Question for Thunderbolt

[quote]Mikeyali wrote:

Are you kidding me? Jeez, I actually used to think you were squared away. Just because a libertarian believes it doesn’t make it untrue. Besides, I buy into it and I’m not a big L Libertarian. I refused to sign their stupid non-aggression policy. Besides, I think the bulk of them are Jacobins in waiting. In any case, by calling Lincoln anything but a tyrant, then you must subscribe to the idea that he had to burn the village to save it. [/quote]

I’ll repost from a different thread:

[i]4. “Lincoln’s needless war that killed thousands!” - this is not much of a conclusion, based on what TJ did or need not believe in terms of secession. Though the neo-Confederates and the Lost Cause libertarians maintain that if only the South could have seceded without Lincoln ordering war against them that a fantastic Age of Aquarius would have broken out - hilarious to the point of absurdity - the fragmentation of the Union could have created perpetual war on the North American continent, as old rivalries and spoils would have been up for grabs all over again. The Brits had been eyeballing Texas to regain a foothold in the Americas. Mexico was in a state of perpetual civil war and factions were feeling restless about conquest. Indian tribes still lurked and would have loved to reclaim territory. Spain and France.

Hell, divisions within the seceded states themselves would have created internecine conflict for years - i.e., the ferocious antagonism between Eastern Tennessee Unionists and Western Tennessee Confederates is a perfect example. And that doesn’t even count the near automatic chances of the North and South fighting post-secession - i.e., over territory in the American West.

The failure of the unionized republican experiment in North America would have had dire consequences to the free institutions the later generations have enjoyed. Unionization protected American liberty from external forces - take away the Union, and you take away the fortress that protected the very fragile republican experiment that had only been underway for 100 years. Lincoln wasn’t about to roll over and let that happen on is watch.[/i]

http://www.T-Nation.com/tmagnum/readTopic.do?id=1479104

Read HH’s thread for a good discussion of the history. Setting aside the legal aspect to secession - it was unconstitutional - the political ramifications would have been unending warfare on the North American continent.

There is this curious revisionism by a brand of libertarians that the Civil War was fought on the grounds that the “big government” types wanted to expand the state. Silly on its face to begin with, we know from history that this battle was one of pure regional self-interest - go brush up on the Nullification Crisis.

Jackson - ardent states’ rights advocate, strict constitutionalist opponent of a federal bank, and opponent of Clay’s “American system” of federal expansion of infrastructure - was an unapologetic Unionist in exactly the same way Lincoln was. He would have done the same to the treasonous secessionists (or worse, probably), and it was entirely within the domain of preserving the Union against rebellion (which the constitution specifically mentions).

“Libertarian revisionism”, as it were, is guilty of bad history. The Southern plantationists weren’t champions of liberty or principle, and if anyone was willing to “burn the village in order to save it”, it was certainly the secessionists, who would have, in the name of “states’ rights” plunged the continent into eternal warfare.