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disappointing (#118643)
by John Edward Philips on February 4, 2008 at 3:32 AM
"the alternative to the Civil War wasn’t to do nothing and wait for Southern slaveholders to decide when, if ever, they might emancipate their slaves. The alternative was to recognize that slavery was a gigantic beast, and no single strategy was likely to bring it down, so multiple strategies, including buying off slaveholders, had to be pursued"

The war didn't start because the North marched down to emancipate the slaves. The war started because seven southern states seceded and attacked the Union. Lincoln wasn't an abolitionist who wanted to forcibly emancipate slaves. He wanted to contain slavery where it existed because he thought slavery couldn't survive without expanding. The secessionists agreed with him about that, although many people, opponents and proponents of slavery alike, did not.

I had hoped to see an informed discussion of whether Lincoln's policy of containment would have brought down chattel slavery the way the policy of containment later brought down Communism. I am disappointed to find the old canard that the North went to war to abolish slavery. If so, why did the Union wait almost two years to make emancipation a war aim, and instead started out by offering a Constitutional Amendment to guarantee slavery where it existed?

This is bad history. Does the Cato Institute officially endorse it? Does HNN stand by this misrepresentation of both Union and Confederate war aims?

Re: disappointing (#118648)
by James W Loewen on February 4, 2008 at 8:52 AM
Phillips is right: this is the least competent piece I've read on HNN for years. The errors are so many, there is no point picking on one or a few. It would be a fine article to give to HS students, however, for their dissection.

Re: disappointing (#118798)
by Braine Tree on February 7, 2008 at 1:17 PM
"I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think and feel."
--Abraham Lincoln, 1864

Re: disappointing (#118807)
by Matthew Polzkill on February 7, 2008 at 3:43 PM
...countdown for all time funniest presidential zingers:

No.2 "I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think and feel."

No.1 "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monac........"

Re: disappointing (#118826)
by Braine Tree on February 7, 2008 at 9:41 PM
Abraham Lincoln had more character and wisdom in the tip of his little finger than many of his critics today have in their whole body and soul. In regard to slavery, Lincoln was tolerant where he was helpless. He knew that slavery had existed for two hundred years, that it would be impossible to uproot it overnight. He knew full well that slavery was ingrained into every facet and aspect of life in the Southern states, but he refused to accept the spread of slavery to the territories where the practice had not existed previously. As Lincoln stated in his debate with Stephen Douglas:

"The Republican party ... looks upon [slavery] as being a moral, social, and political wrong; and while they contemplate it as such, they nevertheless have due regard for its actual existence among us, and the difficulties of getting rid of it in any satisfactory way. . . . Yet having a due regard for these, they desire a policy in regard to it that looks to its not creating any more danger. They insist that it should as far as may be, be treated as a wrong, and one of the methods of treating it as a wrong is to make provision that it shall grow no larger."

Lincoln was prudently tolerant where he had to be, but his personal opposition to slavery was explicit. Radicals in his own party condemned him as a "slave-hound." Besmirch the character of this great and good man who is no longer here to defend himself, but his character and wisdom shine undimmed a century and a half after his passing!

Re: disappointing (#118827)
by Matthew Polzkill on February 7, 2008 at 10:46 PM
"Besmirch the character of this great and good man who is no longer here to defend himself"...I too will bow down to without a doubt the greatest railroad lawyer who ever lived. They never had a better employee, in fact he also spread his goodness to most American banking & mercantilist interests with an iron fist. Though, of course not everyone appreciates these things he accomplished, but we are still pygmies in comparison.

All one needs to besmirch him is look at his words, his deeds, or in a combination for instance, his sophistry in claiming executive privilege to suspend habeas corpus(which he wielded wildly) when it was clear that only the Congress had authority to. 1854, and another quote regarding the human beings he was known in private to habitually refer to as "the Africans" as if they were from another planet. When not telling howlers he could sometimes be TOO Honest Abe:

"...the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up. This I believe of the masses north and south. Doubtless there are individuals, on both sides, who would not hold slaves under any circumstances; and others who would gladly introduce slavery anew, if it were out of existence. We know that some southern men do free their slaves, go north, and become tip-top abolitionists; while some northern ones go south, and become most cruel slave-masters.

When southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery, than we; I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists; and that it is very difficult to get rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, -- to their own native land. But a moment's reflection would convince me, that whatever of high hope, (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible. If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days. What then? Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? I think I would not hold one in slavery, at any rate; yet the point is not clear enough for me to denounce people upon. What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not."

Really rose above the fray on that occasion. Some Spooner, an actual visionary and humanist, might cure you of your adulation.

Re: disappointing (#118800)
by William Dalton on February 7, 2008 at 2:31 PM
I think you're 100% right, Mr. Philips. My question has always been why the deep South states voted to secede (the later seceders did so when Lincoln demanded they go to war on their neighbors). With Dred Scott in effect, the South not only had their right to hold slaves secure, but also the right to have them returned from free states. President Lincoln could not have changed this appreciably. Likewise, with Dred Scott, the expansion of slavery westwards would have been less vital to the South. So what was the motivation for secession when it came?

Re: disappointing (#118808)
by Matthew Polzkill on February 7, 2008 at 3:51 PM
It's immaterial, the reason. ANY motivation in the world is all a body of OR an individual FREE man needs. The 1859 statement by the Wisconsin legislature virtually identical to Jefferson's Kentucky Resolve of 1798: "Resolved, That the government formed by the Constitution of the United States was not the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; but that, as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress."....(individual states),"being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of its [the Constitution's] infractions; and that a positive defiance of those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts done or attempted to be done under color of that instrument, is the rightful remedy." To speculate, about a good reason to leave, how about they had a premonition of the future and the ULTIMATE Yankee: Hillary Clinton.

Re: disappointing (#118953)
by John Edward Philips on February 12, 2008 at 2:38 AM
Lincoln ran against the Dred Scott decision, and arguably won because the Dred Scott decision alarmed those in the North who were hoping to get homestead farms in the West. There was still a considerable Jeffersonian and Jacksonian sentiment against the power of the Supreme Court to declare laws to be against the Constitution, and Lincoln actually contemplated arresting Chief Justice Taney at one point.

Re: disappointing (#118819)
by Jim M Powell on February 7, 2008 at 6:42 PM
Of course, the North went to war to save the Union, not to abolish slavery, but abolishing slavery became a justification for the war, and most people today are likely to ask how slavery could have been abolished without the Civil War. So I discussed the pros and cons of war as a military strategy for emancipation, and compared this with other antislavery strategies.

Although chattel slavery was abolished after the Civil War, the civil rights of blacks were subverted for another century, so one certainly couldn't claim that war did the job. I think it's more meaningful to ask which strategy or combination of strategies would have have been most likely to secure equal rights for the former slaves and their descendants.

One big problem with the military strategy, particularly if one side wins a decisive victory and is able to humiliate the losers, is that the losers are likely to want revenge. There will be an uncontrollable backlash. There was a backlash in Europe following the Napoleonic conquests, a backlash in Germany following the imposition of the vindictive Versailles Treaty, on and on.

Moreover, a number of times Americans have gotten into wars and then gone home. Certainly that was the case after the Civil War. After the losers were outraged by the death, destruction and humiliation, the Northerners went home and let the losers take it out on the former slaves. Nobody could be counted on to protect the former slaves.

Well, suppose Northerners didn't go home. Suppose they occupied the South for decades, maybe up to the present. What might have happened? We might have ended up with chronic violence such as has plagued Northern Ireland, with local guerrillas targeting the occupation forces, and hatred continuing from one generation to the next.

War isn't a shortcut for achieving equal rights or any other social reform that needs widespread acceptance. War is the long way around.

I believe the experience of emancipation in the Western Hemisphere suggests that persistent application of multiple antislavery strategies would have worked in the United States, as elsewhere, if the Civil War had been avoided, and equal rights probably would have been secured decades sooner.

Re: disappointing (#118949)
by John Edward Philips on February 12, 2008 at 1:07 AM
War was not Lincoln's strategy of emancipation, the Emancipation Act was his strategy of war. By 1863 Lincoln didn't have much choice. It was either emancipate the slaves, or lose the war and/or election. It worked. Before the Act, and indeed for several months before it took full effect in breaking the back of the southern economy, the Confederacy was winning.

Lincoln's original choice of a strategy had been containment. If you wanted to discuss Lincoln's strategy for ending slavery that's what you should have discussed. It was the Confederacy that forced Lincoln into the choice of immediate abolition or surrender, and many loyal Unionist southerners considered secessionists "practical abolitionists" for having forced Lincoln's hand. They were right, in my opinion.

Americans went home after the Civil War, you say? Excuse me, but Americans WERE home IN the Civil War, which was what the whole thing was really about.

Union troops did not move north after the Compromise of 1877, rather most of the black units which had been used to garrison the south after the war were disbanded, with a few moved west into the Indian Wars, where they became known as Buffalo soldiers. The black Union veterans were left to the tender mercies of the Bourbon restorationists and the rest, as they say, is history.

Good history, I'm afraid, is what your essay above this is not. Please try to familiarize yourself with facts, as well as the extensive literature about whether or not containment would have put unbearable strains on slavery. Did slave owners really need to convert their chattel into capital improvements, as some at the time suggested? Could the mining frontiers of the west have absorbed the slave population? These are the real historical questions.

As for civil rights for the ex-slaves, immediate emancipation put that on the national agenda, at least for a while, and into the Constitution. Gradual emancipation wouldn't have done either one. Equal rights for blacks in the Union certainly wasn't Lincoln's intention in 1861.

Re: disappointing (#119008)
by Jim M Powell on February 13, 2008 at 9:29 PM
I think the biggest mistake was going to war to save the Union. From the standpoint of securing equal rights for blacks as quickly as possible, I think a good case can be made that prospects would have been much better by letting the South secede peacefully.

George Washington was a great man, but saying that secession was unthinkable because he wrote a letter doesn't really address the issues. Hey, we seceded from the British Empire, didn't we?

Anybody with a modest amount of business experience knows that it's often better to let a counter-party out of a contract if the relationship isn't working. For example, if you hired somebody to do a job for two years, and they want to quit after one, you might be able to force them to continue working, but if they don't want to do it, how good a job are they likely to do for you? Better to go through another search and find somebody else who is highly motivated to do a good job.

Is it unthinkable for a married couple to get divorced if they're constantly fighting? What's the point staying together, even if they vowed to be a couple forever?

What's the point of forcing different peoples to remain in the state state when they really don't want to be together, regardless of legalities? So we can have a bigger country? Many small countries have much higher per capita wealth than resource-rich bigger countries. Particularly when there's relatively free trade, one doesn't need political control of an area to gain access to resources there.

R.J. Rummel, a political scientist who has compiled statistics on the number of people killed in various wars, reported that especially during the past century, far more people have been killed in wars WITHIN STATES than in wars BETWEEN STATES. We tend to think of World War I, World War II and other wars between states as the biggest killers, but in fact far more people were killed by their own governments or in civil wars. Hundreds of millions of people have been killed by the Soviet government, the communist Chinese government, governments in Cambodia and Vietnam, in Africa, etc. during the past half-century.

If we need a further reminder about the trouble that can come from forcing people together, there's Iraq. The trouble intensified after World War I when Winston Churchill cobbled together the Iraqi state with Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiites. Previously, they had pretty much gone their separate ways, but with a centralized state, whoever controlled the power could disrupt the lives of everybody else, and now they are at each other's throats more than ever.

So I believe Unionists were asking for trouble to insist that the North and South remain in the same state. As we know, there was no end of trouble, and it was getting worse. Slave hunters foraged freely throughout the North for runaway slaves and free blacks alike. Southern senators blocked antislavery action sought by Northern senators. The South became increasingly desperate after California was admitted as a free state, and there weren't many good prospects for additional slave states. It became increasingly difficult to avoid war.

I believe war could have been avoided if both sides feared war enough. Europeans avoided fighting as long as possible during the 1930s, despite the rise of dictators, because the World War I bloodbath was still a nightmarish memory. The United States and the Soviet Union avoided a hot war despite many provocations, because both knew it could have been catastrophic.

At the very least, avoiding the Civil War and the killing, destruction and humiliation of losers meant avoiding an uncontrollable lust for revenge that was an almost inevitable consequence of that war. This phenomenon had occurred many times after previous wars, so it shouldn't have been a surprising hazard of warfare, but by 1860 in the United States terrible wars seemed long ago and far away. Northeners thought that since they won the war, they could go down South, take over the state governments, tell the Southerners want to do, and that would be that. Some of these Northerners wanted to eradicate slavery, some wanted to punish the Southerners, and others seemed most interested in loot, but after a few years they began to go back North to their homes, leaving the embittered Southerners to harass and murder blacks. The war intensified hatred all around, and nobody could be counted on to protect the former slaves and their descendants whose civil rights were subverted for another century.

It was hard enough to overcome racism without adding bad feelings intensified by the killing, destruction and humiliation of war. The Civil War made it harder to get to a point where blacks and whites could live together peacefully in a free society.

If the South had been permitted to secede peacefully, the Confederacy would have come under increasing pressure, regardless how much the Deep South slaveholders tried to hunker down. The politics of fugitive slave law enforcement probably would have changed. It no longer would have been politically acceptable for mayors, governors and the president of the United States to support Southern slave hunters who came North to haul away peaceful people, especially after the South rejected and insulted the United States by seceding. I expect runaway slaves would have been safer when they crossed the U.S. border and wouldn't have had to go hundreds of miles farther north to Canada, not because Northeners loved blacks (they certainly didn't), but because of the nationalist reaction against the Confederacy.

The Confederacy would probably have put up barbed wire, put up walls and ordered soldiers along the long border with the U.S. to shoot on sight any runaways trying to cross, which would surely have become a huge public relations disaster with political and economic consequences.

Because a safe border was likely to be be much closer (than Canada), the number of runaways from the border states was likely to increase, and the population of slaves in these states was already declining because of the demand for slaves in the Deep South. The lower the population of slaves, the less of a stake border state residents had in slavery.

The population of the United States continued to outstrip that of the Confederacy, in part because the overwhelming percentage of immigrants settled in the United States and in part because twice as many people left the Confederacy for the United States than left the United States for the Confederacy. Larger populations mean larger markets, more people to work in fields and factories, helping the economy expand -- and more people to settle in new states.

The U.S. economy was industrializing much more rapidly than the Confederacy, and the thriving centers of commerce, finance and trade were in the United States. As a result, the United States became an ever more powerful magnet for whites as well as blacks from the Confederacy, and the Confederacy probably wouldn't have been any more successful trying to stop the flow than mainland China in its efforts to stop its people from fleeing to Hong Kong, or East Germany in its efforts to keep people from fleeing to West Germany.

In March 1862, Lincoln proposed compensated emancipation, an antislavery strategy that figured in the comparatively peaceful emancipations that occurred in the British Caribbean and in Brazil (the largest slave market in the Western Hemisphere). But border state congressional representatives blocked the proposal, and Lincoln felt he couldn't push too hard because by that time he was in the middle of the Civil War, and he didn't want them to bolt to the Confederacy. Border state representatives knew Lincoln needed all the support he could get for the war, so they refused to compromise on slavery, and he couldn't do anything about it.

Most people still seem to believe that the civil rights of blacks would have been subverted up to the 1960s whether the Civil War occurred or not, simply because the Southerners were terrible people. Well, many were terrible, but the situation became much worse and much more difficult to deal with because of the killing, destruction and humiliation of the war. I haven't heard anybody who was pro-Civil War explain how to deal with the consequences -- the uncontrollable lust for revenge that led to the wholesale abuse of blacks, including the effective revival of Black Codes, the exclusion of blacks from state-controlled public schools, compulsory segregation on railroads, intimidation to deny the right to vote, and the refusal to enforce laws against murder when blacks were shot or lynched, on and on.

Comparing the experience of other Western emancipations offers a reminder that the way things worked out isn't the only way they could have worked out or the best way they could have worked out. People make different choices, and consequences can be very different. Minimizing the violence involved in emancipation (or any other kind of social reform) makes it easier to get people to the point where they can live together in peace.

now I get it (#119516)
by John Edward Philips on February 25, 2008 at 4:56 AM
"most people today are likely to ask how slavery could have been abolished without the Civil War"

In other words, Americans are so ignorant about their own history that you think you can lie to them and get away with it. Maybe you can to the Cato Institute and the public at large, but not here on HNN. Give it up.

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