would justify the deliberate murder of a child? If not, then to be strictly consistent, you must reject all war, across the board. It makes no difference if the military goals are defensive or offensive - in order to achieve these goals, either way, you have to kill a child. If it is never legitimate to kill a child, then it is never legitimate to go to war.

The only way to avoid injury to the innocent, or to avoid directly causing it, in the 1770's for example, would have been to simply submit to the occupation and all of the British political demands. Disband the militia and turn in your arms. As the occupation forces move about the country, collecting arms and what not, there will be incidents - accidental shootings, abuse of civilians and their property, etc. - but this is on the heads of the British. After your leaders have shown the obsequious signs of complete submission, the occupation forces will be sent to other parts of the empire, where people do choose to stand up for their rights.

I do not know the precise statistics, but when you assemble any number of armed men, there is bound to be some kind of accident, if not something more deliberate - in even a small body of assembled people, there are bound to be arguments, disputes, fights. Every country they march through, even a friendly one, there will injury to innocent civilians. If not a shooting, then a private domicile being used to house weapons or wounded will be accidentally set on fire. If not a fire, then a panicked horse will kick a child in the head. The laws of probability here do not allow you to believe that these things can be avoided, even if the defensive forces are very small and are assembled in a friendly country, as in the Revolutionary War (although it should be pointed out, the smaller the force, and the more sympathetic the country it moves through, the fewer the civilian casualties; but this number can be never reduced to absolute zero, and therefore my focus on the fact that, no matter how scrupulous in your effort to minimize civilian casualties, there will be at least one dead child.).

I have been somewhat reluctant to discuss the Revolutionary War, because I have not read a detailed history of the battles and campaigns (I do not quite trust wikipedia; the devil is in the details, and these details can only be found in a printed historical narrative). I know this: compared to the Civil War, the Revolutionary War was just a skirmish, really. The casualty numbers alone could tell you that. The combat casualties for the entire Revolution could almost be accounted for by one major battle from the Civil War, like Shiloh. In the Civil War, the assembled forces were truly massive, on both sides. At the start of Grant's campaign against the Army of Northern Virginia in 1864, Lee had an assembled force of 65,000 men. The citizens of the Old Dominion were certainly more sympathetic to this force than they were to Grant's invasion. But everywhere that a force of 65,000 is armed and assembled, even among a sympathetic populace, there will be accidents. As Lee struggled with Grant, he used the local roadways and houses, however he saw fit to supply his military necessities. Civilians are always hurt in this process.

Listen to the testimony of Katherine Couse, who, although a citizen of Virginia, was imposed upon greatly by the Army of North Virginia (this is from my latest reading, with my emphasis).

After being in Fed lines I can scarcely tolerate the sight of the graybacks. I hate their rusty old uniforms. I am disgusted with the sight of them. Every hour some of them ride or walk up [and] rummage the whole place. We do not ask them to come in, have as little to do with them as possible.

The only way to justify these terrible methods (the confiscation and destructive use of private property by large bodies of armed troops, which always causes some injury to noncombatants) is to view them as means to an end. If, like the Quakers, you maintain that these means can never be justified, I can respect that. War is almost synonymous with injustice. This is a truism that can be verified by reading any history of any battle or campaign, from any war you choose. Josephus' account of the insurrection of the Jews serves just as well as S.L.A. Marshall's Night Drop. Civilians are always hurt. If you prefer to avoid the death of civilians, then you must avoid war.

And so, in conclusion to this part of the argument, I assert the following. If you justify any war from all of history, then you justify injury to civilians. The fact that these deaths are caused by defensive rather than offensive warfare is besides the point. The concept of defense and offense in war refers more to the means, rather than the ends. Defensive warfare is merely one of the methods of war. It is true that the strategic objectives might make one method more useful to you, versus the other. Grant, for example, could not always avail himself of defensive techniques, like earthworks. Lee, however, in '64, had to use them constantly. Both men caused civilians to be injured, not to mention destruction of property. In that sense, their efforts were equal. If you think that one man is more worthy of justification than the other, this distinction cannot be based on the methods they used (both sides starved prisoners, for example). It all boils down to combat, fighting, physical conflict - which always involves injustice. The only thing that can justify the means is if one of them was fighting for a worthy cause. I believe that Grant deserves the benefit of the doubt here, versus Lee. That is because I agree more with the ends of the Union, versus the Confederacy, as you are well aware.

Onto your other comments. The following demonstrates another misconception I believe you have about war:

...I judge war actions as I judge all other human action involving force - it is only justified if applied proportionately and in retaliation for prior use of force.

You have mentioned this concept before - the idea that justice in war is based on proportionality - and I am sorry that I have waited this long to address it, because this is an erroneous concept, and you need to be made aware of that fact. I will follow the arguments of a much greater thinker than myself.

It was never deemed wise to risk one’s whole fortune without employing at the same time one’s whole forces, and which may be done in different ways. One is the acting like Tullus and Metius, when they committed the entire fortunes of their countries, and so many brave men as both had in their armies, to the valor of only three of their citizens, who constituted but a minimum part of their respective forces. They did not perceive that by so doing all the labors of their predecessors in organizing the republic so as to insure it a long and free existence, and to make her citizens defenders of their liberty, were as it were made nugatory, by putting it in the power of so few to lose the whole. On the part of the Romans, they could certainly not have done a more ill considered thing.

If it is worth fighting for, then you must do everything in your power to win. Otherwise, it is better not to fight in the first place. War is a dangerous and destructive endeavor, and if you do not have the stomach for it, then you should stay out. More pain and injustice will be caused by a halfhearted effort, versus no effort at all - it would be better to submit at once, in that case.

If you have the stomach for it, then be prepared for every injustice conceivable to the mind of man. War is a crime against nature, almost. I have never read any history on this subject that has failed to disgust me at some point. Infants will be killed, I assure you. If you are proposing to rebel against a powerful government like the Union under Lincoln, then you must be prepared for something not unlike what is described in the Book of Revelations. The resources of the Union are almost limitless compared to your own. It is not reasonable to expect them to refrain from a military response. Before you issue your acts of secession, before you attack military installations, you already know that they will respond violently. You can say that their response is unjust - you might as well call the current that electrocutes you unjust, after you jam a fork into a toaster.

All war can be reduced to combat, and all combat can be defined as a struggle to the death between at least two opponents. There is no such thing as proportionality in a death-struggle; you will do everything in your power to survive. If that requires you to use a grenade launcher, when all your opponent has is a pistol, should you put down your superior weapon and go looking for something more proportional to his own? A struggle to the death - that is the means in all war. If you cannot accept that, then you cannot accept war, period. That includes the Revolutionary War, and especially the rebellion of the Confederacy. On the Revolution, I am willing to cut you some slack. The militias and other defensive forces were small, by modern standards, and they were supported by a sympathetic populace. More troops on both sides were killed by illness, like Smallpox, versus combat. In the Civil War, you do not get a pass. The Confederacy knew that their rebellion would cause the death of many children (more in the South than anywhere else). They were willing to accept this as an acceptable cost for their rebellion (if they did not realize this, then they were complete fools, which I find hard to believe). It seems you are also willing to accept these costs.

Was immediate secession a proportional response to the election of Lincoln? The electoral congress had selected a new president, as they had every four years, for many generations. Until this point in 1859, no one had made a real effort to secede over the results of such an election. This is what civilized and peaceful people do: Consolidate your political base, seek new allies if necessary, alter your strategy where appropriate, and with luck, you can recapture the executive office in another four years. If you cannot wait that long, then at least wait for this Antichrist to take office, and see what he does! Perhaps you will be able to deal with him; perhaps he will allow you to preserve your precious "way of life," more than you think!

In a certain sense, the actions of Tullus and Metius seem laudable. Why should an entire army be destroyed in a large, destructive battle? Why not settle the matter with a small, symbolic combat? Here is the problem: if the thing you are fighting for is small and symbolic, then this kind of strictly limited, ritual combat may be appropriate. But if the thing you are fighting for is important, then you should commit all forces and mobilize every resource.

If you have to remove a bandage, do you slowly peel it off, tediously plucking out one hair at a time, or do you rip it off all at once, just to get it over with? By the same logic, it is better in war to use a doctrine of overwhelming force, rather than feed your troops into the battle one company at a time, in piecemeal fashion. You do not say to yourself, "Oh! The enemy only has one regiment of soldiers in this sector. I must match that with a regiment of my own." No, if you can, you send an entire brigade, or even a division. A division will be able to beat a regiment with a lot less pain and suffering, on both sides, than a more evenly matched force will be able to.

If you restrict your military to only "proportional" methods, then it is better not to deploy them at all. Vietnam is a perfect example. The communists in the South were supplied from the North, but for political reasons, the links in the supply chain (North Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) were not susceptible to infantry attack by US forces. We should not have gone to war under these restrictions - not when our enemy was willing to use every available physical resource in order to meet their own goals. If you are unwilling to risk your troops in Laos and Cambodia, then you cannot expect the enemy to respect these limitations. You have no right to expect them to make their efforts proportional to your own. If you cannot match or even exceed their commitment, then it is better not to fight in the first place.

Proportionality in war is one of those idealistic dreams that is impossible to achieve in reality. If you are uncomfortable with the deliberate murder of children, then war is not for you. Similarly, if you are disturbed by the lack of proportionality, that is an indication, or you should take it as such, that war violates your basic presumptions on justice, and should be opposed across the board (including the American Revolution). There is nothing proportional about war, except by accident. Every once in a while, the opponents seem to be evenly matched on both sides. If they are not evenly matched (as is typical), if one side has more resources, should the superior side refrain from the use of their extra resources because that would be "unfair" and "disproportional"?

I have spent too much time on the idea of proportionality in war (a thoroughly erroneous idea, like trying to imagine a mountain without a valley). Other comments deserve a response.

What if you restricted your question to those who lost a brother, a father, a husband or a son? What if you asked those who lost a friend or a leg and an arm? Do you really think they would also have preferred the glories of war over a peaceful transition?

Perhaps they would. Some of the Civil War vets were bitter and cynical, others would be filled with pride. Even those who were crippled, perhaps especially those people, could be expected to look upon their war experiences with pride, at least on occasion. Vietnam was one of the most demoralizing military adventures in American history, so it is not surprising that some of the wounded vets, like Ron Kovic, would turn against the war. But this was an exception, I think. Most 'Nam vets that I have spoken to lean toward the opposite side of the spectrum. They are proud of their service, by and large, and their only regret is that the US did not make more of a commitment. Hanoi should have been invaded and conquered, in these men's opinion.

Men tend to discover their own strong, patriotic feelings at the exact moment that they are served a draft notice. This fact is dependent on the psychology of justification (it is one of man's basic needs, to feel that his conduct can be justified). As you have pointed out, Eran, military conscription resembles slavery. But the men who submit to conscription would generally prefer not to think of themselves as slaves (and the battle and campaign histories demonstrate that they do preform like slaves, either). And so, upon receipt of the draft notice, they suddenly experience a surge of patriotic enthusiasm: "My ancestors sacrificed their lives and health in the wars of their own times. Why should I be an exception? I have enjoyed my life as a private citizen in a free republic, but the only reason we have a free republic is because my ancestors fought to make it so. Now the republic needs her citizens to fight once more. It is better to just submit to this draft, pitch in like everyone else (unlike the hippies - those ungrateful slobs). If I am lucky enough to survive, I can return to the ease and comfort of private life later, when the job is done. If not, then no one can say I didn't do my duty, and future generations will be grateful for my sacrifice." By the way, it is this exact attitude that makes American infantry so deadly and effective - like Rome before she gave up her liberty, the citizen-soldiers of a free republic are almost unstoppable (and they generally do not go to war, except under the most extreme provocation).

The same psychology of justification can be found in those who have been crippled by a war. Sometimes the crippled soldier becomes consumed with self-pity and resentment, sometimes not. Ron Kovik was crippled by an NVA bullet, and he went on to become an antiwar activist. I do not think this is a typical reaction, although I am sure it was common among the surviving casualties of the Civil War. More commonly, once someone has literally given an arm or a leg for a political cause (like the preservation of the Union), they tend not to turn against the cause. Having already paid this terrible price, to then turn against the cause and call it unjust will only demoralize you. It is better to look at this lost limb as a noble sacrifice. Having once made such a sacrifice, how can you turn against the cause that required the sacrifice? For a more general example, outside of the field of war, look at doomsday cults in which a leader announces the end of times, and all of the devoted followers sell their possessions and gather on some hill somewhere. The Apocalypse fails to materialize of course, but do the faithful then renounce their faith? Generally not; having already invested so much at this point, there is no turning back.

You do not realize this perhaps, but the point you are trying to make is somewhat distasteful. To all of these people who lost relatives on the Union side in the Civil War, to all of the veterans who were physically and emotionally crippled, you assert the following: "Your efforts meant next to nothing. Your justifications for your actions in the service are completely wrong. Slavery would have been extinct by the 1890's, anyway, even if there had been no Civil War. That arm you lost, that son, it did not help all that much. Your precious Union, to which you sacrificed so much, is unjust and illegitimate. Your enemies, even though they practiced slavery, were more legitimate."

Let's go for an even sharper degree of clarity. You are all for children being murdered and soldiers being crippled, as long as it is in the name of secession. If you are fighting for a secessionist movement, even one motivated by the desire to preserve slavery, go ahead and tear off all the arms and legs you want, kill all the children you want - you are willing to excuse all of that, but only on the Confederate side. We find nothing but excuses and justifications here (it really wasn't about slavery). But, if you lift an arm to fight against secession, you are some kind of totalitarian monster. If you serve in an army opposed to secession, your suffering is meaningless. You might as well have been a storm-trooper in Hitler's Wehrmacht. For the South, despite all of their slavemongering (which caused the war!), you have nothing but sympathy.

Here is what I cannot get past in your defense of the Confederacy - they started the war! You claim that you are against war, that you are opposed to the suffering of children, people getting their arms and legs blown off, and so on. Fine, I am opposed to these things also. Allow me to quote some more William James (the essay this is from is called The Moral Equivalent of War).

...Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out. Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing, in cold blood, to start another civil war now to gain another similar possession, and not one man or woman would vote for the proposition. In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible.

The Civil War was not forced upon the South. They choose to enter into this conflict. Before Sumter, before secession, there was no war. They started a war, in cold blood, because they thought that the results of the 1860 election equaled the death of slavery. They would rather start a war than face an end to slavery. Earlier, you tried to justify the use of force only in defense from a "prior use of force" by someone else. Fort Sumter is a perfect example of "prior use of force." Perhaps the response of the Union was not "proportional," but if there had been no provocation, there would have been no need for a response, proportional or otherwise. You claim that you are against war in general, almost a Quaker, but you are willing to a make an occasional exception, if it is necessary, in the case of dire emergency, if it is "forced upon one." That describes my own position. But then, what do you offer as the one exception that proves the rule? The rebellion of the Confederacy in 1860!?! A war started (and they did start it) in order to preserve slavery? I still find this to be profoundly confusing. Can you not find a better example, in which the side you sympathize with was forced to go to war, or were acting in response to a real military provocation (not a political provocation, like losing an election)?

I feel my blood pressure rising at this point, which is a sure indication that I have reached that fundamentally irreducible level of emotional evaluation. I must slog on, however.

I don't doubt that war presents many an opportunity for courage and valour. That it is a period of intense group-cohesive emotions, and that such emotions take hold in the national conciousness and far outlast the individual pain and loss associated with the war. Both William James and you seem to be under the spell of those emotions.

No, no, no! This is my fault. I should have given you the title of the essay and summarized the argument for you, and we could have avoided this misunderstanding. James is almost a complete pacifist, but he thinks that the pacifists can only succeed against the "war party," if they take a thorough and painfully honest account of the facts. It is an undeniable fact "that war presents many an opportunity for courage and valour." In fact, only in war are these opportunities so plentiful. It serves no purpose, when arguing with a strong advocate of war, to draw attention to all of the gore and senseless suffering. That gore is the central part of the attraction. The gorier, the better (the more physical danger, the more opportunities for courage and valor). If war is truly to be ended, then intelligent pacifists have to acknowledge the natural attraction of war, and then they must then try to find a "moral equivalent." Otherwise, pacifism is doomed.

I find James' advice to be troubling, because of the date he put it out there - 1906. If only his advice had been heeded, we might have avoided WWI. It was probably too late at this point, but still - almost a decade before the outbreak of the worst war yet, this preeminent American intellectual had already warned the world of the following.

...when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them... I look forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civilized peoples.

Despite these warnings, no substantial action was taken to avert the coming catastrophe. At that point, it was probably too late anyway.

I have heard that the socialist movement shamed itself deeply in the build up to WWI. Here was a perfect war to oppose - a giant capitalistic machine that was grinding up the working class. Think about that man in the trench across from you - that is another worker, just like you! Even though they surely could not have stopped the catastrophe, they could have scored some lasting points, if they had taken a strong stand against it.

And yet, I hear that the socialists caught the war fever just like everyone else. It was like a kind of collective hypnotism, and even the people who should have known better, like the socialists, were swept along with the wave.

That is my read on WWI, in general. It was like a wave that swept through Western society. No one nation is to blame, more than the others. Everybody just rushed into the war, like lemmings to the ocean. Some kind of strong instinct gripped the collective populace on all sides; it has an atmosphere of fatalism.

There were many other people besides James who issued such warnings, but I think that he had the best ideas about how to avert the catastrophe. It should be admitted that man has a kind of instinct for war, and we should not try to eradicate the instinct itself. But we should try to find less destructive outlets for this instinct. In other words, we have to find a "moral equivalent of war."

In order to find this equivalent, the first step is to acknowledge the moral virtues of war. How can we identify these virtues, unless we are willing to acknowledge them as virtues in the first place? In other words, we have to go back through the history of war, and we have to evaluate our past wars by the most serious possible standards. To whatever degree that this is possible, we should eliminate all of the myths of propaganda that obscure our understanding.

I think that your evaluation of the Civil War is distorted by your allegiance to abstract principles that do not apply in this situation. Secession seems more just, in the abstract. I can agree with an abstract rule that states that government violence is less legitimate than the secessionist violence that it is calculated to repress, that the defensive violence of indigenous citizens is more legitimate than the offensive violence of an invading or occupying army. But the concrete historical reality shows that the rebellion of the Confederacy is an exception. Perhaps it is the exception that proves the rule, but it is still an exception. They fought to preserve slavery!

But I am merely patrolling territory here that we are both thoroughly familiar with. At the base, this is an irreducible difference of evaluation. When it comes to the Union cause, I evaluate it highly. In the words of Machiavelli, I deeply respect "the labors of [our] predecessors in organizing the republic so as to insure it a long and free existence." You, it seems, do not.

Although I fail to find your points convincing, it is a pleasure to examine them. As usual, I have not been able to examine all of your comments, as I would have liked, despite the length of this post.

I most scan through a few remaining comments before I finish, however (sorry once again for this diarrhea of the keyboard, and thank you for your patience).

...you admiration of the glory of death and destruction, an admiration clearly shared by many, can easily lead people to choose or support war and war-like solutions to problems at hand, discounting the quickly-forgotten death, pain and suffering such wars invariably cause in abundance.

I believe, with W. James, that the opposite is closer to the truth. The war-enthusiast has not forgotten the "death, pain and suffering." In fact, it is these exact things that inspire his enthusiasm.

Taking pride in military accomplishments is perfectly consistent with wishing strongly that history didn't cause the need for such accomplishments in the first place.

Not in my estimation. A strong wish that something did not happen is a pretty good description of the feeling of shame. Shame is the opposite of pride, is it not? How can you have pride over what happened, and still see what happened as shameful?

Please tell me, are you also similarly happy for the two World Wars of the 20th century?

Too big of a question, for the time being. Look at how far this debate on the Civil War has gone. If we go into the Great War and its even more destructive sequel, we have no hope of ever getting back to Title II. I look forward to examining your A-bomb arguments, however, if I can find them.

There are numerous causes that led to both the Southern secession (of which the issue of slavery is primary)... But none of them had to lead to war.

Yes, they did. I cannot imagine a "counter-factual" scenario with any verisimilitude in which secession would have failed to lead to war. A formal declaration of secession alone would have kicked it off in all likelihood (seemingly). Direct violence against Federal property, like Sumter, made a military response inevitable. An alien with telepathic powers could have taken over Lincoln's mind and forced him to immediately capitulate to Confederate demands, but that scenario does not seem probable. The Confederacy knew exactly how the Union would respond. They hoped they would be able to counter this response, i.e. they hoped they would win the war. But they knew when they were seceding that this would cause a war. They made all possible preparations to win the war they started (they made it last four years!), which means they knew they were starting a war in the first place, or they would not have not been so well prepared (they almost won, it seems, against 2 or 3 times the force!). If they themselves knew it, why can you not acknowledge it?

I believe severe restrictions apply to the moral right of injuring innocent people to benefit other innocents.

Then why support the Confederacy, which consciously started a destructive war in order to preserve slavery? They did not start this war to benefit anyone who could even remotely be considered "innocent." They started this war to benefit slavemongers.

IF one is determined to... use military means to end slavery... then the question of timing becomes relevant. However, it is that very choice that I am questioning. IF, conversely, the North's attitude was what I recommend, i.e. that neither the union, nor even the abolition of slavery is worth initiating a war, why assume that such war would start at a later date?

There is no verisimilitude in the attitude you recommend. You are an enlightened English anarchist in the 20th century, Lincoln was a powerful Republican politician in mid-19th century America. The Confederacy did not subscribe to these anarchist notions, so why would you expect the Union to? Millions felt that the Union was worth preserving, not just Lincoln. They consented to a second term for Lincoln, after 4 years of grueling war. Union troops were one of Lincoln's solid electoral supports. If Lincoln had pushed the policies that you had recommend, he might have been removed from office, under the assumption that we was his insane, or that his mind had been taken over by a telepathic alien pacifist, and he would have been replaced with an president who was more willing to execute the people's will to preserve the Union.

Perhaps we can argue whether secession constitutes a direct or indirect cause of the Civil War. But only under these conditions: if you continue to resist blaming the secessionist rebellion of the Confederacy, fine - but you cannot shift the blame to Lincoln. Instead, you must blame a statistical majority of American voters, who put him in office, and who endorsed his policies by supporting his re-election in 1964.

I do recognise circumstances under which [an] action, while unjust, is moral.

An interesting distinction that I had not considered: Justice versus Morality! I hope we can clarify this distinction in the future.

Thank you for you efforts, as always.

[later edit: I have just discovered your recent posts on the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings. I am dying to rip some quotes from this other thread, and graft them onto my Ends vs. Means argument, but I feel like that would violate some kind of forum rule, or something. I may comment on the original thread: "Was the nuclear strike on Imperial Japan justifiable?" This question bears directly on this important ethical question, does the end justify the means - in fact, it cuts right to the heart of the issue.]

[Danny Joe]

Okay, you got me on my first de Tocqueville quote. It has been years since I read it. It was actually one of the first serious books that I ever read. Before that, I consumed trashy conspiracy theories, such as those expounded in The Creature from Jekyll Island, by some kook named G. Edward Griffin.

I did not use my de Tocqueville quote accurately, and now I can see that your reading is better. I was just grabbing something real quick off the net, and I did not look it over in enough detail.

In the spirit of honest debate, I would like to repeat the contested quote (this way, you will see that my retraction is sincere).



I was looking for something else. I thought there was a part where de Tocqueville describes the attitude of ordinary Americans, who could already anticipate a horrible war on the horizon, because of Southern slavery. Instead, I latched onto the first quote that contained the phrase "civil war." You know, I thought there was something wrong with the phrasing--I am glad you pointed this out. I can see that it is not a complete waste of time to argue with you. Well done.

I have to revisit this masterpiece it seems, and soon. I think you should also, however.



Perhaps that was indeed his view. He seems like someone who was optimistic about the continued progress of mankind. All decent people can hope that progress will be brought about without unnecessary pain. And the tension had not reached an intense enough pitch to make war seem inevitable at this point, I suppose. That is what deeper reflection tells me, anyhow. In the section following the one I quoted above, I find comments that are also relevant to our sub-argument on the Civil War. It is titled "What Are The Chances In Favor Of The Duration Of The American Union, And What Dangers Threaten It." (Part VI of "The Present And Probable Future Condition Of The Three Races Which Inhabit The Territory Of The United States." I had previously quoted from part V.)

De Tocqueville does not see such a war as likely, and if it occurs anytime soon, he predicts that the Union will lose. The editors have added a few notes preceding this chapter, to draw attention to the facts that make de Tocqueville's opinions here less than authoritative (I quote the version that wikipedia links to).



You have clarified my error, with your polite and accurate criticisms. I was letting historical hindsight creep back into my memory of de Tocqueville's original evaluations. Obviously, he could not have foreseen such a war, in any of its specific details.

Nobody could have predicted such a war over 20 years in advance, I guess. We are talking about something that had never happened in the history of the world, to my knowledge. There had been wars over slavery, of course. The Spartacus uprising jumps to mind. But that was a revolt of the slaves themselves. Never before had there been a war caused by slavery, in which the combatants themselves were not slaves. There had been slave uprisings, of course. There had been legal abolition of slavery by kings and government. But not one other example (as far as I know) where neither side in the conflict was a party of revolting slaves (there was some marginal contribution by former slaves in the Union forces, but not at high enough levels to be significant to my current argument).

It is not surprising that de Tocqueville's vision fails at this point. We are talking about something unique and unprecedented, something that could only be barely glimpsed with the most penetrating insight. Don't get me wrong: de Tocqueville had such insight. But, even the most penetrating intellect can be expected to fail at certain points. All humans, even the most talented, suffer from limitations.

Which brings me back to the original point: de Tocqueville's failure to completely grasp the nature of the coming Civil War. The individual states were too powerful at this point, and the Union was too weak. It was hard to imagine how such an inherently weak Federal authority could muster the energy and resources to combat a confederation of seceding states. He also failed to anticipate the ascendancy of a strong anti-slave party in the North.

Regardless of his inevitable intellectual failures (inevitable, because no matter how inspired, he was still human), it is still impressive to see how much his vision did encompass. He doesn't seem to think that slavery would peacefully melt away, like ice in the sun, without effort or pain, as you suggest it would have.



It is quite obvious that he sees only two real possibilities: a legal abolition of slavery, or a violent uprising of the slaves themselves. That White people who didn't own slaves would bear arms for this cause is hard to imagine in 1831. He didn't think the Union could levy sufficient troops for any cause, let alone for this one. Blacks fighting Whites over slavery was imaginable; Whites fighting Whites over such an issue only really became conceivable in 1861. But, in any case, he knew that this progress would be accompanied by "great calamities"

More importantly, he also managed to express the fact that Southerners were not amenable to reason on this issue. I understand that you "found de Tocqueville's sentiments to be supportive of [your] position," but I have provided evidence to the contradictory. I know how easy it is to experience errors in one's memory, when you are quoting from a book that you haven't read in a long time. Once again, here is the quote I wanted you to reflect on:



Your assertion that slavery in America would just peacefully disappear, because the Southerners would gradually come to accept that it was inefficient, is contradicted by these other statements (which you also failed to address directly):





These were Southern attitudes in '31. In thirty years, these attitudes had only hardened. Perhaps that was because anti-Slavery attitudes had solidified in the North. In any case, I think that if de Tocqueville's observations are correct, it is unlikely that the South would have changed their slave-mongering ways under the mere force of reason. What history shows us is that it required the force of arms.



Hindsight being 20/20, yes, these efforts were doomed. What doomed them was the military victory of Union forces. We can speculate about alternative scenarios, in which slavery was peacefully wiped out by "advances in industrialisation and automation... increasing international pressure" and so on, but these speculations have precisely the same authority as any science fiction novel.

It was also the belief of de Tocqueville that "slavery... cannot survive." But, he was not naive enough to imagine that this would happen in a peaceful way. I find your faith in the smooth and painless progress of mankind to be touching--you obviously have a lot of faith in your fellow man. History shows us that progress is always accompanied by violence and/or coercion, however. A social injustice does not just go away when people first begin to recognize it. Many examples could be cited to show that the people who benefit from these injustices always fight back with coercive methods, in order to secure their position of privilege. In order to overcome these defenses, coercive countermeasures must be deployed.

The slavery issue is a perfect example. Progress on this question was quite retarded in America. It was recognized by many enlightened people, even in the South, to be a great injustice. All enlightened parties acknowledged this, in the abstract, but no concrete measures were ever enacted (in the South). There was no political will to solve the problem, in 1831, even if Southern slavery made us an object of international disdain and embarrassment. The secondary problems that would inevitably arise seemed insurmountable; de Tocqueville does a good job of enumerating them. For example, anti-slavery measures in the North, preceding 1831, were also accompanied by the most virulent racism (much worse than in the South, in its way). Other forms of discrimination, primarily on the non-legal social plane, drove the recently freed slaves to emigrate to other places--mainly the South. If legal forms of discrimination were abolished in the South, de Tocqueville expected a corresponding rise in social discrimination. The Northern Blacks at this time could make their exodus to the South, but the Southern Blacks had no such line of retreat. Stuck where they are, with the tension continually rising in their neighborhood, something bad was bound to happen. A war of extermination, perhaps. Maybe the forceable deportation of former slaves to other nations. In 1831, he could not imagine free Blacks and Whites living together on an equal footing.

So, sure, de Tocqueville anticipated an end to slavery in the South. It was only going to take the forceable removal of almost all the Blacks, or their outright extermination. That sounds even worse than what actually did happen. A Civil War against the South sounds like a humane alternative, compared to the solution that de Tocqueville envisioned. In any case, the change would be accompanied by "great calamities."

Look, I am sure that you can indeed find support for your own positions in de Tocqueville. He is a complex thinker, and not a rigid ideologue, so I am sure that modern ideologues of all sorts can find supporting material for their own point of view in his seminal masterpiece. I certainly find such support, despite the fact that my first use of him in this debate was incorrect, because I didn't familiarize with the necessary context (I hope you can excuse this mistake, which was made in good faith, because I was in a rush... I certainly didn't consciously intend to distort de Tocqueville's position).

To further demonstrate my good faith, I will quote a passage that does seem to support your position.



In other words, if a confederation of Southern states were to secede, the Union could tolerate this, without any significant threat to the material prosperity of the whole. In fact, he speculates that this would even enhance the naval power.



It seems to me that you hold to these exact same opinions. Here's the catch, he wrote these things in reference to the world of 1831. We now have three decades of historical development to look at, which de Tocqueville did not have access to. Even if his evaluations were valid in 1831, they may not hold in 1861.

And so what has changed? Here is my estimation (certainly not the most authoritative... I haven't even gotten around to the second reading of Democracy In America yet!):

1) The ascendancy of Union power. The central power was more consolidated in '61 than in '31. De Tocqueville thought civil war unlikely, but even if it broke out, he seems to think that Union efforts would be anemic and easily repelled. This had changed completely in the 30 intervening years. History shows us, that by the time the war actually broke out, the Union was now able to hold its own against even a powerful Confederacy under competent command.

2) The growth of industrial manufacturing in the North. He is aware that there is already a disparity with the South, but it was only to grow after that. In '31, the South still received her manufactured goods predominantly from Britain. By '61, as we already know from a previous chapter in this debate, the North had appropriated this trade to herself. In '31, if the South had seceded, then Britain would not have had such a strong motive to launch aggression against the North, using a newly established toehold in an independent South. She would not have wanted to disrupt her lucrative trade to the South. However, in '61, her manufactured goods were in more direct competition with those of the North. Now there was an incentive for aggression. In other words, an independent Confederacy of Southern states, in 1861, backed by the power of Britain's navy, would have been a significant threat to the rest of the continent.

3) The rise of a strong anti-slavery party in the North. This was something that de Tocqueville failed to anticipate completely. Who could have seen this coming, in 1831? He tells us how racist they were, up in the North. They were quite willing to abolish slavery from their own states, but not because of any high minded ideals, and they were confident that racist discrimination on the social plane would drive the newly freed Blacks into other territories. They cared nothing about the injustice of slavery, and were only interested in the practical side of the question. By 1861, this had changed. Now there was strong agitation in the North against Southern slavery, not for vulgar reasons of sheer expediency, but more as a matter of principle. Another way to put this: before, in '31, there were political motives that went against this, but now, in '61, there was an ideological motive. This ideology crystallized around Lincoln in the 1860 campaign, and it drove the South into an absolute panic.

4) The consolidation of pro-slavery sentiment in the South. De Tocqueville describes an attitude in 1831 that is already almost completely intransigent: "they hold their life upon no other tenure." This attitude had only hardened by 1861. In all likelihood, this was in response to the abolitionist movement in the North, which was steadily growing in power. Then again, maybe the Northern sentiment for abolition crystallized in response to an escalation of pro-slavery sentiment in the South.

It is clear to me that I should read more about the origins of the Civil War, but even with my limited knowledge, I can see that the crisis was driven by the South's intransigence on the issue of slavery. Beginning the narrative (somewhat arbitrarily) in the year of de Tocqueville's visit to America, all of the economic and social forces that you think would have destroyed Southern slavery by 1870, without a war, or apparently without any real pain or effort at all, all of these forces were already active at this time, in 1831. Three decades went by, and still these forces had not brought the South to reason. They refused to be coerced by these "soft" methods. This made the force of arms necessary, I think.

We can speculate about what the South would have done about slavery, if they had won the war, if the Union had capitulated to their secession, or according to the dictates of any number of "alternative history" scenarios from science fiction novels. I myself can envision a scenario in which the South, now free from Union pressure, suddenly and dramatically abolishes slavery, almost out of spite, to show the North and the rest of the world that it was not slavery that made them rebellious, and now that they were not being directly forced to it, they were willing do the right thing, under their own volition. This scenario does not seem likely to me, however. More likely, inspired with confidence by their victory over the North, they would have clung to their "way of life" even more. The victor in any military contest always feels, whether it is true or not, that his victory came about through some kind of moral superiority. If the Union has just capitulated without a war, this was would have inspired an even greater feeling in the South for the moral superiority of their "venerable traditions." For all you know, a successful rebellion of the South might have secured the existence of state-sponsored slavery in the western hemisphere well into the 20th century.

Now, none of these science fiction scenarios are very relevant, because we should focus on what actually did happen, instead of what your ideology says should or could have happened. But you still seem resistant to the established facts of history.



By all means, set it aside! This is not an open topic of debate, among the minimally literate. They almost immediately seceded upon Lincoln's election, which is in itself an act of aggression. They knew full well that this would trigger a war; they showed no willingness to avoid the catastrophe. Lincoln might have been willing to capitulate on certain issues; we will never know, however, because of the South's eagerness to fight. On top of this political aggression, they were the ones who initiated military aggression, at Fort Sumter. The South picks a fight, and then you blame the North for accommodating them!

You would like to equate my justifications for the Union to the excuses that are made by propagandists for Israel. It seems to me that that is precisely what you are doing: making excuses for a bunch of murderous slave-mongers.



What aggression? I know what you mean, of course. You mean the Union should have just ignored all military and political aggression from the South, like a bunch of weaklings--just capitulate to every demand, like a wimp. I have been upset by a lot of recent elections in my country. What if I begin conspiring with a group of like-minded neighbors, and then start shelling the police station down the road? After all, if I "perceive" this station to be an aggressive military outpost, then my actions are justified, by your reasoning. When the violent counter-reaction inevitably comes, I will complain incessantly about the "unjust aggression" of "invading" forces. According to your libertarian logic, anyone who is dissatisfied with a presidential election can initiate violence against police, military personnel, or anyone at all that is "perceived" to be a threat.

If the aggression of the Confederacy at Sumter is to be justified, then you ought to show that it was in response to aggression from the Union. But in early 1861, there was no such aggression. It isn't good enough to demonstrate that they expected this aggression at some unknown point in the future. I expect a lot of things to happen, but that doesn't mean I can preemptively shoot at anyone I feel like, does it? Here is the "aggression" that you think justified so much violence: Lincoln's election. In other words, they were angry at the North because they freely cast their vote for a candidate that the South disliked.



I have already made the following point, but it bears repeating. All war boils down to defense and offence. One side is defending themselves, and the other is on the attack. The defenders should not automatically receive a normative justification, for the simple fact that they are defending themselves. But I should correct myself here. On a certain level, they do receive an automatic justification. The principle of self-defense is the central feature of all normative justifications for war. But, this principle is complex in its applications. For example, I am sure that you will admit that an offensive attack can be justified, if it is sincerely intended to defend against an imminent threat. That is your excuse for the South's violence, in fact. They anticipated an invasion, and so they acted preemptively.

But the principle of self-defense also covers the case of Union "aggression" against the Confederacy. After all, a secession by the Confederacy would have destroyed the Union as it currently existed. How can you claim the right of self-defense for the Confederacy, but not extend this to the Union as well? The Union had as much right to exist as the Confederacy.

But there is another principle we should consider as well: All wars have a political objective. Beyond the simple fact of who is attacking, who is defending, in order to evaluate whether or not a war is just, we have to ask, what were the political objectives? I have already pointed out that Germany was defending her own national territories in the second phase of WWII. Does that mean these defensive efforts were just? On a certain simplistic level, yes, everyone is allowed to defend themselves, if it is a case of national survival. But, two facts allow us to reach a more adult judgment. One, they started the war--the invasion of Germany was launched in response to their earlier aggression. And two, their political objectives were wrong--a totalitarian empire covering all of Europe and Russia. You don't get to start a war under these motivations, and then claim self-defense when you begin to lose.

This is not an exact analogy. The aggression of Germany was a great threat to all of Europe, and even the world; the Confederacy's aggression was not quite so threatening to the security of North America. I have already drawn your attention to the potential threat posed by an independent Confederacy, allied with Britain, and supported by her naval power. This was serious, but not nearly as serious as the threat posed by the Nazis. On this scale of comparison, the danger posed by an independent Confederacy ranks more as an annoyance.

But, that is not the point of the analogy. The point is, even when a nation is defending their own territory, they should not receive a blanket justification. Especially if, one, they started the aggression in the first place, and, two, their political objectives were unjust. The Confederacy did in fact initiate the violence (stop trying to hallucinate it away!), and part of their motivation was to preserve slavery. Therefore, their cause was unjust.

I know that it sounds childish to talk about "who started it," but you are the one who is trying to press a normative justification for the Confederacy. If we are trying to determine if a war is just or not, we have to ask this question. You may not like the answer, but it is a matter of fact: the South started the war.

* * *

I've got to break it off at some point. I told you I would become captivated by the subject of the Civil War, and leave the original thread behind. I find this war to be deeply interesting--so many things changed in this era. One thing that did not change was the subjugation of Southern Blacks. The Southern Whites, despite the outcome of the war, continued to force the Blacks into a quasi-feudal state of abject dependency. I believe that the North went along with this, for reasons of political expediency, and it created a serious problem for future generations.

As you point out, all other races emigrating to America managed to assimilate. The Irish were subject to all kinds of discrimination early on, but after a while, they found their "nitch," and began to enjoy the rights and privileges of full citizens. The Italians experienced difficulties, the Jews, but all eventually assimilated. The Blacks, however, continued to be oppressed well into the 20th century, making us an international embarrassment. It took truly strenuous efforts to correct this situation.

In fact, it took the heroic contributions of a true political genius, Martin Luther King. He campaigned hard for the Civil Rights Act, and one of his central goals, the main purpose of all those marches and demonstrations, was to solicit positive action from the Federal government. I find it frankly appalling that politicians and other talking-heads who follow the libertarian ideology try to claim King as one of their symbolic mascots. His methodology was completely at variance with their own. To claim King as a "libertarian" hero is to violate the facts of history. It is Orwellian.

Do us both a favor, in your future post, and distract me from the subject of the Civil War. Please expound on the "practical harm caused by Title II." I will admit that I don't see it.

Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a pivotal component of this landmark legislation in the United States. Enacted to combat discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin, Title II specifically addresses public accommodations. It prohibits businesses and facilities open to the public, such as hotels, restaurants, and theaters, from discriminating against individuals based on the aforementioned criteria. This provision played a crucial role in dismantling segregation and promoting equal access to public spaces, contributing significantly to the broader goals of the Civil Rights Act in fostering equal rights for all citizens.