Big Government and the End of Slavery

By now, enough people have said something about Jim DeMint’s recent neo-secessionist account of the Civil War that to continue to correct it might count as piling it on. In case you missed it, DeMint, once a Republican U.S. Senator from South Carolina and now the head of the once-rational Heritage Foundation, said that “no liberal is going to win a debate that big government freed the slaves,” since, in truth, it was achieved by Christians acting on their own, vibrating in mysterious harmony with the Constitution. “The move to free the slaves came from the people, it did not come from the federal government. It came from a growing movement among the people, particularly people of faith, that this was wrong. People like Wilberforce who persisted for years because of his faith and because of his love for people. “ (William Wilberforce was a great anti-slavery leader who lived in Britain and died in the eighteen-thirties.)

This is, in plain English, so ignorant that, as I say, there has been no shortage of corrections. A debate about whether big government freed the slaves is pretty much the only debate that a liberal is guaranteed to win. The Civil War was the original big-government overreach: it came from Washington, D.C.; it involved raising new taxes (in fact, it is the origin of a number of taxes); it confiscated rifles from rebels; it did special favors for minorities (in this case, the special favor of recognizing them as human beings and setting them free from lifelong bondage); and, in the end, it imposed a bureaucracy on an unwilling population (that is, it imposed the Union Army on the South). Many things can be said about the Civil War, but not that it was done with the benign neglect of the federales. The moral point was argued for decades, as it is with most issues in a democracy. But that big government freed the slaves is as sure a fact as any in history.

Nonetheless, DeMint’s idiocy should not allow those on the other side of the question to escape from reflection on a mote or two in their own eyes. A mind-opening new book on the subject at hand will be forthcoming to your local independent bookseller: James Oakes’s “The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War” (Norton), the latest in a series of revelatory books that Oakes has written. It contains a necessary corrective to the idea—which not long ago was as orthodox in liberal and radical academic circles as it was among right-wing neo-secessionists—that the war was only accidentally or incidentally antislavery.

As Oakes has shown before and shows again in his new book, slavery was always the issue; the question of “the Union” spoke to North’s right to play a part in deciding the future of slavery. For the most part, the North didn’t seek to immediately abolish slavery by arms (that was the position of the John Brown fringe); it first tried to do so by isolating slavery in its home region and then squeezing it, or, in the lurid image that was often used at the time, by surrounding the scorpion with a ring of fire, causing it to sting itself to death. (Natural-history note: at the time, this is what scorpions were believed to do. In “The Life of Samuel Johnson,” Boswell writes about seeing a scorpion within a ring of fire end its life “like a true Stoic philosopher.” But, in truth, scorpions are immune to their own poison and die when surrounded by fire because the heat provokes convulsions that look like self-stinging—perhaps an even better metaphor for the war.)

The fact that slavery, and slavery alone, was the issue, and that the war was precipitated by the election of an anti-slavery candidate, Abraham Lincoln, is one of those plain truths that’s often lost sight of. As Oakes shows in his new book, the only plausible nonviolent solution to slavery—gradual emancipation, perhaps over as long as twenty-five years, funded by the North—was never even on the table, with even the most antiwar Southerners proposing only to further limit the rights of the Northern states to protect runaway slaves. (Gradual emancipation, of course, would have been a convenient solution for everyone but the gradually emancipated.) Failing the scorpion strategy, the only other path to emancipation, as Lincoln knew, was war, and, as Oakes says, war was “a short cut for the government to bypass the Constitution, and accelerate emancipation.” Claiming to tolerate slavery where it existed while squeezing the slave states was not a formula for coexistence; it was a prelude to emancipation. Without ever coming to America, the smartest man of the century, John Stuart Mill, immediately grasped exactly what the strategy was: “If they”—the Lincoln-led Republicans—“have not taken arms against slavery, they have against its extension. And they know that this amounts to the same thing. The day when slavery can no longer extend itself, is the day of its doom. The slave-owners know this, and it is the cause of their fury.”

So bash away at the right’s DeMintia, but remember that the truth about the Civil War and the end of slavery has also been warped by the fatuous idea that, in a democracy, change can only arise as the result of inexorable social or economic forces, and that it can somehow escape the exigencies of coalition building, tactical shrewdness, and a constant appeal to the conscience of the ruling classes. We have an understandable preference for tales of conversion over stories of scorpion squeezing: we want oppressed people to free themselves—we want the Israelites to have crossed the Red Sea without help from empathetic Egyptians. But pity, in the famous sense that Shakespeare evoked it in “Macbeth”—as a loud, awakening emotion, empathy on horseback—is central to change. It was compassion and sympathy for the suffering of others that provoked the abolitionist movement. Sometimes this was, indeed, deeply rooted in Christianity and in the church. At other moments, as with the young, freethinking Lincoln, who was antislavery as a young man, when he was still aggressively atheist—it was not. Sometimes it was idiosyncratically American-spiritual. And the role of the slaves who fought in the Civil War, chiefly at huge personal risk, getting up and fleeing for the safety of the Union lines, is hugely significant. But so was the decision of the government in Washington to advance those lines, to give the yearning for freedom, which had been present since the first slaves arrived in America, a practical structure and a place to go.

A generation ago, it was considered the essence of wisdom to accept that vast, impersonal forces made history happen without the condescending assistance of anyone’s awakened conscience. But, today, Oakes reminds us of the essential truth that what makes human lives change is restoring agency to altruism. Change is achieved, as are the victories of a government in a democracy, by way of painful coalition-building, hypocrisy, occasional violations of apparent principles, ugly if short-term violations of civil liberties, tactical duplicity and long-game strategic thinking, and, often, disingenuous dealings around the goals and the scope of an operation. That picture of liberation by politics appeals as little to the left as the notion that big government did the work of ending slavery appeals to the right. But that’s the way it happened.