Rothbardian libertarianism upholds liberty as an ethical and moral standard, and for this reason it is often criticized for being idealistic and utopian. Addressing this critique, Duncan Whitmore argues that the mere fact that we live in a statist society, in which all our liberties are under siege does not mean the fight for liberty is a lost cause. His point is that “the seeming remoteness of victory today does not mean that victory will never arrive.” Despite the growing power of the state, the cause of liberty is still worth continually striving towards. Whitmore quotes T.S. Eliot to substantiate this argument, Eliot’s point being that a worthwhile cause may never be entirely won but it must be kept alive:
If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that it will triumph.
Similarly, in his 1908 book, The Philosophy of Loyalty, Josiah Royce argues that: “Loyalty to lost causes is, then, not only a possible thing, but one of the most potent influences of human history. In such cases, the cause comes to be idealized through its very failure to win temporary and visible success.” The cause being lost does not mean that it will, or should, be abandoned—on the contrary, its supporters continually rally their energies to the defense of the cause. The same is true in defending liberty, including wars fought to defend life, property, hearth, and home. Murray Rothbard wrote that he only considered two American wars to be just wars—the Revolutionary War and the War for Southern Independence. He saw both of these as wars fought in defense of liberty, and expressed his certainty that “the South shall rise again.” To Rothbardians, this defense of liberty (where liberty is understood as an emanation of self-ownership and property rights) is the only circumstance in which war is justified.
The South losing their bid for independence is widely characterized by critics of the South as a “lost cause,” but they do not mean this in the hopeful sense described by Eliot and Royce. Rather, critics of the South use the phrase “lost cause” as a term of derision—they mean that the cause was never worth fighting for in the first place. They deploy the phrase “lost case myth” to signify that the Southern cause never had any merit in the first place. In referring to the Southern cause as a “lost cause,” they do not simply mean that the South lost the war—after all, losing the war is an undoubted fact, but unless we are to assume that might always makes right, we can understand that the side which has the just cause will not necessarily triumph. A just cause may be defeated by a bully with greater firepower.
But when critics describe the Southern cause as a “lost cause myth,” their claim is that the Southern cause was not, in fact, just. They claim that Southerners fabricated a fictitious just cause in the years after the war, purely in order to mollify their injured feelings over losing the war. Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, editors of a book titled The Myth of The Lost Cause and Civil War History, are an example of critics who believe the Southern cause to be a myth, a “caricature of the truth.” Clyde Wilson describes their book as follows:
The “Lost Cause,” presumably a belief that the Confederates had a few points on their side of the argument, was something, according to Nolan and Gallagher, invented after the war by Southerners to rationalize their evil, destructive, and failed actions. In support of this conclusion [Gallagher and Nolan] present a history of the development of this false and pernicious “Lost Cause Myth,” beginning with the postwar writings of Edward A. Pollard and Jubal A. Early. These writings, the authors claim, foisted on an unsuspecting world false and deceptive notions such as the admirable character of Robert E. Lee, the skill and heroism of Confederate soldiers against heavy odds, and the honorableness of Southerners in their cause.
Purveyors of the view that the Southern cause is nothing but “lost cause mythology” argue that the South, in fact, fought purely, or primarily, to defend slavery—which is as far from being a just cause as a Rothbardian could imagine—and that the cause had nothing to do with independence or liberty. This is a question of great concern to Rothbardians. In defending the Southern cause as just, was Rothbard also purveying “lost cause mythology”? To understand the context of Rothbard’s defense of the Southern cause, it is important to note that he sees this war as being fought on the same grounds as the American Revolution, which he sees as a just war:
It is plainly evident that the American Revolution, using my definition, was a just war, a war of peoples forming an independent nation and casting off the bonds of another people insisting on perpetuating their rule over them. Obviously, the Americans, while welcoming French or other support, were prepared to take on the daunting task of overthrowing the rule of the most powerful empire on earth, and to do it alone if necessary.
Rothbard draws upon libertarian principles in forming the view that the Revolutionary cause was just: “The Americans were steeped in the natural-law philosophy of John Locke and the Scholastics, and in the classical republicanism of Greece and Rome.” He adds that sovereignty vests ultimately in the people: “sovereignty originated not in the king but in the people, but that the people had delegated their powers and rights to the king.” Indeed, as Rothbard points out, this was the only principled basis on which American revolutionaries could break their bonds of loyalty to King George III while maintaining their integrity and honor:
The American revolutionaries, in separating themselves from Great Britain and forming their new nation, adopted the Lockean doctrine. In fact, if they hadn’t done so, they would not have been able to form their new nation. It is well known that the biggest moral and psychological problem the Americans had, and could only bring themselves to overcome after a full year of bloody war, was to violate their oaths of allegiance to the British king.
Rothbard sees the secession of the Southern states in exactly the same light: “In 1861, the Southern states, believing correctly that their cherished institutions were under grave threat and assault from the federal government, decided to exercise their natural, contractual, and constitutional right to withdraw, to ‘secede’ from that Union.”
The parallels between the Revolutionary War and the War for Southern Independence are not only drawn by Rothbard; it is a view well-represented in historical literature during and after the war. For example, in 1902 Charles Francis Adams compared George Washington and Robert E. Lee, arguing that we may view Lee with the same regard as that held for Washington:
Washington furnishes a precedent at every point. A Virginian like Lee, he was also a British subject; he had fought under the British flag, as Lee had fought under that of the United States; when, in 1776, Virginia seceded from the British Empire, he “went with his State,” just as Lee went with it eighty-five years later; subsequently Washington commanded armies in the field designated by those opposed to them as “rebels,” and whose descendants now glorify them as “the rebels of ’76,” much as Lee later commanded, and at last surrendered, much larger armies, also designated “rebels” by those they confronted. Except in their outcome, the cases were, therefore, precisely alike; and logic is logic. It consequently appears to follow, that, if Lee was a traitor, Washington was also.
