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Conclusion For seventy-two years the American experiment in constitutional government enjoyed enormous success. A handful of communities along the seaboard burgeoned into an industrial and agricultural colossus, well on its way to first place among nations. The Constitution and the government it established played a critical role in this process by ensuring the sanctity of contracts , clearing the stage of restrictions on trade, and encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship with patents, copyrights, trade routes, and the protection of capital. Adam Smith’s description of the conditions that enabled Great Britain to prosper during the eighteenth century applied equally to antebellum America: “a general liberty of trade . . . the liberty of exporting, duty free, almost all sorts of goods which are the produce of domestic industry to almost any foreign country . . . the unbounded liberty of transporting them from any one part of our own country to any other . . . but above all, the equal and impartial administration of justice . . . which by securing to every man the fruits of his own industry, gives the greatest and most effectual encouragement to every sort of industry.” 1 The American confederation derived much of its success from creating a duty-free area of enterprise larger than Britain or any other free nation on earth.2 The experiment began to unravel when its framework was forced to serve ends beyond its original purposes and stand as the government of a nation, at least in the territories. Americans moved beyond their original agreement in purchasing foreign territory and then found that they could not agree how to govern it. Fractures appeared when one side in this dispute refused to accept the prospect of losing the contest. The Supreme Court played a critical role in turning a disagreement over governance into cause for dissolving the Union. By converting what had been a dispute over the merits of legislation into an assault upon a constitutional “right,” the Supreme Court invited southerners to turn a political loss into a breach of the constitutional contract and a cause for dissolution. 352 1. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (London, 1776; New York: Knopf, 1991), 546. 2. Johnson, History of the American People, 531–32. Debate over the causes of the Civil War has lasted, at the time of this writing, almost a century and a half. Even at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, Americans subscribed to competing explanations for secession; a dwindling group continues to cite the growth of federal power as the cause, while others point to friction over slavery. The age of the dispute has done little to aid the claims of the former, which were dismissed almost as soon as they were offered. The future of slavery was the primary cause of the trepidation that led southerners to leave the Union. The secession resolutions of the states, comments of southern newspapers, and transcripts of congressional debates are replete with the conviction that a Republican-controlled national government would threaten the institution in the South itself. Despite its longevity, this disagreement rests upon a fallacy. Secession was a product of both centralization and friction over slavery.The two worked together in bringing about the fracture of the Union. Slavery was the end to be protected, and maintenance of the limits on federal power was the means. A half-century of fractious disputes over the growing powers of the federal government ignited a small but stubborn fire of mistrust and contempt. The dispute over slavery turned what had been a smoldering coal into a conflagration . Southerners seceded out of fear for the future of slavery under a Republican-controlled federal government because of the increased potency of that government. The patronage available within the executive branch alone made the notion of risking the future under a Republican administration intolerable for many. Centralization also worsened sectional strife by raising the specter in southern minds of a Republican Party maintaining in perpetuity its hold on national power through the embrace of programs that appealed to the pecuniary interests of voters, i.e., tariffs, land grants, and river and harbor subsidies. That secession ultimately proved a mistake even from the perspective of radical southerners—it resulted in a war that laid waste to their region, the destruction of the Confederacy, and the abolition of slavery —cannot alter the fact that it was based upon a sincere calculation about the future of slavery under a northern-controlled national government. Neither the folly of secession nor the tragedy of the Civil War and its six hundred...

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