Intrepid Tactics

As we approach our 250th anniversary, I believe it's worth noting that our government is only actually 165 years old. The American Republic established in 1776 ended in 1861. The Civil War cost almost a million lives: one out of every five white men of military age in the South and one out of every ten in the North. It destroyed virtually all of the wealth in the South — a 90% reduction to per capita GDP. The South would not recover economically until 1950. But the real cost of the war wasn't economic. It was political. The Civil War destroyed the Federalist system that our founders built to ensure the central government's power remained genuinely limited. Not limited by the goodwill of its legislators, which is no limit at all, but limited by the existence of rival sovereign States, which could restrain the central government and each other through competition. After 1865 the only real limit to federal power was the self-restraint of the men in office. And that didn't last for long... But, before we look at the long-term impact of America's first war of aggression, let us dispel a critical myth: that the Civil War ended slavery. Slavery was ending because of technology and economics. And it would have ended just as surely if no war had ever been fought between the States. Britain abolished slavery, without a war, throughout its empire in 1833, freeing some 700,000 people in the West Indies alone. France abolished slavery in its colonies in 1848. Russia — the most backward great power in Europe — emancipated some twenty-three million serfs in 1861, the very year of Sumter. The Netherlands freed the slaves of Surinam and Curaçao in 1863. Across the entire industrializing world, unfree labor was abandoned within a single compressed generation. And, in no other great nation, was war required. In America, slavery did not end because of General Grant and the boys in blue. It did not end because of a moral awakening. The cause was economic. Chattel slavery extracts muscle power from human beings. Therefore, slavery only makes economic sense if muscle power is the binding constraint on production. Once machines had multiplied the labor output of muscle by hundreds of times, slavery was not only immoral but inefficient. In an industrial economy a slave costs more than he yields. As a result, capital flees from slavery into factories. All over the world. And even in the South. Slavery ended everywhere at roughly the same time for the same reason: innovation and economics. It would have ended in the American South regardless of who won at Gettysburg. Even Brazil, the last holdout in the Western hemisphere, freed its 725,000 slaves with the Golden Law of 1888. No war was required: slavery was no longer productive. With apologies to the celebrants of Juneteenth, slavery was not legally abolished in the United States until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December 1865. The institution died, not because of the war, but because the world had entered the machine age. The unnecessary destruction of half of our country and almost a million people wasn't the greatest tragedy of the Civil War. The greatest tragedy was the loss of Federalism and the hard-won liberty Americans won in the Revolution. The Civil War destroyed the federal structure of the American republic, in which the several States were sovereign in their own spheres, with genuinely different legal systems, cultures, and traditions. The national government was beholden to the States, with only limited and enumerated powers. The clearest proof of this change lies in our language. Before 1861, the United States was a plural noun. Men said the United States "are." After 1865 our country became singular. The United States "is." The doctrine that a state could check the central government — by interposition, by nullification, in the last resort by departure — died at Appomattox, and with it the last structural brake on the power of the federal government died too. The framers had not relied on parchment to limit the government they created. They relied on competition. So long as the States were genuinely sovereign — so long as a man oppressed in one State could remove to another, so long as the national government had to reckon with twenty or thirty rival centers of authority each jealous of its own jurisdiction — the central government could not easily grow into a Leviathan. The States were not administrative subdivisions. They were the Constitution's immune system. What followed the Civil War was America's first empire -- in the South. And Empire's require a strong central government. Thus began a long erosion of the line between the citizen and the State, and between private institutions and public power. Twelve years after the war, the Supreme Court considered whether a State could fix by law the prices a private grain warehouse charged its customers. The owners argued it was a taking of their property without due process — that what a man does with his own property, and what he charges for its use, is rightfully his own affair. The Court disagreed. Chief Justice Waite ruled that when private property is "affected with a public interest, it ceases to be juris privati only," and may be regulated by the government for the common good (Munn v. Illinois, 1877). That was the end of private property in America. After all, if the national legislature may decide which property is "affected with a public interest," and may then dictate its prices and uses, there is in principle no property the government may not control. Justice Stephen Field saw it and dissented with prophetic fury. The doctrine, he warned, "is nothing less than a bold assertion of absolute power by the State to control at its discretion the property and business of the citizen." A legislature that could fix the uses and prices of property "against the consent of the owner" could "deprive him of the property as completely as by a special act for its confiscation or destruction." New York City's landlords are finding out the truth of this reality. They believe they own their properties. But they are about to find out otherwise, as rents will now be controlled by the mayor, who is a communist. This will spread. A communist ruling over all of America is only a matter of time. Why? Because the law provides an unlimited incentive for such power. There is nothing in America the government cannot take from you. Nothing. The proof of the unlimited central authority was established in blood. The courts followed where the armies led. And the first American Empire — the North's conquest of the South — led to more such military adventures, which continue to this day. In its first century, the United States heeded its founders' warnings against entangling alliances, a large standing army, and foreign military adventures. But the creation of the massive Northern army created its own momentum. Only 20 years after Reconstruction, the country clamored for another Empire and war against Spain. America became an imperial power, with possessions from the Caribbean to the far Pacific — Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines. The consolidated nation that emerged from the Civil War was the precondition for the American Empire that emerged in 1898. Power flows to the center, and the center's reach has no natural boundary. The Leviathan must be fed. In 1913, every American became a direct serf to the national government: The Sixteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to tax incomes directly. The size of a government is set, in the end, by the size of its revenues. The income tax removed the ceiling. The Seventeenth Amendment, ratified the same year, provided for the direct election of United States senators. Under the original Constitution, senators were chosen by the state legislatures. This was the last vestige of State sovereignty. It could not be allowed to stand. The Senate stopped being the guardian of federalism. And… then… with these Constitutional impediments finally vanquished, you saw Leviathan act to ensure its permanent dominance: it would control the money supply. In December of 1913, Congress created the Federal Reserve System. The power over money, which the Constitution had strictly withheld from the central government, was enshrined into law. Income tax, a central bank, and the removal of the states from the Senate — all in one year. The Revolution that began in 1861 was complete. America's Empire had begun. Munn established that the government may dictate the use of private property. 1898 established that the consolidated nation would project power without limit beyond its borders. 1913 established the revenue, the money power, and the removal of the states from their guard post. The 1964 Civil Rights Act expanded this dictatorial power into every private transaction in America. Government of the people, for the people, and by the people has been destroyed. We now live in an Empire, not a Republic. The Civil War didn't free any slaves; it enslaved all of us.