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How Slavery Doomed Limited Government in America

It made it impossible to limit the size and scope of the federal government. Conservatives need to recognize that.

Whatever one’s sentiments about the Times project, however, I do think it is important to examine the implications of slavery that live with us until this day. One implication that I think of constantly is the extent to which the legacy of slavery effectively made it impossible to limit the size and scope of the federal government.

Philosophically, I am a believer in a central government of limited powers as enumerated in Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution. That is, in my ideal world, the central government would perform a narrow range of functions, such as defense, courts, creating a standard currency, while most everything else could be dealt with at the state and local levels. I’ve argued, in fact, that a central reason why the nation is so divided is that the states have ceded so much power to the federal government, not leaving much room for regional differences in policymaking. Thus, under the system we have today, decisions made in Washington have ramifications for every American in every state. Currently, Betsy DeVos can help steer educational policies in liberal states, and when Democrats are in power, conservative states have to worry what the administration has in store for them. It did not have to be this way. But slavery made it inevitable.

The combination of slavery and the Jim Crow era simultaneously tainted arguments in favor of federalism, convinced many Americans that states could not be trusted with retaining too much power, and set precedents that paved the way for government intervention in other areas.

From both the text of the U.S. Constitution and other founding documents, it’s pretty clear that there was a significant resistance to overly broad central authority, one that persisted for decades. But ultimately, there was no way that the evil of slavery would ever be ended without federal intervention.

Apologists for the Confederacy will often try to argue that the Civil War was actually about state sovereignty, not slavery. This has been a pernicious myth that’s been destructive to the cause of limited government.

It’s quite clear that Southerners rebelled to defend not only their right to own slaves, but also to expand slavery into other territories. It’s clear from the documentary evidence at the time that Southerners saw the war as being about preserving slavery. This was evident in the infamous “cornerstone” speech, in which the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens, declared that slavery was “the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution” and said of the new Confederate government, "its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.”