A few years ago libertarian lawyer and Cato adjunct Timothy Sandefur wrote an excellent article on secessionism, slavery, and the U.S. Civil War that I would urge you all to read. He covers the legal points far better than I ever could. But it would be a sick joke to stop merely at calling these provisions unlibertarian—as if all but the exceptionally punctilious members of our little tribe might maybe tolerate them after all.

These provisions are unlibertarian, but they are far worse than that. There is only one legal term that seems quite to do them justice. That term is hostis humani generis: The founders of Confederacy were the enemies of all mankind, as admiralty law holds slave‐​takers to be. War against slave‐​takers is always permitted, by anyone, without pretext or need for justification. The practice of slavery is to be crushed, so that mere humanity might live.

Anyone who cares about human liberty—to whatever degree—ought to despise the Confederacy, ought to mock and desecrate its symbols, and ought never to let Confederate apologists pass unchallenged.

Those who make excuses for the Confederacy are at best ignorant, and even that ignorance is hard to fathom. Those who wave the Confederate flag just to make other people angry? Well, I get angry at them. It works every time, and I’m not even a little ashamed of it.

All friends of the Confederacy are my enemies. Wherever they appear. They’re your enemies too—they are the enemies of the entire human race—and the only remaining question is whether you face up to your responsibility as a human being and disown them.

My views here won’t pass without controversy, I know. I would implore all of you on the other side to consider that your sympathies have been badly misspent on the Confederacy. No, you don’t have to start loving everything Lincoln ever did, including all of his civil liberties violations, and you don’t have to ignore the growth of federal power following the Civil War. You should do no such thing. But it’s not as if, when faced with a choice of two wrongs, you would do better to pick the greater one.

Note: An earlier version of this piece was originally published at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen.