Remember also that the last Civil War veteran died in the 1950s. Albert Henry Woolson (February 11, 1847 – August 2, 1956), Union Army, making him also the last member of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). As the GAR had in its charter that it could only admit Union Civil War veterans, it dissolved on Woolson’s death and, barring zombies, will never exist again. However, its organizational style was replicated by the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, founded to give Spanish-American War veterans a place to congregate away from the much more numerous GAR members.
The idea was that she would care for him in his infirm old age, and get his stuff in return when he died.
Suggest that he sail a boat along the coast of Somalia, giving him a chance at investigating slavery from the inside.
It could be an absurd contention if one uses a LIFO (Last in first out) form of accounting. So that any debt paid off was the last debt that was taken out. So, in theory, unless a state paid off it’s debt in full, the last outstanding dollar of debt was tied to the first dollar of debt taken out back on day one of statehood.
That’s really a piss poor way of looking at things, though.
With that system, by analogy a 40 year old with credit card debt could say that he is STILL paying on those movies he took his dates to in college, when a more fair assertion would be that he is paying for the lawn mower he bought last year.
You couldn’t call it strictly Civil War debt, but debt issues relating to events from the war persisted well into the 20th century here in Virginia.
When West Virginia split from Virginia, they actually provided for the assumption of some of Virginia’s debts (surprisingly magnanimous.) But after the Civil War it was very difficult for the two Virginias to come to any agreement about what portion of the debt West Virginia would be responsible for, most of the debt we’re talking about were bonds and such used to finance canals and other public works.
I do not know the particulars but I’d assume Virginia was trying to liberally interpret as many of these bonds as possible and arguing they covered works that in some manner helped the counties to the west and thus should be assumed in part by West Virginia. I’m sure West Virginia tried to interpret the bonds most narrowly, and were only willing to assume the debts incurred directly for projects exclusive to West Virginia.
In the 1870s Virginia just essentially wrote off one-third of its debt and said it belonged to West Virginia, since they had been unable to come to any resolution.
None of this was resolved until a Supreme Court case in 1915 which assigned WV responsibility for $12m of debt and basically from that point on WV was making payments to Virginia to pay off this debt. It was finally paid off by 1939–a full 76 years after West Virginia had split away. I’m not sure if any States have debt issues directly related to the Civil War that go after that.
Generally State governments wouldn’t consider pension benefits “debt.” They are considered a form of liability, but they are different from debt because typically a debt instrument there is a legal obligation for the State to pay it. They’d have to probably go through some form of bankruptcy to discharge it. Pension liabilities and the like are creatures of Statute or even just administrative decision making depending on the State. While it may be an entitlement under current rules or even the law, the legislature could always change the law/the rules and your entitlement could be reduced or disappear entirely.
The Corwin Amendment, passed by Congress on the eve of the Civil War, would have prohibited the abolishment of slavery on a federal level. Granted, it was merely a last-ditch political maneuver to avoid war, but Lincoln himself was on record saying he had “no objection” to its passage. (Ironically, this amendment is still pending, and could theoretically become law if enough states decide to ratify it, but such a scenario is extremely unlikely nowadays.)
It should also be noted that Lincoln’s famous Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in states which had already seceded. The proclamation did not affect border states, such as Kentucky, which were pro-slavery but remained committed to the Union. Lincoln’s reputation as the Great Emancipator is one of the world’s greatest acts of historical revisionism – he was a politician, primarily committed to the preservation of the Union, and any issue regarding slavery was naught but a political tool to him.
AFAICT, when Lincoln freed South Calinkey’s slaves, no monetary compensation was ever offered to the slaves’ owners. I think Yankee carpetbaggers blocked any recovery until statute of limitations ran out. Who could blame South Carolinans for being bitter?
But wouldn’t that fall under the, “Fuck you, you started a war” decision of 1865?
I’m unaware of any legitimate proposal that got anywhere at all that would have freed slaves prior to the war. Especially ones that would have provided compensation to the slave owners for the loss of their animate property. He’s insisting that there were such proposals that caused South Carolina to want to secede.
There were schemes dreamed up, but nothing I’ve seen any evidence people took seriously. There were certain schemes for handling emancipation, but most of these were private initiatives. For example some small number of Southern plantation owners had developed some level of moral opposition to slavery and wanted their slaves freed. They did it in the way least painful to themselves–by freeing the slaves in their wills.
Many times the inheritors would find ways to get those slaves out of where they were and send them somewhere else. For example they might sponsor (pay for) their passage to a Central American country (this was separate from the Liberia colonization program.) Sometimes it would just be paying to have them moved out of the location where they already were.
This practice of “beneficence” was hard coded into the law in some States because it’s actually to the State’s benefit when slaves are disposed of that way after emancipation. The alternative would have been the slaves just being set loose and told to leave, which could lead to them roaming the countryside with no prospects and that’s not really something Southern political leaders wanted to see going on.
So Virginia for example, to legally emancipate your slaves at all, you had to provide funds to set them up somewhere outside of Virginia. Robert E. Lee married into money (he himself only owned a few slaves, his wife grew up on a huge plantation), and when his wife inherited her family fortune her parents’ will had provided for the emancipation of all of their slaves. However the requirement of Virginia law that those slaves be provided means to leave Virginia meant that the Lees were not able to immediately emancipate them. Robert actually interrupted his military duties to get his wife’s plantation in order so they could accumulate enough capital to execute the terms of the will–a process completed by 1862.
I can see how someone ignorant of history could confuse some of this for some sort of program being “forced” on the South, but that just didn’t happen. There is no history I’m aware of where the South was seriously threatened with emancipation schemes like your friend is talking about.
As a matter of fact we know that South Carolina seceded because Lincoln was elected, because they viewed him as a direct threat to the long term fortunes of the peculiar institution. It’s really just as simple as that. For years the South had gotten fairly pro-South President’s elected because the North was itself pretty moderate on the slavery issue (in that they mostly did away with slavery, but weren’t big on abolition.) With Lincoln’s election, you have someone who was not even a true abolitionist, but just opposed to the spread of slavery into new territory and that ended up being a line for South Carolina. They saw that as so antithetical to their way of life that they were going to have to leave the country.
You have to look at Lincoln in terms of the environment in which he found himself. He was strongly antislavery, as his work to pass the 13th Amendment shows. However, he was also a realist. If there were secession of all the slave states, including Kentucky and Maryland, then there would be no chance either to save the Union or to end slavery. He had to wait to act until a time when that action would be effective.
Not to hijack and I’ll preface this by saying that slavery was a terrible moral wrong so any comments about how bad slavery was can be saved. Anyways:
Wasn’t the south absolutely right about Lincoln’s intentions? Oh, he said that he only wanted to outlaw slavery in the territories and in new states, but would NEVER touch slavery where it existed. Why are you southern states so upset about my election? I promise I would harm the institution of slavery. The south said we don’t believe you and seceded.
Fast forward four years and Lincoln pushes through an amendment to the constitution outlawing slavery everywhere. They were absolutely right in their perception that Lincoln wanted slavery over and done with.
And a further hijack, it’s like gun control advocates who say that they only want “reasonable” regulations like background checks and magazine size restrictions. We KNOW that isn’t their intention. They don’t believe in private ownership of guns. We can’t give an inch because they will want the next inch.
As I said, the south was wrong for defending slavery, but absolutely right in their belief of Lincoln’s intentions.
This is opposite to any history I’ve read. Lincoln was selected as the GOP candidate because he was more moderate on the slavery issue than Seward; abolitionists were disappointed in his selection. The original (1862) Emancipation Proclamation was issued as a threat to free slaves in states that continued their rebellion.
By the time the 13th Amendment was proposed, a war of extreme devastation had been fought, and most of the slaves had already been freed.
I agree with everything you said. But I’ll note that then as today, a moderate is someone who is smart enough to make his views politically palpable.
If Lincoln was sincere in his belief that slavery should be kept legal where it already was, why didn’t he keep it legal? Did the “devastation” in Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey require emancipation?
Lincoln was very much opposed to slavery. In his earlier years he supported gathering up all of the slaves and shipping them back to Africa. When he realized that wasn’t going to work from a practical point of view, then he preferred just freeing them.
He supported letting the slave states keep their slaves only as a means of keeping the states together in the union. He refused to compromise on letting the new western territories become free states, and when the south seceded that removed any political reason he had for allowing slavery to continue.
Agreed. So the south was correct in asserting that Lincoln’s ultimate goal was total abolition. We don’t disagree on these points, except to say that the south was correct in their slippery slope argument.
I don’t think we can look at Lincoln’s actions during and after the Civil War as a fair predictor of what he’d have done as President if there had been no Civil War. If the South had not seceded I don’t actually see what legal mechanism would have been at Lincoln’s disposal to end slavery nationwide. The South was still a large enough portion of the country in terms of legislative representation it would have been very difficult to have passed something like the 13th Amendment through Congress–more like impossible. Additionally, without the backdrop of the Civil War I do not believe Lincoln could have gotten those border states to sign off on a slavery-ending amendment either.
Going into office Lincoln was fairly considered a moderate on slavery. He was deeply opposed to it morally and wanted it to end, but he was not in favor of forcing the issue with the South. He was opposed to its spread to new territories, because he felt slavery would “eventually” die everywhere, but the more it spread the longer it would take for that to happen.
Lincoln was a racist in line with most similar minded people of his day. His views are actually quite similar to those of Robert E. Lee–who viewed slavery as a grave moral wrong but actually felt it did more harm to the white slave holder because of the “moral corruption”, and who also felt that blacks were basically ungovernable and couldn’t easily or even feasibly coexist with whites as free persons. Where I’d say Lee and Lincoln would differ is Lee also felt slavery had been “necessary” to raise up the blacks to some level of civilization, whereas Lincoln probably would argue we’d have been better to never have brought slaves here at all.
But I think there is genuine evidence Lincoln’s views changed–he was President in a tumultuous time when opinions did change substantially. This was not a country anywhere close to approving a constitutional amendment to ban slavery in 1860, for example. After the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln still had it in his mind we needed to explore options to ship all the freedmen to Africa because he didn’t think it’d work to keep them here. But by the end of his life there is strong evidence Lincoln was no longer in favor of that, and that he wanted blacks to not only live here but to be helped to establish themselves and to be given citizenship and political rights. I guess you could argue those were Lincoln’s “secret” beliefs all along, but a lot of the quotes from Lincoln prior to the end of the Civil War make it seem a lot more likely he was a typical “moderate” Northerner of his time. Which meant morally opposed to slavery, but not wanting to fight a war over it, and certainly not someone who felt blacks were equal to whites or deserved even equality under the law to whites.
It’s worth noting the South did not even claim Lincoln was going to emancipate their slaves. Much of the rhetoric you read about involves defending the rights of their “children and grandchildren.” The Southern politicians were fully aware of how the political process worked–they knew Lincoln had no legal mechanism to emancipate their slaves. But they also knew that long term his election represented the nation finally moving against slavery on a national level, and it most likely was the predecessor to eventual moves to abolish slavery in the South.
If slavery could not expand in the territories, then each new State would dilute the South’s power in the House and the Senate. Eventually, 2/3rds of both bodies would have been able to vote in approval of a constitutional amendment to ban slavery. Once that happened, there would have been a real chance that enough of the new states carved out of then-territories could have rammed such an amendment down the throat of the South. The South also recognized at that point, presumably decades later, the non-slave States would have expanded quite rapidly in terms of territory and probably population, while the slave States would have remained “hemmed in” in the Southeast. So any attempt to resist with force at that later date would have been doomed to failure as the slave states would be a much smaller portion of the country and much worse outnumbered. [As it turns out of course, in 1860 the South was already too small relative to the rest of the country, both population-wise and industry-wise, to win a war. But it is logical that they had a better chance of beating the non-slave / border states that were Union in 1860 than they would have in 1880 when the other side would be even larger and more powerful.]
I believe the Southern slave states feared that the addition of free states to the Union would make it possible for slavery to be outlawed by Congress. They felt that Congress would be controlled by the free states and such legislation could not be prevented.
Yes, that is precisely what they feared. When the practice of admitting one free and one slave state at a time was forever ended, and all new territories converted into States came in as free States they feared eventually being outvoted and having a constitutional amendment passed over their objections.
They also feared Lincoln as chief executive, would further the (at that point) already widespread practice throughout the North of promoting slaves running away and helping them escape the South and also refusing to comply with the Fugitive Slave law or various legal obligations that (in a legal sense) absolutely required the non-slave States to arrest and send slaves back to the South.
In 1863, proclaiming emancipation in the states in rebellion was (a) a political gesture (no way to enforce) and (b) a warning that there would be punitive economic action for persisting in rebellion: we’ll make a huge amount of “asset” book-value simply cease to exist.
By 1864/65 things had already progressed to a point of “look, we’ve gone through all this in the name of freedom, we are invested in taking it all the way now, after all these dead we’ll get run out of town if we say we go back to doing it in gradually.”
As to the fears that policies were being planned that would doom the slave economy, well, yes. But the thing is that in the long term, ongoing expansion and industrialization would have still made the North, Midwest and Pacific Coast more populated and economically far more powerful than the South anyway. In the end, the South Carolinians’ “children and grandchildren” would have been forced to contend with their society stagnating to the point slavery became politically and economicaly unviable in the US South as it would have become everywhere else by the end of that century (and would have figured out on their own that sharecropping/peonage, disenfranchisement and segregation were as effective at keeping the social order in its place, and less expensive).
For all their trouble trying to prevent the potential economic calamity of abolition within a generation or two, they brought upon themselves even worse ruin within four years.