I’ll have more to say on this Thursday when I speak at Cato, but I wanted to say a few words on the New York Times’ front page profile of Rand Paul the other day, whch has once again irritated the old blister about the paleolibertarians and their neo-Confederate views.
Readers of Freespace know that I am among the most outspoken critics of that wing of the libertarian community. But what deserves emphasis here is that libertarians have a far stronger claim to the legacy of the antislavery movement than either liberals or conservatives today. As I argue in The Conscience of The Constitution, libertarians are the inheritors of the political philosophy that eradicated slavery and put the kibosh on the authoritarian dogma of “states rights.” It’s a heritage libertarians ought to celebrate.
When people think of abolitionism today, they typically think of the anti-constitutional radicals like William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison was, indeed, a brave and eloquent man, a great American defender of liberty who railed on the profound immorality of slavery and was heard, as he said he’d be. But even more important than Garrison were the pro-constitutional abolitionists, more properly called the antislavery constitutionalists, who argued that pro-slavery forces were perverting the Constitution to their own ends. Beginning with John Quincy Adams, and including people like Charles Sumner, Salmon Chase, William Seward, Frederick Douglass, Joel Tiffany, Lysander Spooner, and, of course, Abraham Lincoln, these men articulated a constitutional theory that began with the presumption that all people are entitled to liberty. They interpreted the Constitution in light of the principles of the Declaration of Independence—which pro-slavery forces denounced.
The antislavery constitutional theory had two primary elements. First, Americans are citizens of the nation first, and only secondarily of a state. Second, American citizenship brings with it protections for natural rights, constitutional rights, and the rights of the Anglo-American common law. These rights—the “privileges and immunities” of American citizenship—could not be justly abridged by any state.
The reason that national citizenship took priority was because the Declaration was the basic foundation document of the American nation. It not only made the nation a sovereign entity, but it limited that sovereignty in light of the natural rights of all mankind. That was the argument of Adams’ epochal work, The Jubilee of the Constitution. His followers would advance this interpretation of the Constitution in courts and legislatures over the next thirty years. When at last a President was elected who believed in these principles, and who articulated a plan to end slavery peacefully and gradually, southern states chose to start a war—to initiate force—rather than to allow slavery to be peacefully ended.
They did so on the basis of quintessentially anti-libertarian principles. Defenders of slavery held that states are sovereign—not on account of the consent of the governed, but because they are fundamentally sovereign entities—and that states have the legitimate authority to give or withhold “rights” (i.e., privileges) to the people. Slavery’s defenders ridiculed the principles of the Declaration, denied the existence of an American nation, demanded greater federal subsidization for slavery, insisted on a new Fugitive Slave Act and a national slave code that would have transformed the nation into a police state—and, indeed, ran their own states as proto-totalitarian societies. Pro-slavery ideology was communitarian, traditionalist, positivist, gradualist, and anti-Enlightenment.
It was antislavery radicals—Garrisonians at first, and then those who would found the Republican Party—who put an end to all this. Their greatest triumph came with the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, which, they hoped, would forever put the “states rights” heresy to rest. National freedom, and federal protection for the natural rights, constitutional rights, and common law rights of all Americans, would be every American’s birthright. And no state government could claim any legitimate authority to trample on these individual rights in the name of collectivist principles of autonomy. The purported “right” of states to tyrannize over individuals would come, they hoped, to an end.
Yes, that triumph was betrayed. But that fact doesn’t lessen the triumph. And it doesn’t tarnish the libertarian heritage and its roots in the antislavery movement.
Conservatives, of course, fought in the years that followed to undo that achievement, by undermining Reconstruction and restoring state autonomy—and reinstituting slavery by another name. These conservatives were initially grouped within the Democratic Party. Republicans, meantime, lost much of their enthusiasm for protecting civil rights in the south. By the end of the century, both parties would become infatuated with the rising tide of Progressive political thought, which rejected the idea of natural rights entirely, and embraced the idea that rights are just privileges government can grant or withhold at will. Although the 1960s would bring important qualifications and realignments, this still remains largely true. The intellectual leadership of both conservative and liberal ideologies hold that government is presumptively sovereign, and that individual rights are permissions granted to individuals to suit the needs of society—more or less the same view held by those who resisted the abolition movement in the years leading up to the war. Today, liberals and conservatives agree on one thing, whatever their differences: individual freedom is a gift the government gives people, when and how the collective decides to do so.
That, of course, is just what the antislavery movement fought against—and what today’s libertarians still combat.
I think it’s a shame that many people have been confused by the arguments of the neo-Confederates at the Mises Institute, and people like Ron Paul. It is my hope that people will come to understand not only that those arguments are false and dangerous—and not only that libertarians are the champions, and not the enemies, of equal rights for all—but that libertarianism rightly understood is the true inheritor of the antislavery legacy.
Like I said, I’ll have more to say about this on Thursday at Cato. But you can also learn more about antislavery constitutionalism in the works of Jacobus tenBroek, James Oakes, Harold Hyman and William Wiecek, and of course by reading the original sources—particularly Tiffany, Spooner, Douglass, and Lincoln—for yourself.
Update: Here is what I said at Cato:
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