# Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men ## Metadata * Author: [Jeffrey Hummel and John Majewski](https://www.amazon.comundefined) * ASIN: B00G1SRDUK * ISBN: 978-0812698435 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G1SRDUK * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK) ## Highlights This in effect required the national government to subsidize the enforcement of the slave system with resources from slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike. Second, the Constitution counted three-fifths of a state’s enslaved population to determine its representation in the House of Representatives. This “federal ratio,” although applied to direct taxes as well, principally increased the political power of slaveholders in proportion to the number of enslaved blacks. — location: [841](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=841) ^ref-47041 --- Embraced in the French Revolution of 1789, these radical ideals soon helped spark a bloody slave insurrection in the French West Indies. By New Year’s Day, 1804, the successful black rebels had established the Republic of Haiti, the second independent nation in the New World. — location: [848](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=848) ^ref-7219 --- Confronted with mounting moral condemnation, Southerners ceased apologizing for their peculiar institution as a “necessary evil.” They instead began boldly to defend it as a “positive good,” to use Calhoun’s very words. — location: [1034](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=1034) ^ref-38264 --- The proslavery defense was built upon a belief in Negro inferiority. — location: [1046](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=1046) ^ref-23444 --- Fitzhugh defended slavery as a practical form of socialism that provided contented slaves with paternalistic masters, thereby eliminating harsh conflicts between employers and allegedly free workers. Liberty, he believed, places classes in a position of antagonism and war, — location: [1054](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=1054) ^ref-2209 --- To squelch any further resistance, Southerners extended many of slavery’s totalitarian controls to the free blacks and eventually to whites. — location: [1090](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=1090) ^ref-35579 --- The South’s siege mentality turned it into a closed society. — location: [1097](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=1097) ^ref-12848 --- Congress did bow to southern outrage over the antislavery petitions now pouring in, most commonly demanding an end to slavery in the District of Columbia. It instituted a “Gag Rule” that automatically tabled such petitions. Both measures were possible because abolitionists were unpopular in the North too. — location: [1109](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=1109) ^ref-18565 --- French commentator on 1830s America, observed that “race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known.” — location: [1113](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=1113) ^ref-24195 --- Slaves who were skilled carpenters, masons, or other artisans often could “hire their own time,” that is, choose their own employers and thereby engage in entrepreneurship. Many lived separately from their masters. Charles Ball, a black undertaker in Savannah, Georgia, was even able to hire other slaves to help with his jobs, paying his master $250 a year in monthly installments. “A city slave,” observed black leader Frederick Douglass, “is almost a free citizen” because he “enjoys privileges altogether unknown to the whip-driven slave on the plantation.” — location: [1421](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=1421) ^ref-55404 --- What distinguished slavery was the master’s option to wield brutality and terror. Theoretically he could add sufficient force to induce a slave to do any task that could be induced with a wage. Flogging was the most common method. This power was legally limited only by unenforceable state laws protecting human chattel from murder and mutilation and setting minimum standards for subsistence. — location: [1435](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=1435) ^ref-9130 --- Many blacks, if free, might have done these well-paid jobs. They therefore could produce either of two possible streams of future output—one less valuable while slaves and one more valuable while free. — location: [1446](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=1446) ^ref-5607 --- Despite the refusal of state laws to recognize the bondsman’s right to hold property, his higher asset value once free should have enabled him to borrow the purchase price, under all sorts of risk and repayment plans, either from his master or a third party. — location: [1448](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=1448) ^ref-61879 --- “the most important distinction between the legal status of slaves in British and Latin America” was the extensive barriers to manumission in British-settled areas. “Only in the Southern United States did legislators try to bar every route to emancipation and deprive masters of their traditional right to free individual slaves.”7 — location: [1458](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=1458) ^ref-23847 --- Because of all these legal obstructions, slavery necessarily misallocated labor into less productive uses. Slaves were not only worse off, but the South’s aggregate output was lower than otherwise. This does not justify slaves having to buy their own liberty but merely acknowledges that the market provided a route to eliminate this inefficiency and simultaneously erode the peculiar institution. — location: [1466](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=1466) ^ref-56278 --- Higher output drove down cotton prices and caused a redistribution from black slaves to American, English, and continental wearers of clothing. — location: [1500](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=1500) ^ref-33692 --- American blacks were being deprived of leisure so that millions of workers elsewhere could live slightly better. — location: [1503](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=1503) ^ref-63806 --- British influence might induce Texas to abolish the institution, whereupon runaway slaves would have a new haven, and British mills would have a new source of cotton other than the slaveholding South. Former President Jackson was now a staunch supporter of annexation because of just these fears. “Would not . . . our slaves in the great valley of the Mississippi [be] worth nothing, because they would all run over to Texas, and under British influence, [be] liberated and lost to their owners[?]”4 — location: [2187](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=2187) ^ref-43851 --- Those “interested in the continuance of domestic slavery and the slave trade in these United States have solemnly and unalterably determined . . . that, by this admission of a new slave territory and slave states, the undue ascendancy of the slaveholding power in the government shall be secured and rivetted beyond all redemption.” — location: [2220](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=2220) ^ref-60169 --- Belief in an abolitionist plot caused Southerners to behave just as the opponents of Texas annexation predicted, and belief in a Slave Power plot caused Northerners to behave just as the advocates of annexation predicted. — location: [2228](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=2228) ^ref-42395 A word for this effect --- An anonymous southern Congressman reportedly complained later in exasperation that the “whole controversy over the Territories . . . related to an imaginary negro in an impossible place.” — location: [2337](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=2337) ^ref-10623 --- Just three months before the election, organizers from the Liberty Party skillfully united the Barnburners and Conscience Whigs into a more broad-based third party. — location: [2356](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=2356) ^ref-7374 --- The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 also inspired stronger personal liberty laws. Beginning with Vermont, nine free states either provided for the legal defense of alleged runaways or openly defied the national government by requiring jury trial, habeas corpus, and other procedural safeguards. — location: [2467](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=2467) ^ref-39545 --- If the Spanish continued refusing to sell the island, “by every law, human and divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain if we possess the power.”27 But when the “Ostend Manifesto” was leaked to the public at the end of 1854, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune denounced it as the “Manifesto of the Brigands.” — location: [2512](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=2512) ^ref-55449 --- the socialists (and their variants, particularly social democrats or, in the U.S., modern liberals), when they came on the scene during the nineteenth century, were not more radical than the classical liberals but less. They represented a middle-of-the-road compromise that attempted to achieve the goals of classical liberalism, greater freedom and prosperity for the masses, but by using the means of conservatism, State intervention. Socialism thus is not only reactionary in practice, as the abysmal failure of the planned economies recently yet so eloquently attests, but also reactionary in its theoretical origins. — location: [2539](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=2539) ^ref-5991 --- The 1850s was the most intense decade of rail construction for the United States. Track mileage soared from 9,021 miles to 30,627, as railroads became the country’s first billion dollar business. — location: [2655](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=2655) ^ref-65254 --- The 1856 presidential election became almost two separate contests. Because the Republicans were a purely sectional party, Buchanan competed only with Fillmore for votes in the slave states, whereas competition in the free states was primarily between Buchanan and Frémont. The Democrats, as the sole national party, secured a majority of the electoral college. But they won just 45 percent of the popular vote. Frémont carried all but five of the free states, making Buchanan the first presidential winner since 1828 without majorities in both the North and South. — location: [2720](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=2720) ^ref-59669 --- Thrown on the defensive, Lincoln revealed the limits to his support for racial equality. “I will say then, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way, the social and political equality of the white and black races—that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters of the negroes, or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office, or having them to marry with white people. I will say in addition, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I suppose, will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality[;] and inasmuch as they cannot so live, that while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, that I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white man.” — location: [2849](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=2849) ^ref-21806 --- Many loyal unionists in the South thought that the seven seceding states were over-reacting. — location: [3148](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=3148) ^ref-16338 --- As one Georgian explained, independence would permit Southerners to erect “an impassable wall between the North & the South so that negroes could not pass over to the North or an abolitionist come to the South to annoy us any more.” — location: [3174](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=3174) ^ref-44297 --- Some Northerners agreed that the new Gulf Coast Confederacy should be allowed to depart in peace. — location: [3247](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=3247) ^ref-24837 --- The military authorities soon began imprisoning prominent secessionists without trial. The writ of habeas corpus was a constitutional safeguard to prevent such imprisonments without sufficient legal cause, — location: [3335](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=3335) ^ref-35602 --- Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, sitting as a circuit judge, ordered Merryman released, but federal officials, acting under Lincoln’s orders, refused. — location: [3338](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=3338) ^ref-37521 --- This provocation converted many Union sympathizers into secessionists. One delegate to the state convention, who had voted against Missouri’s secession, announced his change of heart to a city crowd. “If Unionism means such atrocious deeds as have been witnessed in St. Louis, I am no longer a Union man.”20 The Lincoln Administration’s heavy-handed ineptitude had managed to provoke open hostilities within a state that had not formally seceded. — location: [3381](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=3381) ^ref-23376 --- During the war’s second summer, the most notorious band of Confederate partisans, led by William C. Quantrill, descended upon Lawrence, Kansas, burned the business district to the ground, and murdered in cold blood every male inhabitant they could locate—183 in all. — location: [3400](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=3400) ^ref-55734 --- Federal authorities declared martial law; required loyalty oaths before people could trade or engage in many other daily activities; censored books, journals, sermons, and sheet music; and crowded the jails with Rebel sympathizers. By 1862 the military was interfering with elections, preventing candidates from running, and dispersing the Democratic convention at bayonet point. The net result was that the people of Kentucky felt greater solidarity with the rest of the South at the war’s end than at its beginning. — location: [3425](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=3425) ^ref-43127 --- From Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, and West Virginia together, about 185,000 white men served in the Union armies, while 103,000 served in the Confederate armies. — location: [3453](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=3453) ^ref-36852 --- the decades before the Civil War had witnessed a dramatic transformation in the militia system, from compulsion to voluntarism. Because of this transformation, the Mexican War become the first in U.S. history to be fought exclusively with volunteer enlistees. — location: [3664](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=3664) ^ref-58891 --- The Union had 235,000 men already under arms as Congress assembled. Its army had multiplied by a factor of fifteen despite defections. That sharply contrasts with the army’s mere threefold growth, under a rigid system of conscription, during the four months at the beginning of U.S. entry into World War I. English novelist Anthony Trollope was quite correct in 1862 when he expressed “doubt whether any other nation ever made such an effort in so short a time.” — location: [3686](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=3686) ^ref-33848 --- Lincoln, however, had made clear that the war was for the preservation of the Union only. He promised not to interfere with slavery in the states, and many Union commanders during the early campaigns returned runaways to their southern masters, in compliance with the Fugitive Slave Law. — location: [3842](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=3842) ^ref-19350 --- “The contest is really for empire on the side of the North,” concluded the London Times, the most important paper reflecting this sympathy, “and for independence on that of the South, and in this respect we recognize an exact analogy between the North and the Government of George III., and the South and the Thirteen Revolted Provinces.” The paper further claimed that “these opinions . . . are the general opinions of the English nation.” — location: [3844](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=3844) ^ref-59542 --- The South’s cotton diplomacy had proved an expensive irrelevancy so far. The bumper crops of the prewar years had given European textile mills ample stocks. Once the British began to feel the pinch, they developed alternate sources in Egypt and India. — location: [3894](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=3894) ^ref-29618 --- Within less than a year, before seeing any action, both regiments had been reduced almost to half strength. — location: [4303](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=4303) ^ref-65315 --- Lincoln insisted that he wanted only to preserve the Union, and the newly elected Congress confirmed this war aim shortly after it convened. The Crittenden-Johnson resolutions denied that the government was waging war “in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those States” but only “to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union.” — location: [4541](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=4541) ^ref-648 --- Northern blacks, abolitionists, and Radical Republicans, however, wanted from the very beginning a crusade against the South’s peculiar institution. All these groups strenuously protested when Lincoln revoked General Frémont’s punitive emancipation in Missouri. — location: [4546](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=4546) ^ref-21975 --- Yet the prospect of wartime abolition had seduced even William Lloyd Garrison and most of his militant followers into abandoning disunion. — location: [4551](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=4551) ^ref-16422 --- The thirty-three-year-old American Peace Society virtually closed up shop as most of its members praised this war. — location: [4554](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=4554) ^ref-64928 War always seems justified when it is in support of one's own ideology or belief system. --- Only a handful of slavery opponents went along with George W. Bassett, who proclaimed that “the same principle that has always made me an uncompromising abolitionist, now makes me an uncompromising secessionist. It is the great natural and sacred right of self-government.” — location: [4555](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=4555) ^ref-17407 --- “Abolition—yes! abolish everything on the face of the earth but this Union; free every slave—slay every traitor—burn every Rebel mansion, if these things be necessary to preserve this temple of freedom to the world and to our posterity. Unless we do this, we cannot conquer them.” — location: [4586](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=4586) ^ref-15856 --- The London Spectator dismissed the proclamation because it liberated “the enemy’s slaves as it would the enemy’s cattle, simply to weaken them. . . . The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.”14 — location: [4658](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=4658) ^ref-58339 --- In the final analysis, it was not military conquest but the fugitive slave who brought down the South’s peculiar institution. Liberation, so often presented as something the Union did for blacks, was as much something they did for themselves. — location: [4684](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=4684) ^ref-53204 --- Nonetheless, nearly 200,000 blacks served in the Union military by the end of the war. Over half were recruited right off plantations along the Mississippi River or the southern coast—a few even drafted at gun point. — location: [4727](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=4727) ^ref-22333 --- At the war’s close the United States could boast higher taxation per capita than any other nation. But all the new and old taxes combined were just sufficient to cover about one-fifth of the Civil War’s monetary cost. — location: [4911](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=4911) ^ref-27697 --- The Union had to go to the banks for most of its loans, however. And this required that Congress undermine the restraints built into the country’s prewar financial structure. — location: [4913](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=4913) ^ref-50325 --- The only legally recognized money was specie, that is, gold or silver coins. The economy’s currency consisted solely of bank notes redeemable in specie on demand. Private competition thus regulated the circulation of paper money. — location: [4917](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=4917) ^ref-46345 The american Pseudo-Free banking system. --- The alleged excesses of the fraudulent, insolvent, or highly speculative “wildcat” banks were highly exaggerated. Total losses that bank note holders suffered throughout the entire antebellum period in all states that enacted free-banking laws would not equal the losses for one year from today’s rate of inflation (2 percent), if superimposed onto the economy of 1860.3 Moreover, most of these losses resulted from too much regulation, not too little. Lingering at the state level were prohibitions on branch banking, mandates for minimum specie reserves, restrictions on the issue of small-denomination bank notes, and requirements that banks purchase state bonds, which at this time were among the most dubious investments. — location: [4921](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=4921) ^ref-57722 --- The Republicans then drafted the National Currency Acts of 1863 and 1864. These acts fashioned a network of nationally chartered banks, which were required to hold specified quantities of war bonds. In exchange, they could issue national bank notes supplied to them by the new federal Comptroller of the Currency. The state-chartered banks were still allowed to compete by providing other financial services. But a prohibitive 10 percent tax on state bank notes imposed in 1865 made sure that nationally chartered banks had a currency monopoly. In other words, the national banks became privileged intermediaries whereby the Treasury’s war debt was converted into a government-managed circulating medium. — location: [4932](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=4932) ^ref-25333 Currency monopoly enforced during the war betreasury bond backed notes, and a hefty, tax on state-bank notes. --- The Greenbacks were unbacked, directly issued by the government, and made legal tender through fiat for all payments, public and private, except tariff duties and interest on the Treasury’s debt. These differences gave Chase extreme misgivings about the Greenback’s constitutionality. But he was desperate. — location: [4941](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=4941) ^ref-33903 --- The Confederate Treasury ultimately issued over $1 billion worth of currency, more than twice the amount of Greenbacks. Its printing presses ran continuously toward the end of the war. This monetary expansion spurred ruinous price increases that made the Union’s wartime inflation seem trivial. — location: [4997](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=4997) ^ref-32338 --- Between 1860 and 1864 prices less than doubled in the North as compared with multiplying twenty-seven times in the South. — location: [5001](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5001) ^ref-8065 --- The skyrocketing inflation worked a great hardship on the southern people. As this hidden tax diverted resources to the Confederate war effort, prices climbed faster than incomes. — location: [5013](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5013) ^ref-31993 Cantillon effect : it he issuer and primary recipient of new money receives the purchasing power. --- By war’s end, average duties had risen to 47 percent and the free list had been cut in half, effectively stifling foreign competition. — location: [5054](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5054) ^ref-8474 --- Congress authorized the President to seize any rail and telegraph line at his discretion, and all the railways in occupied portions of the South were under full military management. Inside the North, however, the War Department directly controlled only a few tracks close to the front; the government’s influence derived primarily from being the rail companies’ largest customer. As a result, some of the North’s subsidized and over-expanded rail lines paid dividends to stockholders for the first time. — location: [5066](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5066) ^ref-4199 --- Industrialists and financiers such as Andrew Carnegie, J. Pierpont Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller all started their fortunes during the war. — location: [5091](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5091) ^ref-25148 --- The war prosperity, in reality, did not extend to all sectors of the northern economy. Adjusting for inflation, workers’ wages actually fell by one-third. Laborers sometimes organized unions to keep abreast of living costs, but the Lincoln Administration introduced the policy of employing federal troops against strikers: — location: [5104](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5104) ^ref-50087 --- The 1860s saw the American economy’s worst performance of any decade between 1840 and 1930, with real income per capita falling by 3 percent. Some of this loss stemmed from wartime destruction in the South. But if the North is considered in isolation, the Civil War still hampered prosperity. — location: [5110](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5110) ^ref-31399 --- Overall the war erased at least five years of wealth accumulation. — location: [5114](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5114) ^ref-53141 --- Toward the very end, President Davis took possession of all un-captured southern railroads, steamboats, and telegraph lines outright, incorporating their employees and officers into the military. — location: [5141](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5141) ^ref-45768 --- Accompanying all these policies were public exhortations for sacrifice to the common cause. — location: [5164](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5164) ^ref-2683 --- It is implied in the spirit which times demand, that all private interests are sacrificed to the public good. The State becomes everything, and the individual nothing.”16 — location: [5167](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5167) ^ref-34295 The call to action behind all such ideologies forced down the throat of every person, meant to achieve a better society, but really taking freedom and well-being away. --- One of the Civil War’s enduring myths is that the South’s unbending commitment to states’ rights paralyzed its war effort. In actuality, Confederate war socialism was more economically centralized than the Union’s neo-mercantilism, which at least relied heavily on private initiative. — location: [5169](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5169) ^ref-43369 --- The standard condemnation of the free-banking era is most readily accessible in Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America (cited in ch. 3). Subsequent research has overturned nearly everything Hammond had to say about the politics of banking in antebellum America, which could be tolerated if the author had not been so abysmally innocent of any sound monetary or financial theory. — location: [5210](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5210) ^ref-9158 Important to consider this critique as I read Hammond's book. --- The best general profile of the antebellum financial system remains Peter Temin, The Jacksonian Economy — location: [5226](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5226) ^ref-6369 --- Often overlooked is that Congress started out in 1863 with a 2 percent tax on state bank notes, compared with half that on national bank notes. The fact that jacking up the rate to 10 percent was necessary to drive state notes out of circulation eloquently testifies to their superior efficiency and desirability. A great deal of additional literature pertains to the postwar operation of national banks, on which I will have much to say in chapter 13. — location: [5235](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5235) ^ref-1297 --- The Civil War was just one year old when the flow of volunteers willing to put up with this treatment and do the fighting began drying up. The Confederacy, with its smaller population, noticed the drought first. — location: [5409](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5409) ^ref-59129 --- Wigfall maintained that “no man has any individual rights, which come in conflict with the welfare of the country. The government has as much right to exact military service as it has to collect a tax to pay the expenses of the government.”4 — location: [5418](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5418) ^ref-62614 In reference to Confederate conscription. There is an incredible sad irony that the Confederacy was stripping rights from their citizens, effectively treating them like slaves, in the name of rights for Southerners. --- Conscription furthermore was a crucial cog in Confederate war socialism. Draft exemptions were the mechanism for manipulating the labor market. Any southern business that did not conform to military priorities found itself without workers. — location: [5437](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5437) ^ref-36057 --- The internal logic of military conscription had led the nation of black agricultural slavery to the ironic but appropriate adoption of white industrial slavery. — location: [5441](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5441) ^ref-60823 --- “We entered into this revolution in defense of the rights and sovereignty of the States,” Governor Brown reminded the Georgia legislature. The conscription act was unconstitutional; “at one fell swoop, [it] strikes down the sovereignty of the States, tramples upon constitutional rights and personal liberty of the citizen, and arms the President with imperial power.” — location: [5446](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5446) ^ref-58861 --- In contrast to the Confederacy, the Union honored a soldier’s original enlistment and did not prevent him from going home when his term expired. — location: [5462](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5462) ^ref-54038 --- But nothing matched the fury of the outbreak in New York City during July of 1863. The drawing of the first draftees’ names touched off four days of uncontrolled rioting, mostly among the city’s teeming population of Irish workingmen and women. The rioters first destroyed the local draft headquarters. Then, mauling any police sent against them, they vented their rage on the city’s hapless free blacks, whom the rioters blamed for the war. Any who fell into their hands were lynched from the nearest tree or lamppost. The mob also burned down the Colored Orphan Asylum and sacked the homes of wealthy Republicans. The riot was only suppressed with a contingent of four thousand troops rushed from the battle of Gettysburg. — location: [5486](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5486) ^ref-8525 --- Ezra Heywood, a young abolitionist who was one of the few to remain true to Garrisonian principles throughout the war, declared in the pages of the Liberator that “the right to draft men is as purely imaginary as the right to enslave them.” — location: [5501](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5501) ^ref-44192 --- even before this blanket suspension, Union authorities were routinely arresting without trial or charges any Northerners they suspected of disloyalty. — location: [5519](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5519) ^ref-13544 --- The military’s provost marshals required passports of travelers in nearly all Confederate-held territory. — location: [5636](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5636) ^ref-23616 --- Jefferson Davis summarily rejected Lincoln’s demands, yet he might have given in on southern emancipation in return for Southern independence. — location: [5988](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5988) ^ref-47965 --- slavery should not be “a barrier to our independence. If it is found in the way—if it proves an insurmountable object of the achievement of our liberty and separate nationality, away with it! Let it perish!” This was a drastic step, but “we must make up our minds — location: [5991](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=5991) ^ref-35972 --- By the war’s second year, a significant movement within southern churches was agitating for such reforms as prohibiting the separation of slave children from their mothers, admitting slave testimony in courts, and permitting slave religious assemblies. — location: [6044](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6044) ^ref-24809 --- The two years since the Emancipation Proclamation had stiffened northern determination that the elimination of slavery must be complete, permanent, and uncompensated. The Fugitive Slave Law was at last repealed, and the border states of Maryland and Missouri freed their slaves. — location: [6178](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6178) ^ref-25103 --- Only five years after proposing a thirteenth amendment that would have guaranteed slavery forever, the Republican-controlled Congress had now endorsed one that would forever abolish it. — location: [6183](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6183) ^ref-29971 --- Many Northerners denounced the break-up of slaveholder plantations as violating private property. “An attempt to justify the confiscation of Southern land under the pretense of doing justice to the freedmen,” declared the New York Times, “strikes at the root of all property rights in both sections.” — location: [6262](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6262) ^ref-64010 --- The earlier wartime confiscation acts for the punishment of rebels, the collection of the direct tax on real estate, and the seizure of abandoned plantations did put a lot of southern land into Federal hands. Army officials helped settle many former slaves onto this land. But far more often, the Freedmen’s Bureau implemented a paternalistic policy of compelling the former slaves to work, for wages and under supervised conditions to be sure, but still on plantations owned by white Southerners or leased to white Northerners. One official consequently summed up the Bureau’s accomplishments as follows: “It has succeeded in making the Freedman work and in rendering labor secure & stable—but it has failed to secure the Freedman his just dues or compensation for his labor.”10 — location: [6279](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6279) ^ref-21432 --- The reconstructed governments were therefore in the anomalous position of being recognized by the President but not by Congress, of being legitimate for the purpose of ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment but not for the purpose of having representation within the national government. — location: [6321](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6321) ^ref-24405 --- The remainder of the old Confederacy was divided into five military districts. The vote was taken away from ex-Confederates and given to blacks, and new governments were established under military supervision. Only after the new governments ratified the amendment did Congress promise to restore them to their former status within the Union. — location: [6389](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6389) ^ref-51197 --- All these functions were costly, with the result that the war-ravaged South suffered under some of the heaviest state and local taxation in proportion to wealth in U.S. history. Tax rates in 1870 were three or four times what they had been in 1860, even though property values had declined significantly. — location: [6649](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6649) ^ref-21687 --- It was not long before resistance to what was denounced as Black Reconstruction turned violent. A secret society called the Ku Klux Klan spread over the South to become one of the world’s first paramilitary organizations. Its Grand Wizard was Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general who had been most successful at unconventional warfare. — location: [6661](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6661) ^ref-32280 --- Kenneth M. Stampp, a prolific and distinguished historian of American slavery, has suggested why. The defeated Rebels had “every reason to assume” that “free Negroes would be an inferior caste” because this, by and large, was the practice “of most of the northern states. . . . White Southerners were understandably shocked, therefore, when Radical Republicans, during the Reconstruction years, tried to impose a different relationship between the races in the South. . . . Now for the first time white Southerners organized a powerful partisan movement and resisted Republican race policy more fiercely than the civilian population had ever resisted the invading Union armies during the war.” — location: [6681](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6681) ^ref-9365 --- Liberated into a regime of military paternalism, they had not been required to build the kind of community structures and solidarity necessary to sustain a protracted armed struggle on their own, even though some Reconstruction governments organized Negro militias. And denied compensation for past enslavement by a national government that actively protected the land titles of their former masters, the freedmen were left without economic independence. — location: [6694](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6694) ^ref-41597 --- Four years of conventional warfare during the Civil War had lost white Southerners their political independence, but an average of six years of low-level unconventional warfare during Reconstruction, off and on depending on the state, had regained them their political autonomy. Northern Republicans gave up any further efforts to protect the freedmen. — location: [6738](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6738) ^ref-50728 --- Just as the Republican Party had put the Union ahead of antislavery before the war, so now predictably the party put national reconciliation ahead of equal liberty. — location: [6746](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6746) ^ref-54790 --- Income per capita went down because people were better off. They were working less or producing household amenities, both of which represented improvements in the quality of life. — location: [6761](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6761) ^ref-23285 --- American tariffs must share some responsibility for this, because they made southern cotton relatively more expensive in terms of the goods and services Europeans had to sell to get dollars. The Republican Party’s economic exploitation of the defeated South therefore harmed blacks as well as whites. — location: [6766](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6766) ^ref-13901 --- The postwar South, however, lacked adequate financial markets. Croppers and renters relied almost entirely upon credit from the country store. Local merchants sold food, clothing, and agricultural supplies either for cash or on time, with crops pledged as security. — location: [6791](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6791) ^ref-16367 --- The Union’s financial expedients had been riddled with features that ended up interdicting the flow of savings to agriculture. Nationally chartered banks could not legally make real-estate loans at all until 1913. The general prohibition on branch banking made it more difficult to shift credit out of areas where interest rates were low to where the demand was greatest. High capital requirements for bank charters, the Comptroller of the Currency’s restriction of entry, and initial ceilings on bank notes also all discriminated against the rural South. — location: [6799](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6799) ^ref-46621 --- The National Banking System contributed to starving the agricultural South not only for credit but also for cash in small denominations. — location: [6812](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6812) ^ref-31627 --- the denominational shortage often reduced freed slaves to an inefficient reliance upon barter. — location: [6831](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6831) ^ref-12424 --- the National Banking System throttled both financial intermediation and monetary exchange in the agricultural sector. — location: [6835](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6835) ^ref-4820 --- Within the majority of southern states, the only form of discrimination legally imposed on private institutions applied to passenger trains. Social segregation was pervasive but mostly informal and often favored by blacks themselves. Not until the 1900s did mandated segregation for railway stations, street cars, workplaces, and other public facilities make widespread appearance. — location: [6850](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6850) ^ref-22809 --- The national government that emerged victorious from the conflict dwarfed in power and size the minimal Jacksonian State that had commenced the war. The number of civilians in federal employ swelled almost fivefold. A distant administration that had little contact with its citizens had been transformed into an overbearing bureaucracy that intruded into daily life with taxes, drafts, surveillance, subsidies, and regulations. — location: [6861](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6861) ^ref-53246 --- One indication of this financial inefficiency was the appearance of major differentials among regional interest rates, something that had not existed under free banking. — location: [6901](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=6901) ^ref-44642 --- At the moment of Lincoln’s inauguration the Union still retained more slave states than had left. Radical abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, had traditionally advocated northern secession from the South. They felt that this best hastened the destruction of slavery by allowing the free states to get out from under the Constitution’s fugitive slave provision. Passionately opposing slavery and simultaneously favoring secession are therefore quite consistent. Yet hardly any modern account of the Union’s fiery conflagration even acknowledges this untried alternative. — location: [7393](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=7393) ^ref-16637 --- Violence ultimately ended slavery, but violence of a very different nature. Rather than revolutionary violence wielded by bondsmen themselves from the bottom up, a violence that at least had the potential to be pinpointed against the South’s minority of guilty slaveowners, the Civil War involved indiscriminate State violence directed from the top down. — location: [7442](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00G1SRDUK&location=7442) ^ref-62161 ---