Slavery and Confederate Nationalism

Big Government ^ | 03/21/2010 | Paul A. Rahe

[livius]

I have read that, too. I don’t know if the idea of buying and liberating the slaves or of liberating them and compensating the former owners was ever discussed at the time, but it would probably have solved the problem and in fact also would have prevented the economic collapse that meant that large parts of the South would sink into severe poverty for generations.

[Lysandru]

I recently read an economic analysis that suggested that the cost of the U.S. government buying and liberating all slaves in the U.S. would have been roughly equal to the cost of the Civil War (without the long-term negative effects).

This idea was actually proposed by some at the time. It's too bad that it didn't fly politically. But then you would have had to convince the southern third of the country to up end their entire society.

[K-Stater]

Emancipation meant doing away with slavery where it existed. The slaves were not going to stay on the property after they were emancipated, and in fact they didn’t: they flooded into cities where there was a need for labor, since few of the male former slaves had any skills. This was the source of the many black-majority cities in the South.

OK, then prior to the Civil War nobody in government was talking about emancipation. Lincoln and the Republicans weren't naive. Their goal was to limit it to where it existed because they knew they lacked the authority to end it.

[K-Stater]

I recently read an economic analysis that suggested that the cost of the U.S. government buying and liberating all slaves in the U.S. would have been roughly equal to the cost of the Civil War (without the long-term negative effects).

The fact that the government would be willing to buy and liberate the slaves doesn't mean anything without a willing seller, and there is no evidence that the slave owners were interested in selling their property to begin with. In fact Lincoln did propose compensated emancipation in the Union slave states and it was a dismal failure.

[Sherman Logan]

But then you would have had to convince the southern third of the country to up end their entire society.

You would also have to convince the rest of the country they should cough up the money, which would have required an expansion of the government roughly equivalent to that of the war itself.

There were roughly 4M slaves in the USA in 1860. A reasonable price of $1000 each adds up to $4000 million.

This was at a time when the entire federal budget for 1860 was $60M.

Does not compute.

Might have made sense to cough up the money anyway, on moral if not necessarily economic savings grounds, but this of course runs up against two major failings in human nature.

1. People naturally tend to skimp on maintenance and prevention because "they don't have the money," but invariably come up with (much more) money to repair what fails because of this lack of maintenance.

2. Almost nobody, North or South, expected a long and bloody war. So why pay an immense amount of money to avoid one?

[Sherman Logan]

I find it fascinating that Alex Stephens rejected the natural rights language of the Declaration on the grounds that “modern science” had shown it to be invalid.

Sound familiar?

[Georgia Girl 2]

Lets don’t leave out economics from this discussion. Lincoln was desparate to keep the South in the Union for the taxes on cotton which he couldn’t give up. His plan for the blacks was to either ship them all off to colonize a place in South America or parts unknown. He had no intention of leaving them in the USA.