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 ...
“As late as 1864, the Union offered to buy all the slaves if the South would end the war.”
Source, please?
I’ve read an awful lot of Civil War history and never run across anything like that. Lincoln was fighting to preserve the Union and said so repeatedly. Abolition was peripheral to his interests, he wasn’t one of the Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens.
You nailed it.
“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.”
And just why would the slave owners have sold them? They needed them to work on the plantations.
Link to time line of mechanized farming in America.
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blfarm1.htm
Rather than buying the slaves, the north should have offered discount pricing on mechanized farming equipment to southern farmers. This would have killed off slavery faster than anything else.
The reasons the south was using slaves was because, at the time, it was the cheapest way to farm. Give them a cheaper way to farm and what need would they have for slaves?
What part of the US were you raised in?
Besides, while the issue of slavery was one spark to the rebellion and opposition to its extension to any new states or territories was the founding principle of the Republican Party, there were many other economic and political reasons behind secession and war.
The idea of raising funds to buy all the slaves freedom was broached before the war but it would be like adding several trillion $'s to today's national debt. No one besides an imbecile or someone who wanted to bankrupt America would advocate that, now, would they?
Getting their Tinfoil hat refitted. Or waiting for orders from the Mothership.
It wasn’t only emotion. Remember, the north had the advantage of an economy based on manufacturing as well as ag at that point.
The south was almost entirely dependent upon high-dollar, labor-intensive ag crops for their economy - things like tobacco and cotton. The expression “40 acres and a mule” wasn’t referring to someone growing cotton, corn or wheat on 40 acres and making a living - it referred to people growing 40 acres of tobacco. From the Civil War until the 1950’s, if you had 40 acres in tobacco, you were getting a tidy little paycheck - but you were absolutely busting your hump to do it.
So for the North to offer to buy out the South’s slaves might have ended the question of slavery, but the second question “OK, what will become of our economy?” was never addressed.
No! The north didn't catch the slaves and send them back. They hid them in their attics, basements, barns, even built homes with special hidden rooms and tunnels to help them cross the northern states and on to freedom in Canada where the slave bounty hunters by law couldn't go.
No matter what other issues coexisted with that of slavery, slavery was the only one that proved irreconcilable by political means. As much as I would have preferred the South's view of state's rights, the existence and support for slavery was intolerable as a matter of human decency.
The bitter irony of the matter today is that condescension and a presumed need for dependency has taken the place of prejudice among the Democrat party; their ancestors in the South thought of black people as property, while their descendants in the North (including some descendants of slaves) now treat them (their own people, in some cases!) as functionally inferior beings deserving of unearned spoils, making of them slaves, this time, to the government.
Paul probably thinks that slaves were at fault for the whole mess, due to them working so efficiently and breeding so well...
Sort of like how it was our fault that the terrorists came over here.
Salty Nuts
and Kookies and Cream
Ah, the slaves, in this highly hypothetical situation, were going to need an income, it's called share cropping.
“Ron Paul calls Abe Lincoln a blood-thirsty war-monger.”
He was. So what’s your point?
Thank you for your contribution to the discussion. In my opinion, a very good and concise summary.
Lincoln fought the war to preserve the Union, in fact he said multiple times if he could preserve the Union by freeing no slaves, all slaves or some slaves he would do so.
Now its another issue as to whether Lincoln had the right to preserve the Union by force. Unfortunately the Civil War was probably unavoidable, from my study of that era the real raping of the Constitution was started in Reconstruction, then went industrial strength with both Roosevelts. When Paul first appeared on my political horizon I was quite intrigued. My first reaction was perhaps another Phil Crane type of Constitutionalist, but after several years of listening and reading some of his writings (like his newsletter) its clear he is in his "own world" and its not a rational one!
Ding, ding, ding! I was reading to see when somebody would point this out, congrats.
Here comes the mental and intellectual cowardice that continues to hold political conservatism back.
“No one besides an imbecile or someone who wanted to bankrupt America would advocate that, now, would they?”
Hey, that reminds me. Any idea when Obama will bring up the idea of reparations again? I’m guessing after the 2010 elections.
No, big’ol_freeper, I am not a paulite nitwit; I am not a Ron Paul supporter of whatever mental capacity. I am, however, someone who knows history and has some common sense. You on the other hand rather ridiculously believe that you can still buy full-blown slaves in the U.S. today (and no, I don’t see a woman forced into prostitution as the exact same things as a field slave purchased on an auction block by businessmen as part of a huge regional system). There were literally millions of slaves in South in 1860. Show me some proof that it is possible to illegally purchase millions of people just so long as “you have money.” As I said, a few slaves could have been smuggled into the country in defiance of the importation ban, but nothing even close to the number that would be required to replace all the slaves already purchased and freed. I’m not saying that Pual is right, merely that the argument that you and a couple others on thread made is incorrect. If there is a nitwit in this discussion, it certainly sounds more likely to be you than me.
That would have addressed the situation fully. The only trouble was, the mechanization wasn’t ready to handle things like cotton harvesting yet, and there’s never been a completely mechanized way to handle tobacco. Unless people were willing to wait another, oh, 50 years for the level of mechanization to reach the point where southern crops would really be mechanized, it would not have worked.
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