Austin gets the Civil War wrong

Anyone who knows me knows I am a huge fan of former Libertarian presidential candidate Austin Petersen, who generally nails my political views perfectly. Sadly, he dropped the ball in his podcast last night:



In discussing secession and the American Civil War specifically, he made an erroneous point about slavery. He brought up Ron Paul's idea about how England just bought all of their slaves, and no other country in the world ended slavery with a civil war. But Petersen disagreed with Paul, using an example that when a private person is enslaved, we can and should use any means necessary to free them, up to and including lethal force.

The problem is Petersen is making an apples to oranges comparison. Petersen is talking about an individual being denied their civil rights, whereas Ron Paul was talking about institutionalized slavery. There is a world of difference between governments denying civil rights versus individuals doing it, and Petersen should know better.

Another thing that Petersen gets wrong is the Constitution itself was created allowing for institutionalized slavery. The southern states agreed to join the union with the acknowledgement that slavery would be allowed. The northern states could have formed a separate union if they did not like slavery, as opposed to withdrawing their support for it at a later time. In other words, the northern states were complicit in the formation of institutionalized slavery in the United States. In effect, the North broke their contract with the South, and then expected the South to accept new conditions on their contract, without the South's consent.

While slavery was an awful thing, it wasn't considered that at the time of the forming of the nation. When the agreement between the states needed to be changed to end slavery, the worst possible way was to kill off 2% of the American population (620,000 or more Americans) to accomplish this. This is stupidity on a grand scale, and Petersen should be ashamed to defend this. While it is a virtue to be willing to defend human rights, even to the death, there is no virtue in reneging on a contractualized obligation, which is what the Constitution was, and is.

In fact, the most ethical thing the North could have done would have been to secede themselves. They made a bad deal with the South. Instead, the North's ethical high ground was lost with the Civil War's mass murder. Excusing it, as Petersen does, with "Americans are naturally more violent" is absurd. That is like excusing rape with "boys will be boys".

On top of this, it is even more absurd to claim civil rights as a justification for the Civil War, since it took the black population another century to finally get equal human rights, as Jim Crow laws were created making them an underclass. Instead, racism against blacks became institutionalized. The Civil War ended institutionalized slavery, but did nothing for the human rights of the black population. Was it worth killing 620,000 people for a mere "step in the right direction"?