Ron Paul is wrong about Lincoln, the Civil War and slavery
For years I have admired Congressman Ron Paul’s principled stance on spending and the Constitution. That said, he really damaged himself with his remarks on “Meet the Press” this last Sunday when he blamed President Lincoln for the Civil War, saying, “Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war… [President Abraham Lincoln] did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic.”This is historical revisionism of the worst order and it must be addressed.
For Congressman Paul’s benefit – and for his supporters who may not know – seven states illegally declared their “independence” from the United States before Lincoln was sworn in as President. After South Carolina fired the first shot at Fort Sumter, four additional states declared independence.
President Lincoln wanted very much to preserve the Union. The chief issue surrounding slavery at the time was whether or not the Federal government could have a say as to slavery’s disposition in the territories. Lincoln thought the Federal government could determine whether slavery was to be allowed in a territory and hence, whether or not that territory would become a slave state or a free state when it made the transition to statehood. Leading Democrats of the day, such as Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois argued for popular sovereignty – letting the people of the territories decide whether or not they should be slave or free.
Lincoln thought that if the Federal government could prevent slavery in the territories that eventually the U.S. Senate would swing over to having a sufficient majority of pro-emancipation Senators that slavery would be put on the path of extinction (as most of our Founding Fathers intended – hence the end of the African slave trade in 1808 as mandated in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution). Pro-slavery interests in the South saw this strategy as dooming slavery to a slow, but inevitable death, moving them to act. South Carolina voted secession on December 20, 1860 – two-and-a-half months before Lincoln was to be sworn in on March 4, 1861.
President Buchanan had attempted to resupply Fort Sumter by sending sea but the Confederates fired upon the ship, the Star of the West, and drove it away. Does this mean that Buchanan started the war? Or did the rebels in South Carolina who fired on the ship start it?
As for states not having the right to seceed, that is obvious, as the United States was created with the ratification of the Constitution hence only a legal dissolving of the same could allow a state to become independent. The states that voted for secession in 1860-61 could have followed the legal route in calling for a Constitutional convention or for an amendment to the Constitution allowing them to seceed, but they chose the route of rebellion and war instead.
The historical record and timeline is clear: pro-slavery politicians started the Civil War; President Lincoln fought it to its successful conclusion. As such, freedom was extended to slaves far earlier and yes, with far more blood spilled than Lincoln intended, fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This promise of liberty for all, by the way, was explicitly denied by the Confederacy as outlined the “Cornerstone Speech” on March 21, 1861 by the Vice President of the Confederacy when he said, “The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution — African slavery as it exists amongst us — the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution… The prevailing ideas entertained by (Thomas Jefferson) and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically… Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races… Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.”
So, Abraham Lincoln was right when he said at Gettysburg that the Civil War’s, “…dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
In rejecting this Congressman Ron Paul has rejected the most fundamental aspect of liberty which he and all libertarian-minded Americans profess: that the most important role of any government is to first secure the blessings of liberty for its people, that “…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” Given that slaves never gave their consent to be governed, the very existence of slavery would be at fundamental odds with everything in which Mr. Paul claims to believe.