I’m currently revising this paper, which deals with the Memphis Riot of 1866. At the urging of Luigi Marco Bassani, who was my commentator on this paper at the Istituto Bruno Leoni’s Mises Seminar in October, I’m reviewing a number of sources on slavery apologetics in the early nineteenth century.
One of the lessons I’m learning in this research is that even a superficially plausible case for government monopoly provision of certain goods and services is undermined when it requires institutions that allow people to exercise racist preferences (and inflict damage on others) at minimal cost to themselves. In reviewing some of my notes, I came across the following instructive passage from page 26 of Jeffrey Rogers Hummel’s excellent Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men:
Advocating abolition became a felony in Virginia in 1836. The Georgia legislature offered a reward of $5,000 for anyone who would kidnap [abolitionist William Lloyd] Garrison and bring him south for trial and punishment. Louisiana established a penalty ranging from twenty-one years hard labor to death for speeches and writings ‘having a TENDENCY to promote discontent among free colored people, or insubordination among slaves.’ All slave-state legislatures except Kentucky’s passed similar laws censoring free speech. The surveillance and violence of private vigilance committees made the region unsafe for even the most restrained critic of the peculiar institution. A theology student from the Lane Seminary in Cincinnati who carried abolitionist literature into Tennessee in 1835 was lucky to escape with the public whipping of twenty lashes, while one Virginia newspaper editor was gunned down in a duel in 1846 because of his alleged antislavery sympathies.
When northern abolitionists employed new and cheaper printing technologies to flood the South with antislavery tracts, mobs seized and burned much of this mail. Southerners even appealed to northern officials to cooperate in the suppression of abolitionist agitation. In this case, President Jackson shared the concern of his fellow slaveholders. He asked Congress in 1835 for a law barring abolitionist propaganda from the mail. Although the House of Representatives failed to heed Jackson’s request by a narrow margin, his postmaster general acquiesced in the illegal refusal of local postmasters to deliver antislavery literature.
In his biography of William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Mayer reports that Virginia Governor John Floyd’s suppression of abolitionism was aided by postmasters throughout the state:
Floyd received letters from all over the South describing suspicious events and the malign influence of Quakers, itinerants, and ‘fanatical’ Yankee editors. ‘Much mischief is hatching here,’ said one informant from Philadelphia; articles from The Liberator were being read aloud at conclaves in black churches. One Virginia postmaster after another confiscated copies of The Liberator and mailed them to the governor as evidence.
This is broadly consistent with Mark Thornton’s thesis that slavery was propped up by state intervention. I think it speaks to a larger issue that, as far as I can tell, is seriously under-explored: state monopolies over the flow of information, business licensing, law enforcement, and other aspects of civil society allow racists to impose their worldview on others at very low costs to themselves. In these cases, voices in the debate over slavery were silenced by state officials who could, at low cost to themselves, prevent the free flow of information, impose very large costs on the slaves, and perpetuate a monstrous and unambiguous evil. Something similar emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as state governments moved to restrict the free functioning of the labor market.
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After reading Walter E. William’s The State Against Blacks, it’s become rather clear that the vast majority of institutional racism that has existed since the end of the Civil War, and continues to exist to this day, exists because of governmental interference. It’s true that many businessmen were quite racist, but they were never able to act on their racism while remaining profitable until the government granted them monopoly power or prohibited minorities from entering the market. And yet, people still believe that were it not for the government, private enterprise would be stuck in the racial dark ages.
Many people I discuss libertarian ideas with are oftentimes intrigued and near acceptance. However, the stumbling block always seems to be slavery. I then posit this proposition: What if a slave simply walked off the plantation (or say, sought escape via channels like the underground railroad and were later discovered), who would be there to enforce the slavery?
Once they realize that it was the state, they begin to realize that slavery was a state sanctioned and enforced institution, one that couldn’t exist in the absence of the state. Then bells go off.
On to segregation. Of course, the statists love to point to “Jim Crow”, but fail to realize that they were Jim Crow laws, and that blacks were forcibly prohibited from peaceful exchange and oppressed by, wait for it…the state. In fact, if I understand it correctly, even if businesses wanted to sell to blacks, they were prohibited from doing so by the state.
The violence towards blacks? The state protected the violent. Blacks were prohibited from all sorts of economic exchange by the state. In all instances, it was the state, not the market, that persecuted blacks. In the absence of the state, slavery and segregation simply would not, nor could not, exist. Sure, some businesses would discriminate, but the profit motive would be to enticing to resist. And even if businesses did, there would be others that wouldn’t that would prosper. And even if no white businesses did, only intervention by the state prohibited blacks from owning and trading property.
In fact, I remember a discussion about redlining minorities with regards to home loans. Apparently, we need all this banking regulation to insure minorities have “equal access” to loans. So, I asked why then if redlining did exist, were their no banks that would enter the neglected market and make loans, and ostensibly, profits.
Perplexed and without answer, I then explain it was the banking regulations that prohibited entry, that supported the discriminatory practices, and that only in their absence would such nefarious practices be ended.
I love the look of cognitive dissonance!!
@Simon Gray
It was helpful to me that the USA was one of the few places that required violence to resolve the question of slavery. When exploring why violence was so nessecary here while entirely unnecessary elsewhere it irt pretty obvious out government was instrumental in preventing change for so long.
Ego-Driven Intervention Blocks The Flow Of Knowledge.
All error comes from a lack of knowledge. The error of personal prejudices is caused by the lack of knowledge, you could say, at the microlevel. The error of an unethical society is also caused by a lack of knowledge; by an interference with the nature and role of knowledge somewhere in the system.
Sometimes the status of ethical development in society is a product of an age of latency, like a spiritual winter, but other times it is precipitated mostly by the ego-driven. Of course it is true that the ego-driven are often a product of the spiritual winter.
In historical analysis this is a valid starting point and so deviations from ethical social practices can be traced back to ego-driven intervention somewhere along the way.
It must be hell living without an ego. Are you dying of starvation?
Thanks for more truth about Andrew Jackson, American’s worst president. Jackson was the closest we have come to having an American Dictator. He was the quintessential Democrat concerning the rule of law. It applied to everyone but him.
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