The Myth of Confederate Minarchism and the Fugitive Slave Act

[Rooney]

This is a very good post. It is always interesting to read what actually was included in the six different bills signed by President Fillmore in September 1850. 

It is quite true that minarchism was not a tenant of the antebellum South or the Confederacy as a nation. The CSA as an independent entity did not engage in libertarianism to any meaningful degree. The Confederate government, for example, nationalized munitions/iron production in a way that only President Truman would try to do in the 1950s. The Confederate government also used the Conscription Acts of 1862 and 1863 to coerce private companies into fulfilling unwanted government contracts. The Confederacy was not a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist paradise, but a nationalized state which dealt with the issue of war in a terse and totalitarian way.