Buying the slaves was offered as part of many, many plans to end slavery (or let it taper off and die by the year 1900).
As late as 1864, the Union offered to buy all the slaves if the South would end the war. Otherwise, the South would lose its slaves anyway, not be compensated for them, and most of its territory would be ruined by war as well.
But the South wouldn’t take the offer. Emotions had gone beyond reason (and had, even in 1860).
But RuPaul won the CPAC straw poll - he must be a strong conservative! Right?
I stand corrected. It appears that the North did offer to buy them.
Okay, there is now no thread of sanity on this quote from him.
No, there are basic economic reasons such a purchase was impossible. The value of each “next” slave sold would go up geometrically. It’s like the reason we have eminent domain: while some property owners would sell, the closer you get to completing the “line,” the more each remaining owner would hold up the buyers until the final price got outrageous. But as others mentioned, the South didn’t WANT to sell, because slavery was a political and social system of oppression, NOT a “market” system of labor.
We were just discussing how contentious 1860 would have been with the election of A. Lincoln for President of the US without his name being on the ballot of any southern state.
It wasn’t just emotions — they knew that the whole economy of the South would have collapsed without slave labor.
“As late as 1864, the Union offered to buy all the slaves if the South would end the war.”
Source, please?
I’ve read an awful lot of Civil War history and never run across anything like that. Lincoln was fighting to preserve the Union and said so repeatedly. Abolition was peripheral to his interests, he wasn’t one of the Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens.
It wasn’t only emotion. Remember, the north had the advantage of an economy based on manufacturing as well as ag at that point.
The south was almost entirely dependent upon high-dollar, labor-intensive ag crops for their economy - things like tobacco and cotton. The expression “40 acres and a mule” wasn’t referring to someone growing cotton, corn or wheat on 40 acres and making a living - it referred to people growing 40 acres of tobacco. From the Civil War until the 1950’s, if you had 40 acres in tobacco, you were getting a tidy little paycheck - but you were absolutely busting your hump to do it.
So for the North to offer to buy out the South’s slaves might have ended the question of slavery, but the second question “OK, what will become of our economy?” was never addressed.
“As late as 1864, the Union offered to buy all the slaves if the South would end the war.”
Never heard that, but I assume that this condition, if it existed, was to be coincidental with the South’s surrender. Is that a correct assumption?
Can you provide some documentation for that assertion please?
The Civil War wasn’t about slavery, but states’ rights.
Lincoln only latched onto slavery in the hopes of seeing a slave revolt in the Confederacy, diverting precious troops from the front lines.
I would sincerely be interested in knowing your source for the information that the Lincoln government offered to buy the south’s slaves in 1864. I have never, in any research I have pursued, come across this statement. Additionally, I would add that Great Britain, when they banned slavery, also appropriated money for the purchase of slaves from their owners and it proved to be a very workable program. There is much truth to the assertion that the war was a struggle between those who wanted a strong central government and those who did not. Certainly, anyone who has read beyond the textbooks provided by the U.S. Department of Education knows that the war was not about slavery. The men who fought for the south were the grandsons of Revolutionary soldiers who had been brought up to believe in state’s rights and most owned no slaves. The struggle continues today, and only because those who believed in the strict interpretation of the U. S. Constitution, were defeated. I never thought I would have to make this argument on Free Republic
I wasn’t aware of that the North had offerred to buy out Southern slavehlders. Could you please point me in the direction of something on that?
Buying slaves was not an option because the treasury had no where nearly enough funds to make such purchases.
You are correct. The proposal to use funds from the sale of new land in the west to buy out the slaves was proposed as early as the 1844 presidential election by minor party candidates. William Wilberforce got slavery abolished in England in 1838 by using public funds to buy them out. Unfortunately, the Nat Turner rebellion at about the same time scared many southerners away from what would have been a logical solution.
However, there is a caveat here: The proposal was aimed at slaveholders in areas already under Union control, including the Union States where slavery was legal, notably Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 had already freed slaves in areas under Confederate control, though the immediate effect was negligible because there was no way to enforce it.
Remember, early in 1864, Lincoln's reelection was far from a sure thing. Missouri was still being harried by the Confederacy, particularly in the key western city of Independence. The Wilderness Campaign in Virginia was dragging on as a stalemate until Grant's army finally begin to turn the tide late that fall. The South was still able to mount limited invasions of the north, as the Monocacy Battlefield in Maryland attests.
There was not even a huge outcry from the Northern States to abolish slavery outside of New England and frontier states such as Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Kansas and Minnesota where the farming economic base was at a distinct disadvantage competing with slave labor agriculture from the south.
Outside of these areas, most northern states were not keen on the idea of massive immigration of freed slaves to the north. New York City, in particular, was a den of copperheads and southern sympathizers who hated Lincoln for his interference with their once profitable commerce with the south. It was also the site of the largest race riot in U.S. history just the year before.
Even Lincoln himself entertained the idea of resettling as many freed slaves as possible in Africa or in newly opened lands in the west to minimize the postwar friction which he considered inevitable.
So the point I'm making is that those 1864 proposals were made in the heat of an election campaign against a very popular former Union General who had a real chance of defeating Lincoln at the time.
You have links to prove that notion?
Also, slavery was only part of the reason for the Civil War. It mostly had to do with the South believing that the federal government was overreaching its constitutional authority and also the north was using its superior number in Congress to force unpopular taxes and legislation on the south.
Sound familiar?