Lysander Spooner on Lincoln's War (1870)

The vast majority of people who opposed slavery and wanted its elimination had very little use for Garrison and his radical friends who demanded immediate emancipation by any means possible. This, moderate faction BTW, included a great many Virginians. They saw slavery as morally wrong and inconsistent with our founding principles.

I don't think the moral dimension played a part, until Lincoln played it up himself. It was his major message in prosecuting emancipation during the war, and also a plank of his political platform. But I don't think people shared it nearly as strongly.

It took the war, and four years of his use of the bully pulpit in wartime, to drive his message home. I'm sure your Grant quote from April 1861, just as Robert E. Lee was winding up his affairs with the War Department and the U.S. Army, is more typical.

The Virginian antislavery movement withered in the 1820's under the weight of sectional abuse piled atop the calls for abolition from Northern orators. This was a large part of the damage the red-hot Abolitionists did. They made it impossible for Southerners to argue the case themselves, or do anything but close ranks and defend their society.

You're starting to sound like Stand Watie or Twodees --- anyone who shoots at your Lost Cause Myth and self-pity is a Marxist. That's ironic as hell since my post extolled the virtues of the northern capitalists who built America into the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth.

No, the irony is that Marxists like McPherson and some of the Declarationists who've bought a Marxist argument would use as their vehicle the party of the Gilded Age.

As I described it to you in the post you scoffed at, the Marxist use for the Civil War is to present it as a Marxian "second revolution" against the planter "bourgeoisie", a "liberation movement" that they can cite as validating their historical model.

The argument is Marxist or it isn't, not just because I say so. In this case, it appears to be, and I've been persuaded of its essential content by perusing the McPherson thread, and GOPcapitalist's post-up on McPherson at the top of that thread.

Oh, and by the way, nothing says a Marxist can't be right. It's just that you need to know whose bat and ball you're playing with. It's just that when you mess with those people, you know how they'll want things to come out.

As to your mythical geographic advantage of the north, explain to me what advantage New England had in textile manufacture. Their raw material had to travel 1000 miles!

As it was explained to me once in a geography or history class long ago, the presence of plentiful hydro power in New England was decisive in starting the industry there. Other Fall Line towns in the Piedmont had mills, too, but not as big as New England.

The presence of the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal was decisive for Northern versus Southern locations. Plus, the big ports were in the north since late colonial times. New York ran away from the rest of the country after the Erie Canal was opened.

Sure, there was coal in the South, but it was the combination: proximity to water transport AND raw materials AND population centers AND ports AND finance AND markets.

It all added up in favor of the Northeast. It wasn't "cultural" -- that's a political construction, as I said before.

On that, we agree. Virginia was without doubt the ‘leader’ of the south. In the late 20s and early 30s, there was very strong support for ending slavery in the state --- I seem to recall the legislature being within a handful of votes of actually doing so. But the radical Abolitionists damnations combined with Nat Turner's rebellion, allowed the pro-slavery faction to push the proponents of abolition into a political box from which they could not escape. IMHO, it was one of those tremendous "missed opportunities" of history. If Virginia had ended slavery, even with a gradual phase-out, I think the pressure on the other slave states, especially those of the upper south, to follow Virginia's lead would have been overwhelming.

This brings me back to the abortion debate of today. The antics of outfits like Operation Rescue and the overblown rhetoric of TV preachers like Fallwell push people on the fence over into the other camp. They allow the pro-choice side to paint the vast majority of those opposed to abortion as dangerous radicals. They do far more harm than good. It is for those reasons that I have little regard to Garrison and others who were strident and un-compromising without taking into account the very real political and economic implications of their demands. Lincoln always took a moderate course in regards to slavery until the latter stages of the war. The only area where he was unwilling to compromise was on expansion and on that he had solid constitutional ground.

I'm not aware of any significant textile mills operating in the Piedmount before the 1890s, but I could be wrong. But by 1860, mills were no longer relying on water wheels. They were steam powered meaning they could be build anywhere that there was access to fuel, and the south had plenty of that available.

Without getting into the constitutionality of the prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Ordinance (we are talking about a property right, after all -- imagine the difficulty faced by a public law that forbade people to own real estate in the territories), I was wondering how the Virginia abolitionists intended to accomplish emancipation, and what their plans were for the emancipated slaves. Have you seen anything about that? Redemption would have been enormously expensive and would have required some very serious taxes -- and since they didn't tax income back then, the burden would have fallen on the planters, who in effect might have been required to buy their own slaves.

I was wondering how the Virginia abolitionists intended to accomplish emancipation, and what their plans were for the emancipated slaves.

I have not explored that issue, but I suspect that it would have been similar to what many of the northern states had done when they eliminated slavery --- a Grandfather arrangement where current slaves remained "property" for life but children of those slaves would either be born free or entitled to freedom at age 21.

That is just a guess. I'll have to do some research to find more information. Virginia, to their credit, would have taken a much larger economic hit than say New York or New Jersey who were both late in ending slavery in the North, but the record shows that there was a near majority in Virginia for doing so in the Jacksonian era.

Sadly, a “missed opportunity” that could have changed the course of history.

Virginia, to their credit, would have taken a much larger economic hit than say New York or New Jersey who were both late in ending slavery in the North, but the record shows that there was a near majority in Virginia for doing so in the Jacksonian era.

Yes, I think it would have been nearly impossible without an enormous emission of debt. In his discussion of the issue apropos Texas's social and economic development in the antebellum period, T. R. Fehrenbach, my manual source, gives the economics of emancipation thusly:

"Aside from the emotional questions of right or wrong, or subordination and equality, emancipation by 1860 had become economically unreasonable. In Texas, the assessed value of all slaves was $106,688,920 -- 20 percent more than the assessed value of all cultivated lands. Whatever its moral capital, the South had invested its economic capital in blacks. Like many another capitalist or dominant group before and since, the Southern gentry, in coping with a labor problem, had fallen into a terrible cultural and racial trap. It was more vulnerable to criticism than either the Northern industrialist paying out slave wages or a government using forced labor, because the cotton planter was creating no fruits for the descendants of his workers to enjoy. [This is a huge, overlooked point about slavery.] The great mass of Negroes were never expected to rise out of bondage. And the profits of the plantation economy were rapidly creating a new leisure class that, however admirable in many respects, was already an anachronism in the 19th-century Western world.

He goes on to compare the planters to the old 18th-century squirearchs of the Atlantic seaboard, who in the North were shoved aside by the Millocracy but who continued to lead society and its affairs in the South.

The arithmetic is such that it would have taken a national undertaking and debt issue to redeem the slaves, and would have taken generations to work off. But even at that, as Fehrenbach points out, the slaves would have come out of bondage in many cases with only the shirts on their backs and nowhere to go. Even the abolitionists didn't have a clue what to do afterward, and Lincoln, in his letters, professed his own shortage of answers in the 1850's.

I have been laid up with a virus for several days and just picked up your reply on the Civil War/General Grant thread. I just wanted to let you know I thought your post was outstanding (and funny too). We are one nation today and when we serve the flag we are truly brothers in arms, whether from North or South. While we should be proud of our respective heritages (and I think the P.C. crowd has gone too far in trying to shame Southerners to renounce their heritage) we should not re-fight the Civil War.

Anyway, thanks for a post with which I agree 1000% and thanks for your service.

"...and Lincoln, in his letters, professed his own shortage of answers in the 1850's."

You are correct. Even in his eulogy to Clay, he recognized both the economic problem and the human problem of the constructed 'racism' of emancipation. But during the war, Lincoln often pointed out the costs of the war per day/month/year vs. the value of the slaves in a given state.

IMHO, the rational answer (by 19th century realities) to slavery was a gradual, compensated, emancipation with a combination of education and resettlement to the territories and/or colonization. The fact was that the very small but politically powerful southern aristocrat class of the south prevented any serious movement in that direction in order to preserve the status quo in their favor and to the determent of 95% of the nation. They manipulated policy and opinion for no other purpose than maintaining their elite status.

The south should not blame the civil war on Lincoln (or the Abolitionists who never had one-tenth the political power of the much smaller elite planter class.) The guilt of 600,000 dead and the trials and troubles that followed, rightly belongs on the memory of the southern aristrocrats! It is revisionism in the extreme to do what DiLorenzo and the rest have done in absolving the southern aristocrats while calling it Lincoln’s needless war. The war was indeed “needless” in that the vast majority, North and South, did not want or need slavery. But the war became inevitable because of the pure arrogance, greed and refusal to compromise by that small but powerful faction. They deserve no fond memories ---- IMHO.

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