Was The Union Army's Invasion Of The Confederate States A Lawful Act?
Was the Union Army's Invasion of the Confederate States a Lawful Act?
An Analysis of President Lincoln's
Legal Arguments Against Secession
by James Ostrowski
This paper, included in Secession, State, and Liberty (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1998), edited by David Gordon, was delivered at the Mises Institute's conference on the political economy of secession. It is ©1998 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. All rights reserved.
On 27 May 1861, the army of the United States of America (the Union) a nation which had been formed by consecutive secessions, first from Great Britain in 1776, and then from itself in 1788 invaded the State of Virginia,1 which had itself recently seceded from the Union, in an effort to negate Virginia's secession by violent force.
The results of the efforts begun that day are well known and indisputable: after four years of brutal warfare, during which 620,000 Americans were killed, the United States of America forcibly negated the secession of the Confederate States, and re-enrolled them into the Union. The Civil War ended slavery, left the South in economic ruins, and set the stage for twelve years of military rule.
Beyond its immediate effects, the Civil War also made drastic changes in politics and law that continue to shape our world 130 years later. Arthur Ekirch., Jr. writes:
Along with the terrible destruction of life and property suffered in four long years of fighting went tremendous changes in American life and thought, especially a decline in [classical] liberalism on all questions save that of slavery. . . .
Through a policy of arbitrary arrests made possible by Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, persons were seized and confined on the suspicion of disloyalty or of sympathy with the southern cause. Thus, in the course of the Civil War, a total of thirteen thousand civilians was estimated to have been held as political prisoners, often without any sort of trial or after only...