Rating: 
Summary: interesting
Review: interesting take on the issue, but the arguement that slavery was "on its way out," and therefore never to return, is weak. american chattel slavery had been "on its way out" decades before secession, but technological advancements (eli whitney's cotton engine, for instance), the opening of new land to slave owners, and general market fluctuations had spurned renewed interest (which means that slavery still paid off monetarily) in the peculiar institution. if there had been no civil war, COTTON slavery might well ground down to an insignificant (not insignificant if you're a slave, mind you) level during the later 1860's and early 1870's, but the exploitation of free labor, along with the social caste system that held it tight to the breast of southern culture would have stayed strong. as the cotton crop continued to garner less and less of a profit for planters, the south would have had to industrialize so as to not pull the united states into an economic black hole. in turn, the need for slaves to work factories, etc., would have been huge. let's not forget that the individual job a slave is made to do is not important when the topic is the hypothetical non-civil war future of american slavery. the importance of the issue lies in the fact that free labor will always be exploited to do the work at hand. this is why southern slavery would never have ended had there been no american civil war to force that end.
again, interesting book. but as long as free labor exists in a society, it will always be exploited, made to do whatever the kind of work that has to be done (cotton planting and picking, road construction, factory work, ship building, etc. and so-forth).
Rating: 
Summary: The Slaves Freed, Free Men Enslaved to Big Government
Review: Jeff Hummel, Associate Professor of Economics and History at Golden Gate University, in his new book Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men puts forth the unique new Libertarian hypothesis that, while the slaves were freed as a result of the Civil War, free men were enslaved to bigger government. Evidence which Hummel cites in support of this hypothesis include:(a) the war was fought to preserve the Union, with the fate of slavery being secondary; (b) the Emancipation Proclamation was not issued until two years into the war and even then left the slaves in bondage in the border states (where Lincoln could do something about) while "freeing" them in the Confederacy (where they were beyond Lincoln's reach); and (c) the Civil War accustomed the American people to bigger government, including increased taxation, intervention in the economy, social reform, and suppression of dissent, among other things. Hummel is among the few historians who draw a distinction between the causes of secession and the causes of the Civil War, thus separating the questions "Why did the South want to leave the Union?" and "Why didn't the North let them go?" While Hummel is no Lincoln hagiographer, laying at his doorstep the responsibility for the Civil War (due to his refusal to let the South go), neither is he any fawning apologist for the absolutism of Jefferson Davis. As a Libertarian, Hummel sees no inconsistency in his pro-secession views and his anti-slavery views; indeed, both are part of the revolutionary right of self-determination. Further, he believes that secession would have destabilized slavery by allowing the North to repeal its fugitive slave laws and thus legally making the North a haven for escaped slaves. Hummel is a man who is not afraid to let his opinions be known. His interpretation is fresh, lucid, and insightful. His bibliographies are extremely thorough, showing an excellent command of the literature of the field. Above all, unlike many academics, Hummel actually writes interestingly!
Rating: 
Summary: A Libertarian perspective on the Civil War
Review: Jeffrey Hummel has given us a concise and well written Libertarian's eye view of the Civil War.Professor Hummel's central thesis is that the civil war was the fruition of one of the principles of the American Revolution Human Freedom, but that it was a repudiation of the Revolution's other principles; self-determination federalism , limited government. The first part of the book gives an excellent survey of the causes of the war. Hummel is not a neo-Confederate.He makes it clear that slavery was an abomination and one of the war's central causes along with states rights vs. federal encroachment and the pursuit by both sections of economic self interest. Hummel believes that the war was not inevitable had both sides been willing to live and let live.The book is well written and well researched with massive notes at the end of each chapter.But on a number of points the author is simply not persuasive. He contends that without the war slavery would have died out by the end of the nineteenth century. I would like to believe this but something tells me it would not have happened. Also His assertion that the U.S. would be just as important a nation today minus the Confederacy does not ring true and ditto His Constitutional defense of the right of secession.But having said that there is more positive than negative to be said about this book.His documentation of Lincoln's massive assault upon civil liberties in the name of preserving the union is enough to cause one to rethink the Great emancipator.Hummel is certainly correct that the war brought on a massive exspansion of federal power which continues to this day and the jury is still out as to wheather that is good or bad.In the final analysis this is a thought provoking book. Wheather you agree with Hummel's arguments or not you cannot ignore. I would reccomend this book only to those who want to be challenged to think about the seminal event in our history and all that has flowed from it.
Rating:
Summary: An economist's view of the American Civil War
Review: Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, a historian and economist at Golden GateUniversity, has produced an innovative, unusual, analytical view ofthe American Civil War, that's ultimately very frustrating and unsatisfying. It's one of those books I hate to criticize, because I'm always in favor of alternative points of view on history, provided they have some basis in fact. The problem isn't fact here, though, it's interpretation, consistency, and sometimes stubborn wrong-headedness. The American Civil War has been the subject of many books, and this one is very different in that the author tries valiantly to shoehorn all the economical, social, and political data he can into his account of the war, its causes, courses, and results. While that's a good idea, some of the conclusions he comes to, and often his emphasis, seem poorly thought out or just wrong.
The book contains, at the end of each chapter, bibliographical notes that not only tell the reader which books are worthy of further study, but also, if the reader is astute enough, give a hint as to the author's philosophy and thinking. Unusually, the author lists several works of fiction in these bibliographical notes, and the first hint we might be in trouble is that he liked Ambrose Bierce's short stories, William Safire's Freedom, and Gore Vidal's Lincoln, but didn't like Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels or Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. The former three books are all very cynical (Freedom turns Rose O'Neal Greenhow into a dominatrix spanking Union military secrets out of a U.S. Senator!) while the latter two are much more positive, and take place exclusively on battlefields. Hummel doesn't seem to think battlefields have much to do with wars.
Instead, the author wants to study the various political and economic factors that drove the war. I'm completely unqualified to speak on the economic aspects of the war or the author's opinions of them, but I do know that while they may have influenced the outcome, they didn't determine it. The author seem unsure what did.
There are also a number of maddening inconsistencies and illogicities in the text which sometimes just don't make sense. For instance, the author seems to really dislike Abraham Lincoln, and spends much time critiquing his handling of the early war period, as if a one-term Congressman should have been able to administer a government bigger than the country had ever had before by a factor of a hundred or so. The truth is Lincoln learned how to run the government remarkably fast, and was better at picking generals than his counterpart, Jefferson Davis, who held onto Braxton Bragg right up til the end in spite of the fact it was obvious he was incompetent. The author also repeats the old canard about the 1876 election being a fraudulent Republican victory, when in reality the Democrats drove away from the polls (through their surrogates in the KKK) millions of black voters who would have ensured Republican victory.
The result is a very frustrating book: the author makes some good points, only to fall on his face when building on them. Much of the book is very good, but the ending conclusion (that the North should have let the South secede, because they wouldn't have been able to survive outside the Union) is very debatable at best, and preposterous if clearly thought out. It's a shame, because there's some good material here. END
Rating:
Summary: a must-read for Civil War buffs
Review: The main thing I got out of this book was just how damaging Lincoln was to the cause of freedom in America. Lincoln trampled individual rights, jailing people indefinitely on his whim, instating the draft, even assaulting freedom of speech (which I think is one of the few freedoms left). From Hummel's Libertarian perspective, Lincoln was probably the worst president in history. The one thing that should be pointed out in Lincoln's defense is that war always involves curtailments of liberty and requires an essentially fascistic operation of the government. The problem is that the increased governmental power doesn't go away after the war ends. I think this book is very timely at this moment in history, as our current president is about to lead us into yet another war. The Constitution says that only Congress can declare war. That means that the United States cannot engage in any military action with another country unless two-thirds of Congress approves it. Yet, look at all the presidents who have committed U.S. troops to war without a Congressional declaration. Why isn't this seen as unConstitutional? Why aren't they talking about it on Face the Nation? What gave Truman the right to commit U.S. forces to fight in Korea? Why does everyone in the media assume that George Bush has the right to start a war with Iraq when he has no such constitutional authority? What gave Clinton the power to bomb an aspirin factory in the Sudan to divert attention from his sex scandals? I'll tell you who: it was Lincoln. He started the whole trend.
Rating: 
Summary: Surprise! The Civil War had something to do with slavery!
Review: The title sounds more provocative than the book actually is. No doubt it may lead a few people to a more up to date interpretation of the civil war era than they are used to. The most valuable aspect of the book are the annotated bibliographies following each chapter, which will be great for sophmore in college looking for a book list at 3 AM. Some readers of this book may be surprised to discover the war had something to do with slavery. Outside of the slavery issue, the author rarely spends much ink on other topics of the war or reconstruction-he barely touches on reconstruction at all, though this is supposed to be one of the points of the book. Pick it up at the library for the bibliographies, find an area of interest, grab a real book, then read on.
Rating:
Summary: How we got today's welfare-warfare state
Review: These days many of us wonder how it happened that the great ideals of the American Revolution, liberty and self-reliance, were overthrown and replaced by today's gigantic and ravenous welfare-warfare state. It is easy to blame Roosevelt and the New Deal, but many of his monstrous impositions only continued and expanded institutions that arose in the Progressive era earlier in the century. Hummel argues that we must look back farther, to the Civil War, as the beginning of the end of our Revolutionary experiment.
"The Civil War represents the simultaneous culmination and repudiation of the American Revolution," says Hummel. By ending slavery, it settled once and for all the great contradiction that had bedeviled the Republic from its beginning and whose resolution had been forestalled by several shaky Compromises prior to 1860. But while freeing the slaves, the War set the stage for the gradual enslavement of us all. The War legitimized the intrusion of the central government into virtually every aspect of our lives which is so evident today.
Slavery would have ended almost as quickly and at much lower costs in lives, treasure, and liberties, had the South been allowed to go peacefully, says Hummel. This is not because slavery was uneconomical -- it wasn't -- but because enforcement costs would have overwhelmed what Hummel calls the "peculiar institution." With secession, runaways would no longer have been captured and returned to the South. It would have been impossible for the Confederacy to effectively guard its long border. This would have virtually ended slavery in the border states of the South and eventually in the entire Confederacy.
Though Hummel's radical libertarian views will put off many
historians, they cannot ignore his careful scholarship and especially his extensive bibliographic essays. This is a seminal book that deserves careful study and follow-up.
Rating:
Summary: Superb, insightful analysis of the American Civil War.
Review: Within the framework of history, Jeff Hummel provides the mostinnovative analysis of the ACW I have yet to encounter. This work isthe American equivalent of Quo Vadis, an in depth understanding of the growth of the American federal government, exploding from the onset of the Civil War. The detailed bibliography concluding each chapter is an encyclopedia of its own. A must read for ACW buffs and historians. Jeffrey L. Wissot, DDS
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