Francis Lieber, A “Proslavery Man”?

ECW welcomes back guest author K. Howell Keiser Jr

In May 2023, I penned an article for the Emerging Civil War titled, “Thomas Cooper: Harbinger of Proslavery Thought and the Coming Civil War.” Cooper’s brief career at South Carolina College – now the University of South Carolina – left a lasting impact on proslavery thought. His use of political economy as a scientific defense of slavery, Southern expansion, and states’ rights was all-consuming. It elevated the agricultural over the urban and demanded the continued westward march of the South’s economic system.

Yet his contrarian attitude, specifically his avowed atheism, prompted his resignation from the college in 1833. Six years later in 1839, Cooper passed away. It is incorrect, however, to assume that his influence disappeared following his departure and death. “After Dr. Cooper,” historian Edwin L. Green wrote in 1916, Southern political economy “was taught for the next twenty years by the distinguished publicist, Francis Lieber.” Lieber, in many ways, was an unlikely replacement. He was a Prussian by birth and had spent years in New York lecturing at Girard College. While Lieber was hardly a Southern doctrinaire like Cooper, he nevertheless continued the work his predecessor had started.^[1]

Despite privately harboring qualms over the institution of slavery, when Lieber took his post at South Carolina College he magnified the college’s proslavery influence by assigning and lecturing from Thomas Cooper’s appended Manual of Political Economy (1834) until issuing his own textbook, as well as Francis Wayland’s (minister and professor from Brown University who agreed with Malthus on the poor laws) Elements of Political Economy, in later years.^[2] Like Cooper, Lieber used demographic theory as a tool for discussing societal development. The South – a region defined by a sparsely populated agricultural economy – saw demographic theory as a scientific tool capable of challenging the emerging preference for a manufacturing society. Lieber thus found an eager audience in the Palmetto State. “Crowded by population,” wrote Lieber, “and heavily taxed as England is; deeply wretched as a part of her people are, especially in the manufacturing districts, it is no wonder that many just or unfounded complaints should be made.” Students – many of them sons of planters – could promptly make the connection between Liber’s statement and that of pro slavery writers. In short, SCC students could easily translate – even misconstrue –  Lieber’s words by referencing the common proslavery language of the day, as typified by the Charleston Mercury and Southern Literary Messenger, “slave society…[is] free from the many ‘isms’ [communism, socialism, feminism] that ran rampant through free society” because slaveholders and agriculturalists keep “no more [labor] than can be profitably employed…It is this very self-protecting power against overpopulation…[that] is our safeguard.”^[3]

Although some scholars have posited that Lieber shied away from imparting onto his students the Southern doctrines of states’ rights and pro-slavery, this interpretation ignores the fact that Lieber edified proslavery nullifiers while at SCC. Lieber, for example, had busts of John C. Calhoun, William C. Preston, and George McDuffie adorning his classroom. More than this, however, he instructed his students in a school of political economy – demographic theory – that lent itself to “strong arguments for [southern] nationalism in the classroom.” If manufacturing societies fostered demographic density, wretched populations, and social tensions, it was best to rebuke such a system in favor of a primarily agricultural vision. This point was well-understood by Southern students when Lieber lectured on the material. According to Charles Sumner, the fact he even entertained such ideas and doctrines was evidence enough that Lieber was now a “proslavery man.”^[4]

Southerners could peruse Lieber’s other publications for evidence of his supposed pro-slavery views as well. His Essay on Property and Labour reminded readers that “good order is the foundation of all good things.” Furthermore, he added, “absolute equality can, of course, exist nowhere but in the dreams of the utopian politician or philanthropist.” Attempts to render society equal through legislation had proven a failure. In fact, attempts to uplift mudsill populations – that is, the lowest sorts in society – through legislation, he argued much like Cooper and other proslavery writers, only extended misery to a greater portion of the population. In proving this, Lieber asked rhetorically, is “idleness to be cured by legislation?” He responded: “let the laws prevalent in Europe for several centuries respecting wages and hours of labour, and the subsistence of labourers and vagrants, answer the question.”

Any attempt to improve society and alleviate the ills of the manufacturing system through legislation should be dismissed, for “it is a universal law of social degradation that it [society] consists always of a chain of degraded classes who at the same time are or try to be in turn degraders.” For the sons of slaveholding planters invested in the protection and growth of their slave-based agricultural interest, Lieber’s teachings and writings vindicated their own anxieties regarding the competition between their slave society and the growing abolitionist movement in the Northern states. Although Lieber never explicitly placed slavery at the center of a healthy society, his silence on the slavery issue – he actually owned enslaved people during his tenure at South Carolina College – enabled opportunistic Southerners to use his ideas to support the peculiar institution. His students, in turn, reached the conclusion that slavery and the agriculture-first economy of the South generated a system of greater social stability. It did not require utopian legislative schemes to perfect the socio-political structures of society. Slavery, as an organic social relation, and agriculture, as the preferred economic system, already did that; it achieved the most stable democratic institutions by incentivizing agricultural independence and erecting a racial bulwark which prevented demographic pressures and unified all whites under a single political banner. Believing Lieber to be a proslavery man, his students concluded that Lieber put forth ideas in support of Southern society and culture. After all, Lieber had reminded his students that “order is the most essential element of liberty.”^[5]

A survey of student opinions confirms this perception of Lieber. Students believed he truly was a Southern doctrinaire while at SCC. Although later disgusted with Lieber’s betrayal in 1860, his students had initially shared the opinion that his views on slavery and Southern society reflected that of their own. Students in the debate society at SCC had thought that “the sincerity of his endorsement of slavery” and Southern political economy had been “confirmed by the fact that he himself owned slaves in our midst, and also by his attaching his name to the Southern Rights Association, established in the South Carolina College in 1851 – a conspicuous instance of the zeal which he then professed.”^[6]

Nevertheless, Lieber departed the South in 1855 after having shown his true colors several years prior, when he counseled against the radical idea of secession. Although his son, Oscar Lieber, remained in the South and enlisted in the Confederate army, the elder Lieber went North. He endorsed Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 election and later served as a member of Lincoln’s War Department, ultimately helping the president draft General Order 100, which later became the Lieber Code for policing the laws of war.

Lieber continued his pro-Union, anti-slavery slavery activities throughout the war. By 1864, he lobbied for legislation to abolish slavery and ensure equal rights. He even went as far as proposing an insurrection amendment, asserting that “it shall be a high crime directly to incite to armed resistance to the authority of the United States, or to establish or to join Societies or Combinations, secret or public, the object of which is to offer armed resistance to the authority of the United States, or to prepare for the same by collecting arms, organizing men, or otherwise.”^[7] From the perspective of the war years, it’s clear Lieber was anything but a pro-slavery man. But we in the present have the power of history; we can look back in time and reach different conclusions about individuals who came before us. Contemporaries of the period did not have this luxury. Thus, when looking at Lieber’s activity in South Carolina, and his willingness to put forth ideas that lent themselves to the slave defense, one can understand Sumner’s charge that Lieber was, in fact, a “proslavery man.”

Howell Keiser is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy. He is an American historian specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century U.S. History. His primary research focus is on political economy, the Civil War era, and American political thought. His current book project explores how the political economies of Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo shaped Southern thought and action during the sectional crisis. His work has been published with Civil War History, the Simms Review, Emerging Civil War, and RealClear History. He earned his PhD from Louisiana State University in 2024.

Endnotes:

[1] Edwin L. Green, A History of the University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC: The State Company, 1916), 312; see also, Francis Leiber and Thomas S. Perry, The Life and Letters of Francis Lieber (Boston, 1882), 297.

[2] Frank Freidel, Francis Lieber, Nineteenth-Century Liberal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1947), 136; Lieber, like all university economists, assigned students works ranging from Jean Baptiste Say, to Adam Smith, and to Malthus and Ricardo; yet it was his willingness to initially use Cooper’s notes as a teaching tool which undermines any attempt to exempt Lieber from perpetuating the school’s Southern rights platform. Beyond mirroring and teaching from the works of Cooper, Malthus, Ricardo, and others, Lieber also edified proslavery nullifiers who had imparted onto the planter class the doctrine of disunion and states’ rights. Nullification, along with demographic theory, would lay the groundwork for Southern secession in 1860; see Francis Lieber to his niece Clara (July 1854), Lieber Papers, South Caroliniana Library (University of South Carolina); Maximillan LaBorde, History of the South Carolina College, 1801-1865 (Charleston, SC: Walker, Evans, and Cogswell, 1874), 425-431.

[3] Francis Lieber papers, Box 1, Folder 40, South Caroliniana Library (University of South Carolina); William Sumner Jenkins, Proslavery Thought in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 76, 299; See “R.E.C.,” Southern Literary Messenger, XXVI (1858), 402-403, 418.

[4] Francis Lieber Papers, South Caroliniana Library (University of South Carolina).

[5] Lieber, Essay on Property and Labour, ix-xix; Francis Lieber, Civil Liberty and Self Government (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1853), 354.

[6] J.A. Wilson, President of Euphradian Society, and W.T. Charles, Secretary, “Meeting of the Euphradian Society” (Oct. 25, 1860), Francis Lieber Papers, South Caroliniana Library (University of South Carolina).

[7] Jill Lepore, “What Happened When the U.S. Failed to Prosecute an Insurrectionist Ex-President,” The New Yorker (December 4, 2023).