June 9, 2002
NOT PRO SLAVERY, JUST PRO PROPERTY RIGHTS :
Civil (Libertarian) War? (James Ostrowski, Lew Rockwell.com)What ultimately can a natural rights libertarian say about Lincoln, secession and slavery? The South had the right to leave in peace; slavery is and was morally wrong; though force may be rightly used to end slavery - after all other means for ending slavery have failed - such force must be strictly limited to accomplishing that end and must not violate the rights of third parties by means of taxation, conscription or mass murder; the Union's invasion of the South, involving as it did taxation, inflation, conscription, confiscation, destruction and the mass killing of non-slave holders, and not having been initiated for any libertarian purpose widely understood at the time, must be condemned as a moral outrage; had an effort been made at the time to free slaves throughout the United States (including the District of Columbia, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland) that did not purport to violate the rights of innocent third parties, or accomplish any evil goals such as expanding the power of the central state, libertarians at the time should have supported it; alas, no such movement existed; thus, any attempt to pretend that the Union?s invasion of the South was a moral cause to end slavery and did not have numerous other and evil goals, the accomplishment of which plagues us today, is an absurd exercise involving the libertarian endorsement of illibertarian means and ends then and continuing.
Gee, where would Francis Fukuyama have gotten the idea that Libertarians might have supported the right to keep slaves in mid-19th Century America.
UPDATE :
Sean Hackbarth is curious about this phenomenon too