“A debate about whether big government freed the slaves is pretty much the only debate that a liberal is guaranteed to win”

Adam Gopnick rebuts Jim DeMint’s moronic points about “big government” and what it did or didn’t do with slavery:

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.

I still read and hear men of education argue with what they consider a zinger’s triumph that the Civil War “really” wasn’t “about” slavery. The rebel states sought liberty to act as they wished. Article IV, Section Three of the Confederate Constitution at least did not lie about what these states wanted:

In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.

To return to Gopnick:

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.”

Let there be no mistake either: the defeated rebel states fought Reconstruction precisely because it was working, the full legislative power of the Unionist federal government committed to securing the freedmen life, liberty, due process of law, and an education. “Legislative” power because the executive branch, held by the Democratic president Andrew Johnson, refused to enforce those laws.