Northern Jacobins and Political Slavery

 

 In the end, the radical abolitionists were used by the Republican party to cover their revolution that changed the Founders’ form of government. After the war the radicals drifted away “as the Republican….party’s narrow concerns and corrupt methods became apparent,” and it was clear that freedmen were provided the vote only to be herded to the polls to elect Northern political opportunists in the devastated South.

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"

Northern Jacobins and Political Slavery:

“The North, [Lysander Spooner] argued, had fought for the principle that “men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support a government they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.” The result was that chattel slavery had been replaced by “political slavery.” Before the war the government had been “in theory at least” based on popular consent. “But nothing of the kind can be said now, if the principle on which the war was carried on by the North is irrevocably established.”

As for the argument that emancipation had changed the nature of the war, Spooner pointed to the well-established fact that slavery had been abolished “not for any love of liberty in general – not as an act of justice to the black himself, but only “as a war measure.”

Spooner and other ante-bellum agitators had assumed that humanitarian radicalism is indissolubly linked to anarchism or the rejection of all constituted authority. But it is possible, especially in a democracy, to believe in strong government as an expression of the popular will and an instrument of egalitarian reform. For Northern humanitarians of 1865…..Such reliance on government for the protection of the rights of the freedmen could be reconciled with the humanitarian impulse only by re-evaluating the role of the state and abandoning all vestiges of doctrinaire anti-institutionalism.

The common description of the [Republican] Radicals as “Jacobins” suggests that they had a belief in the unlimited power of the central government to legislate the general will and, what was more, a sense of themselves as uniquely embodying and transmitting that will. The proposals of Thaddeus Stevens and Wendell Phillips for the confiscation of Southern estates and division of the land among the freedmen undeniably defied the cherished rights of property in the name of a national democracy.

By 1867….”[Phillips] and a little band of abolitionists he represented, like Robespierre and the Jacobins, believed that their will was the General Will” and looked for the federal government to establish and maintain an equal political and social position for the Negro in the South, by as much force as proved necessary. They were groping for something like the modern concept of the welfare state – foreshadowed as it was by pragmatic programs of the time like the Freedmen’s Bureau – but their intense hatred of the white South prevented a rational approach.

In the end, they settled for the panacea of moderate Republicans – the purely political solution of giving the Negro the vote, denying it to certain classes of whites, There was the desire to get the Southern States readmitted to the Union under Republican control in time to deliver critical votes in 1868 and thereafter.”

(The Inner Civil War, Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union, George M. Frederickson, Harper & Row, 1965, pp. 190-192)

Northern Jacobins and Political Slavery