The Londoner

ON DECEMBER 24th 1860 the government of South Carolina issued a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina.” The proclamation stated that the “ends for which [America’s] government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them.” Six southern states followed suit in the ensuing six weeks. On March 11th 1861 representatives from the seven states ratified the constitution of the Confederate states of America, and a month and a day later troops from the Confederacy opened fire on Fort Sumter, a United States sea fort off the South Carolina coast. Thus began America’s civil war. On November 7th 2012—the day after Barack Obama was re-elected—a petition appeared on the “We the People” White House website, which is a means for citizens to engage in their first-amendment right to “petition the Government for a redress of grievances”. It asked the federal government to allow ...

By: Jarrett Stepman   I recently wrote an article in Human Events called “ Secessionists and nullifiers won’t succeed ,” in which I made both a historical and practical argument against secession and nullification. I also called the two ideas “unconstitutional.” Dr. Thomas Woods, author of “ Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21 st Century ,” wrote an article attacking my call against secession and nullification . In it, he rejects my argument against nullification and secession and for why our Federal Union, despite its current problems, must be preserved. Dr. Woods devotes a large part of his article to condescendingly dismissing my ideas as the product of a “New York Times” way of thinking and my alma mater, UC Davis – a curious choice, given the fact that Woods attended Columbia and Harvard, the schools that produced Barack Obama. Like many with Ivy League diplomas, Woods knows much that isn’t so. I...

Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at. State capitalism consists of one or more groups making use of the coercive apparatus of the government… for themselves by expropriating the production of others by force and violence. — Murray N. Rothbard, The Logic of Action (1997) The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often referred to as the time of the "robber barons." It is a staple of history books to attach this derogatory phrase to such figures as John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the great nineteenth-century railroad operators — Grenville Dodge, Leland Stanford, Henry Villard, James J. Hill, and others. To most historians writing on this period, these entrepreneurs committed thinly veiled acts of larceny to enrich themselves at the expense of their customers. Once again we see the...

  A new portrait of the founding father challenges the long-held perception of Thomas Jefferson as a benevolent slaveholder Illustration by Charis Tsevis With five simple words in the Declaration of Independence—“all men are created equal”—Thomas Jefferson undid Aristotle’s ancient formula, which had governed human affairs until 1776: “From the hour of their birth, some men are marked out for subjection, others for rule.” In his original draft of the Declaration, in soaring, damning, fiery prose, Jefferson denounced the slave trade as an “execrable commerce ...this assemblage of horrors,” a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberties.” As historian John Chester Miller put it, “The inclusion of Jefferson’s strictures on slavery and the slave trade would have committed the United States to the abolition of slavery.” That was the way it was interpreted by some of those who read it at...