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IN 1979, JOSEPH R. Stromberg published an article with the title, "The War for Southern Independence: A Radical Libertarian Perspective"; Stromberg's interpretation was praised and expanded in 1996 with the appearance of a volume by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, a second libertarian: Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men.1 Both Stromberg and Hummel are trained historians, born in the late 1940s, and they set forth a distinctive interpretation of the United States Civil War that differs from traditional pro-Union or pro-Confederate accounts.
Before describing their interpretation, it is useful to note that its underlying cluster of ideas, modern libertarianism, took shape in the United States in the quarter-century after World War II as part of a movement sharply and fundamentally opposed to the legacy of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. One strand in the movement hostile to the Roosevelt-New Deal legacy was modern "conservatism"; by the late 1960s, a second strand, "libertarianism," was splitting from the "conservative" segment. Many of the "founders" or "enunciators" of modern libertarianism in the 1950s and 1960s were male academicians in economics, philosophy, and political science. (Ayn Rand called her philosophy "objectivism" and libertarians have disagreed over whether she can accurately be described as a libertarian.) None of the academicians were trained historians, but at least two of them briefly mentioned the Civil War, which foreshadowed the interpretations advanced later by libertarian historians Stromberg and Hummel.
One of these mentions of the Civil War focused on Abraham Lincoln, and was published by Frank S. Meyer in two, one-page articles in the National Review in 1965 and 1966.(2) Meyer (1909-1972) was one of the original group of senior editors of the National Review, founded by William E Buckley Jr. in 1955. Born in New Jersey, Meyer attended Princeton and Oxford, was a member of the Communist Party in England and in the United States from 1931 to 1945. By the early 1960s, he had become an advocate of the fusion of "conservatism" and "libertarianism" and a few hours before his death in 1972, he became a member of the Roman Catholic Church.
In his 1965-66 articles, Meyer held Abraham Lincoln responsible for the coming of the Civil War-had Lincoln been "less the ideologue, he could have let the seven states which seceded before...