I'm rereading Robert Fogel's titanic work on slavery, Time on the Cross. The work was incredibly controversial when it came out, because it completely overturned a lot of the standard economic claims about slavery. Here's the list from the first chapter of the revisions it made to the standard model:
1. Slavery was not a system irrationally kept in existence by plantation owners who failed to perceive or were indifferent to their best economic interests. The purhcase of a slave was generally a highly profitable investment which yielded rates of return that compared favorably with the most outstanding investment opportunies in manufacturing.2. The slave system was not economically moribund on the eve of the Civil War. There is no evidence that economic forces alone would have soon brought slavery to an end without the necessity of a war or some orther form of political intervention. Quite the contrary; as the Civil War approached, slavery as an economic system was never stronger and the trend was toward even further entrenchment.
3. Slaveowners were not becoming pessimistic about the future of their system during the decade that preceded the Civil War. The rise of the secessionist movement coincided with a wage of optimism. On the eve of the Civil War, slaveholders anticipated an era of unprecedented prosperity.
4. Slave agriculture was not inefficient compared with free agriculture. Economies of large-scale operation, effective management, and intensive utilization of labor and capital made southern slave agriculture 35 percent more efficient than the northern system of factory farming.
5. The typical slave field hand was not lazy, inept, and unproductive. On average he was harder-working and more efficient than his white counterpart.
6. The course of slavery in the cities does not prove that slavery was incompatible with an industrial system or that slaves were unable to cope with an industrial regimen. Slaves employed in industry compared favorably with free workers in diligence and efficiency. Far from declining, the demand for slaves was actually increasing more rapidly in urban areas than in the countryside.
7. The belief that slave-breeding, sexual exploitation, and promiscuity destroyed the black family is a myt. The family was the basic unit of social organization under slavery. It was to the economic interest of planters to encourage the stability of slave families and most of them did so. Most slave sales were either of whole families or of individuals who were at an age when it would be normal for them to have left the family.
8. The material (not psychological) conditions of the lives of slaves compared favorably with those of free industrial workers. This is not to say that they were good by modern standards. It merely emphasizes the hard lot of all workers, free or slave, during the first half of the nineteenth century.
9. Slaves were exploited in the sense that part of the income which they produced was expropriated by their owners. However, the rate of expropriation was much lower than has generally been presumed. Over the course of his lifetime, the typical slave field hand received about 90% of the income he produced.
10. Far from stagnating, the economy of the south grew quite rapidly. Between 1840 and 186, per capita income increased more rapidly in teh South than in th rest of the nation. By 1860 the South attained a level of per caita income which was high by the standard of the time. Indeed, a country as advanced as Italy did not achieve the same level of per-capita income until the eve of World War II.
As you can see, there was something in there for everyone to get angry about, and they did. The debates are still going on, though the work has held up remarkably well.
I bring this up for a few reasons. First, everyone should read the book. Second, it reminded me of the definitional problems of feminism.
Bear with me. Most traditional feminists would say that being pro-life is an automatic disqualifier for calling yourself a feminist. I find this argument dramatically uncompelling. Fetal personhood is a quasi-empirical value judgement that should not be made for instrumental reasons--we can't decide that six year old children aren't persons simply because this would possibly make it easier to advance female equality.
What Fogel brings to mind is that the argument about the personhood of slaves was a similar sort of instrumental argument. Recognizing their personhood would in fact have destroyed a highly functioning economic system; therefore, many people advanced the argument that slaves couldn't be persons. This is rubbish.
To be sure, it's obvious to me that slaves are persons, while I find the personhood of fetuses deeply problematic. But I don't think it's facially ludicrous to declare that they are persons. To me that means that "Feminists for Life" cannot, as I've heard declared, be an oxymoron; it seems perfectly possible to embrace all the other tenets of whatever you want to define as feminism, and also regretfully believe that since fetuses are persons, we cannot embrace this particular means of women's liberation.
The third thought is sort of related: there's a lot of instrumentalism in arguments about the Civil War in some libertarian circles. The Civil War, in my humble opinion, makes it impossible to jointly hold two beliefs dear to libertarian hearts:
1) No country should ever wage aggressive war
2) States (or for that matter, smaller geographic units) have the right to secede from the polity if it stops meeting their needs.
The South posed no immediate military threat to the North; they wanted to leave the Union, not invade it. If you don't think that, say, Saddam's awful behavior posed a valid moral reason to invade*, then it's hard to make an argument that we had a right to invade to end slavery. Even a prudential argument doesn't work very well on this metric--we killed more confederates than Iraqis both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population, and the south was far more economically devastated by the war than Iraq will have been.
I reject proposition one and say that aggressive wars can be justified on humanitarian grounds. Prudentially, they probably rarely work, but as a matter of moral theory, okay, it was worth having the Civil War to get rid of slavery. Yes, even if we did it under the penumbra of "preserving the union" rather than "ending slavery".
Others bite the bullet and say, okay, we didn't have the right to invade the South. This is logically consistent, but it leaves you with the problem of saying that aggressive wars are worse than slavery. There is thus a largish cottage industry among those who hold this view in claiming that slavery would have ended anyway.
Time on the Cross is a pretty thorough refutation of this belief. Slavery was not an economically inefficient institution that was withering away. It's doubtful that we could have had our moral cake and eaten it too. Certainly, the book makes it clear to me that the very least we could have hoped for was decades more of slavery.
*(I am leaving aside the now-obvious, and arguably then-obvious, fact that the war was prudentially undesireable, and addressing only the belief that aggressive wars are definitionally morally illegitimate.)
The fundamental problem with your premise is #2. Do I really have to explain it to you?
The south didn't pose a military threat to the Union, granted, but they were an existential threat. If states could seceed (or even threaten to seceed) whenever they didn't like some part of federal law, that law becomes effectively meaningless.
If you can demonstrate that Iraq posed a similar threat, I have no problems with your analogy.
I'm not familiar with the book, so I don't know to what extent he goes into further detail, but I have a couple thoughts.
Point 1 is a non-sequitar. The slave-driven cotton industry was profitable compared to manufacturing. That's nice to know. However, the relevant comparison is whether or not the slave-driven cotton industry would have been profitable compared to a cotton industry based on free labor. It may or may not have been, but the point as stated above frames the question incorrectly.
To that end, point 2 unwisely lumps together "war or some other form of political intervention." How about economic sanctions? The North certainly could have (and probably would have) imposed them short of war, and Britain had an anti-slavery movement that was politically active. Without export markets for cotton, the Southern cotton industry would have become considerably less profitable.
"There is thus a largish cottage industry among those who hold this view in claiming that slavery would have ended anyway.
Time on the Cross is a pretty thorough refutation of this belief"
It seems likely to me that we would have gone the coarse of Brazil which ended Slavery without war in the 1880's.
I think that the war was justified to free the slaves, but I think there is a pretty good case that slavery would have ended peacefully in a couple of decades as it did in Brazil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Brazil
Also, FWIW (very little, I suspect, since I have a Y chromosome) I agree with you about feminism.
Both your "the slave system was doing so great!" arguments, above, and your "what cause could the USA have had to invade the CSA", lower, ignore the question of whether the West was to be open to slavery or not. Regardless of what one thinks the return on an investment in a slave was, or what one thinks was happening to the fertility of the soil in cotton territory, the proximate cause of secession was Lincoln's promise to ban slavery in the territories, and the CSA did claim far more territory than the actual states that seceded (including WV, which seceded from VA), and clearly the value of a capital good, like a slave, is affected by the predicted demand for the good, which in turn is affected by laws banning it's use.
I haven't read the book, but going by what you list (and reading more about it) I wouldn't take it as necessarily being right.
I'm not libertarian at all, but I think slavery was much less resilient than he's indicating. It'd almost have to be or it would've survived longer in the Americas than it did. Also, judging by what I read of the book, he is kind of trusting the word of the slave-owners on the slave's treatment. If this is so I conceed this might be inevitable, they were the most involved people to write anything on the matter, but I don't think it makes for any kind of clear refutation of anything. At the very least slaves had lower rates of literacy or ability for upward social mobility than industrial workers.
I don't often comment to say I agree with you completely, but this time I do. Kids, don't try quoting Fogel's point in history class: you won't like the result. (I know: I made some of the same arguments myself once based on another book.)
Megan, it's also interesting to compare your points 1 and 2 with Pat Buchanan's recent WWI revisionism.
There are some who argue that aggressive wars are never justified. There are a much larger number who say that currently -- but whose views change abruptly when the proposed aggressive war is for something that they support. Genocide (e.g. Darfur) leaps to mind, but is hardly the only cause.
The fact is, most aggressive wars have not been justified on the basis of the left's pet causes. As you say, the Civil War was justified on "preserve the Union" rather than "end slavery." But if someone did manage to get a President and Congress to go along with an aggressive war for a liberal cause, you'd see a major reversal of left and right support and opposition. Some few on the left would maintain their total pacifism, just as some on the right are currently isolationists. But overall, the arguments made may based on aggression or not, but the motivations on both sides are almost totally different.
To this day, there are slaves in various places around the world. Yes, there are some differences between the businesses that use slaves today and those that used slaves in the American South 140 years ago, and clearly there are social and legal differences (slavery today is not nearly as open in most places, and it is rarely part of the formal institutions) but the continuation of slavery makes me reluctant to assume that it would have simply gone away rather than changing form. Maybe it would have gone away in response to changing economic circumstances, but we can't rule out the possibility that slavery would have changed form and persisted.
I don't know much about slavery in Brazil, but I'm skeptical about claims that Southern slavery would have ended on its own, in a more or less peaceful fashion, and not just because it was still economically profitable. It was interwoven into the very fabric of Southern society. It formed not just the foundation of the South's agricultural economy, but also the basis--the bottom rung--of its social hierarchy. It was a socio-economic caste system, and pretty near every man was bound and determined to make sure that those below him on the ladder stayed there, especially the slaves. Any disruption in the system from the bottom up would threaten the economic and social position of thos above. The economics of slavery might have turned as the decades went on, but I'm not sure that emancipation is logical outcome of that scenario.
Um no, that’s not quite true. The South fired on a fort owned by the United States and did in fact invade part of the United States in the form of Fort Sumter. In which case all of the discussion about whether the North had the right to invade the South is rendered moot by the fact that the South started the Civil War by firing the first shots.
Others bite the bullet and say, okay, we didn't have the right to invade the South. This is logically consistent, but it leaves you with the problem of saying that aggressive wars are worse than slavery.
Isn't that a distinct possibility? Isn't that, just like the personhood question, a quasi-value judgement about whether the suffering of slaves is likely to be more or less than the suffering likely to be inflicted by waging an aggressive war? You can argue whether someone who decides against supporting an aggressive war in a specific instance is right to do so, but I don't think it's the logical problem that you're implying it is.
Also, maybe I'm just being a schlep here, but I'm left wondering:
1. The purhcase of a slave was generally a highly profitable investment which yielded rates of return that compared favorably with the most outstanding investment opportunies in manufacturing.
2. Over the course of his lifetime, the typical slave field hand received about 90% of the income he produced.
How does statement 1 square with statement 2? Was the initial investment that low? If so, why didn't a higher percentage of people own slaves? Or was it just the fact that you could buy two slaves and breed them into 4,5, or 6 over the course of several years?
The war may technically have been about preserving the union in the beginning, but when one gets down to brass tacks it was about ending slavery from day one. This goes for every issue. Whether it be "states rights", the tariffs, or any other major issue.
Lincoln said many times he would take whatever course was required to preserve the Union. There were only two or maybe three options open to him. First, he could resign office in the hopes of placating the south. This would have just destroyed whatever authority still rested within the Federal government.
Second, he could have tried to force through an amendment allowing slavery in perpetuity. The north would have never accepted this. Most likely the south wouldn't either. They would trust to the north not getting a large enough majority in a couple of decades.
Finally, he could declare war on the south. Which he did. This act signed the death warrant for slavery in the south. There was no way the south would have been allowed back into the Union without having to give up her slaves.
If we're engaging in horrific alternative history, here goes:
A split United/Confederate States is too weak to participate in WWI, resulting in German victory or at least more favorable post-war terms for Germany.
No Treaty of Versailles
No National Socialist uprising in Germany
No Hitler in power
No Holocaust
Not fighting the U.S. Civil War may have prevented the holocaust!
(Of course, this is pointless; the real lesson is that G-d has a tough job.)
The south didn't pose a military threat to the Union, granted, but they were an existential threat. If states could seceed (or even threaten to seceed) whenever they didn't like some part of federal law, that law becomes effectively meaningless.
The US seceded from Great Britain. Did that make British law meaningless? Did Great Britain cease to exist?
A big problem with the libertarian argument against the Civil War is that it runs aground, very quickly, on the Border States---specifically, Missouri and Kentucky. Both states sided, in the main, with the Union, but had large enough pro-Confederate minorities to send some considerable forces to the CS Army, and both were represented in the CS Congress.
Even if the Union had acknowledged the "right" of the Deep South to secede, there'd have been war over conflicting claims to those states.
Also---no US government, of any complexion or composition whatsoever, is ever, ever, ever going to allow any non-US power to control one inch of the Mississippi River. We nearly went to war with Spain over that in the early 1800s, and at that time, we were much weaker and Spain was far stronger.
Thoreau, once South Carolina had seceded, Fort Sumter was in their territory. The US had a right to withdraw its troops peacefully; it didn't have an unnegotiated right to the Fort. If Hawaii seceded, the US wouldn't have a right to keep Pearl Harbor. Or so I mote. Moreover, Fort Sumter was in fact being built up in order to control South Carolina's territory, no? I don't think the firing would fall outside just war territory.
Others bite the bullet and say, okay, we didn't have the right to invade the South. This is logically consistent, but it leaves you with the problem of saying that aggressive wars are worse than slavery.
I reject the leap. I can certainly believe that a situation is bad, so bad that a war would be a net gain, and still assert that we should not wage war.
This could be because I am morally opposed to all war, or it could simply mean (as others have suggested) that the balance changes when one examines the secondary and tertiary effects of a war.
I am also skeptical of the claims that slavery in the US would have been analogous to slavery in Brazil. Brazil ended slavery in the 1880s after most of the world had already ceased the practice (Britain, Russia, and the USA). Keep in mind that, though slavery was technically illegal in the US, after Reconstruction ended the South effectively reintroduced slavery through Jim Crow laws. So really it took almost 100 years to end slavery in the US. So the supposition that we could have avoided 100 years of struggle by ponying up a few bucks to buy the slaves seems rather dubious. Also, debating alternate history is a lot like debating Star Trek; pointless, futile, and certain to involve nerds with no social skills.
I second the suggestion that plantation slavery would have died out on its own, as it did in every other country around the world by 1900, even in the absence of a Civil War and even in a Confederate States of America. Even if Southern slavery outlasted slavery in places like Russia (1860s) and Brazil (1880s), it would have been ended by the mechanized cotton picker - which came on the scene shortly after 1900 and spawned the Great Migration of displaced black field hands to Northern cities from 1900-1950.
I don't understand what Megan means when she says that the Civil War was a success from the standpoint of moral theory but probably a prudential failure.
Bravo, Bravo, Bravo! An excellent post. You don't get bogged down in 1 topic either. Leviticus bans 'aggressive war,' and I'd tend to go along with G-d on that. A commenter on another blog said that Lincoln had the option of negotiating with the Southern states their secession. That is what he should have done. The idealism of Lincoln is however in our cultural DNA locally changing logic and argument like a mass bends light if you will. Just to take up one counterpoint, the remaining states could have have agreed to a constitutional amendment banning further secession if they wished.
A number of random musings regarding this post:
In regards to Fogel's 6th contention regarding the myth of breaking up families. I'm not sure if this is the result of having to breifly summarize a section of his book, but this is much too simplistic. It is certainly true that it was in an owner's economic interest to keep intact families, but life shows us that sexual urges have a way of overpowering own's econommic interest. Owners had free reign to rape his slaves anytime he wished. The sexual dynamics between an owner and slave almost certainly had a devestating impact on the woman and husband. As was pointed out in a previous post, it is often owners' memoirs and recollections that form the basis for our understanding of slavery. It seems likely that former owners would not exactly like to be forthright about their sexual relations with slaves.
Second, your contention that the North's invasion of the South was a war of aggression is deeply problematic. I wonder if this stems from the fact as a libertarian, you are more likely to lean Republican and such, more likely to find common cause with the people who form the base of the Republican party. Despite the pronouncements of Jefferson Davis that the South's only desire was to be "left alone", the states themselves were fully aware of the consequences of their actions and were preparing for war. Indeed, letters and publications of the period often express a certain amount of relief that the tension of the previous generation had been broken and the "fun" of war was upon them. But most importantly, the first official shots of the war were from Southerners against Fort Sumter. Before the attack on the base, there had been much discussion in the North about what was the best course of action to bring the states back into the fold. While Lincoln was of course considering military action before Fort Sumter, his call for 90 day militias did not go out until shots were fired. In addition, Washington D.C. was a southern city. Lincoln had to sneak into the White House due to the real threat of assasination in Baltimore. For a modern comparison, it is worth thinking about why Cuba never tried to militarily take over Guantanomo bay. Besides, the logistical problems of taking on the American military, the other reason was that it was sure to move an American invastion from a possibility to a certainty.
A more apt comparison to today would be as follows; a radical faction of Cherokee in 1860 carry out a devestating raid on NYC killing 1,000 people. This radical faction wish not only to take back their territory in Florida, but most what is the United States. In its place it wishes to impose a tribal order at odds with Cherokee tradition and law and at odds with the wishes of Navajo, Creek, Nez Pearce etc. Nevertheless, the tribes give muted and fractured accomodation due to their own greviences with U.S. Indian policy and even have a few of their own member join in raids in Missouri and Kansas. In response, Lincoln briefly sends troops to Oklahoma to quell the situation and prevent general uprising against the U.S. But after a few months, Lincoln desides the best course of action is to invade a Confederacy that had broken away in 1850 do to the dispute over "bleeding Kansas" and letting California in the Union. In the intervening 10 years, slavery has expanded, and Confederates breifly threaten Cuba so as to expand a slave empire and even makes a few overtures to the Cherokee, all in attempt to extend slave territory. Abolitionists continued to the fight against slavery and decry abuses in the South. In response, Lincoln has a massive invasion that only Mass, CT, NY, RI send troops to support, which he justifies under the lie that the South funded the Cherokee raids and that only by invading to end slavery can justice be obtained. The old NW will not support a war to end slavery into a country that left 10 years prior.
This a much more apt scenario to compare, and would show into relief the bizarre machinations that led to the Iraq invasion. I know this is a long drawn out analogy and it is by no means perfect. But I think it serves to show the inadequacy of comparing Iraq to the Civil War.
Brazil ended slavery in the 1880s after most of the world had already ceased the practice (Britain, Russia, and the USA).
Well yeah, probably because they had by far the most slaves. So it took years to accomplish a total buy-out. The US received less than a third, IIRC, of all the African slaves imported during the middle passage.
So really it took almost 100 years to end slavery in the US. So the supposition that we could have avoided 100 years of struggle by ponying up a few bucks to buy the slaves seems rather dubious.
I think you are ignoring how mad people get when their property is violently expropriated and a significant percentage of the population has died in effort to stop it. Not saying that the South was right in holding slaves, but surely the anger over their defeat had a part to play in the retribution against blacks. Brazialian slaveholders were participating in consentual transactions and didn't see their plantations destroyed and sons killed in the process.
I'm by no means a Civil War scholar, and I'm not a very doctrinaire libertarian, but my impression has been that the conundrum to which you refer was mostly a legal cart-before-the-horse problem. If the Emancipation Proclamation (or its legally effective equivalent) had been issued before the secessions started, the invasion would have been justified to prevent the re-enslavement of the newly freed Americans. If it is assumed that the purpose of the invasion was to free the slaves, one can justify the invasion, without denying in principle the right to secede, by glossing over that timing issue (not that that's an easy intellectual exercise, especially in light of Dred Scott).
It is also my impression that the war was largely "sold" (to use modern parlance) as a war to preserve the Union. If it is assumed that the real purpose of the invasion was in fact to preserve the Union, then obviously the invasion can be justified only by denying altogether the right to secede.
You have a different concept of aggressive war than I do...
If the US invaded Canada, that would be an aggressive invasion (which I think we did try in the War of 1812?)
If part of the United States tries to secede, and the US military acts to prevent that secession, I don't see how that's an invasion.
If the south was such an economic power house, why did they have such trouble, even when fighting on their own turf?
Agricultural superiority is irrelevant as the south has a much longer season of growth. Given the same techniques, I am sure the 'northern' approach would also have done better in the south than the north.
I still don't see how costs can compare when northern factories (at least according to common knowledge) were regularly mangled and left with no recompense. A person who did that with an asset would be losing money by wasting their assets.
Some of the points I have not heard argued before and a couple others interesting if true (especially slaves receiving income: if that were true, why is it much different than involuntary servitude?)
This discussion of history is interesting, but what about the current events econo-blogging? I confess I spent some time away from your blog, but coming back it doesn't seem as if many of your recent posts deal with the current economic environment. Does it not interest you? Do you find it too depressing to blog about? Just curious.
Peter: She said "aggressive war", not "invasion"; a war need not be an invasion to be aggressive (though in practice most of 'em are, since brutally crushing a secession movement isn't real common).
Megan: Perhaps part of it is the tendency of some libertarians to conflate States and persons; the principle of non-aggression (or "non-initiation of the user of force") applies to persons, but the idea that it therefore applies to States is a leap of logic.
I'm tempted - for once in my life - to agree with Rand, who is reputed to have said (I've never found the original location and don't care to look real hard) that a non-democratic State is inherently illegitimate, and therefore not just can but should be toppled.
Such a State, after all, has already initiated the use of force against its subjects by compelling them to be its subjects without representation and control over it, and an act of "aggressive war" with the aim of bringing in representative self-rule [as opposed to annexation, colonization, or other aims] can be, at least provisionally, justified on Libertarian grounds.
(What level of non-democracy in a State justifies what level of response, given the costs on the people involved, is a difficult problem, especially at the edge cases, rather than a fight against the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany... but anyone who imagines that accepting libertarian basic assumptions then makes all decisions flow easily and without wrestling with competing values is simply wrong.)
I am an untutored follower of libertarian thought, but it seems to me that the following makes sense.
1. States have a right to secede, I see nothing in the agreement betweens states that causes current bases on the promise future action.
2. It is probably worth noting that any thing important enough to split the union over, is also worth fighting a war over. The difference between two in terms of political will need make it happen is probably very small. Fort Sumter was just one place, that it could of ignited. As other noted the border states were problematic also.
3. Libertarian philosophy deals with actors within a common framework of behaviors. It is not clear to me that it says anything helpful about people acting outside of that framework. Thus it's usefulness in guiding foreign policy is limited.
4. On the question of the economics of slavery, it is probably significant that so much of south societal structure was needed to maintain it. Slavery may have been efficient at the time. But it is was brittle institution, destined to go away at some point in the future.
5. The civil war was incredibly destructive on the South, the ending of slavery by peacefully means would have also turned southern society upside down. Nobody in the South at the time would of signed up for either, even peaceful change would of caused massive violence.
My thought is to a large degree the debate, is meaningless. the ending of slavery would of looked a lot like a civil war regardless. I regret that the civil war resulted in so much federalization of government powers. However even if the civil war was prosecuted as we are invading a foreign country to rid it of slavery. The result of ruling conquered territory would of had the same corrosive effect on states right and self determination.
I've had aquaintances say that slavery was a local issue, of no proper concern to the north. I suggest that is mistaken.
The existence of slave labor in the economy destroys the value of free labor. A free man cannot compete with slave labor. His return for his efforts is too small when he has to provide his own food, clothing, and lodging at retail.
The slave states recognized this. Many had laws forbidding slave literacy. A number had laws banning slaves in skilled trades, like blacksmithing, bricklaying, or carpentry. Such laws were regularly flouted. The value of such training was too great for both the slave and the owner.
When the south eventually industrialized it might very well have used slave labor. If the slave based economy was as rubust Robert Fogel thinks it was, it was a direct threat the the livelihoods of freemen in the USA.
I would also suggest that Brazil gave up slavery at least partly because the USA had. The CSA would have been an example pointing the other way.
I've had aquaintances say that slavery was a local issue, of no proper concern to the north. I suggest that is mistaken.
The existence of slave labor in the economy destroys the value of free labor. A free man cannot compete with slave labor. His return for his efforts is too small when he has to provide his own food, clothing, and lodging at retail.
The slave states recognized this. Many had laws forbidding slave literacy. A number had laws banning slaves in skilled trades, like blacksmithing, bricklaying, or carpentry. Such laws were regularly flouted. The value of such training was too great for both the slave and the owner.
When the south eventually industrialized it might very well have used slave labor. If the slave based economy was as rubust Robert Fogel thinks it was, it was a direct threat the the livelihoods of freemen in the USA.
I would also suggest that Brazil gave up slavery at least partly because the USA had. The CSA would have been an example pointing the other way.
I strongly urge Megan and anyone interested to read Jeffrey Rogers Hummel's near-definitive treatment of this subject, "Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men" (Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/5jz9wf).
Two central arguments from the book:
(1) Fogel's work fails to capture all the economic costs of slavery. These include slaves' leisure time and heavy enforcement costs associated with maintaining slaves. Slavery did benefit slaveholders, but it was not economically efficient considering *everyone's* costs.
(2) It would have been very difficult, if not impossible, for the CSA to maintain the slave system as an independent nation with the Union acting as a refuge for escapees. Border states' hold over slaves would have been weakened terribly with Dred Scott no longer holding force. Also, as pointed out above, many other countries saw slavery disappear without resort to war.
The Civil War resulted in a morally just outcome: the abolition of slavery. But it's unclear that it was necessary to fight the Civil War to achieve that outcome. To argue that the Union was morally *obliged* to fight the war to end slavery in the South makes about as much sense as saying it was morally obliged to go to war to end the slave trade in Brazil or in the Middle East, or to end the contemporary slave trade in Africa.
The Union was morally obliged to secede from the South, and become a haven for refugees in an effort to weakend the CSA's toxic system over time. Similarly, the U.S. today has a similar obligation to be a haven for refugees from all over the world.
The only thing that "Time on the Cross" could argue on historical grounds is that slavery was profitable within the United States, as it existed. However, the United States had partly socialized the cost of slavery, via the fugitive slave laws. Slaves in the south had to get to Canada to escape, and that's a long walk.
Had the North let the South go, then the USA would have moved to emancipate its relatively few slaves, as did other countries. But it would have repealed the hated fugitive slave laws almost immediately. Combined, this would have placed the border between slave and free at the border between the CSA and the USA. This would have made slavery much less teneble in the South, insofar as most of the deep south is within 400 miles of Tennessee or Virginia, and some of it is within 1 mile, whereas the slave states in the USA were no closer to Canada than about 350 miles, and most of the slaves were more like 600-800 miles from the Canadian border.
I was taught as a little boy in Montgomery AL that the correct name for that conflict was 'The War Between the States'. Which is a better decription of it really. I remember my extremely proper Grandmother (who in true southern fashion we called 'Madeah'--a southern-eze form of 'My Dear') telling me 'They-ah wahz NOTHIN' 'civil' about it!'
You can tell I have thought about the issues you and Mr Fogle raise.
The War was fought not because the South was a slave-owning society. It was fought over the expansion of slave-owning into the mid-west and west. This expansion was necessary because the methods used at that time to grow cotton depleted the soil and fertilization and crop rotation and such hadn't been developed. Public opinion in the North was divided but the absolutists of the abolition movement were a minority. In the absence of border state and territorial conflicts over the expansion of slavery (someone above mentioned 'bloody Kansas') the two parts of the country would likely not have resorted to slaughter.
When secession actually began occurring, no one could have doubted that war would follow. An analogy might be the divorce of a married couple. Sometimes the two parties go their separate ways and never see nor speak again. Other times the divorce is simply a new stage in their relationship where they can freely practice the hatefulness that has been between them anyway. Secession was a divorce of the 2d kind.
By any definition, the institutions of Jim Crow (specifically 'share-cropping' and 'vagrancy' laws, 'work gangs', etc) can be thought of as slavery by another name. Southern whites (alas, including my forebears) held so tenaciously to the treasured dreams of their supposedly golden past that they ('we') wore down the Reconstruction forces until they finally dragged their weary selves home. So Americans who idealise the Emancipation Proclamation should cross their fingers behind their back if they praise it too highly.
The last verse of the Confederate Anthem, as I learned it while my voice was soprano:
Three hundred thousand Yankees
is stiff in Southern dust.
We got three hundred thousand
before they conquered us.
They died of Southern fever,
and Southern steel and shot.
And I wish they was three million
instead of what we got.
That was the general feeling in the South in the 1950s. A cultural artifact worth pondering when considering a war of aggression. Unless a conquered population is exiled or annihilated, you create enemies for your grandchildren to deal with.
To be as contrarian as possible I would say that Fogel's work suggests that the vast majority of people (slaves included) would have been better off if the slave system didn't end until mechanization made it inevitable around the turn of the century. That's assuming that you believe what he says, and it does require placing a relatively low value on the inherent human dignity (or however you want to phrase it) of being free. There's no doubt that the Civil War exerted an enormous cost on both sides (but especially the South). The message that I get from the quoted part is that slavery wasn't so bad, even for the slaves. So it seems like a pretty short leap to say that the Civil War was a mistake. I could be crazy, but I do see the above argument implicit in the quoted section.
What if a Civil War-type scenario occurred today? What if, in some alternate reality, the governor of Texas, let's say, decided he wanted to secede from the union so he could re-enslave blacks and/or hispanics or whomever, and he got a large majority of his constituents and a bunch of other states on board? Would it be wrong to wage war against him? Why?
Before the war broke out, I think the federal government had already successfully established its supremacy in multiple ways. Washington suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion early on. And Jackson successfully warned SC to back down on its dreams of nullification.
Since the question of slavery moved westward as the nation created new states, the contradiction of having half the country view slaves as legal property while the other half viewed slaves as people who could not be owned (even while not viewing them as citizens with rights) was simply exacerbated. Civil war had already broken out as Mr. Chaudhuri mentions above in the guerrilla fighting over "Bleeding Kansas."
Adding the fact that South Carolina attacked federal troops at Fort Sumpter -- in part out of a widespread belief that war was inevitable, although contemporaries seemed to believe it would be a short romp -- just makes it seem all the more unreal to think the war could have been avoided.
It should be noted that the Confederacy did try diplomatic routes before trying to evict the Federal Government from Fort Sumter.
If secession is allowed, I think it only makes sense that territory within that state be owned by the state and is not changed if the Federal government improved it. In that case, they can sue for loss of those improvements, which I can see them having the upper hand.
There was an exhibit recently in Texas, 'The Reluctant Confederate.' The title reflects the fact that the county north of Dallas voted "No" on secession from the Union. Judge Throckmorton apparently yelled out this vote loudly at the state convention. Later he would raise a company for the Confederacy; however for 'reasons of health' he did not take this company to war. He lived into the 1890s so apparently took pretty good care of his health. It was interesting to see the results of the county votes. You really can't grow cotten in McKinney, the county seat, too dry I guess. The cotton and lowland counties were for secession; more peripheral against it. The vote in Dallas County was some 741 to 421 in favor as I recall. It was interesting to see a Chart of Accounts which had 'Bedroom suite $10' and on another line 'sale of girl named Becky $269' on it.
There was an exhibit recently in Texas, 'The Reluctant Confederate.'
I learned my ancestors on my mother's side, Texans, wanted no part of the war. When the citizens of their small town got advanced word that the recruiters were coming through, every adult male eligible for recruitment had left and "gone hunting" (for snipe I presume) for as long as the recruiters were around.
Typo alert: You have "wage of optimism" for "wave of optimism."
No wages were involved in slavery, that was the point.
Megan I don't know where on earth you get the idea that our invasion of Iraq hasn't killed more people than the civil war. We have no reason whatsoever to be confident that the increase in mortality since invasion over sanctions hasn't been responsible for over a million deaths (most of them violent): see IRAQ BODY COUNT: “A VERY MISLEADING EXERCISE”. The whole thing started with the deliberate bombing of Iraqi civilian infrastructure in the '91 war to accelerate the effect of sanctions (the start of the regime change policy): see Barton Gelman, 23rd June '91, Washington Post: Allied Air War Struck Broadly in Iraq.
All in all we have managed to reduce one of the most well developed countries in the region to the second most screwed-up basket case of a country on the planet in 2007 (according to the FP failed state index); post-surge it is now in 5th place. there are still millions of people displaced inside and outside the country. It is not clear whether this country will even be able to be ever put back together. As appalling as the civil war was this is too, and we would do well to remember it as we are responsible for it.
Having spent a fair amount of time wading through statistical analyses of the conflict, I'm prepared to state with quite a lot of confidence that we have very good reason to believe that it has not been responsible for over a million deaths. I am not entirely ruling it out, but the best estimates care between 100,000 to 300,000. A million is a nonsense statistic generated by a British polling firm that won't defend its methodology and appears to be employing someone who has no idea what he's doing.
My understanding of the point of this post is that it describes a conundrum for libertarians. That is, is aggressive war justified to end slavery? Yet it appears to me that the attack on Fort Sumter described in posts above, make it clear that Lincoln and the north were attacked first. Further, Mr Lincoln's responses after his inaugeration were generally reactions, not provocations. The southern states feared his future actions and proceeded to preempt him. They also believed they would defeat the north in short order. For these reasons, they readily pushed Mr Lincoln toward war. Again, my understanding is that he would not have moved against slaveholders in the states of the south but would have prevented further expansion of slavery. None of these actions is pursueing an aggressive war in a way that I understand the term.
Lastly while I haven't read the book described, my general recollection of my American history course includes the note that if the civil war had been fought in 1850, King Cotton would have won. The combination of industrialization and immigration in the 1850's in the north turned the tide for them. It seems to me that the rapid reaction of the south to Mr Lincoln's election is confirmatory. They acted in part before the north's advantages became greater. Overall, slavery was not gaining in influence or power but losing in their eyes.
Jeff @ 4:17, you might be amused to learn that according to the terms under which it joined the Union, Texas has a perfectly legal right to secede any time it might so prefer. :-)
Further, Mr Lincoln's responses after his inaugeration were generally reactions, not provocations.
It's hard to second guess actions. I may have done the exact same thing Lincoln did. But if I engaged in a war that killed more Americans than any in history, I'd probably feel like I had somehow failed as a president and that there must have been a less bloody path.
When you see a battle flag of the most famous cavalry raiders of Texas, Hood's brigade IIRC, tacked to a wall of the Illinois National Guard you can still feel the winds of war.
Regarding aggression, it should be noted that the Confederacy committed acts of aggression against the United States and its citizens before Fort Sumter: seizing other forts, arsenals, and such, and committing violence, including murder, against Southerners who, without committing violence of their own, expressed disapproval of secession. Supposing that the Condfederacy qualified as a foreign country, could the Union have declared war based on outrages against its own possessions and the lives and property of its peaceful citizens?
One can argue the the War Between the States was a disproportionate response, but hardly that the C.S.A. had clean hands.
1965-75 was a peak time for "revisionist" history of Antebellum/War/Reconstruction studies. Much, maybe most, of that [1] came from a variety of Left perspectives and interests [2] was "revising", if anything, an older Left/liberal consensus, and one that tended to the kind of economic analysis that Fogel's work questioned. By the time Fogel wrote "Cross", scholars like Eugene Genovese (on slave-society & slave-culture), Starobin (on urban/industrial slavery), my own little MA Thesis on Parson/Governor Brownlow of Tennesse -- even, indirectly, Foner on Whiggism, all these created an image of a Southern ruling class secure enough to believe their own rhetoric and to start what they meant to be a fulfillment of the American Revolution on their terms. I notice that, in the years the followed many of us who worked that turf on those terms were less surprised by some at the non-conservative "conservatism" that, as Hillary noted in her last 2-3 goodbye/unity speeches, has wreaked its "revolutionary" havoc from Goldwater/Nixon through Bush. Those who laughed in the past at the thought that neocons, Christianists, etal, really believed themselves are realising the debts (of all kinds) that we've piled up. And now, as in 1860, we're hoping a skinny, "inexperienced" lawyer from Illinois will get us back to where we need to be to face the hard work and hard world ahead.
Yes he does seem to be the bearer of idealization of the Negro which motivated Lincoln and a repetition in our history.
There's a good reason Fogel's controversial - because he seems to've paid attention to only one side. Here's another side on slavery's efficiency.
I haven't recently consulted the Book of Dearly Cherished Libertarian Ideas, but it surprises me to hear that the movement is still shot through with secessionism.
Moreover, it seems unfathomably myopic to believe that an ideological movement committed to the sanctity of individual liberty ought to weigh in on the side of the South in the civil war. Sure, they had secessionism, but chattel slavery was in issue.
Shouldn't there be some hierarchy of priorities in the libertarian mind? Would it not place the protection of rights of secession below the termination of an unimaginable tyranny? If Joe Stalin himself took over Vermont and subjugated its citizens, would you also throw your weight behind his right to secede with that territory? Or is the individual liberty of slaves not a matter of concern in your conception of libertarianism?
Finally, why exclude Fogel's co-author? Engerman deserves as much blame for the book. Why not rehearse the controversy that surrounded the book? The book wasn't controversial solely because it got people mad. It was controversial because Fogel and Engerman were shoddy statisticians. As I understand it, they looked at data from one plantation that may not have been particularly representative, they excluded more reliable and voluminous data sets, they chose bizarre metrics and misrepresented their import, and they assumed that slaves behaved exactly the same way as factory workers. Those seem like critiques that, if they aren't true, are at least worth addressing.
Thus was the Union "preserved." As is obvious but also sometimes profoundly learned in romantic relationships, sometimes to love someone means having to let them go. One of the ironies of the Civil War is that Lincoln fought the war because the Southerners 'wouldn't let the slaves go.' He should have led by example and let the Southerners go.
If South Carolina had an absolute right to not be part of the United States, then the people on the island Fort Sumter was built on had a right not to be part of the Confederacy, especially since the island was built from about 10,000 tons of Maine. So bombarding the fort was an act of aggression. (As was, as has been pointed out earlier, seizing Federal arsenals and dockyards prior to that)
To address a different point which Megan raised, it is not necessary to conclude that a fetus has all the legal and moral status of a person in order to oppose abortion. It is only necessary to conclude that, because it is alive and it is human, it is worthy of protection.
We don't consider dogs and cats to be people, yet you can't just kill one when you no longer deem it to be in your best interest to care for it.
If agricultural slavery wouldn't have ended on it own for economic reasons, then why is is gone in most places in the world? One may speculate, but probably John Deere and his friends ended the institution. One farmer in a giant combine can be far more profitable than an army of slaves. Try to compete with him, and you will wind up having to sell your slaves to pay the bills. Where slavery still exists, even in the United States, is in the sex trade. That's because it's very profitable. Especially if you addict the victims to control them. Of course, it still has a racial component, but the races of choice today would seem to be biased more toward asians and whites. The Feds are always finding some young woman from China or Montenegro in a brothel who thought she was coming to America to work in a restaurant.
We don't consider dogs and cats to be people, yet you can't just kill one when you no longer deem it to be in your best interest to care for it.
Your overall point seems quite valid to me, but it's quite legal to euthanize an animal you own, so long as you refrain from cruelty and properly dispose of its remains. To the extent we do not euthanize household pets (I'd submit it's common practice to let local government do it for you), it's not because of a legal restriction.
Can you have a pet euthanized simply because you don't wish to care for it anymore? I thought that--at least in many jurisdictions--it would need to be seriously ill.
You can certainly have pets put down for any reason at all. Many animal shelters put down pets that they can't place.
"it's quite legal to euthanize an animal you own, so long as you refrain from cruelty and properly dispose of its remains. "
OTOH, are either of these required for an abortion?
BTW, the war was "The Slave-Holders' Revolt."
0:)
Although an impressive work of scholarship, _Time on the Cross_ was published over 30 years ago. It would be a better use of one's time to read more recent treatements of the topic, such as Fogel's _Without Consent or Contract_. I'm not going to argue over what "hold up remarkably well" means, but I will say that it is generally unwise to accept any scholar's description of the opinions of his opponents. Fogel and Engerman's description of the supposed "consensus" they overturned is unreliable.
There are also multiple definitional problems. Take F/E's claim #9, on the rate of slave expropriation. You _can_ derive that number from Fogel and Engerman's data--but only by assuming that slaves are capital assets of their owners. F/E say that "a substantial part of the income taken from those slaves who survived into the later years [past the age of 19 when slaveowners began to break even] was not an act of expropriation but a payment required to pay the expenses of raising children who failed to reach later ages." (p. 154). Why did slaves owe their masters compensation for kids who died young? Because Fogel and Engerman said so.
I'm not interested in advancing the claim that aggressive wars are never justified. But I think analyzing the claim that the Civil War was justified depends on just how devastating it was. It resulted in a massive number of deaths, a great many of whom, on both sides, were conscripts (iirc, the Confederate slaveowners were excluded from conscription, and the Union slaveowners were probably wealthy enough to buy their way out of conscription). No doubt lots of innocent civilians were killed too, and the South, which included a lot of innocent, though racist, people, was economically devastated. War is really, really, really, really, really horrible, and the Civil War was unusually so for the time.
On top of that, the fact that the Union allowed Southern white to control the Southern governments again produced laws and institutions that de facto reenslaved a great many blacks, and severely oppressed the rest. We didn't see the end of this until years after the '64 Act was passed. De jure equality didn't come until remarkably recently—Southerners were still going to the Supreme Court to defend the right to close their public facilities rather than integrate them even through the early 1970's.
On the other hand, the form of slavery practiced in the U.S. was the about most horrendously evil institution in human history other than mass murder. So I'm torn.
In any case, I think aggressive humanitarian wars are even more difficult to defend today. Tactics like aerial bombing necessarily hit a lot of innocent civilians. The government claims this is unintentional and unwanted "collateral damage," but I see no reason to take the government at its word on this point, and even if they're telling the truth it makes no difference to the innocents killed or maimed. Targeting things like power plants makes living in a war zone, where your electricity, water, and food lines get cut off at random, even worse than living under a brutal dictatorship.