Posted on 03/31/2010 3:04:35 PM PDT by TitansAFC
Ron Paul: Why didn’t the north just buy the south’s slaves and free them that way?
Getting down to the last two questions here…. Most people consider Abe Lincoln to be one of our greatest presidents, if not the greatest president we’ve ever had. Would you agree with that sentiment and why or why not?
No, I don’t think he was one of our greatest presidents. I mean, he was determined to fight a bloody civil war, which many have argued could have been avoided. For 1/100 the cost of the war, plus 600 thousand lives, enough money would have been available to buy up all the slaves and free them. So, I don’t see that is a good part of our history.....
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
Where are all of the RonPaul supporters defending their hero?
Never mind, I’ll check the Palin threads.
I don’t agree with Ron Paul, but judging by some of the replies its easy to tell who grew up and never bothered to learn anything more about the War Between The States then what they were taught in government schools.
Wake up! If you believed everything they put in front of you then, you should have no problems believing what is being taught to children today. Or as history been right up till now?
Because helping slaves to escape bondage was illegal, nor could a former slave be free by being on free soil in Northern states, per Dred Scott. The "Underground Railroad" was an act of Civil Disobedience.
Who would’ve worked the South’s cotton and tobacco fields if all of a sudden the slaves were repatriated to Africa or some colony? Poor whites? Indentured servants from somewhere else? The Chinese? The economy of the South was based on agriculture, whereas the North was rapidly industrializing. The North could entice Europeans to immigrate and work in the factories, but does Congressman Paul really believe that anyone else would work the fields for subsistence wages?
There’s a saying: “War is a failure of trade.” And that’s generally true, but not always. Capitalism might eventually have fixed the problem (though not by purchasing individuals), but had I been living then, whether slave, or slave owner, soldier or priest or Quaker schoolmarm, I would not have wanted to wait. Without a war, who knows but that the slave owners would now be using slave labor for manufacturing widgets and Walmart merchandise, and tomorrow be providing human organs for harvest. Hmm...
Of coarse the state right most in question was whether or not people could own slaves is besides the point.
To this day you can buy slaves. If you have money someone will provide them. But if you are naive paulite nitwit you wouldn’t be able to grasp that.
“the first Dixiecrats wanted to be able to expand slavery into the territories. It was precisely the issue of slavery that drove secession”
Lincoln didn’t happen in a vacuum. A bloody border war had been raging between the states for years. People understood very well before the war that the new republican party was an abolition party. Free soil and abolition were the reasons for their founding.
>Ron Paul is nuts to link the issue to Lincoln>
When you check out the PaulBot sites, their hatred for Lincoln is psychotic.
The PaulBots create arguments to bash Lincoln and try to
suck others into their cult.
The only justice was that Lincoln died with his war.
Why didn’t the north just buy the south’s slaves and free them that way?
Because the war was about enslaving the States, not freeing the slaves.
Actually slave trade continued rather fiercly after the act on Congress outlawing it:
The Legacy of 1808: Post-Abolition Slave Trade
It is difficult to explain why it was moralist sentiment was not strong enough to carry the day. One possible explanation is that even though there was strong sentiment to abolish the trade in Congress, constituencies in the South were able to exert sufficient pressure to weaken the force of the law. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention could not have forseen the effect that Ely Whitney’s cotton gin would have on Southern agriculture. The decades following the abolition of the slave trade show that United States did not have enough will to even enforce the laws they had passed. Illegal slave trade continued overland through Texas and Florida, while ships continued to smuggle slaves in through South Carolina.27 Even though Congress passed a law in 1820 making participation in the slave trade an act of piracy and punishable by death, it was not strongly enforced.
In the 1820’s, the nature of the illegal slave trade changed somewhat. US ships were now primarily involved in the transport of slaves from Africa to other countries in North and South America like Cuba and Brazil. The British wanted cooperation from the Americans in the form of the mutual right of search and seizure. The Americans opposed this principle, not so much out of a desire to continue the slave trade, but out of a sense of national pride and an appeal to the freedom of the seas.28 The US’s refusal to enforce its own anti-slave trade laws, as well as cooperate with other nations allowed the slave trade to continue for decades to come.
Everyone’s for sale, at the right price. Take my wife...!
His pronouncements are at such odds with reality that one must question his implicit assumptions and wonder ‘what starting place and what direction could lead to such a bizarre destination?’ ; and thus we surmise that the man is a bit of a loon.
How I wish that a long serving member of Congress who speaks of the Constitution, lower taxes, and a smaller less intrusive government were a more credible spokesman for those causes.
But unfortunately Ron Paul is a loon.
The importation of drugs have been illegal for decades and we see that hasn’t stopped anyone from bringing in tons of the stuff.
It wasn’t just emotions — they knew that the whole economy of the South would have collapsed without slave labor.
I think the CWI could have been avoided in many ways. If you’d not been so bloody minded in overthrowing your lawful Lord and King George III, slavery would have been done in the 1820s.
“They could have passed a law ....”
Yes, apparently they could have passed a law requiring us to buy them too! /s
Wonder if Scott is related to George.
Sorta like amnesty, right?
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