http://larison.org/the-whig-partys-treason/

So essentially the Court Party was the analog of today’s “corporate center,” facing an opposition made up of both radical left and radical right versions of populism.

Neither party had an ideology, but the Whigs were out to validate exploiting their self interest while the Tories supported existing values in a coherent way; their problem was that the values didn’t line up, and, while the Hanoverians lacked legitimacy, the court was tactically with the Whigs (not the other way about); the party at court, not a court party. The same thing had happened but with the Tories for Charles II and James II; their court found natural support from the Tories, who were also the party at court but not a court party.

That changed after the ‘45, when Tory loyalties ceased to be meaningfully divided. Just as the Whigs had found a foothold at court through Mary and Anne under Charles II and James II, so also did the Tories under George II’s son, Prince Frederick. Then, with George III accepted by the country as not a foreigner, the court’s interests aligned with the Tories - which had been the country party all along, and stayed that way. As is usual with colonies, the Americans lagged in cultural developments; they saw the threat of royal tyranny of a century before, with the new generation turning Tory.

Short answer: the Tories were the country party, the Whigs the party of great wealth through trade and/or powerful “places”, i.e. government posts in pre-civil service days, and there never was a true court party, just a natural alliance between the court and one or other of the parties according to the circumstances of the time. In the 19th century, the Whigs acquired an ideology and became the Liberals, while the Tories became the Conservatives in antithesis without acquiring one until the 1960s (essentially a covert hostile takeover like that of the neocons).

Other way round. The Tories were known as the “Court Party” for their political loyalties to a powerful and interventionist Crown; the Whigs distinguished themselves as the “Country Party” in opposition to the royal court. (Cf. WikiPedia: British Whig Party, etc.)

ajay: I was with you until that point… why shouldn’t slavery have continued in (say) the Carolinas, Georgia, Virginia etc? Obviously not on the same scale without the ex-French states of the Deep South, but the “died of strangulation” argument doesn’t really ring true.

Well, a few reasons.

First, it’s not clear that plantation slavery would have remained economically viable without expansion into the Deep South and the old Southwest. In the upper South (Maryland and Virginia especially) unsustainable farming practices had already stripped much of the land, and the slavers’ livelihoods had become substantially dependent on the American slave trade — “selling down” slaves to the Deep South or to the Caribbean — rather than on actual planting. (This is part of the reason why Virginian slavers like Jefferson and George Mason pushed so hard for the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade: not because they wanted to roll back slavery, but rather because they wanted to eliminate foreign competition.) Had it not been for the expansion of U.S. territory, and the slavocracy along with it, into the Gulf states, slavery might well have died out for economic reasons, at least in the upper South.

Second, without the centralized system created by the Constitution there would have been no enforceable federal Fugitive Slave laws. The Southern slavocracy depended on the federally-assured cooperation of the free states, and without those assurances — with freedom beginning not at the Canadian border, but rather at the Mason-Dixon line — individual refugees and coordinated efforts like the Underground Railroad, operating without any fear of slave-catchers or federal judges, would very quickly have made slavery unsustainable even in those states where it would otherwise have remained economically viable.

Third, on a similar note, without Union bayonets and cannon, and without the Slave Power’s expansionist program, there would have been no Seminole Wars, and far more territory outside of the U.S. for fugitive slaves to flee to and establish maroon communities. This threatened to dramatically destabilize the slave system in the Carolinas and Georgia prior to the Seminole Wars, and would have had a profound effect had it not been for the subjugation of Florida by the Federal military.

Note that it’s for precisely these reasons that many radical abolitionists — most famously William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and, early in his career, Frederick Douglass — argued that the Northern states should secede from the Union, and that the Constitutional system of compromise and political centralization was one of the chief bulwarks holding up the slave system in the Southern states.

Although I consider myself an anti-federalist on its defining issue, I can’t completely choose one side over the other (I can’t even sure the revolution was a good idea). The Federalists had a less naive view of democracy and most blatantly of the French Revolution (it was on that issue that Patrick Henry switched sides near the end of his life). It wasn’t the Federalists that gave us the embargo and later war with Britain nor the Louisiana purchase. They gave us plenty of other crap though.

I’ve often read that both Patriots and Tories only comprised about a third of Americans each around the time of the revolution. Under those circumstances isn’t it hard to say one or the other represented “the people”? And if the majority was against the Federalists, how did they manage to pull off the coup so well and get two presidents elected, and then AFTER they fell from power avoid having the system dismantled?

The interesting thing, though, is that secession was voted on, not by state governments, but by exactly the same kind of elected conventions that earlier ratified the Constitution. The clear implication of Madison’s argument in Federalist No. 39 is that the Constitution derived its authority in each state solely from the sovereign act of its own citizenry assembled in convention. And the southern states rescinded ratification and withdrew sovereign consent from the federal government’s exercise of delegated power in their territories, by exactly the same mechanism they’d earlier used to ratify and delegate the power.

If the conventions’ claim in legal theory to represent the sovereign will of the citizenry was fictitious, the same was true of the conventions which ratified in the first place. You might just as easily say “Not all the voters in the ratifying states agreed, and the many slaves (and women, and convicts, etc.) never even got the chance to be heard. Yet the ratifying conventions presumed to speak on behalf of all of them.”

In the end, it’s less a question of whether the states had the right to secede, than of by what right the federal government could claim the authority to stop them.

That’s an interesting point. In his book The Causes of the English Civil War, Conrad Russell advances the thesis that one of the forces for liberty during the early 1640s was simply that the British King was ruling over 3 kingdoms, and in each kingdom the people wanted the rights and privileges that had been granted to the citizens in the other kingdoms. Because the borders between the 3 kingdoms were porous, people often traveled to, or traded with, the other kingdoms, and so they were on intimate terms with the freedoms allowed in each state.

I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think the point can be generalized - porous borders are a reliable aid to freedom. When I think about Renaissance Italy, I’m struck by the number of times that people were able to be controversial yet escape punishment because of porous borders (when Leonardo da Vinci offended some nobles in Florence, he was able to get out of there easily enough and instead spend some time in Rome). Likewise, when the French King issued a warrant for the arrest of Voltaire, Voltaire was able to get over the border to Geneva, and there he lived for many years, writing some of his most controversial work. And again, in 1989, when the border between East Germany and the West became porous, communism collapsed. As Wikipedia says:

“In August 1989 Hungary removed its border restrictions and unsealed its border and more than 13,000 people left East Germany by crossing the “green” border via Czechoslovakia into Hungary and then on to Austria and West Germany.”

An area made up of a lot of small states, each with porous borders, is likely to be quite free. Sadly, each time such a situation arises, the result seems to be something similar to Renaissance Italy: conquest by some outside force.

I am curious if the porous borders that now prevail in Europe will lead to any great blossoming of additional freedoms. (Of course, the people of Europe are already quite free, judged by the standard that has prevailed there for the past few centuries.)

I have a friend who has a bumper sticker that reads “The American Revolution started when some white slave owners didn’t want to pay their taxes.” While there is some truth to that bumper sticker, I think it does an injustice by erasing from history the working-class and middle-class radicals who fought for a system much more just than what a cynic might imply. The radicals certainly fought for a system more just than what was actually acheived, and they deserve to be remembered.

Interesting examples. Of course the reason these places were large and centralized to begin with was due to the battle of ideas fought years earlier in which, among other relatively non-authoritarian folks, the anarchists lost. So you got a large state wherein a succession of power hungry figures were able to thrive (to the extent they could, bound by economic laws in the case of the explicitly communist nations). All the more reason to resist further centralization in the US, so when (and if, of course) a dictatorship were to sprout up in D.C., he or she’s got less power to wield.

And here’s where talk of “states’ rights” serves only to confuse the issue. Yes, one should be able to withdraw consent from one’s government, where “one” is a sovereign individual, not another (local) government. The “secession” that occurred during the American Civil War wasn’t a bunch of individuals deciding to reject the authority of the Federal government. It was a secession of governments. State legislatures voted on and passed resolutions that said, basically, “We few legislators have the final say over what happens in these territories, not Washington.” Not all the voters in those territories agreed, and the many slaves (and women, and convicts, etc.) never even got the chance to be heard. Yet the secessionist governments presumed to speak on behalf of all of them.

Kevin, I think you misread my comment as voicing unqualified support for a federal system of government. My point was that a decentralized, Articles of Confederation or Confederate States-style system isn’t appreciably better than a federal system, because it’s still made up of governments– political entities who presume to speak for their subjects without their voluntary consent, and who defend their authority through force. Small local governments can still be oppressive, and if you happen to live in one of those small jurisdictions that’s ruled by an iron fist, it’s not going to be much of a consolation to you that the village over the hill is a land of freedom and prosperity.

Speaking of which, Dain says There’s less likely to be a gang of thugs in every jurisdiction when one can “vote” via exit. True, but one of the first rights dictatorships take away is precisely the right to leave. East Berliners, Cubans, Chinese, and southern slaves certainly attempted to “vote with their feet,” and many succeeded… but many also died or were captured. Many more were probably to afraid to try, or never got the opportunity.

In an area divided into “sovereign nations,” one nation might be very free, but hasn’t much control over the fact that its neighbors have heavily guarded borders and won’t let anyone out. On the other hand, it’s much less likely that a modern-day U.S. state, county, or municipality would become an East Berlin-style totalitarian walled fortress, because the Federal government wouldn’t allow it. Yes, it’s true that there’s no higher body acting as a check on the Federal government, and that the Federal government can and does violate the rights of its citizens with impunity. I never made the claim that Federalism was the best system, or even a very good one; just that, within the context of American history, it may have done better at safeguarding individual rights than a Confederacy would have.

As for what type of system I would really like to see, I’d have to say a truly decentralized one, in which individual participation is entirely voluntary, and no person can claim the authority to speak on behalf of the entire group, no matter how small that group might be. Measured against this standard, the debate over federalism just looks like “big mob rule vs. slightly smaller mob rule”.

Exit vs. Voice. There’s less likely to be a gang of thugs in every jurisdiction when one can “vote” via exit. The worst kind of gang is that which takes over a central locus of power. It’s not true that they can’t see what everyone is doing as easily as in a smaller polity, because they simply hire local proxies to do the work for them.

Indeed, I’d say that in a crushingly authoritarian small community it’s rather obvious what’s going on, whereas in a large authoritarian community the causes and effects of authoritarian measures (and the ability to expose just what is authoritarian anyway) can be more difficult to figure out.

The South was the main political force behind continental expansionism, in order to keep slavery viable. And the issue of slavery in the territories figured as prominently as it did precisely because the slaveocracy saw slavery as untenable if limited to its original extent.

Charles,

What if the United States were to violate basic human rights? Should the UN be able to invade to enforce them? And if the UN violates basic human rights, must we appeal to the United Federation of Planets? Any human polity is capable of injustice, and at some point there will be no higher outside authority to which to appeal; in any case, the higher authority is always made up of human beings, not angels. So the question is, which level of government is most likely to be threatening to liberty? The odds are much more stacked against, all the towns in a state coming under authoritarian government, than a single state government falling under authoritarian control.

And I would argue that totalitarianism would far less tenable as practiced by individual communities under a panarchy, than by a continent-wide polity. For one thing, as a matter of simple geometry, the ratio of border area to population is greater, by several orders of magnitude, when totalitarianism is practiced on a community level, and therefore requires far greater resources per capita to prevent escape. And we’re living under the very real threat of totalitarianism from a single national government, what with USA PATRIOT, the gutting of habeas corpus and posse comitatus, and all.

Regarding your reference to the secessionism of 1860-61, in particular, I wrote elsewhere:

I’ve encountered arguments against decentralism… claiming that the elimination of racial injustice was possible only because of a “progressive” national government imposing its will on the south. Nothing could be further from the truth. The national government was pro-slavey and dominated by the Democratic Party through 1860. The enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dred Scot decision, the suppression of abolitionist speech in Congress and abolitionist literature in the U.S. mail reflected the federal political climate in the 1850s.

And what brought that to an end was not the triumph of a progressive anti-slavery majority in the federal government. It was, rather, entirely a fluke: the disintegration of the ruling Democratic party. And the Democrats came apart at the seams as the result of a feud over whether the party should be rabidly racist, or only moderately racist. Had the racist majority that dominated the national government not been divided against itself, the anti-slavery Republicans would have been another footnote in history.

I would add that, through the 1850s, local defiance of federal law was mainly on the abolitionist side: the Underground Railroad, juries nullifying the Fugitive Slave Laws, etc. Had a more radically pro-slavery Democratic president come to power, which certainly seemed a real possibility in the 1850s, there would have been a very real possibility of an abolitiionist secession movement in New England.

As for Charles’ comment about paleolib sympathies for the Confederacy, I think on one level they have a point. Once the idea of secession was crushed, the prospects for liberty in the US diminished greatly. Had the South been allowed to peacefully secede, it would have set a very important precedent that one should be able to withdraw consent from one’s government.

I will have to say, though, that I still don’t see how “local government” and a confederate system is any improvement over the federal system. “Big government” isn’t the problem: to paraphrase Dr. Seuss, a government’s a government, no matter how small. If, say, Stalin had only been absolute dictator of a tiny village in the Caucasus, life in that village would have been just as miserable as it was when he ran the whole Soviet Union. In fact, it might even have been worse, since the logistic nightmare of trying to exercise control over a continent-wide empire naturally means you won’t be able to watch everyone at all times.

You say the towns in New England “didn’t feel bound by any provision of the state constitution or enactment of the legislature that wasn’t ratified locally”. What about provisions of the state constitutions (if there were any) that prohibited the seizure of private property, the suppression of peaceful protest, or other violations of the people’s basic rights? Should the local government’s desire to suppress the people’s rights trump the state or national government’s desire to keep them from doing so?

Remember, America’s next great experiment in anti-Federalism came about when smaller local governments wanted to continue to strip away the rights of millions of human beings, and the big federal government told them they couldn’t. For some reason, the “paleolibertarians” over at Lew Rockwell seem to think the Confederates were in the right, apparently because they favor “smaller government”. I’ve never understood this. Murray Rothbard once said that if you want to understand the state, think of it as a criminal gang. If that’s true, then the debate between federalism and local government is just the choice between being bullied by one big gang or a bunch of smaller ones.

I was with you until that point… why shouldn’t slavery have continued in (say) the Carolinas, Georgia, Virginia etc? Obviously not on the same scale without the ex-French states of the Deep South, but the “died of strangulation” argument doesn’t really ring true.