Lord Acton on Slavery and the War between the States
Lord Acton was one of the greatest classical liberal historians of the nineteenth century, but his view of the War between the States has in some circles occasioned dismay. Acton, in a letter of 1866 to Robert E. Lee, said, “I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.”
For example, the political theorist Jacob Levy, who admires Acton’s pluralism, says that Acton’s insights “led him to analyses of the U.S. Civil War that were not merely wrong, but carefully and thoughtfully wickedly wrong. He identified the cause of the Confederacy as the cause of freedom, even knowing slavery to be evil, and he thought this with firm commitment, for many years.” (As we’ll see below, “wickedly” is a parody of something Acton says.)
If slavery is evil, how could Acton defend the cause of the Confederacy as the cause of freedom? Acton’s case for doing so is well argued and does not at all depend on doubting the badness of slavery. The case begins from the fact that a free society cannot be run by an absolute power but must make room for the rights of individuals. In saying this, Acton not only condemns absolute monarchy but unlimited majority rule as well. If anything, majority rule is worse, because it is much harder to resist. Many of the Founders, in particular those in the Federalist Party, recognized the dangers of democracy. As Acton explains in a lecture given in 1866,
[T]he authors of the most celebrated Democracy in history esteemed that the most formidable dangers which menaced the stability of their work were the very principles of Democracy itself. With them the establishment of a Republican government was not
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