dailyreckoning | In order to understand Lincoln’s passion for preserving the Union,
you have to put yourself into a different era of federal finance. There
was but one source of revenue: the tariff. There were no internal taxes.
There was no “too big to fail,” because there was no central bank
capable of bailing out an entire industrial base. As Lincoln himself
said by way of explanation, “The tariff is to the government what a meal
is to the family” (1861). The South’s ports collected 75% of all
federal tax revenue. Without that revenue — that’s what secession meant —
the federal government would be starved.
So in one sense, Lincoln was doing only what we’ve come to expect of
presidents. One only has to imagine how Bush or Obama or any modern
American president would react to the prospect of a 75% cut in incoming
revenue — especially if there were no central bank to make up the
difference. Would any modern president let the people go, just stand by,
and let the federal government starve? Let every opportunity for graft,
payoffs, spending on projects, and patronage just evaporate? No chance.
The controversy has raged for a long time about whether the Civil War
was really about slavery. It depends on the meaning of “about.” In
terms of Lincoln’s motivation, the Fallon book makes it indisputably
clear that it was not the desire to end slavery that drove Lincoln’s
prosecution of the war, but the need for national unity, which in turn
comes down to enforcing the revenue stream. Anyone who knows anything
about how politics operates can see this very clearly. In fact, I don’t
even know why this would be a controversial claim at all. Why does the
head of any state put down rebellion? To liberate people or to enslave
them?
As for the motivation of the South to secede, matters become more
complex. The desire to shore up slavery and protect the territory from
the abolitionists played a large and even decisive role, given that most
everyone assumed that slavery was essential to the South. There was
also the desire on the part of Southern elites to set up a new
government that could form its own trading relationships with foreign
nations. And though the demand for secession is an essential right of a
free people, the new Confederate government drafted, taxed, and inflated
in a way that contradicts every other principle of liberty.
The lesson here is that no government or power of any size or scale
can be relied upon to defend liberty. And governments in wartime come
into their own, stopping at nothing to protect their power at the
people’s expense.
