Coming up on the sesquicentennial of Gettysburg, Tony Horwitz has an interesting piece in the Atlantic entitled 150 Years of Misunderstanding the Civil War. He notes that the Civil War, like all wars, is a complicated business when it comes to looking at whether it was a moral or worthwhile undertaking or not. The cost was more horrific than we generally acknowledge and the results more ambiguous if you look at the aftermath that included Jim Crow laws and whatnot.
A couple paragraphs in particular that caught my eye:
Slaveholders also resisted any infringement of their right to human property. Lincoln, among many others, advocated the gradual and compensated emancipation of slaves. This had been done in the British West Indies, and would later end slavery in Brazil and Cuba. In theory it could have worked here. Economists have calculated that the cost of the Civil War, estimated at over $10 billion in 1860 dollars, would have been more than enough to buy the freedom of every slave, purchase them land, and even pay reparations.
We could have gotten off cheaper by paying the planters. But, thinking about that, my response is emotional. Better that we should kill the those who would commit treason in defense of the evil of owning other people; even if it costs more. I have the benefit of hindsight and still would have a hard time voting for a peaceful, cheaper solution that further enriched the slave owners. But, maybe my response would be different if I would be a guy who takes a shot through the thigh and be the beneficiary of 19th century medicine.
In retrospect, the North had little choice. The Southern rebels attacked the United States, and, whatever the sensibilities of then, we can hardly take seriously today the votes in favor of a system that would have continued the slavery of 3.5 million Americans. It’s not as if they gave those individuals a chance to vote on the subject. Modern advocates of “states rights” (to allow some individuals to own other individuals) mostly ignore the rights of the owned individuals while proclaiming the legitimacy of the rights of the states that purported to secede.
If one compares the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, one sees that States do not possess “rights.” States, like any other governmental entity, possess powers. People—human beings, not corporations—are noted, by the Framers of the Constitution, as being endowed with rights.
“We could have gotten off cheaper by paying the planters,” except that they refused all buy-outs, even in some border states where slavery was a much smaller part of the economy than the deep south.
Eric Foner explores this in some detail in “The Fiery Trial.”
Worse, the South was insisting on slavery’s spread to the territories, and, after Dred Scott, tried to make the case that nowhere could slavery be banned.
Martin makes a great post. The south’s desire to expand slavery was another casus belli for the Civil War. The south coveted Cuba, Mexico, Central America and the US territory west of Texas.