The Human Right to Migration as Foot Voting for Freedom

THE RIGHT OF MIGRATION

In the winter of 1869-1870, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech on "Our Composite Nation" in various locations across the United States--including Burlington, Vermont, Boston, Peoria, Illinois, and Chicago.  America's greatness, he argued, arose from its being a "composite nation" in that it was composed of different races of men with different creeds and religions, and this composite nationality showed America's devotion to "the equal rights of all men" as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

We all know about Douglass as the slave who ran away from his master and then became famous as a black abolitionist writer and orator and a leader of the Republican Party during and after the Civil War.  But what is less well known about Douglass is how he extended the principle of equality of rights to include all human beings--not just equality for both black and white people but equality for women as well as men, equal liberty for all religions, and equal rights for foreign people immigrating to the United States.

In his 1869 speech, Douglass criticized white Americans for their hostility to Chinese immigrants:

I submit that this question of Chinese immigration should be settled upon higher principles than those of a cold and selfish expediency.  There are such things in the world as human rights.  They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are eternal, universal and indestructible.

Among these is the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular, but belongs alike to all and to all alike.  It is the right you assert by staying here, and your fathers asserted by coming here.  It is this great right that I assert for the Chinese and the Japanese, and for all other varieties of men equally with yourselves, now and forever.  I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity, and when there is a supposed conflict between human and national rights, it is safe to go the side of humanity.  I have great respect for the blue-eyed and light-haired races of America.  They are a mighty people.  In any struggle for the good things of this world, they need have no fear, they have no need to doubt that they will get their full share.

But I reject the arrogant and scornful theory by which they would limit migratory rights, or any other essential human rights, to themselves, and which would make them the owners of this great continent to the exclusion of all other races of men (Douglass 1991, 252).

Earlier in this speech, Douglass had compared the "repugnance to the presence and influence of foreigners" to the "prejudice of race and color" that had supported chattel slavery:  both express the natural human propensity to tribalism or xenophobia that favors us against them.  Even if all other nations manifest this natural tribalism in limiting migratory rights and other human rights to themselves, America is unique in being the nation dedicated to human rights for all--"the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds."  And therefore America must recognize the right of locomotion or migration as a right for all of humanity, so that America must have open borders.

Moreover, Douglass suggested that this human right to migration includes not only migration across national borders but also migration within those borders.  Douglass's first writings and speeches told the story of how he emancipated himself from slavery by running away from his master, which he justified as a natural human right to flee from unjust oppression.  This supported his argument that the fugitive slave laws that required capturing runaway slaves and returning them to their masters were unjust laws that violated natural law.  Runaway slaves were exercising their human right to migrate from slavery to freedom.

Later in his life, Douglass justified another kind of internal migration.  In 1886, in a speech on "Southern Barbarism," he lamented that with the end of Reconstruction, the old white master class of the South had restored their dominance over the Negro, and "he is worse off, in many respects, than when he was a slave . . . . he is actually a slave" (Douglass 1999, 715-16).  Douglass had always hoped that the former slaves could work out their future as free men in the South.  But once he saw the emergence of the Jim Crow South, he conceded that many blacks might want to emigrate to the North and thus "change their residence to parts of the country where their civil and political rights are better protected than at present they can be at the South" (1999, 702).  He foresaw, however, that many blacks might be too poor to migrate, and that white landholders would obstruct their leaving because they needed their labor.  He proposed, therefore, that the federal government should provide protection and financial support for those blacks who wanted to emigrate to the North.

A few blacks did begin moving North in the 1890s.  And then after 1900, there were two or three great waves of black migration over the next 60 years.  Before 1900, 90% of all black Americans lived in the South.  But within a few decades, almost half lived in the North and the West.  Eventually, as many as five million black people migrated out of the South.

Their ancestors had endured a forced international migration out of Africa into slavery in North America.  Now they were moving by a free internal migration out of the Southern states into what they hoped would be a freer way of life in the Northern states.

Like those who have freely immigrated to America from all parts of the world, American blacks were voting with their feet for freedom.

THREE KINDS OF FOOT VOTING

When we speak of "voting with your feet," we distinguish this from ballot box voting.  In his book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom, Ilya Somin (a law professor at George Mason University) argues that in some ways foot voting is superior to ballot box voting.  We often assume that ballot box voting is the main expression of political freedom because it allows citizens to choose what sort of government policies they want.  But ballot box voting has at least two deficiencies.  An individual voter has almost no chance of deciding the outcome of an election, which is why many people who are qualified to vote don't vote because they think it's a waste of their time.  And for that reason, an individual voter has little incentive to become well-informed about the issues in any election.

Somin asserts that foot voting rectifies these two flaws in ballot box voting because foot voting provides "the opportunity to make a decisive choice and the associated stronger incentive to make well-informed decisions" (Somin 2020, 1).  So, for example, those black individuals who chose to migrate from the American South to the North made a decisive choice for their lives that was informed by what they had heard about the greater freedom for black people in the North.  Similarly, on September 3, 1838, when the twenty-year-old Frederick Douglass left Baltimore and travelled to a safe house in New York City, he had made a decisive and well-informed decision to move from slavery to freedom.

That's Somin's first great insight about foot voting as being better than ballot box voting.  His second insight is that there are three types of foot voting in the modern world: "foot voting between jurisdictions in a federal system, foot voting through international migration, and foot voting in the private sector" (Somin 2020, 2).  And if individual freedom is understood as the ability to choose for oneself how one wants to live, then each of these forms of foot voting expresses individual freedom.

I have written previously about international immigration as foot voting for freedom.  As I have indicated, we see this foot voting for freedom even in the first states in Mesopotamia:  the Mesopotamian states are full of evidence of people running away from their states--slaves running away from their enslavement, soldiers running away from their conscripted service in war, taxpayers running away from oppressive taxation, laborers running away from coerced labor, and people generally running away from cities racked with famine and contagious diseases.

So beginning with the first states, we see that people tend to move from poorer, violent, and exploitative societies into richer, peaceful, more just societies.  And thus immigration tends to promote the spread of ideas and institutions that favor prosperity, peace, and justice--in other words, liberal capitalism.  That explains why the United States and other liberal regimes have attracted so many immigrants over the past two centuries.  But if Trump and the MAGA movement succeed in transforming America into an illiberal dictatorship, we can expect that immigrants will be voting with their feet for other countries that promise liberty.

Once people have migrated into a new country, they have to decide where to move within that country, which is a second form of foot voting--internal migration.  In a federal system of government, they can choose between states (as in the United States) or provinces (as in Canada).  They might also choose between smaller jurisdictions such as cities.  As I indicated in my previous post, most of the immigrants to America in the decades before the Civil War chose to go to the states in the North and West because they thought the slave states in the South would offer them fewer opportunities.  This became a crucial factor in favoring the Union over the Confederacy in the Civil War because the population of the North was greater.

Another example of internal migration is the life of J. D. Vance as he described it in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy.  He describes the dysfunctional culture of his childhood community in a poor Appalachian-white region of Ohio.  He then shows how his life was changed when he moved out of that community--joining the Marines, going to college at Ohio State University, going to law school at Yale.  Then, with the help of Peter Thiel, he had a short career in venture capital before moving into politics.  This all started, he explained, when he realized that he could "escape the worst of my culture's inheritance" by becoming a "cultural emigrant" who left home and never went back (Vance 2016, 252).  He did return to Ohio so that he could run for the U. S. Senate with Trump's endorsement.  But instead of returning to his Appalachian home region, he moved to the vibrant prosperous city of Columbus.

There is still a third form of foot-voting, when people exercise their freedom of choice in the private social and economic sector of a liberal regime.  When people decide what goods and services they want to purchase in the market, or when they decide what social or religious organizations they want to join, they are voting with their feet.  

A clear example of this is when people move into private planned communities.  According to the Community Associations Institute, there are (as of 2023) 365,000 community associations in the United States with over 75 million residents.  Perhaps the largest of these is Celebration, Florida, a private planned city originally designed by the Walt Disney Company that now has over 11,000 residents.  These planned communities take over many of the functions traditionally belonging to local or regional governments, such as security, street maintenance, and waste-disposal.  Notably, there are more private security guards than public police officers in the United States.

In previous posts, I have written about "private governance"--the various ways in which people in a free society can privatize their governance, which creates private communities and allows people to move to whatever community they find most desirable for them.  

Actually, throughout most of their evolutionary history, human beings have lived in stateless societies--foraging bands--where all of the governance was private.  Moreover, throughout the history of bureaucratic states, from Mesopotamia to the present, most of the local governance has been private.  As I indicated in my post on Hammurabi's Code, that code of laws assumes that most of the enforcement of the laws will be by private individuals.

Another illustration of foot voting in the private sector is the religious liberty that allows individuals to freely join or leave religious organizations.  In this way, a liberal regime provides the conditions for "The Benedict Option":  people can withdraw from what they perceive to be a morally degrading secular society and form cohesive religious communities that enforce the norms of a religious life.  The Amish communities are a particularly clear manifestation of this: they have chosen to move into tightly controlled religious communities where they can live their own distinctive way of life.

The general point here is that to understand foot voting for freedom, we need to see all of the three ways in which it is manifested--not just international migration but also internal migration and the freedom of movement in the private sector of economic and social liberty.

In my next post, I will show how the U.S. Constitution supports this.

REFERENCES

Douglass, Frederick. 1991. "Our Composite Nationality." In John Blassingame and John McKivigan, eds., The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 4, pages 240-59. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.

Douglass, Frederick. 1999. Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner and Yuval Taylor. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books.

Somin, Ilya. 2020. Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. Revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Vance, J. D. 2016. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. New York: Harper.

Open Borders Would Make America Great Again

President Trump is trying to end illegal immigration by closing the borders to illegal immigrants and by deporting all of the 10 million or more illegal immigrants now in the U.S.  To do this, he has mobilized tens of thousands of police officers (Border Patrol and ICE) and military personnel across the country to enforce his directives; and in many cases, people have been arrested, detained, and deported without constitutional due process of law.  This looks like a police state and a military dictatorship.

The better way to end illegal immigration would be to make immigration legal.  U.S. borders should be open to all immigrants who satisfy certain minimal criteria.  And illegal immigrants already in the U.S. should be provided a pathway to legal resident status.  Those with a criminal record and those unable to support themselves economically should be deported.

This would not violate anyone's constitutional rights.  And this would respect the natural human right to freedom of trade:  people have the right to engage in any voluntary exchange that is mutually beneficial as long as it does not unduly harm any third parties.  This freedom of trade includes not only goods but also services and labor.  If a foreigner wants to accept a job offer from a willing American employer, or rent an apartment from a willing landlord, no one has any right to stop them.  These are contracts between consenting adults.  When governments restrict immigration, they're barring free trade between natives and foreigners.  This not only denies our freedom to trade, but it also deprives us of the wealth that would be created by such trade.  Some economists have estimated that completely free immigration would double the GDP of the global economy, which would mean that there would be almost no poverty in the world (Clemens 2011).

Now, of course, there is one problem here in what I have just said.  People have the right to engage in free trade--voluntary exchanges that are mutually beneficial to both parties--but only on the condition that this does not severely harm any third parties--creating what economists call "negative externalities."  Governments use their coercive powers to prevent free immigration because many people believe that free immigration has large externalities.  

People think free immigration would be economically harmful because low-skilled immigrant workers lower the average standard of living for native workers.  People also think immigrants benefit from government services and welfare state programs in ways that burden native taxpayers.  And don't many immigrants become dangerous criminals and terrorists?  Don't these immigrants also introduce foreign cultural beliefs and practices that undermine and even dissolve the national culture of the native people?

I will respond to these objections in future posts.  But here I only want to make the point that during the colonial settlement of America and then during the first one hundred and fifty years of American national independence, America had virtually open borders; and it was during that latter period that the United States became the richest and most powerful nation in the world.  So, if Americans want to Make America Great Again, they will have to once again open their borders to immigrants.

OPEN BORDERS IN COLONIAL AMERICA

Although we all know that the American colonists were immigrants, most of us do not appreciate the stunning scale and diversity of that movement of immigrants to colonial America, which shows the attractiveness of America for immigrants and the lack of restrictions on immigration.  In the fifteen years between the end of the Seven Years War and the Revolution--1760 to 1775--approximately 125,000 people from the British Isles immigrated to America (55,000 Irish, 40,000 Scots, and 30,000 Englishmen).  There were also at least 12,000 immigrants from the German states and Switzerland, and 84,500 enslaved Africans imported to the southern colonies.  This total of 221,500 arrivals in this fifteen-year period was almost 10 percent of the population of America in 1775, which means an annual entry of about 15,000 people, which was close to the population of Boston during these years (Bailyn 1986a, 9; 1986b, 26).

Moreover, this movement of immigrants was multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious, and multi-lingual.  Historian Bernard Bailyn describes it as "a composite of ethnic and religious groups--Germans, French, Swiss, Scotch, Scotch-Irish, English, Caribbean islanders, Africans, Afro-Americans--carrying with them different cultural baggage, different patterns of family organization and discipline, different ways of working and living together" (1986a, 59).  10 percent of the pre-Revolutionary population was German-speaking.  In Georgia, "the colony was so polyglot that a successful magistrate needed to speak fluently in at least three languages and preferably four" (1986a, 17).

The American colonists knew that this openness to immigration was crucial for their economic and social growth.  At the same time, some British leaders worried that the immigration to America would weaken Great Britain through depopulation, and there were attempts to restrict immigration to the colonies.  

In the Declaration of Independence, this was one of the grievances against the King: "He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws of Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands" (para. 9).  This is a complaint against British efforts to veto colonial legislation for assisting and encouraging immigration and British policies for limiting land grants to immigrants (Bailyn 1986b, 55-56). 

THE AMERICAN NATION'S OPEN BORDERS, 1789-1921

When the Constitution was ratified in 1789, immigration had made the United States the most ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse society in the Western world.  The Constitution's enumeration of congressional powers did not include any general power to regulate immigration, but it did include a power over naturalizing immigrants as citizens: "to establish a Uniform Rule of Naturalization" (Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 4).  The Constitution also required citizenship as a qualification for some of the officers of the national government.  No one could be a member of the House of Representatives who had not been a citizen of the United States for at least seven years.  Senators had to have been a citizen for at least nine years.  And the presidency was restricted to only natural-born citizens.

The First Congress established the first uniform rule of naturalization through the Naturalization Act of 1790.  The Act provided that (1) any alien being "a free white person," (2) who has resided in the United States for two years shall become a naturalized citizen after proving to a court that (3) he is "a person of good character," and (4) after taking an oath or affirmation to support the Constitution of the United States.

This Act also provided that the children of such naturalized citizens being under the age of 21 years shall be considered citizens of the United States, and that the children of citizens of the United States born out of the limits of the United States shall be considered natural born citizens.

In 1795, Congress amended this law to require that a declaration of intent to become a citizen must be submitted at least three years before naturalization, and to extend the minimum residence requirement to five years.

In 1798, as part of the Alien and Sedition Acts, a Congress controlled by the Federalist Party lengthened the period for the declaration of intent to five years, lengthened the residence requirement to fourteen years, and barred the naturalization of any alien from a country at war with the United States.

In 1802, after the victory of Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party in the election of 1800, the Congress repealed the previous laws and restored both the five-year residence requirement and the three-year declaration of intent period.

The critical point to notice here is that although the Congress limited naturalization to "free white persons," it did not limit the entry of immigrants who became residents but not citizens.  (The Naturalization Act of 1870 extended eligibility for naturalization to African Americans.)

From 1789 to 1875, the borders of the United States were completely open to immigrants.  Then, from 1875 to 1921, the borders were largely open with a few exceptions.  In 1875, the Congress prohibited the immigration of convicts, East Asian women, and indentured servants.  In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which did indeed exclude Chinese from immigrating to the United States.  This was the one big exception to the rule of open borders.

Between 1820 and 1924, 36 million people immigrated to the United States.  If their American-born descendants are added to this, then this would account for most of the growth in the U.S. population during this period--from 9.6 million in 1820 to 106 million in 1920.

The most severe restrictions on immigration began in 1921 with the Emergency Quota Act and in 1924 with the National Origins Quota Act, which set very low quotas for European immigration, particularly for Southern and Eastern Europe.  Those who wrote and supported this legislation (like the Ku Klux Klan) were clear that they wanted to protect the racial purity of the "American stock" from the degeneration of Catholics and Jews.  The total immigration quota of 165,000 for countries outside the Western Hemisphere was an 80% reduction from the average before World War I.  Remarkably, however, there were no restrictions on Mexican or Hispanic immigration from Central America and South America.

The 1924 Act also created the U.S. Border Patrol and established a consular control system that allowed entry only to those who obtained a visa from a U.S. consulate.

The 1924 Act was revised by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 and finally replaced by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which went into effect in 1968.  Although this established a more liberal immigration system than the 1924 Act, the 1965 Act was still much more restrictive than the open immigration system of the nineteenth century.  Since 1968, the average inflow of immigrants per year in proportion to the resident population was more than double what it had been from 1922 to 1967, but this was still less than half the inflow of immigrants from 1820 to 1921 (Nowrasteh and Powell 2021, 193).

IMMIGRANTS IN LINCOLN'S NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM

Scottish, Swedish, German, Irish, and French Soldiers of the Union Army at the Siege of Corinth, Mississippi, 1862

From 1830 to 1860, ten million foreign born people crossed America's open borders and settled in the United States.  This made them one-third of the total 30 million Americans in 1860.  That was a critical turning point in American history because this huge migration decided the outcome of the deepest crisis in American political culture.  

In the presidential election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln's victory depended upon his winning a large portion of the immigrant vote--particularly, the Germans, who were staunchly anti-slavery.  Lincoln won the Northwestern states of Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Iowa by winning huge majorities in German districts (Holzer 2024, 133-36, 144-45).  Again, in the election of 1864, Lincoln won reelection with the support of German voters (Holzer 2024, 303-20).

In response to Lincoln's election in 1860, the secessionist Southern States left the Union and started the Civil War a few weeks after Lincoln's inauguration because they saw this as the only way to preserve slavery.  As I have indicated in previous posts, the Civil War can be seen as a war over the interpretation of the Declaration of Independence--over whether the declaration that "all men are created equal" in their rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" really includes all men of all races, or whether it includes only "the white race," or perhaps only the British people.

In a speech in Springfield, Illinois, on June 12, 1857, Stephen Douglas argued that the framers of the Declaration of Independence surely did not include the "African race" in its principle of equality.  Rather, what they meant was "that they referred to the white race alone, and not to the African, when they declared to have been created equal--that they were speaking of British subjects on this continent being equal to British subjects born and residing in Great Britain--that they were entitled to the same inalienable rights, and among them were enumerated life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (Douglas 1857, 9).

Two weeks later, Lincoln spoke in Springfield.  He quoted the passage above from Douglas's speech, and he remarked: "Why, according to this, not only negroes but white people outside of Great Britain and America are not spoken of in that instrument.  The English, Irish, and Scotch, along with white Americans, were included to be sure, but the French, Germans, and other white people of the world are all gone to pot along with the Judge's inferior races."  Against this, Lincoln insisted that the Declaration of Independence really did extend its principle of equality to "all men" or "the whole human family," which would encompass all races, including all Europeans (Lincoln 1989, 1:398-99).

It should be noted, however, that one year later, Douglas began to speak of the "white basis" of government as "confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians, and other inferior races" (Lincoln 1989, 1:504).  So, this indicated that he was no longer confining the principle of equality of rights to the British people.

On July 10, 1858, Lincoln delivered a speech at Chicago that stated the arguments that he would develop in his debates with Douglas that would begin a month later; and his fundamental argument was about the principle of equality of rights in the Declaration as embracing all Americans and including both black Americans and foreign immigrants.  When we celebrate the Fourth of July, he said, we celebrate the men of 1776--"a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers."  But we also realize that of the 30 million American people of today, many are not descended by blood from those first Americans.  We have

. . . perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe--German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian--men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things.  If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they ae part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.  That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world (Lincoln 1989, 1:456).

This leads him to the conclusion of his speech--that we should reject all talk about "inferior races": "let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man--this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position--discarding our standard that we have left us.  Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout the land, until we shall once again stand up declaring that all men are created equal."

So, what unites the native-born Americans and the foreign-born Americans as "one people" is their affirming the universal principle of the Declaration of Independence that all human beings are born free and equal.

In the Civil War, Lincoln made it clear that enforcing the Declaration's principle of equality of rights as the "standard maxim for free society" would require not only emancipating the black slaves but also promoting free immigration into the United States.  And once Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, it became clear that a victory for the Union in that war would be a victory for this expansive interpretation of the Declaration of Independence.

Remarkably, the eventual Union victory depended in large degree on the millions of immigrants who had entered the United States under the open borders policy.  The key to Lincoln's strategy for defeating the Confederacy was exploiting the advantage of the Union in its greater numbers of soldiers--over twice as many as the Confederates.  This was due to the greater population of the Northern states, which gave them a greater pool of potential military recruits.  Not only was the Confederacy weakened by its small total population--about one-third that of the Union--but as a slave society, the Confederacy lacked access to 40 percent of its adult male military-age population, who were enslaved and thus not eligible for service.  This left about 965,000 free white men between the ages of 18 to 45 to draw on for military service.  But then, of course, not every adult white man could serve.  This meant that at most the Confederacy could put an army of no more than about five hundred thousand men in the field (McCurry 2010).

The greater population of the North can be explained as largely the consequence of the liberal social order in the North that had attracted millions of immigrants from overseas and many migrants from the South.  The comparatively open and free society of the North offered more opportunities for people seeking a better life than did the illiberal South where slaves did most of the work.  As Lincoln said, in the free states, an ambitious man "can better his condition" because "there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer" (1989, 2:144).  Of the ten million overseas immigrants to the United States who entered from the 1830s to the 1850s, most of them (about seven-eighths) settled in the North.  Also, the migration of white Southerners to the North was three times greater than the migration from the North to the South.  Over 40 percent of the Union's armed forces were immigrants and the sons of immigrants--totaling about 600,000 out of 2.1 million.  The Confederacy had only a few thousand immigrants fighting for them (Doyle 2015, 158-81).

At the epic Battle of Gettysburg, in Pennsylvania, July 1-3, 1863, there were Irish troops fighting on both sides.  On the side of the Union was New York's 69th Infantry Regiment, the Fighting Irish, who played a key role in turning the tide of battle.  On the second day of fighting, July 2nd, the Irish Brigade chaplain Father William Corby (later to become President of the University of Notre Dame) stood upon a large rock in front of the brigade to offer general absolution for the Catholic troops.  Artist Paul Henry Wood painted a depiction of this legendary religious service based on memories of some surviving soldiers who were there.

An eyewitness recalled that "Father Corby reminded the soldiers of the high and sacred nature of their trust and the noble object for which they fought."  When he finished his remarks, all the men (both Catholic and Protestant) fell to their knees and prayed for God's merciful absolution.  The sounds of battle resonated all around them.  For many of them this would be their last prayer.

On the decisive third day of battle, July 3, the Irish units defended the center of the Union's position on Cemetery Ridge against the largest assault of the entire war:  General Robert E. Lee ordered General George Pickett to lead his men in a charge across almost a mile of open land, where the Rebels were exposed to the fire of Union troops, but with the hope that if the Rebels broke through the Union lines, this would give the Confederates a victory in the North that could be the decisive turn in the war.  

But the Union Irishmen held their ground.  One veteran described it years later: they "stood immovable, unconquerable, fearless and splendid in their valor, the green flag waving side by side with the colors of their adopted country, both held aloft by the stone wall until the victory was assured, and the hosts of the enemy crushed."  Of the 532 men in the Irish Brigade, 198 were lost at Gettysburg, a casualty rate close to 40 percent (Holzer 2024, 270-72).

On November 20, 1863, Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg to dedicate a cemetery for the over 7,000 men--both Union and Confederate--who had fallen in those three days of battle.  He explained that those who had died on that battlefield had given their lives that the new American nation might live as the nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that are men are created equal.

It was for us the living, he added, to be dedicated to the unfinished work for which they died--"that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Only nineteen days later, Lincoln submitted his Annual Message to Congress, which indicated that the "new birth of freedom" would require not only the Reconstruction of the Southern States with emancipation of the slaves but also a new system for encouraging free immigration.

I again submit to your consideration the expediency of establishing a system for the encouragement of immigration.  Although this source of national wealth and strength is again flowing with greater freedom than for several years before the insurrection occurred, there is still a great deficiency of laborers in every field of industry, especially in agriculture and in our mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals.  While the demand for labor is thus increased here, tens of thousands of persons, destitute of remunerative occupation, are thronging our foreign consulates, and offering to emigrate to the United States if essential, but very cheap, assistance can be afforded them.  It is easy to see that, under the sharp discipline of civil war, the nation is beginning a new life.  This noble effort demands the aid, and ought to receive the attention and support of the government (Lincoln 1989, 2:541-42).

Notice that Lincoln saw immigration as a "source of national wealth and strength," particularly in satisfying the "demand for labor" at a time when the Civil War had created a severe labor shortage.  Notice also that he saw promoting immigration as especially important because "under the sharp discipline of civil war, the nation is beginning a new life"--the new birth of freedom.

Lincoln wanted the government to allocate federal funding to assist immigrants who were "destitute of remunerative occupation" in foreign countries.  Although the Congress did not approve this proposal for direct funding of immigrants, the Congress did approve extending the benefits of the 1862 Homestead Act for foreign immigrants.  Congress also authorized the setting up of a Immigration Bureau in the State Department.  And the U.S. Emigrant Office in New York was authorized to help foreign workers find American jobs and arrange transportation for them (Holzer 2024, 288-98).  Lincoln signed the Act for the Encouragement of Immigration on July 4, 1864.

But Lincoln wanted more to be done for facilitating more immigration.  The 1864 Republican Party Platform resolved that "foreign immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation, the asylum of the oppressed of all nations, should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy" (Holzer 2024, 304).  In his Annual Message to Congress of December 6, 1864, Lincoln observed that the previously passed act for encouraging immigration

seems to need amendment which will enable the officers of the government to prevent the practice of frauds against the immigrants while on their way and on their arrival in the ports, so as to secure them here a free choice of avocations and places of settlement.  A liberal disposition towards this great national policy is manifested by most of the European States, and ought to be reciprocated on our part by giving the immigrants effective national protection.  I regard our emigrants as one of the replenishing streams which are appointed by Providence to repair the ravages of internal war, and its wastes of national strength and health.  All that is necessary is to secure the flow of that stream in its present fulness, and to that end the government must, in every way, make it manifest that it neither needs nor designs to impose involuntary military service upon those who come from other lands to cast their lot in our country (Lincoln 1989, 2:650).

It is remarkable that Lincoln wanted immigrants to be exempt from the national military conscription act that Congress had passed in 1863.  Although the great majority of Union soldiers were volunteers, the military draft was supposed to be fill in when voluntary enlistments fell short.  Conscription was very unpopular, even provoking draft riots.  So Lincoln's offering exemption from the draft as an incentive for immigration shows how important free immigration was for him.

Perhaps even more impressive is how Lincoln saw immigration as ordained by God to be a "replenishing stream" to restore "national strength and health."

Isn't there enough evidence here to justify Trump and Vance in denouncing Lincoln as a crazy globalist and woke advocate of open borders? 

OPEN BORDERS AS CULTURAL GROUP SELECTION FOR FREEDOM

As I have argued previously, global human migration shows what evolutionary scientists call cultural group selection through migration and assimilation, in which countries with cultural traditions of freedom have higher fitness than countries that are less free.  John Locke understood this, which is why he argued that free societies benefited from having open borders, so that they could attract migrants from less free societies.  The freer societies with a growing population of productive and inventive people become the more prosperous societies.  While countries like New Zealand have adopted the Lockean liberal immigration policy, the United States under the rule of Trump the Nationalist is raising barriers to immigration, which means that if the United States continues to move away from Lockean liberalism, it will become a loser in this evolutionary process of cultural group selection, in which people vote with their feet in favor of freedom.

Not too far off Ellis Island in New York's harbor stands the Statue of Liberty, erected in 1886, with a poem engraved at its base: "Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . ."  By 1886, the annual number of immigrants entering the United States was approaching one million.

We can expect that Trump will soon sign an executive order for replacing the Statue of Liberty with the Statue of Closed Borders.  Instead of Lady Liberty with her torch held high, we will have a masked ICE officer clubbing an immigrant. 

REFERENCES

Bailyn, Bernard. 1986a. The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction. New York: Random House.

Bailyn, Bernard. 1986b. Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution. New York: Random House.

Clemens, Michael. 2011. "Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 25: 83-106.

Douglas, Stephen. 1857. Remarks of the Hon. Stephen Douglas, on Kansas, Utah, and the Dred Scott Decision. Chicago: Daily Times Book Office.

Doyle, Don H. 2015. The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War. New York: Basic Books.

Holzer, Harold. 2024. Brought Forth On This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration. New York: Dutton.

Lincoln, Abraham. 1989. Speeches and Writings. 2 vols. Ed. Don Fehrenbacher. New York: Library of America.

McCurry, Stephanie. 2010. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Nowrasteh, Alex, and Benjamin Powell. 2021. Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Can Trump Use His Military Forces to Murder Americans with Impunity?

As I have indicated in my recent posts, one of the primary charges against Charles I at his trial was that he was guilty of murdering his own people in the Civil War that he started, and since murder was a capital crime, he could be rightly executed.  "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed" (Gen. 9:6) is both a law of God and a law of nature.  And like any law of nature, it is an impartial rule: anyone who commits murder shall be punished, which includes the king.  The impartiality of law must therefore deny the maxim of the English common law that "the king can do no wrong," so that the king is above the law.

If President Trump begins murdering Americans, will he be able to claim, as Charles I did, that he is immune to criminal prosecution for murder?

On January 23, 2016, in a campaign speech at Dordt College in Iowa, Trump bragged about the loyalty of his voters, and he explained: "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, ok?  It's like incredible."  Of course, Trump's defenders have said that he was just joking.  But in 2019, Trump's lawyers argued in a federal court that since Trump had total immunity from criminal prosecution for anything he did while President, this would include murder.

Now, until recently, it was generally understood that the presidency as established by the Constitution does not have the immunity from criminal prosecution that had been claimed by the British king.  In Federalist Number 69, Alexander Hamilton explained how the President is "liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law," and how this distinguishes the President from the King of Great Britain, who is "sacred and inviolable" and thus above the law in not being subject to legal punishment.

In the North Carolina Ratifying Convention, James Iredell compared the British King and the American President.  The King "has great powers and prerogatives; and it is a constitutional maxim, that he can do no wrong."  But contrast, the President can be punished for his bad behavior.  He can be impeached.  And "if he commits any crime, his is punishable by the laws of his country, and in capital cases may be deprived of his life."  So the President could be tried for the capital crime of murder and executed if convicted.  As far as I know, no one in any of the ratification conventions disagreed with Iredell about this.

But last year, in the case of Trump v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the original meaning of the Constitution and effectively amended the Constitution (in a 6 to 3 decision) to declare that the President has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his "core constitutional powers"--that is, powers that belong exclusively to the President.

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sotomayor warned: "in every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law."  She explained:

The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President. . . . The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world.  When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority's reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution.  Orders the Navy's Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival?  Immune.  Organizes a military coup to hold onto power?  Immune.  Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon?  Immune.  Immune, immune, immune.

Although Chief Justice Roberts ridiculed Sotomayor for "fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals," we now see Trump setting into motion the very criminal actions--perhaps including murder--that Sotomayor warned about.

Recently, The New Republic has published a secret memo from the Department of Homeland Security about a secret meeting between Philip Hegseth (brother of Pete Hegseth), Liaison Officer to Department of Defense, and all the senior people at the DoD.  A few weeks ago, Trump ordered National Guardsmen and a contingent of Marines to deploy in Los Angeles to help ICE officers facing resistance from people protesting the kidnapping of people identified as illegal immigrants.  Now, at this meeting, the participants talked about orders from Trump that "our joint work in L.A." should be expanded across the country "for years to come." According to one part of the memo, "SECDEF Hegseth wants this meeting to be a message to the uniform side of DoD emphasizing the urgency of the homeland mission."

Notice what this means: the military forces of the United States ("the uniform side of DoD") will be deployed for the "homeland mission" of targeting those Americans who resist the enforcement of Trump's domestic policies.  Can't we expect that this will mean military attacks on Americans peacefully protesting Trump's policies, which will include killing some of those Americans?

Presumably, under the majority's decision in Trump v. U.S., Trump ordering his soldiers to kill Americans will come under the President's "absolute immunity" because his power as Commander in Chief belongs to his "core powers."

Is this "fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals"?  Or is this fear justified by what we know about Trump's grandiose narcissism, his belief that he is God's Chosen One to save America from it's enemies, and the belief of Trump's intellectuals like Curtis Yarvin that something like the absolute monarchy of the Stuart kings would be best for America?

The Evolutionary Psychology of Lex Rex

                                    A Contemporary German Print of the Execution of Charles I

The evolutionary psychology of Lex Rex--that the law rules over the king--depends on two points.  First, we need to see how as opposed to regicide by assassination (murder), regicide by legal execution (as in the trial of Charles I) affirms the impersonal rules of law as superior to absolute monarchy's rule by personal threats.  This understanding of law as impersonal or impartial moral rules is unique to human beings because it arises from the natural evolution of the human capacity for the language of rational symbolization.

The second point is that the denial of the sacred authority of the king to rule with impunity was part of the cultural evolution of the rise of theocratic sacred monarchy (beginning in ancient Mesopotamia) and its decline (beginning in 17th century England) culminating in the Lockean liberalism of King Charles III's Christian monarchy.

Two Kinds of Regicide

In the first systematic and quantitative study of regicide in Europe, Manuel Eisner (2011) has collected data on the frequency of violent death and regicide among 1,513 monarchs in Europe between AD 600 and 1800.  He has distinguished four categories of violent death: accident, battle death, murder, and legal execution.  He found that in the seventh century, the frequency of regicide was 2,500 murders per 100,000 years in office.  There was a long decline in regicide.  So that by the eighteenth century, the frequency of regicide was about 200 per 100,000 years in office.  By comparison, the homicide rate in Western Europe today is around 0.6-1.5 per 100,000 person-years.  Clearly, then, European kingship before the Industrial Revolution was one of the most dangerous occupations in the world, comparable to that of soldiers in combat.

Eisner found that for most of this history, regicide by assassination was carried out within the noble elite in the competition for political rule.  But, then, by the seventeenth century, regicide became a matter of legal execution--the execution of Charles I in England in 1649 and the execution of Louis XVI in France in 1793.  In the Glorious Revolution of 1688, James II was deposed and defeated in war without being executed.

The decline in regicide seems to be part of the general historical decline in homicide (Eisner 2003; Pinker 2011).  This general pattern of declining violence seems to be associated with a Hobbesian pacification process, in which the state claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, and with a Lockean liberal culture of bourgeois virtues that arise in modern commercial societies, in which people learn to control their violent impulses for the sake of peaceful economic and social exchange.

Jane Goodall and other primatologists have presented evidence that chimpanzees are similar to human beings in the practice of political assassinations.  There is plenty of evidence of chimpanzees from one community killing individuals from another community, which looks like warfare.  Goodall's observations of chimpanzee intercommunity violence have now been confirmed by similar observations from many chimpanzee communities across Africa.  

What is most surprising about this is that lethal violence within chimpanzee communities is extremely rare (Newton-Fisher and Emery Thompson 2012).  Chimpanzees often become aggressive in conflicts with one another, but they usually resolve their conflicts without physical contact; and even if there is some physical violence, it is almost never lethal, even though chimpanzee canines are powerful weapons for wounding and killing victims.  Most aggression between adult males consists of bluffing attacks without physical contact--threatening gestures and vocalizations and charging displays.  (This is also true for human beings, who often engage in bluffing displays of aggression, but for whom homicide is rare, despite the publicity given to homicidal violence.)

After decades of observations of chimpanzee communities across Africa, there have been only four documented cases of lethal violence between adult males of the same community, in which a coalitional gang of adult males killed a lone victim.  Kaburu et al. (2013) point out that the individuals killed in these cases were either low-ranking males or they were previously deposed alpha males.

In the revised edition of his Chimpanzee Politics, Frans de Waal reported that in the summer of 1980, Luit--the alpha male of the chimpanzee community in the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands--was attacked brutally and killed by Nikkie and Yeroen, who had previously been alpha males (de Waal 1998, 211-214).  De Waal describes the bloody scene: "Apart from biting off fingers and toes and causing deep gashes everywhere, the two aggressors removed Luit's testicles, which were found on the cage floor."  This looks like a political assassination.  But it's hard to know whether this case of lethal violence among captive chimpanzees is an abnormal consequence of their captive conditions.  The killing of Luit occurred at night, when the chimps were confined in their night cages.

Kaburu et al. claim to report the first case of lethal violence among wild chimpanzees in which the victim was the incumbent alpha male.  PM was the alpha male of the M-group of chimpanzees in the Malale Mountains National Park in Tanzania when he was killed on October 2, 2011.  He had been the alpha male since 2007.  After a bloody fight between PM and PR, the beta male, PR left.  A weakened PM  was then attacked brutally by a coalition of four other adult males, including two former alpha males (AL and DE).  AL was the alpha male overthrown by PM in 2007.  After the killing, there was a period of social instability.  AL became the alpha male for a short time.  But by November, PR had become the alpha male and is now the alpha male of the M-group.

Kaburu et al. explain this as an opportunistic attempt by AL (the third ranking of 10 adult males) to seize the alpha position once he saw that PM was weakened by the fight with PR, although AL was unable to hold his alpha position for long against the challenge of PR.

When I asked Michael Wilson (a primatologist at the University of Minnesota) about whether there were any other cases of alpha males being killed, he mentioned two cases at Gombe.  Vincent was the alpha male of the Mitumba community at Gombe.  He fell from a tree and severely injured himself.  He lived for another three months before two adult males attacked and killed him.  Michael says he has not yet written a report of this case.

The second case was that of Goblin, another alpha male at Gombe.  He was severely attacked and would have died if a vet had not treated his wounds.  Kaburu et al. mention this case, but they claim that Goblin had been deposed from his alpha position before the attack.

Even if chimpanzees show a few cases of political assassination of an alpha male, which is comparable to the political assassination of a king among human beings, it is clear that chimps are incapable of the legal execution of a leader, because legal execution implies laws as impartial moral rules, which requires the uniquely human capacity for rational symbolization.

Previously, I have written about Peter DeScioli's argument that laws are moral rules for choosing sides in conflicts by impartial rules of action, which arose first in the human environment of evolutionary adaptation--or in what Locke called the "state of nature."  Laws as impartial rules require moral judgment, which is unique to human beings, because moral judgement depends on the human rational or symbolizing mind that can grasp and share the abstract symbolic values of the good and the just.  

Dominant chimps rule by personal threats: if you challenge my alpha male dominance, I will punish you.  Tyrannical humans sometimes rule by personal threats.  But humans can also formulate impartial laws for judging who has the right to rule:  in America, whoever is elected president by the proper constitutional procedures has the right to rule as president as long as he is constrained by the rule of law.

Charles I claimed to rule by the law of absolute monarchy--that "the king can do no wrong" and is thus above the law--but this was really a personal threat disguised as impartial law.  Because by impartial law, kings must follow the laws like anyone else.  And so, if the king commits murder by initiating a Civil War in which he kills his own people, then he is guilty of murder and should be punished for it as any other murderer would be.  The legal trial and legal execution of Charles I affirmed that principle--that Law is king over the king.

The Cultural Evolution of Sacred Monarchy from Hammurabi to King Charles III

This is a tracing of a rock drawing from a cave at the stone age site of Remigia, Castellon, Spain, dated to sometime before 6500 BCE.  Christopher Boehm used this rock drawing at Remigia to illustrate the importance of capital punishment in the evolution of morality and egalitarian hierarchy.  He observed that on the right we see ten men jubilantly holding their bows over their heads.  On the left, we see a man lying on the ground with exactly ten arrows sticking in his body or on the ground.

It's hard to know for sure what has happened.  The victim could have been a prisoner of war who has been executed.  In fact, other drawings at Remigia show scenes of warfare.  But Boehm suggests that given what we know about hunter-gatherer foragers in the ethnographic record, it's more likely that the victim here was a deviant member of the band who had violated the moral rules of the band--perhaps by murdering someone--and he was becoming a bully who was trying to assert his dominance over the group.   

This also illustrated Boehm's "ambivalence model" of human nature in politics.  Human politics arises from the complex tension between three levels of our evolved political psychology: dominance, deference, and counter-dominance.  Some human beings want to have dominance over others.  Most human beings are inclined to defer to the rule of the dominant ones.  But when that dominance becomes despotic and exploitative, people will resist that dominance and punish the bullies by shunning them, ostracizing them, or--in the most dangerous cases--killing them.  Previously, I have written about this as showing the evolution of equal liberty through capital punishment.

But then about seven thousand years ago, the first agricultural settlements appeared in the ancient Near East.  And about five thousand years ago, the first urban states appeared.  The city of Uruk emerged in ancient Mesopotamia around 3,200 BC.  These states were the first sacred monarchies, in which the king claimed the absolute power to rule by divine right.  This claim to rule by divine authority is evident in the black stone stela that present the Laws of Hammurabi that were compiled toward the end of the reign of Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC), who was the sixth ruler of the First Dynasty of Babylon.

The Louvre stela is almost seven and a half feet tall.  The top one-third of the stela shows the sun-god Shamash, the god of justice, seated on his throne, with King Hammurabi standing before him.  It is not clear whether the god is dictating the laws to Hammurabi, or Hammurabi is presenting the laws to the god, or Hammurabi is accepting the rod and the ring that are the emblems of authority.  In any case, this conveys the clear message to the viewers--even the many illiterate people who cannot read the laws--that Hammurabi's laws are divinely authorized by the god of justice.

The evidence collected by anthropological archaeologists--that has been surveyed by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus in The Creation of Inequality--has shown that in the first monarchic states, the power of rulers over their subjects could not be legitimated by reason alone, and rulers had discovered that they needed to pretend that they ruled by divine right--that political rule was sanctified by a religious cosmology.  Originally, the first human beings had no rulers other than the gods, but eventually they were persuaded that some human beings could rule with divine authority.

Every society has some cosmological explanation for how human beings and their world came into existence, and this cosmological creation story provides moral sanction for their social order.  Typically, the world begins as a formless chaos, and then some supernatural spirits create order out of this chaos, including the creation of human beings.  This creation story constitutes the moral charter for a society because it provides a sacred origin for the moral rules of a society. And thus religious belief is an evolutionary adaptation for binding people together into social groups.

Originally, among nomadic hunter-gatherers, the cosmological creation story sanctioned a celestial dominance hierarchy: the invisible supernatural beings were the alphas, the invisible ancestors were the betas, and the living human beings were the gammas.  Therefore, originally, all living human beings were equal in their subordination to the invisible gods and ancestors.  Inequality of social ranking arose when some living human beings successfully claimed that they or their clans were divine or divinely sanctioned for rule over others, and thus there was a cosmological justification for inequality.

Here in ancient Mesopotamia is the first cosmic teleology of human law as rooted in divine law, which is developed in Plato's Timaeus and the Bible, and which becomes the theme of the Divine 
Cosmic Model of the universe that runs through human civilization for four thousand years.  

But even though this mysterious magic of a sacred monarchy could win the deferential submission of people, a tyrannical monarchy often provoked the resistance of the people.  As I have indicated in my posts on Hammurabi's Laws and the Mesopotamian kingships, whenever a king increased his exploitation of his people--through increased confiscation of grain, increased taxation, increased conscription of soldiers and laborers--this provoked flight or rebellion.  The records of the Mesopotamian states are full of evidence of people running away from their states--slaves running away from their enslavement, soldiers running away from their conscripted service in war, taxpayers running away from oppressive taxation, laborers running aways from coerced labor, and people generally running away from cities racked with famine and contagious diseases.  

There is also evidence that over 3,000 years of Mesopotamian life, there were hundreds of rebellions.  Historian of the Ancient Near East Seth Richardson (2010, 2016) has noted that rebels against the state were described by state authorities as "the violators of contracts (mitgurtu, rikistu)."  The Akkadian words mitgurtu and rikistu denote agreement, consent, contract, or treaty.  Richardson has observed:  "These motifs relating to violation-of-contract strike a familiar chord to us moderns, since they suggest the premise of a social contract between ruler and ruled, or at least the existence of legal treaties and loyalty oaths" (2010: 9).

Not only in ancient Mesopotamia, but also throughout the ancient Mediterranean world--the Near East, Greece, and Rome--one sees the same pattern of rebellions against the state in which rebels assert their natural freedom from oppression and thus confirm Locke's understanding of government as dependent on the consent of the governed (Howe and Brice 2016).

But this raises a question:  if there was so much popular resistance to the tyranny of sacred monarchy, then why was it the predominant form of government for five thousand years?  Throughout most of this history, the number of monarchies far exceeded the number of nonmonarchies.  

But then around 1900, the number of nonmonarchies surpassed the number of monarchies.  Today, there are very few monarchies in the world, and most of the most prominent monarchies today--like Great Britain--have a purely ceremonial monarch who has no sovereign power to rule.  This raises a second question:  why has monarchy declined in the last few centuries?

As I have indicated in some previous posts, there are at least two kinds of answers to the question of why monarchy was the prevalent form of government for thousands of years.  The first answer is that historically monarchies have been limited in their exercise of sovereign power over their people, and thus they have been limited in their capacity for the sort of tyrannical exploitation that provokes popular resistance.  For example, the evidence from those first monarchic states in ancient Mesopotamia shows an odd contradiction between their claims of absolute sovereignty and the reality of their severely limited powers.  For example, in their written legal codes, one can see what Seth Richardson has identified as "the curious absence of the state in the text." In the prologue and epilogue to Hammurabi's Code, Hammurabi claims absolute divinely granted authority over Babylonia.  But in the hundreds of laws in his code, there is almost no reference to himself or to the central state as providing judgment or enforcement of the law.  Most of the laws seem to assume private enforcement: when something goes wrong, the wronged party must act on his own with the help of local people to investigate, try, convict, and punish the guilty parties. 

What we see here is what Richardson has called the "presumptive state": the early states in Mesopotamia were presumptive in claiming a sovereignty that they did not in fact possess. Their rhetorical claims for absolute sovereignty have been mistakenly interpreted as evidence for the reality of Oriental Despotism.

Over the past 5,000 years, some states have expanded their power to rule through autocratic bureaucracies--for instance, China under the Song dynasty (960-1279).  But even the most powerful states have had to rely to some degree on law enforcement by private individuals acting through customary laws of vengeance and compensation.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, some states began to extend their law enforcement power by inventing modern professional policing.  Previously, people had policed themselves.  Robert Peel founded the London police in 1829.  The English Reform Act of 1835 extended this system of policing to all municipal boroughs.  Boston established the first American police force in 1838.

As long as monarchic states could not fully enforce their laws directly on their people, and their people were free to police themselves, those monarchic states had little power to tyrannically exploit their people.

The second answer to why monarchic states predominated for thousands of years is that in large societies where people are disconnected, the king provides a readily available focal point for legitimating government.  As I have indicated in a previous post, John Gerring and his colleagues have argued that from the appearance of the first states in the ancient world to the beginning of the modern era about 250 years ago, monarchy was the most common political regime because it was the most efficient solution to the problem of selecting leaders to coordinate social order in large societies where people are isolated from one another.  In the modern era, however, improvements in the technology of communication--for example, the printing press, newspapers, national postal systems, the telegraph, radio, television, and the internet--made it easier for people in large societies to communicate with one another and thus to mobilize a mass public for social coordination, which allowed elites to develop new systems of rule that did not need a central locus of sovereignty in a monarch (Gerring et al. 2021).

But doesn't this beg an obvious question--Why can't kings use modern mass communication to glorify their monarchic rule over their people?

We can answer that question by considering again the causes of the English Civil War, which led to the first trial and execution of a king.  Thomas Hobbes (in Behemoth) indicated that disputes over the interpretation of the Bible were a primary cause of the English Civil War.  The translation of the Bible into English in the sixteenth century and the invention of the printing press made the Bible widely available to common people, who could then interpret the Bible for themselves rather than being dependent on the authority of their priests.  The printing press also facilitated the production of thousands of books and pamphlets debating theological and political questions.  This contributed to the Protestant Reformation in breaking from the authority of the Catholic Church.  As a consequence, all the parties in the English political controversies of the time found their ideas in the Bible (Hill 1993).  People like John Cooke could publish books arguing that the Bible did not support absolute monarchy.  And when the Stuart monarchy was restored in 1660, Charles II had to order the burning of such books as the greatest threat to the monarchy.

The success of modern mass communication in popularizing ideas of religious and political liberty has made it ever harder to defend absolute monarchy with the coercive enforcement of one national church.  This was dramatically manifested in the coronation of King Charles III on May 6, 2023, which was broadcast around the globe.  In the Coronation Liturgy--as designed by Charles himself--we saw a subtle interweaving of Old Testament and New Testament traditions that reconciled the conflicts between them by favoring the liberal interpretation of the New Testament advanced by Roger Williams and John Locke.

Since Henry VIII, the English King has been "Defender of the Faith"--first the Catholic Church and then the Anglican Church, which meant that the King would enforce a theocracy.  But King Charles III has identified himself as the "Defender of Faith"--that is, all religious faiths.  And indeed the coronation procession into Westminster Abbey included "faith leaders" from a dozen or more religious traditions.  Moreover, the Coronation Oath included a pledge "to foster an environment in which people of all faiths and beliefs may live freely."  Notice that "beliefs"--as distinguished from "faiths"--suggest that even atheists "may live freely" under the rule of Charles III.

The coronation of Charles indicated how his kingship will follow the model of Christ's persuasive kingship rather than the theocratic kingship of ancient Israel.  At the beginning of the coronation, Charles was greeted by a Chapel Royal chorister: "Your Majesty, as children of the Kingdom of God, we welcome you in the name of the King of Kings."  Charles responded: "In his name, and after his example, I come not to be served but to serve."

Here Charles echoed the words of Jesus when he warned his followers not to strive for authoritative rule over others:  "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them.  Not so with you.  Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave--just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Matt. 20:25-28).

Charles thus intimated here that he is a king who has no coercive authority over his people, particularly in matters of religious belief.  At most, he can only exercise the sort of persuasive authority that comes through Christian preaching.

Unlike the Stuart dynasty, the King of the House of Windsor rules over Great Britain as a purely ceremonial head of state that exercises no sovereign power in what is really a liberal Parliamentary democracy where Law is King.

REFERENCES

Boehm, Christopher.  2017.  "Prehistoric Capital Punishment and Parallel Evolutionary Effects."  Center for Humans and Nature, June 12.

Cooke, John.  1649.  King Charles, His Case, or An Appeal to All Rational Men Concerning His Trial at the High Court of Justice.  London: Peter Cole.

DeScioli, Peter.  2023.  "On the Origin of Laws by Natural Selection."  Evolution and Human Behavior 44: 195-209.

Eisner,  Manuel. 2003.  "Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime."  Crime and Justice 30: 83-142.

Eisner,  Manuel.  2011.  "Killing Kings: Patterns of Regicide in Europe, AD 600-1800."  British Journal of Criminology 51: 556-577.

Filmer, Robert.  1991.  Patriarcha and Other Writings.  Ed. Johann P. Sommerville.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Flannery, Kent and Joyce Marcus.  2014.  The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.   

Gardiner, Samuel Rawson.  1906.  The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625-1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gerring, John, et al.  2021.  "Why Monarchy? The Rise and Demise of a Regime Type." Comparative Political Studies 54: 585-622.

Hill, Christopher.  1993.  The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. London: Penguin Books.

Howe, Timothy, and Lee Brice, eds.  2016.  Brill's Companion to Insurgency and Terrorism in the Ancient Mediterranean.  Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.

Kaburu, Stefano S. K., Sana Inoue, and Nicholas E. Newton-Fisher. 2013. "Death of the Alpha: Within-Community Lethal Violence Among Chimpanzees of the Mahale Mountains National Park." American Journal of Primatology 75:789-797.

Locke, John.  1988.  Two Treatises of Government.  Ed. Peter Laslett.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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