Liberty Chronicles

Phil Magness joins us this week to teach the radical nature of Lysander Spooner. Spooner’s legal career started in an apprenticeship under 2 lawyers and he was best known for his support for the Abolitionist movement. His philosophy of liberty heavily influenced his law practice as well as his activist lifestyle. Who was Lysander Spooner? Is there a connection between his post office activism and...

The Democrats and Republicans in the House were doing everything they could think of to force the hands of their opponents into appointing the House Speaker. However, no one could secure the majority number of votes to take over the position. The crisis reached a breaking point when a congressman actually suggested that everyone from the House resign in order eliminate the issue entirely. With eve...

Stephen Maizlish sifted through 1700-1800 different documents and speeches from the 19th century in order to recreate an accurate depiction of the discourse that was occurring in Congress prior to the Civil War. His book, A Strife of Tongues: The Compromise of 1850 and the Ideological Foundations of the American Civil War (A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era) , is the product of his out...

Prior to 1857, no one had ever heard of Hinton Helper. To be clear, Helper was not a libertarian, he was a vehement racist who made it quite clear that he did not believe that people of color belonged in North America at all. Helper had one great contribution to history and that was his book The Impending Crisis of the South. However, if you read his work closely, his racist remarks were class-ori...

Phil Magness best describes George Fitzhugh as an “eccentric character” because that frames the intellectual direction of his life. Fitzhugh had an obsession with reading about the medieval world and throughout his life he had contempt for philosophers. He is famous for viewing free society as a failure and he also claimed that “all government is slavery”. Who is George Fitzhugh? Was he ever a sou...

One of the biggest drawbacks of thinking in “vulgar libertarian” fashion is that you forget that there were ever alternatives available to people, that the way that we live now or the way we’re used to living is the only way that was ever reasonable or good. The rise of the modern state marks a time in history when authorities began to and continue to control more about people’s lives. The modern...

Historians usually mark off the years, about 1815 to 1845 as the Jacksonian era and for Americans, and many other people across the planet, these were years of singularity. This period of time is remembered for many inventions and innovations. Most notably was Samuel Morse’s magnetic telegraph. His magnetic telegraph “eliminated the greatest problem plagued by all republics since the ancient days...

Abram Smith caught political fire as a radical Locofoco Democrat, a friend of working people and outsiders. Smith was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1852 after he spent some time as a notable defense attorney. Let’s not forget that in 1850 the Fugitive Slave Act was revamped in order to ensure that Northerners were not a hinderance in the capture of slaves who had escaped their southern...

All the way from the 1770s to the 1850s, Americans had plenty of political disagreements, but nothing ever seriously disrupted the machinery of state until abolitionists and planters began forcing the slavery issue. Prior to the election of 1856, some much-needed rearrangement occurred in politics. In 1856, the newly-minted Republican Party lost on the back of John C. Frémont, but they gained cruc...

This is a updated version of “There’s No Excuse for Slavery” which was released on July 3rd, 2018. Enjoy! The planters of the South believed that slavery had grown up with American society and its’ institutions. John C. Calhoun argued that slavery was a “positive good” because he believed that no well-off society existed in which “one portion of the community did not in point of fact, live on the...

In the mid-20th century, it was fashionable for historians to speak of a “Blundering Generation” of pre-Civil War politicians, people who—well intended or not—made a long series of foolish and short-sighted mistakes. They made blunders that make for wonderfully detailed political histories “from below,” as it were, but what appear to be mistakes were often intentional, and what appear to be great...

In 1850, American politics was nearing its breaking point. The Senate as well as the Administration was doing much in order to keep the peace between the Southern and Northern politicians. For example, Henry Clay was pulling out all the stops to pass a combination of compromise measures that would finally resolve the territorial crisis. However, his bill kept failing on partisan lines. No Southern...

Jeff Hummel joins our lengthy debate about who Van Buren really was as a person and as a President. Hummel argues that Van Buren took a small “r” republican position for most of his career, both in the law and in politics. Hummel also argues that Van Buren was more consistent as President than those who came before him. Why would Jeff Hummel categorize Van Buren as the “least bad” President? Why i...

Whigs were happy to have the White House, but many of them, at least, could still see the trouble lying head at the inevitable contest of 1852. On the strength of surprisingly large margins, the Free Soilers actually had a serious seat at the table. The Loco-Focos were the ones out there leading the young America cultural movement, they were the ones integrating Whigish abolitionism, with Jacksoni...

Our conversation about how all history is revisionist and open to creativity with Michael Douma continues this week. Douma believes that a history classroom should not be about memorizing facts that a professor believes matter. It is more important to train people to think critically and creatively. Douma believes that history is always written from the perspective of the historian, describing it...

Michael Douma joins us for the first part of a two-part series to discuss how we see the past as as an interpretative history. He argues that history is a creative discipline because we choose to arrange facts in a certain way. Douma goes through his new book, Creative Historical Thinking , and how he typically asks his students to draw a timeline of their lives or a timeline of American history....

Timothy Sandefur joins us this week to discuss how Frederick Douglass and his beliefs do not align perfectly to today’s political factions. He is often mischaracterized due to his legendary status. Has Douglass been purposefully distorted over time? Does the omission of facts about what he did and how he acted play a large role in that distortion? Frederick Douglass is defined as an individualist,...

1848 was a wild ride. That year the Free Soil Party tried to force Whigs and Democrats to take a stand on the issue of slavery in the territories. Once and for all, politicians would have to openly declare themselves either in favor of Free Soil for free society or Slave Territory, for the planters’ personal dominion. Further Readings/References: Johnson, Reinhard. The Liberty Party, 1840-1848: An...

The average Free Soiler was a radical Loco-Foco, probably from New York, touched by more than a decade of early libertarianism. But always and everywhere there were also the opportunists, the schemers, the self-advancing office seekers, desperate to leverage free soil into greater personal power, and right there at the top of this magnificent new party was the schemer in chief, the little magician...

The Polk Administration was a strange time in the early history of American Libertarianism called Locofocoism. In many ways, it was the time of ultimate triumph. Polk was as committed to their economic program as anyone else on the national stage, including their champion, Martin Van Buren. He was a Republican nationalist and an expansionist, and so were many of the more hopeful and naive Locofoco...

In the end, a few thousand early libertarians in New York made the Mexican War a possibility. And almost right away, Polk began betraying Van Buren defectors. He ignored Van Buren’s cabinet suggestions and supported the conservative faction in New York. Further Reading: For an overview of the later history of locofocoism “The Artist as Exemplar: Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life” A quick life of Thorea...

Dr. Nima Sanandaji has a PhD in Engineering from Stockholm’s Royal Institute, and he has written over 20 books on policy, philosophy, current affairs and history. He joins me now to talk about his latest, “The Birthplace of Capitalism,” which explains how and why ancient Middle Easterners invented capitalism and entrepreneurship. Further Reading: Nima Sanandaji’s Wikipedia entry His latest book, T...

Corporations are so commonplace, so ubiquitous, and considered so necessary that we barely stop to ask whether it’s ever been justifiable in the first place. Here to help us tackle one of the great, relatively forgotten questions in Libertarian history is Gary Chartier. Further Reading: Gary Chartier’s Wikipedia entry His archive at the Center for a Stateless Society “ Corporations: A Contractual...

In the grand catalog of 19th century America, there are few villains so worthy of a Libertarian’s scorn, as James K Polk. The Jacksonian period was one flush with eager upstarts, middling men who hit it big with cunning and peculiar talents. Polk, too, was one of these eager, young, upstart Americans. Further Reading: Frances Whipple, ed. Liberty Chimes. Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Providence....

We often learn that Manifest Destiny was the invention of racists and conquest-hungry imperialists, and there is some truth to that, but much as historians have ignored it and much as we might like to do the same, America’s first libertarian movement was also responsible. Jacksonian radicals called Locofocos provided the ideology that helped transform the United States from a limited republic into...