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 (#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.