Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War.

By Jeffrey Rogers Hummel. (Chicago: Open Court, 1996).

Generally speaking, we need another history of the Civil War like Michael Jordan needs another championship ring. But in the case of Jeff Hummel's Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, I guess all I can say is, "Go Michael, go Michael." Hummel provides the prerequisites of a Civil War history: explanation of all the important events, brief but effective descriptions of life at the front and at home, and more than ample references. But Hummel goes beyond the basics, adding an engaging analysis of the effects of government expansion during the war, and, in the notes and bibliographic essays, dissecting the most challenging of economic data related to slavery, the tariff, and the cost of the war.

First, the obvious. Few readers of texts-perhaps with the exception of the redoubtable Paul Johnson-could digest, understand, and so thoroughly summarize such a vast volume of scholarly material. Hummel outdoes Johnson, though, in that he frequently presents material from scholarly journals, some of them obscure. More important, his source material, in most cases, is the most recent available. This is important because, unlike many other scholars, Hummel does not merely include the views of those who support his positions, but he engages and usually defeats the scholarship or logic of those who disagree with him.

Now the less obvious. Hummel's book is the quintessence of an emerging historical revisionism by scholars of a libertarian bent that, after simmering for a decade, has reached its boiling point. This revisionism, which posits individual liberty as the greatest good, naturally depicts Abraham Lincoln in the same manner as did the early Confederate apologists, viewing him as a tyrant and threat to women, children, and Yorkshire puppies. Hummel doesn't go quite that far, but the direction seems clear. The new libertarian revisionists suffer their most serious divisions, not over whether or not Lincoln acted properly- didn't, they argue-but whether the Confederacy, acting within its Constitutional prerogatives, went overboard in destroying individual liberties. Destroying the notion that Jeff Davis's rebellious government was intent on creating a utopia (with slaves), Richard Bensel's Yankee Leviathan describes in countless ways how the Confederacy had a worse record on individual liberties than the Union. Hummel certainly does not ignore this dark side of the secessionist states, but somewhat finesses the argument by framing it in terms of "Republican Neo-Mercantilism Versus Confederate War Socialism." Obviously, no heroes here.

The central argument I have with Hummel is his statement that "Slavery was doomed politically even if Lincoln had permitted the small Gulf Coast Confederacy to depart in peace." Hummel's assumptions that either the border states would have peacefully given up their slaves, or that the remaining slave states would have allowed the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law without violent action-seeing as though it was a federal promise made specifically in the context of the Compromise of 1850-is just not plausible. Nor would I agree that maintaining the United States' territorial integrity was "bankrupt and reprehensible" as a cause (not "excuse") for war, and certainly I don't think most Americans, then or now, would think so. Such a view is popular only among libertarians who see nations completely in terms of social contracts that may or may not exist at the moment, rather than as long-term political organisms (a polis) that is both natural and desirable. Slavery had produced in a group of Southern states that whose growth resembled that of a severely delinquent teenager who required drastic parental intervention, all of which could have been avoided by making heroic choices at an earlier period. Of course, the libertarians' hero, Andrew Jackson, would not more have allowed South Carolina and the rest to leave the Union than did Lincoln, the villain of the libertarians.

And this is where, ultimately, most teachers using this book (and I will use it for its otherwise excellent treatment of the period) will find themselves at odds with Hummel. Unfortunately, many of the presuppositions that underlay the negative interpretations of the Republicans are driven by a strange (and in my view, completely erroneous) understanding of the Jacksonian Democrats. According to this interpretation, which Hummel does little to dispel, the Jacksonians were freemarket, laissez faire, proto-libertarians who just sort of emerged in the 1820s and who, as they increasingly found themselves at odds with the "big-government" Whigs, were increasingly isolated in the South.

The truth is much different. First, for his exceptional command of the sources, Hummel is missing a key series of articles, accented by Richard Brown's analysis of the Missouri Crisis. What these articles show is that the Democratic Party, from its inception, was lacking in principle. Formed by Martin Van Buren and William Crawford, the only goal of the Democratic Party was to keep slavery out of the national debate by maintaining the party a majority in government. In other words, the Democratic Party's sole purpose for existing was to stay in power. It is irrelevant that the intention, after winning elections, was to keep slavery out of the debate: rather the significant point that Brown and others (such as Lynn Marshall, in his "Strange Stillbirth of the Whig Party") make is that, in essence, the Democrats had not principles except power.

Even more significant-and what should be of even greater interest to someone of Hummel's persuasion-the process by which the Jacksonian Democrats used to ensure that they would stay in power ensured (and I emphasize, guaranteed) that all government, including the federal government, would grow with every election. By creating the "spoils system" to reward loyal Jacksonians for not talking about slavery, Van Buren and Crawford made it inevitable that each election would require an increasing number of promises of jobs, and a growing bureaucracy. Thus, it is exceptionally misleading to compare, as Hummel does, the size of government in Lincoln's era to its size in Jackson's, because the geometric expansion-like cell reproduction-was already embedded in the system. But it had even become apparent in Jackson's time. From 1830 to 1850 (before there were any Republicans, and including only two ineffectual Whig administrations), real government expenditures rose from just over $20 million to more than $80 minion, even after the post-Mexican War "build down." More telling, real per capita government expenditures grew by more than 50% under Jackson, fell a little, then soared again under Van Buren, before rising by 2.5 times under Tyler and Polk. Government employees, when Jackson took over, were under 10,000, soared to 15,000 by the time he left office, and reached 25,000 by 1850. Even allowing for the rising U.S. population, per capita government employees rose steadily and significantly under Jackson and Van Buren. (All data from an unpublished paper by Tiarr Martin, "The Growth of Government During the 'Age of Jefferson and Jackson'," (1989) in my possession).

There is other excellent evidence that the Jacksonian Democrats were "big government"/anti-free-market types: at the state level in the South, as my own extensive studies have argued, only in the states where the Jacksonian Democrats dominated the state legislatures did the governments create monopoly state banks (Arkansas, Alabama, Missouri), or use state powers of bond issue to back a series of non- banks (Mississippi, Florida). Where those "wascally Whigs" served as a political check, the banking systems were actually freer and more competitive. The Post Office monopoly was ensconced under the Democrats, and the office of Postmaster became the chief political plum in the country.

This, I would think, constitutes troubling data for anyone arguing that the Republicans, with their stated dominant political plank of eliminating slavery in the territories, constituted a "neo-mercantilist shift away from the laissez faire Democrats. Indeed, looked at the other way, the Democrats' focus on maintaining power at any cost so as to preserve slavery shares far more in common with totalitarian states than it does with free economic and political systems. And ultimately, if one rejects (as I do) Hummel's contention that slavery would just go away, then Lincoln's single act of freeing almost four million slaves was the most important free-market presidential action in American history, for it provided the nation simultaneously with both consumers and entrepreneurs. And that is, in the final analysis, the most difficult aspect of Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men that both teachers and students will have to (and, I suspect, will want to) overcome: that it has no heroes. For turn the Constitution on its head as much as one likes, the pro-slave secessionists will not inspire anyone, while Lincoln's immortal words and deeds can inspire anyone.

Larry Schweikart
University of Dayton