Costs of War
And the one question I ask here, in terms of the cost of the war, 620,000 deaths in a population of 30 million people. If you standardize that for today’s population of roughly 280 million, that would be the equivalent of about 5 million deaths, or 100 times the number of Americans who died in Vietnam.Thomas DiLorenzo, from a fascinating discussion about Lincoln and the Constitution and the politics of Lincoln's Republican Party's abolitionism. The discussion's a debate, in fact, held by policy group the Independent Institute (what a name!) in 2002, between DiLorenzo and the Claremont Institute's Harry Jaffa.
I look at that, and it’s absolutely horrible; no one would disagree with that. In the book Time on the Cross by Fogel and Engerman, they do a survey of emancipation in this time period, and they find that dozens of countries, including the British Empire, the Spanish Empire, the French and Danish colonies — dozens of countries ended slavery peacefully through some sort of compensated emancipation.
Now, of course, the standard argument is that this could never have happened here, we could have never have done this. But I don’t see any reason to believe why British slave owners valued their slaves any less than American slave owners did. They didn’t want this. The British government paid them off 40 cents on the dollar. It might not have been possible in 1861, but I think in terms of the sheer amount of the death and the total destruction of the economy of the country, North and South. The North took a huge economic hit as well as the South. The one big quandary is, why didn’t we do what every other country in the world did during the previous 50 years that ended slavery, and end it peacefully through compensated emancipation?
From later in the session:
TD: Well, Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island asserted the right to secede from the Union as a condition of ratifying the Constitution. And they asserted that right for the other states as well, and they were allowed into the Union after doing that, and so, that is one thing that happened.Fun!!HJ: That is absolutely wrong. It’s just flat-out wrong.
TD: Well, they did. I quoted the Virginia thing in my —
HJ: They did not speak of secession as a lawful right under the Constitution.
TD: Sovereignty. Sovereignty.
HJ: It was an exercise of the Right of Revolution, which they had recently exercised under the British Constitution. But you simply, stubbornly refuse to recognize that there’s a difference between secession as a Constitutional right and revolution as a natural right.
TD: I disagree with that, and I just —
HJ: No, you’re wrong. [Laughter.]
TD: I think you’re wrong.
HJ: You’re just wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Labels: excerpts, sociopoliticoeconomicocultural
posted by paul bowman at
6:30 AM
2 Comments:
Agreed, it is a fascinating question.
I'd be curious as to whether those other countries mentioned only ended slavery in their colonies, or whether any of them had slavery on the mainland like we did.
But in general, I refuse to believe as a matter of principal that there is any historical example where war is unavoidable. And this quote puts up a good argument.
I've only got the most limited acquaintance with the history, Joel, but the way I understand it is that the economics of slavery and related exploitation of non-Euro populations applied mainly in the parts of the world subject to colonial development, where there was vast untapped natural resource, need for a lot of raw labor if it was to be tapped, and loose legal structure about these economic facts. Europe itself was too dense and internally interest-bound, wasn't it, to support a slave-labor market in the early modern period? But large parts of North America, by contrast, remained non-dense, unexploited colonial territory, in this sense, in the nineteenth century.
I acknowledge I'm not a student of pacifist and anarchist ideas, but I have to say that nothing I've come across in their kind has seemed very promising to me toward civil well-being or meaningful relations between societies. My own view is that humankind is violent, and that there are times when violence and war aren't simply the unavoidable but actually the right addresses to make, in turn, to destructive human behavior. I find that frightening, and the history of conflicts horrifying right up to the present. But I also find it true.
Read the whole Jaffa-DiLorenzo debate there if you get a chance. Clearly just a taste of the complicated U.S. economic and political evolution of the period. One would have to be deep in the literature to really evaluate these competing arguments about what Lincoln represents in the shaping of U.S. political order, I expect. Still, this transcript seems to me handy for thinking about the difficulty sorting out the good political players from the bad, wherever one really gets one's nose close to the story. (Of course I realize you've got a perhaps even more complicated history to wrestle with in your reading on Japan, these days.)
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