Wednesday, March 5, 2008

MSNBC: Abraham Lincoln Letters Proposed Avoiding Civil War

"Barely a year into the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suggested buying slaves for $400 apiece under a "gradual emancipation" plan that would bring peace at less cost than several months of hostilities."

Nothing really new here, this is info that's been known to historians for some time. Up until midway through the war, Lincoln always supported compensated emancipation or compensation coupled with colonization of freed slaves. The obvious moral difficulties involved in these schemes always doomed them, despite many attempts by the states and fed gov't through the years. The major problem was the moral quandary of forcibly deporting free black citizens to another country. This always made legislators uneasy, and the usual solution was to offer free blacks a choice to stay or go. The vast majority of blacks chose to stay, feeling that they were born into the US and helped to build it they saw no reason of leaving the most bountiful land in the world. Another problem was the cost involved, which the article mentioned. By the time of the war, most people dismissed compensated emancipation as prohibitively expensive for either the state or federal government. Lincoln's logic was to compare the cost of emancipation with the cost of running the vast war machinery of the North. In the end, the blood and treasure saved would be enough to make compensation more than worth it. However, as Lincoln himself probably knew, this logic would never work in the North once the southern states had decided to secede from the Union. Having left the Union and precipitated a tremendously bloody conflict, under no circumstances could the northern states be persuaded to pay the southern states and in effect reward treasonous and revolutionary behavior.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23434604/

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