Completely false. The amount of money it would take to buy the slaves and release them would have been less than the cost of the civil war. Check out this link:
It was completely feasible. As far as your point about who pays for it, the federal government would. Of course it would have to be taxed, but all Americans were partly responsible for the institution of slavery, directly or indirectly, and you can be sure this course of action would be much more favorable to any citizen than Civil War, which would kill over 600,000 men and tear the country apart.
Racism has always existed in human history. But certain governmental policies can exacerbate it. For example, we should be a color blind society that doesn’t even think about race in judging another person’s character or actions. But by keeping race at the forefront of discussions and national group think that continuously plays one group of Americans against another, it inflames racial tensions. When any group feels that another is getting special benefits, it breeds resentment.
As far as the Civil War is concerned, if you lived in the South (whether you owned slaves or not) and the Northern Army massacred and maimed your entire family, destroyed your property and afterwards, blamed you (and the entire region of the South) for all the ills of slavery (when the North was very much culpable as well), it would naturally breed hatred and resentment. This in part pushed groups of southerners to commit heinous acts of violence against blacks that continued for decades and led to a long lasting, even irreconcilable division among people in this country. There is no excuse for any acts of violence perpetrated against anyone. But we shouldn’t be blind to the way in which actions have consequences. The way slavery should have been ended is this way:
Admit a united culpability for the institution of slavery and establish a peaceful and orderly phasing out of slavery by purchasing the slaves and releasing them.
Any true historian would admit there were plans to this effect back then, but Lincoln ignored them. He was more interested in waging a war against the American people than getting rid of slavery. Don’t forget many many innocent people were killed in the South AND the North because of Lincoln’s refusal to consider alternatives. If we had followed my suggestion, we would not have had the lingering racism and bigotry (at least not to the degree), and black people would have been truly free much sooner (civil rights and so forth). Remember, more can be accomplished in peace than in war.
Doesn’t this rely on hindsight, though? Today, we may go back through the records and see how much the Civil War cost in terms of money, men, and material. But at the time, no-one really knew how much it would cost either side in those terms. You can have a guess, going in, at roughly how much you think you may lose, and whether it’ll end up pretty pyhrric or wildly successful. But it’s not as though Lincoln had those figures you post to compare against - he did not know, in advance, how much the war would cost. It’s unrealistic to claim that historical figures should have acted in accordance with our fullest understanding, today, of those events leading up to and those after an event.
This is ridiculous. Go back and reread the links I provided in the first page. There were plenty of chances to broker a deal with the South and to offer alternatives to war. War was not inevitable.
Whether you choose to deny reality or not, the shots fired at Fort Sumter were like the Gulf of Tonkin incident that justified Vietnam. They were a desired provoked response that Lincoln could use to justify a war he wanted to engage in. These are the facts.
Your ludicrous comparison between slavery and gun rights insults our intelligence. The second amendment is explicit in the fact that people have the right to own a gun. Slavery was an admitted evil by an increasing majority of the Country at the time. Its time was running out anyone. The sticking point was that the Souths economy was highly dependent upon slave labor. There was actually willingness by many Southern states to negotiate with Lincoln among their many grievances (economics and tax policy being significant in addition to slavery). Lincoln was the one who refused to negotiate or work out a peaceful arrangement.
Considering Lincoln himself was a racist, it is absurd to believe that his motivation was pure and noble while the South was just a bunch of backwards white supremacists (there were plenty of them but many more moderate citizens with different grievances and even many abolitionists among them).
Seriously, all I ask is that you guys think about the complexities of this very important period of our history. Don’t just parrot the simplified, dumbed down history our public schools teach Elementary School students. There is always an agenda behind the way history is presented and there is constant revisionism going on. As I said earlier Civil War history is presented the way it is to discourage anyone from thinking about the wisdom of pursuing a Republican form of government as envisioned by our founders (nearly all abolitionists, by the way).
Every great president we are taught to admire has been either a war president or someone who massively expanded federal government power. Lincoln, FDR, Woodrow Wilson and others we are told are the greatest presidents. Why not the presidents who pursued peace? Why not pick the presidents who defended civil liberties and fought for balanced budgets and fiscal sanity? Why can’t they be considered the greatest presidents?
That’s completely irrelevant to the point that’s been made: the government could not have afforded, financially or economically, to buy out the slaves. That’s without even accounting for the cost of reconstruction.
The cost of buying out the slaves would have been more than the entire GDP of the United States, which prior to the Civil War was about four to five billion dollars. The entire federal budget was less than a hundred million dollars a year. A slave buyout was not an option. It was completely impossible.
That the war ended up costing more (and that’s debateable) is interesting, and irrelevant. Had Lincoln suggested to Congress tha the U.S. free the slaves by spending more money than existed in the entire country, in fact more money than had ever spent on everything the U.S. government had ever bought in its entire history up to that point, he would rightly have been laughed off.
Completely false. I already posted this link, but here it is for your benefit:
The cost of buying the slaves was roughly identical to the cost of the war and when you factor in the cost in human life, the property destroyed, etc, a buyout would have been cheaper.
And I suggest you read up a bit more about the economic feasibility of a slave buyout (not bailout). Several people have pointed out that a buyout would not have been possible, and I have proved them wrong. It was certainly possible. We cannot know how it would have turned out in the end had Lincoln pursued other means than war, but we do know that every other industrialized nation got rid of slavery without a civil war. Do you at least agree that, if at all possible, abolishing slavery peacefully would have been a superior outcome than what did happen?
I don’t think we’re ever going to agree on this. Particularly if you don’t think it’s a problem that the cost of a buyout would have been larger than the national GDP.
I don’t see how a peaceful abolition was possible.
You are exactly right. This is what I have been saying all along. We can all agree that slavery is immoral and can never be okay under any circumstances. But the concepts of states rights and secession are not immoral. The reasons why they may been invoked could be immoral. So, especially today, people are inferring that any use of nullification or states rights are inherently pushed by racists and backwards hicks is ridiculous.
You are right to point out the states nullifying the Alien and Sedition Act was a noble and just use of States Rights. Many abolitionists used states rights to further their goals of equality and justice. So, as far as the Civil War is concerned,
It was the proper and just thing for Americans to fight against slavery (not necessarily in open war, but philosophically). It was not proper to support ulterior motives, as Lincoln did, to abolish the notion of secession and states rights. As I’ve said before, Lincoln did not care about ended slavery when the Civil War started.
So, I can envision a time not to far from now, when Americans will need the use of States Rights to establish independence from an overreaching and abusive Federal Government and to nullify unconstitutional federal laws. And I certainly don’t want to hear this bullshit about how those of us who would support such measures are racists and bigots. That is why there has never been a more important time to understand the Civil War and its implications. To just claim it was only about slavery stops anyone from actually digging deeper in the history.
My argument here is not to defend the South, but to criticize the North (Lincoln, specifically). Those who seceded due to slavery were wrong. But there were abolitionists in the South and there were plenty of racists in the North. So many people were killed in this war needlessly. My point is that there WERE peaceful means to end slavery, Lincoln just didn’t pursue them. And, given that Lincoln was not against slavery, his motivations were very suspect. The North had all the power. It was their prerogative in how the dealt with this issue. This may be controversial, but my own opinion was that we could have let the Southern states secede and work peacefully to abolish slavery and entice them to again rejoin the Union, even if it meant conceding tax policy or other economic concerns which the South had issues with. Anything would have been better than war. And historically, slavery was on its way out. Industrialization was making slave labor economically inviable. It seems to me, the South was simply stubborn in supporting an institution after the writing was on the wall. Even secession didn’t justify war.
Its not like the conditions for black men in this country were dramatically increased right after the war was over. They suffered through decades of abuse. Even if slavery lingered on for another five-ten years in the South, during which time the Abolitionists and the North worked to either buy out the slaves, or entice the southern states back into the union, the outcome would have been superior to what transpired.
The South was wrong, but the North was also wrong in how they handled the situation. Lincoln could have resolved to provide leadership and the voice of persuasion to achieve emancipation, instead he pursued a course of war which tore the country apart and actually eroded the liberties of all Americans through the elimination of States Rights and the creation of a more powerful and authoritarian central government.
sigh We already talked about the cost of a buyout vs the cost of the war. It’s not that far back in this thread.
Besides, you still are left with paying for Reconstruction. That’s a topic you have completely avoided so far in this thread, with Point 5 in your OP going so far as to practically deny it ever happened. Who pays for Reconstruction?
What makes you think that the Confederate States, who seceeded because Lincoln was elected President, before he was even sworn in, would have been willing to in good faith deal with Lincoln about buying out their slaves?
How, without a war, is Lincoln going to be able to get Congress to pass taxes increasing the Federal Government’s budget several times over?
Like some other people had said, it wasn’t politically possible. Even if southerners had agreed to it, there’s no way that Congress would have agreed to spend the money. Even though you and I know that it would have been cheaper than the Civil War, people wouldn’t have known that in 1861, and Congress wouldn’t have agreed to raise 5 billion dollars, which was a whole lot of money back then. In fact, when Lincoln tried it in the border states, the plan was rejected utterly, both by slaveholders in the border states and Congress.
Also, remember, most of the southern states seceded even before Lincoln was sworn in. So by the time he became President, the seceded states weren’t in any mood to listen to anything he had to say.
Today, by the way, is Emancipation Day in the District of Columbia, which celebrates the one time that compensated emancipation actually worked. On this date in 1862, Lincoln signed a law freeing the slaves in the District of Columbia and paying their owners.
A reminder here that the “course of war” was initiated by the South.
The Civil War is also regarded by some historians as perhaps the most justified and least avoidable war in history. I suggest you broaden your reading.
“States rights” may be an acceptable rallying cry for certain people who’ve forgotten Civil War and civil rights history. Whatever traction it gains will vanish the instant people start trying to rip up the Union with that justification.
And to add to what Captain Amazing said, most people thought the Civil War would be over quickly, as in a matter of weeks or at most months. The idea of a slave buyout across the South would have been rejected as intolerable interference by southern slaveholders, and dismissed as horrifically costly and morally unacceptable by notherners.
You never did answer, so I truly am curious, are you really unaware of the illogic between these beliefs of yours? Pretend for a moment that a slave buyout and subsequent reconstruction of the South was a feasible possibility, Lincoln had been elected campaigning on a platform promoting this, the South didn’t secede over it, Lincoln wasn’t laughed out off the floor when he asked Congress to taxably raise more money to do this than as RickJay said existed in the country or had been spent by the Federal government in its entire history and that taxing this amount of money didn’t lead to a Civil War in another form anyway - would you be praising Lincoln? I rather think you’d be here ranting about him being one of the vilest and evil presidents for his fiscal insanity and deviousness in establishing a much more powerful central government in violation of the Founders wishes using abolition as a cover.
First of all, I don’t think I’ve said anything here that I didn’t back up with facts and links. Doesn’t the verifiable fact that Lincoln was a racist make you think that maybe he had other motives to start the Civil War? (duh).
Why don’t you tell me which “dubious” assertions I have made in this thread? I can defend everything I’ve said thus far, but not without knowing what the hell you are talking about.
As to your second point, its perfectly acceptable to have reasonable disagreements over whether or not the civil war bred increasing hostility towards black people. I believe it did, and I am not alone in this assessment. Even people who were not overtly bigoted before the war used black people as a scapegoat to justify their anger and resentment. But even taking that out of the equation, obviously a legacy of the civil war is the continued divisiveness of our politics that continues to this day. It is unnecessary and could have been avoided.
Right, you make some good points. I’m sure they didn’t know exactly how much the war would cost. But it was more than just money however. The moral argument against war was the strongest. The constitutional argument against much of what Lincoln did during the war was not in question. Obviously there were many who supported the North who could not be expected to understand the repercussions of this conflict and I don’t blame them one bit, especially as they considered it the fastest way to end slavery.
But, we do have the advantage of hindsight. Basically my whole argument boils down to the fact that if we would have pursued an orderly buyout of the slaves we would have avoided so much hardship and unintended consequences for so many people. Couple that with the fact that Lincoln had ulterior motives for war and committed endless unconstitutional acts in the waging of that war, and I think my argument is pretty strong.