One of the biggest drawbacks of thinking in “vulgar libertarian” fashion is that you forget that there were ever alternatives available to people, that the way that we live now or the way we’re used to living is the only way that was ever reasonable or good. The rise of the modern state marks a time in history when authorities began to and continue to control more about people’s lives. The modern state also intrudes on people’s lives in a fashion that is so much greater than before. With that be...
Oct 16, 2018•33 min
Historians usually mark off the years, about 1815 to 1845 as the Jacksonian era and for Americans, and many other people across the planet, these were years of singularity. This period of time is remembered for many inventions and innovations. Most notably was Samuel Morse’s magnetic telegraph. His magnetic telegraph “eliminated the greatest problem plagued by all republics since the ancient days of Rome” because it was able to connect the states through rapid communication. Originally, Congress...
Oct 09, 2018•29 min
Abram Smith caught political fire as a radical Locofoco Democrat, a friend of working people and outsiders. Smith was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1852 after he spent some time as a notable defense attorney. Let’s not forget that in 1850 the Fugitive Slave Act was revamped in order to ensure that Northerners were not a hinderance in the capture of slaves who had escaped their southern masters. In fact, Northerners were now required to return any slaves whom they knew to be fugitives...
Oct 02, 2018•27 min
All the way from the 1770s to the 1850s, Americans had plenty of political disagreements, but nothing ever seriously disrupted the machinery of state until abolitionists and planters began forcing the slavery issue. Prior to the election of 1856, some much-needed rearrangement occurred in politics. In 1856, the newly-minted Republican Party lost on the back of John C. Frémont, but they gained crucial insight out of the election. The Republicans realized that they could take over the White House ...
Sep 25, 2018•25 min
This is a updated version of “There’s No Excuse for Slavery” which was released on July 3rd, 2018. Enjoy! The planters of the South believed that slavery had grown up with American society and its’ institutions. John C. Calhoun argued that slavery was a “positive good” because he believed that no well-off society existed in which “one portion of the community did not in point of fact, live on the labor of the other”. How did beliefs like these and those of Calhoun’s followers further split the U...
Sep 19, 2018•28 min
In the mid-20th century, it was fashionable for historians to speak of a “Blundering Generation” of pre-Civil War politicians, people who—well intended or not—made a long series of foolish and short-sighted mistakes. They made blunders that make for wonderfully detailed political histories “from below,” as it were, but what appear to be mistakes were often intentional, and what appear to be great men were often just the schemers whose plans succeeded in the end. Who is the worst politician to co...
Sep 18, 2018•23 min
In 1850, American politics was nearing its breaking point. The Senate as well as the Administration was doing much in order to keep the peace between the Southern and Northern politicians. For example, Henry Clay was pulling out all the stops to pass a combination of compromise measures that would finally resolve the territorial crisis. However, his bill kept failing on partisan lines. No Southerners wanted to vote for restricting slavery, even if it meant getting a souped-up fugitive slave law ...
Sep 11, 2018•25 min
Jeff Hummel joins our lengthy debate about who Van Buren really was as a person and as a President. Hummel argues that Van Buren took a small “r” republican position for most of his career, both in the law and in politics. Hummel also argues that Van Buren was more consistent as President than those who came before him. Why would Jeff Hummel categorize Van Buren as the “least bad” President? Why is Van Buren considered the first “ethnic President”? Was Van Buren consistently classically liberal?...
Sep 04, 2018•42 min
Whigs were happy to have the White House, but many of them, at least, could still see the trouble lying head at the inevitable contest of 1852. On the strength of surprisingly large margins, the Free Soilers actually had a serious seat at the table. The Loco-Focos were the ones out there leading the young America cultural movement, they were the ones integrating Whigish abolitionism, with Jacksonian anti-monopoly, even when Van Buren had left them behind. What happened to the Free Soil Movement ...
Aug 28, 2018•24 min
Our conversation about how all history is revisionist and open to creativity with Michael Douma continues this week. Douma believes that a history classroom should not be about memorizing facts that a professor believes matter. It is more important to train people to think critically and creatively. Douma believes that history is always written from the perspective of the historian, describing it as, “a discussion without end”, meaning history is never completely solid or solved. What is the def...
Aug 21, 2018•37 min
Michael Douma joins us for the first part of a two-part series to discuss how we see the past as as an interpretative history. He argues that history is a creative discipline because we choose to arrange facts in a certain way. Douma goes through his new book, Creative Historical Thinking , and how he typically asks his students to draw a timeline of their lives or a timeline of American history. Quite often, each students’ timeline forms differently. Relating that to the study of the past, Doum...
Aug 14, 2018•28 min
Timothy Sandefur joins us this week to discuss how Frederick Douglass and his beliefs do not align perfectly to today’s political factions. He is often mischaracterized due to his legendary status. Has Douglass been purposefully distorted over time? Does the omission of facts about what he did and how he acted play a large role in that distortion? Frederick Douglass is defined as an individualist, which is best exemplified by his speeches and attitudes toward serving in the military. In his spee...
Aug 07, 2018•42 min
1848 was a wild ride. That year the Free Soil Party tried to force Whigs and Democrats to take a stand on the issue of slavery in the territories. Once and for all, politicians would have to openly declare themselves either in favor of Free Soil for free society or Slave Territory, for the planters’ personal dominion. Further Readings/References: Johnson, Reinhard. The Liberty Party, 1840-1848: Antislavery Third-Party Politics in the United States. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University. 2009. ...
Jul 31, 2018•23 min
The average Free Soiler was a radical Loco-Foco, probably from New York, touched by more than a decade of early libertarianism. But always and everywhere there were also the opportunists, the schemers, the self-advancing office seekers, desperate to leverage free soil into greater personal power, and right there at the top of this magnificent new party was the schemer in chief, the little magician, the Red Fox of Kinderhook, the architect of the Second Party System itself, and now the perpetrato...
Jul 24, 2018•25 min
The Polk Administration was a strange time in the early history of American Libertarianism called Locofocoism. In many ways, it was the time of ultimate triumph. Polk was as committed to their economic program as anyone else on the national stage, including their champion, Martin Van Buren. He was a Republican nationalist and an expansionist, and so were many of the more hopeful and naive Locofocos. By 1844, Locofocoism was all over the country, from the shores of New England, through the mounta...
Jul 17, 2018•26 min
In the end, a few thousand early libertarians in New York made the Mexican War a possibility. And almost right away, Polk began betraying Van Buren defectors. He ignored Van Buren’s cabinet suggestions and supported the conservative faction in New York. Further Reading: For an overview of the later history of locofocoism “The Artist as Exemplar: Thomas Cole’s Voyage of Life” A quick life of Thoreau in the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas (1871) Polk’s Special Messa...
Jul 10, 2018•25 min
Dr. Nima Sanandaji has a PhD in Engineering from Stockholm’s Royal Institute, and he has written over 20 books on policy, philosophy, current affairs and history. He joins me now to talk about his latest, “The Birthplace of Capitalism,” which explains how and why ancient Middle Easterners invented capitalism and entrepreneurship. Further Reading: Nima Sanandaji’s Wikipedia entry His latest book, The Birthplace of Capitalism: The Middle East, Timbro (2018) Dr. Sanandaji’s 2016 speech on Nordic so...
Jun 26, 2018•35 min
Corporations are so commonplace, so ubiquitous, and considered so necessary that we barely stop to ask whether it’s ever been justifiable in the first place. Here to help us tackle one of the great, relatively forgotten questions in Libertarian history is Gary Chartier. Further Reading: Gary Chartier’s Wikipedia entry His archive at the Center for a Stateless Society “ Corporations: A Contractual Program ” in Literature of Liberty, December 1979 “The Limited Liability Corporation” in Literature ...
Jun 19, 2018•39 min
In the grand catalog of 19th century America, there are few villains so worthy of a Libertarian’s scorn, as James K Polk. The Jacksonian period was one flush with eager upstarts, middling men who hit it big with cunning and peculiar talents. Polk, too, was one of these eager, young, upstart Americans. Further Reading: Frances Whipple, ed. Liberty Chimes. Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Providence. 1845. May, Robert. Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill:...
Jun 12, 2018•27 min
We often learn that Manifest Destiny was the invention of racists and conquest-hungry imperialists, and there is some truth to that, but much as historians have ignored it and much as we might like to do the same, America’s first libertarian movement was also responsible. Jacksonian radicals called Locofocos provided the ideology that helped transform the United States from a limited republic into a continental empire. Uncomfortable as it might be, we will find that their early libertarianism wa...
Jun 05, 2018•28 min
As we have seen over the last several months on this show, America’s first libertarian movement called Locofocoism was, but one among many reform movements dotting the Jacksonian period. For a century and a half, historians have diligently detailed the stories of abolitionists, working people, feminists, land reformers, prohibitionists, suffragists, and suffragettes, free lovers, communists, industrialists, progressivists, free thinkers, transcendentalists, socialists, and the Young America Arti...
May 29, 2018•22 min
Frances Whipple was born into the quintessential American aristocratic family. On her father’s side, the Whipple line included Rhode Island heroes like Abraham, who led the burning of the British ship Gaspee in 1772, and some of the earliest settlers of the colony. On Frances’ mother’s side, the Scotts included some of Roger Williams’ earliest and closest associates in the foundation of the Rhode Island colony. In 1815, though, nature leveled the Whipple clan. A storm called the Great Gale ravag...
May 22, 2018•27 min
Little is known about the personal life of Ann Parlin, the woman who came up with the idea for clam bakes to raise relief money for the families of imprisoned suffragists. She married Dr. Louis Parlin on July 7th, 1839, in Maine before moving to Providence. In 1841, they appear in the city’s business records through Dr. Parlin’s homeopathy clinic. He’s considered the founder of homeopathy in Rhode Island, and he practiced there for two to three years while participating in the city’s bubbling ra...
May 15, 2018•21 min
We are celebrating Liberty Chronicles’ one year anniversary with a special Free Thoughts/Liberty Chronicles crossover episode featuring Free Thoughts Podcast host Trevor Burrus. We’ll discuss the Dorr War and its Supreme Court Case Luther v. Borden. Further Reading: Luther v Borden (1849)— Taney’s Majority Opinion and Woodbury’s Dissenting Opinion Dennison, George M. The Dorr War: Republicanism on Trial, 1831-1861. Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press. 1976. Gettleman, Marvin. The Dorr Re...
May 08, 2018•37 min
Steve Horwitz is the Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in Ball State University’s economics department. He has a PhD in economics from George Mason University, and his most recent book is Hayek’s Modern Family: Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions . In the interest of more clearly identifying the relationship between his highly theoretical discipline and our evolving set of humane histories here on Liberty Chronicles, Professor Horwitz joins us now. Further Read...
May 01, 2018•36 min
In this episode of Liberty Chronicles, we are joined by Mike Douma and Phil Magness to discuss their new book “What is Classical Liberal History?” Mike Douma is an Assistant Research Professor at Georgetown University and the Director of the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics. Phil Magness is a professor at Berry College’s Campbell School of Business and author of Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement. Further Reading: Douma & ...
Apr 24, 2018•41 min
David M. Hart is the Director of Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty. His latest book, Social Class and State Power, is a reader in libertarian class theory including documents from Richard Overton in the English Civil Wars all the way down to Libertarianism.org contributor Roderick Long. Further Reading: Hart, Chartier, Kenyon, and Long (eds.), Social Class and State Power: Exploring an Alternative Radical Tradition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. David Hart, ed. Tracts on Liberty by the Levell...
Apr 17, 2018•37 min
In July 1842, Rhode Island had two state governments divided into armed camps. The rest of New England watched, wondering if what they called “The Rhode Island Question” would spill into a widespread civil war. The fight was over which of the state’s two dueling authorities was legitimate—the Charter government established in 1663 by King Charles II, or the People’s Constitution which bypassed the legislature with a popular convention and vote. Further Readings/References: Dennison, George M. Th...
Apr 10, 2018•22 min
Last week on Liberty Chronicles, we left off with May 19, 1842, when Thomas W. Dorr—The People’s Governor of Rhode Island, dressed up like Napoleon and carrying a sword—ordered his makeshift little army to storm the Providence state arsenal.. Most of Dorr’s warriors, though, were young men trying to impress girls in their neighborhoods. It was the furthest thing imaginable from a professional, committed army, and when met with even slight resistance, Dorr’s lines broke and his army scattered. Fu...
Apr 03, 2018•23 min
In Rhode Island, 1842, politician Thomas W. Dorr (calling himself “The People’s Governor”) threatened civil war throughout New England. His main target was the famous colonial Charter issued by King Charles II in 1663. In the 19th century the document of world historical importance—the planet’s oldest existing written constitution at the time, and surely the most liberal in its own day. Radical Jacksonian and America’s first professional historian, George Bancroft, declared, “Nowhere in the worl...
Mar 27, 2018•25 min
