Monday, May 28, 2012

Was Buying the Slaves a Feasible Alternative

The topic is a bit dated, but it is germane to a conversation into which I have inserted myself.*  Back in 2007, Congressman Ron Paul stated his belief "that Abraham Lincoln should never have started the civil war, instead ending slavery by having the federal government purchase all of the slaves and set them free."  As evidence in favor of the potential efficacy of such a policy, he cites the example of the British government buying and liberating slaves in the British Empire.  Unfortunately for Paul, the numbers don't add up.  The British government spent £20 million to free 40,000 slaves, or £500 per slave.  At the time of the Civil War, there were approximately 4 million slaves in the United States.  If the United States sought to compensate slave owners at the same price as the British, it would have cost the federal government $9,699,321.047 at a time when GDP was only $4,345,000,000.  In other words, if the United States had pursued this policy, it would have taken more than two years of devoting the entire economic output of the United States at the time to pay for it.  If the United States were to pay market value for the slaves, the cost would still run to about $6.5 billion.  Simply put, the money wasn't there.


There were also key differences between Britain and the United States which would have rendered such a solution politically untenable.  Though legal in the British Empire, slavery was already illegal in Britain, proper.  Because the colonies did not have direct representation in Parliament, this meant there was a much smaller faction within Parliament with an inherent interest in preserving slavery.  This stands in stark contrast to the American situation, where half of the states were slave states, and the other half were free states.  As a result, the South had the capability to block any legislative attempt at abolition.


Of course, all of this is irrelevant, because Lincoln never had any opportunity to pursue this policy as president. Seven of the eleven Confederate states seceded before he was inaugurated, and the South started the Civil War by attacking Fort Sumter while Lincoln was still looking to bring the Confederate States back into the Union peacefully.  And this is why Paul goes from being off-base to being odious when he says, "No, [Lincoln] shouldn't have gone to war.  He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic."  In Paul's telling, Lincoln must have fought a war he didn't he start to preserve the Union he had sworn to defend in order to overthrow the same Constitutional order because he failed to embrace an abolition policy he never had a chance to enact, never mind to implement, which had no chance of either passing Congress and would not have worked anyway.


*And to a topic which I inserted into the conversation.