Walter Williams Interview

Anon,

"Well, then there certainly was a provision for secession in the constitution ... dammit."

Correct. But do not forget that any power not delegated to the federal government by the states, and not prohibited to the states by the Constitution, remained a right of the states or the people. Since the states never delegated any power to suppress secession to the federal government, secession remained a reserved right of the states ... damnit.

I'm happy to see that my "commom sense" argument for general acceptance of Fogel and Engerman's conclusions seems to be supported by the thinking of Don Boudreaux in a different context above, where he says:

"Suppose country X's workforce is enslaved. The benefit of slavery to producers is the cheapness of the labor. So with the cost that producers must pay for labor held below what it would be if the workforce were one of free men and women, producers will use relatively labor-intensive means of production."

I hold Walter Williams in the highest possible regard so that if I disagree with something he says I assume that I am wrong. However, his assertion that slavery had become unprofitable by the time the Civil War started, and especially the statement by Russ Roberts that Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman agreed, in their book TIME ON THE CROSS (1974), needs to be corrected. It may be arguable whether slavery was profitable or whether it was economically moribund, but Fogel and Engerman wrote their book for the express intention of advancing the former proposition and debunking the latter. Their evidence is powerful, as well as their citation of other authorities.

Fogel and Engerman cite seven findings of econometric research for their thesis:

1. Cotton prices remained high during the antebellum period and during 1855-1860 demand exceed supply;

2. Between 1830 and 1850 the expected rate of return on an investment in slaves equaled or exceeded the average rate on alternative investments;


3. A large part of the price of 18-year old slaves was capitalized rent. The rental component in the price of slaves increased substantially between 1820 and 1860.


4. On the eve of the Civil War slaveholders were quite sanguine on their future economic prosperity.


5. If slavery had persisted until 1890 it is probable that the real price of slaves would have exceeded the 1860 price by more than 60 percent.


7. There is no evidence that slavery caused the ante-bellum South to stagnate. Between 1840 and 1860 Southern per capita income rose at least as rapidy as the national average.

It would seem to me that Fogel and Engerman's conclusions are supported by common sense. If cotton prices remained high, and if cotton production was labor intensive, wouldn't we expect that one who commands cheap labor, i.e., slave labor, would be pretty well situated? I know slaves weren't free, they had to be bought. But if a large part of the price was capitalized rent and that component was increasing, then it really was cheap labor. Perhaps so cheap it was worth going to war to keep it.

So, was the Civil War fought over slavery? Maybe not for the North, but certainly it was the preservation of slavery that motivated Southern slaveholders.

Walter, you are still my hero. You're just wrong on this one.

Respectfully,

Ken Willis


Moose, Wyoming

Williams for President!

(President, that is, of the Country of North New York -- once we secede from the idiots in Albany and the idiots in Washington.)

Southern secession probably was legal, but that debate is pointless. (It was legal because you can't simultaneously hold that the 13 colonies had a right to break off from England, and then say the Southern States couldn't break off from the U.S. for essentially the same reasons.) But the debate is pointless because such matters are political, not legal. "Rights" are conferred by laws. Laws are just a framework to guide social and political activities. If the laws don't reflect social and political realities, they get thrown out the window.

The biggest thing laws convey is legitimacy--everything else is based on power. If the laws don't confer legitimacy, what good are they? And if you violate the law, but your legitimacy is strengthened in doing so (which is certainly the case with Lincoln), that means the laws have stopped doing their job. Hence, the argument about whether the South had a right to secede is pointless.

Tarran,

I agree -- states have no rights. So I'm unclear where this inalienable right to secede comes from. It certainly doesn't come from any principle the country was founded on. Now, the Declaration does refer to an inalienable right to revolution after a long train of abuses, but that's not at all the same thing. That's a right of the individual, not the state (which you could probably already have guessed from the way the supporters of secession objected to the Declaration rather than holding that it supported them). I might add that it's a bit odd for defenders of the Confederacy to talk about the inalienable right to revolution, since this right is based in the inalienable right to liberty and to self-defense and since one of the founding principles of the CSA was that these principles are nonsense.

Nor can you say that the national government is an agent of the states -- the constitution is a compact between individuals, not between states. Even if the states had been party to the constitution, reserving the right to secede would be irrelevant since it is a basic principle of common law that there cannot be new terms in agreeing to a contract. Furthermore, even if one agreed to both of these errors (that states signed the constitution and that additional terms are binding and relevant), then they would only hold for the states that made such reservations -- if I recall correctly, Virginia, Rhode Island, & New York. Only one of these states seceded -- the other 10 states must still be considered to be acting unconstitutionally.

Neglecting all this, one might still hold that slavery was an "ex post" explanation for the war. One would, however, have to take the matter up with the seceding states, which seem to have talked a great deal in their declarations about slavery but not a whole lot about tariffs. One might then argue that the Union did not go to war for slavery. One might make a big deal about how the Emancipation Declaration did not liberate all slaves. I suppose this makes a great deal of sense if one has already rejected the position that the constitution must be followed. If one did not believe that, however, it's unclear why one would condemn Lincoln for going beyond any authority the constitution's war powers could grant him.

Anon,

States have no rights. Their officers are granted special privileges that are in theory anyway delegated to them by the people. In effect they are supposed to be agents of those whom they rule over.

The doctrine that any group of people can fire these agents and secede from the government manned by these agents was the founding principle of the United States.

In the U.S. revolutionary War, 13 colonies withdrew from the British Empire. In the end, the British King signed a peace treaty that recognized each colony as a sovereign state.

When Hamilton's faction managed to change what should have been a meeting to amend the articles of Confederation between these 13 sovereign states into a meeting to set up a central state, they ran into many obstacles. They had a lot of trouble getting attendees to their state ratification conventions to agree to accept the U.S. Constitution. In the end representatives of several states, including Virginia and I think North Carolina and New York arranged to have these states join the new Union under the condition that they could secede at any time in the future.

So why did the South secede? Not over slavery. By enforcing the fugitive slave laws, the broad mass of U.S. citizens showed themselves quite happy to have slavery continue. It was in fact over taxes. As the Republicans swept into power in 1860, they voted into law a massive tarriff to pay for the various "internal improvements" they had promised their constituencies (incidentally, Abraham Lincoln who was quite the savvy lobbyist had purchased a fair bit of land on the planned route of the government subsidized trans-continental railroads, had he lived, he would have become a very rich man).

The Southerners, tired of being taxed in order to pay for government programs that benefitted Norther Industry seceded. This is no different than the lead-up Revolutionary War, to claim that the confederacy had no right to secede is to claim that the United States had no right to secede from the British Imperium.

Now, it is instructive to go read Lincoln's inaugural address. This passage is very illuminating:

"In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere."

In other words, so long as the Southerners kept paying their taxes, they could do whatever they wanted. But if they stopped, well the 600,000 dead and the scorched earth policy of the union demonstrates the threat. When the Confederates bombarded for Sumpter, they were, in effect kicking out unwanted tax-collectors.

Now, what's funny is that while the war between the states raged, slavery continued in the union. Slaves continued to work in plantations in Maryland. Slavery continued in West Virginia. Slaves owned by federal contractors toiled on the construction of the U.S. Capitol. Even the slaves that had supposedly been freed by the emancipation proclamation, the men, women and children held in bondage in the Confederacy found themselves impressed into service of the union army, building earth-works and fortifications this time under the whips of Union officers.

Slavery was a disgusting, despicable institution, and I wish Thomas Jefferson had stuck to his guns when debating the original Declaration of Independence (his first draft condemned the slave trade and would have, in my mind, if adopted forced the end of slavery shortly after the revolution). However, the War Between the States was a war about tax collection as the speeches and historical documents show. The idea that it was to stamp out slavery was a justification trotted out late in the game as a post-facto rationalization.

That only makes sense if you think the states had the right to secede and then to form the CSA and then open fire. Not sure where that first right comes from ...

The position that the war was about states rights is grammatically incorrect. The right to own slaves is a singular, is it not? (Unless you're saying they seceded for the right to own slaves AND the right to secede. So ... they seceded to protect their right to secede? Well, all right then, that definitely makes violence legitimate.)

The CSA refused to allow a foreign power (The USA) to occupy a portion of South Carolina after being duly served with legal notice to leave. Point is the South thought they would be allowed to leave and honestly didn't think war would result. And don't give me that stuff about slavery. Slavery was on its way out everywhere. The War Between the States was about States Rights. California nad Texas would both be better off without the rest but there's no way it would be allowed to happen. California having paid more in Federal tribute in 18 of the last 19 years explains but one reason.

Robert Cote,

Good point. I mean, it's not like they started shooting first. Oh, wait ...

Well, then there certainly was a provision for secession in the constitution ... dammit.

Great interview. I love Dr. Williams. (Though I do disagree with his strident anti-Lincoln stance.) Have you tried asking his friend Thomas Sowell for an interview?

One small correction: I think it was Alfred Marshall who talked about "burning the math" if one was unable to explain the point in plain English.

Hehe, "normal people".

Of course it was a War between the States. Did the many and several and independent States of the south in any way abrogate or violate any duties, responsibilities or obligations to the Union? Did they withdraw in an improper fashion? Even if somebody could find a technicality to answer yes above was that reason enough to go to war? Problem is history is written by the winners. The winners called it the Civil War. This is in keeping with the naming of battles during the conflict where the winners named the location.

A Republican may have preserved Federalism but a Democrat preverted it and we are still paying the price.

Fantastic, thank you Dr. Roberts! Dr. Williams is one of our heroes!