People always seem to say that Abraham Lincoln was one of the best U.S. presidents in history. I hear it in the media, and I learned it when I was institutionalized by the State in compulsory government school. He has been especially adored since the progressive era around the time of Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson for being a president that used his executive leverage to get around the outdated limitations of the Constitution, and took pragmatic action that was “necessary” for the time. The primary achievement given to Lincoln was the abolishment of slavery.
The truth is, the abolishment of slavery via government force and violence, and civil war, was not necessary to see slavery vanish in America. Slavery was dying a natural death all over the Western world before Lincoln was in a position of power. It was ending naturally for two primary reasons – economic, and moral.
The plantation owners that hired workers upon their own volition were producing more efficiently and with higher quality results than the slave owning plantation owners in the Antebellum south. When you work to benefit your own self-interest, you will be more productive than if you are forced to work with no benefit. In other words, slavery was an inefficient and costly way of producing and allocating resources compared to a voluntary market of hiring producers upon their own volition.
There was also progress in the morality of western societies during the 1700’s and 1800’s around many western civilizations. The objective philosophy spread by Thomas Paine, Lysander Spooner, Frédéric Bastiat, and many other individuals during those times were having a profound effect on the understanding equal self-ownership and protection of individual civil rights. It opened peoples eyes to the sick violence that was inflicted upon individuals in the Antebellum south. People from the north, and all around, were no longer tolerating the violence of slavery, and were helping to make people free by organizing voluntarily. The primary reason why those ideas were gaining traction was because the ethical ideas were objectively logical, rather than subjective ethics decreed by a king or some ruler. Of course nowadays we are severely less educated than folks were 200 years ago. So now we are back to the primitive way of believing subjective ethics from arbitrary rulers.
Before Lincoln was in a position of power, slavery was naturally ending in some other areas too, such as England, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and many other areas simply by eliminating, or no longer enforcing laws, such as fugitive slave laws that protected slave masters.
In America there were other secondary factors that were increasing the momentum of ending slavery, for example, the wives of slave masters were realizing that the lousy husbands would be gone for a couple days, and nine months later, a female slave on the plantation was having a baby with lighter color skin. Of course, that would not be tolerated by the southern women.
Lincoln didn’t allow slavery to end naturally in America, or to even assist in letting it end naturally. With the abolishment of fugitive slave laws, he could have at least used the government to buy the slaves, and set them free where they wished, which would have cost a lot less money than the financial cost of the civil war. It would have cost less lives too. 750,000 soldiers and civilians died in that unnecessary war.
Lincoln had many non-violent abolitionist copperheads, legislators, soldiers, and civilians arrested and sometimes imprisoned, without habeas corpus, for refusing to consent to, or participate in the war on slavery. It’s funny how the public schools just forget to mention the gross abuse of executive power, and constitutional violations that were committed by Lincoln. No wonder the progressive presidents in the past 115 years idolize him. He was all about progress, hope, and change by initiation of force.
It’s also funny how when the government declares a war on anything, such as drugs, poverty, pollution, terror, slavery, etc., whether it’s a metaphorical, or literal war, it results in disastrous consequences without actually eliminating the target. Is it actually hard to believe that when you use violence and force to attempt to eliminate something, it just makes it worse? When will we learn that you will get much better results by using voluntary negotiation, ostracization, and non-coercive incentives and constraints, instead of putting a gun to someones head?
In State schooling, I learned that slavery started in America. Outside of school is where I actually got an education, and learned that slavery has existed in every country as far back as recorded history goes. When folks in early America, and other western societies started to understand that we all have equal individual self-ownership from nature, is when slavery was no longer being accepted in society. By the way of digression, I had a blast in school, with a lot of fun memories, I just always had the feeling that education comes from a curious exploration of life, best experienced outside the confines of the institution.
The natural momentum of individual civil rights was disrupted by the after effects that were caused by the civil war. After the civil war there was an increase in racism. Jim Crow laws were enacted. The southern slave owners that were quitting the slavery business, due to competition from the more productive non slave owners that were eliminating the economic incentive to force slaves to be productive, were now changing direction and keeping the slaves. Why? Well, unnecessary force causes unnecessary resistance, and since the economic incentives were disrupted by the war, the slave owners found reasons to justify owning slaves. Some of these irrational justifications were in the form of racism. Slavery did not come about because of racism, racism came about from southern resistance to the war. The new narrative that came about from resisting the war, and justifying slavery, was now “those with black skin are inferior to those with white skin, therefore anyone with black skin has no right of self-ownership.”
Other effects from Lincoln’s war was the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. The effects of the war such as, racism, and the KKK reversed the natural momentum of individual civil rights in society. So even though slavery was abolished by force, the moral reasons for ending slavery died. The chaos that was created by government, killed the ethics of equal self-ownership in society, and after time went by, the chaos created the need for a civil rights movement with Martin Luther King Jr. which is a good end, but would not have been necessary if the government would have left the natural elimination of slavery alone in the first place.
War seems to always be the vitality of the State, at the expense of the individual. I’m sure Abraham Lincoln had good intentions, but he didn’t realize that government force always disrupts the natural progress of human freedom.
