Posted on 06/23/2015 11:10:41 PM PDT by RightGeek
Edited on 06/24/2015 12:56:35 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
Washington also owned slaves.
Re: compensated emancipation.
The war eventually cost the federal government roughly $12B, counting pensions, medical care, etc. It cost about $6B over the course of the war.
The South spent something like $3B during the war, not counting the cost of the destruction nor the value of the slaves, which would probably have brought it to something near the Union total or even higher.
All the slaves in the Union, in 1860, were worth something like $3B. Total war cost, something like 8x or 10x that amount. Thus, with hindsight, it would have made a great deal of financial sense to work out a plan for compensated emancipation.
There were, however, multiple problems.
Slaveowners weren’t interested. During the early days of the war, Lincoln repeatedly proposed gradual emancipation to loyal slave sates, with assistance for compensation from the federal government. They repeatedly rejected any such notion.
We need to keep the amounts involved in some perspective. $3,000,000,000 to buy all the slaves versus $60,000,000 in the federal budget of 1860. That’s 50x the federal budget. What would 50x the federal budget be today?
Most of the money for compensation would be paid by northern taxpayers, most of whom considered slavery evil and would be unwilling to pay immense sums in taxes to pay off slaveowners. A very similar reaction to most Americans today rejecting reparations for descendants of slaves.
Nobody expected the war to last so long or cost so much.
Finally, people are odd. They can’t find money to repair a roof or do preventive maintenance on their car, but somehow they always find money (usually in much larger amounts) to repair the damage. That’s pretty much what happened here.
IOW, people aren’t always “logical.” I know that comes as a huge shock to us all!
Quite true, Pop.
However, he consistently called it a great evil throughout his life and worked as he could to limit its spread. Though he wasn’t terribly vocal about his opposition. He spent the last few years of his life putting a plan into effect whereby all his slaves could be freed after his death.
Which he did, unlike Jefferson who through extravagance and incompetence could not do so, assuming he would have liked to, because all his property, including slaves, was heavily mortgaged. TJ freed only a few slaves in his will.
Washington was thus worlds away from the fire-eaters of the 1850s who proclaimed slavery a great positive good.
Actually thousands of slave owners couldn't vote. They were black.
Realizing that negates the argument that the Confederate flag is a symbol of slavery.
Let’s go over some inconvenient (for leftists) facts:
1. In Virginia, it was illegal for an owner to give a slave his freedom. Jefferson was in the Virginia House of Burgesses ( ?) and tried to get this overturned.
2. George Washington not only granted freedom to his slaves in his will, but also gave them substantial amounts of valuable land in southeastern Pennsylvania.
3. When this nation was founded there was already debate on the morality of slavery. I would dare say that at that time, the peculiar institution was starting to die out, its demise to be accelerated from the church pulpits.
Calling it an evil but still doing it and then postponing a solution until after he was dead doesn’t sound like the deeds of a principled man.
Banning the Confederate Flag has nothing to do with slavery. That flag represents Jim Crow more than it does slavery. It was a battle flag.
Banning the flag removes one of liberalism’s most popular strawmen.
On another level (this discussion has me thinking), look at the fuss about the confederate flag. I'd much rather the focus were on stopping ISIS and Boka Haran from enslaving people today.
Maybe the Confederate flag and other symbols of pasts that are imperfect are needed in order for us to pay attention to those same horrors still existing in the modern world. Maybe the elites don't want us thinking about our slave past while they bring in labor and accept goods from countries where the workers live in horrific conditions.
Erasing and not discussing the past chains us to the same mistakes in the present and future.
Banning a flag - any flag - goes against everything this country was founded on.
OK, I’ll put on my Humanist/liberal worldview hat and begin -
Absolutely, we should remove all positive references to any people of the past, because, well, they are in the past and we are so much more enlightened today than they were then. Their ideas really have no relevance to today and we should just listen to the enlightened elite on how we should run our society.
There seem to be two common extreme viewpoints about causation of the war:
The war was NOT about slavery.
The war was ONLY about slavery.
Seems to me both positions are entirely idiotic. The war was about much more than slavery, but slavery was the root and origin of the problem and the only issue that could not be compromised.
Tariff rates could be adjusted and negotiated. But slavery would either be allowed to expand or it would not. Of course, it would have been possible to allow slavery to expand into some areas and not others, a kind of compromise. Which indeed was in effect till the 1850s.
Thereafter positions hardened. Republicans wouldn’t allow slavery in ANY of the territories, the fire-eaters insisted it must be allowed in ALL the territories, indeed that a federal slave code, enforced by federal troops, be imposed on all the territories, regardless of the wishes of the inhabitants.
Failure by northern Democrats to give in to this demand is what caused southerners to walk out (twice) on the Democratic convention, splitting the Democratic Party and ensuring Lincoln’s election.
I must admit I do get tired of the arguments between the two extreme positions. Seems to me it’s much more interesting to discuss how slavery was and was not involved.
Personally, I think one of the main factors was expressed, perhaps unintentionally, by Louis Wigfall. In one of his speeches, which I haven’t been able to locate again, he spoke of how desperately tired southerners got of constantly being taunted that their entire way of life was based on evil. Which is of course an utterly human POV.
So they wanted out so that they wouldn’t have to hear this anymore. The problem of course was that their society WAS based on an evil institution, and ignoring this truth wouldn’t make it go away. Don’t care how many southerners eloquently proclaimed the positive good of slavery, it didn’t make it true. And that position was at root entirely and completely anti-American.
Washington, like most southerners of his time, believed slavery was evil but didn’t see how to get rid of it without immense social upheaval.
Given that we’re still dealing with related issues 150 years later, it’s difficult to argue with that concern.
He also believed, again in common with most educated southerners, that the institution would gradually wither and die on its own. Given what he knew, he was entirely correct. He had no way to predict the invention of the cotton gin or the sudden development of the Cotton Kingdom.
One virtue is prudence. Washington refused to wage a bitter campaign to destroy an institution that would, he believed, fade away on its own. While I wish he’d done otherwise, I continue to admire him as a principled but imperfect man.
Much as I like to think of myself.
I agree. But I have repeatedly seen claims that the EP was a fraud and a farce because it wasn’t immediately and universally effective.
Some pro-CSA types even claim it was intentionally worded as it was to allow Union slaveowners to keep their slaves indefinitely. Despite the fact that Lincoln had been trying to persuade Union slave states to emancipate and then, after than failed, working for 13A.
The same people who claim the EP was unconstitutional will turn around and say it was a farce because Lincoln recognized he didn’t have constitutional power to touch the institution in loyal areas.
Oh Mister troll, troll, Mister StormFront Troll, please enlighten me.
Oh Mister troll, troll, Mister StormFront Troll, “collaborators” do I see.
These White children are asking you,
To “wake up” the “quislings” to the right view.
Oh Mister troll, troll, Mister StormFront Troll, please enlighten me.
Trepidation?
As the saying goes, never let them grind you down.
We should pull the plug on CNN because nobody watches it!
We should pull the plug on CNN because nobody watches it!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.