A little more empathy for slaveowners (that is, the ability to see things from their point of view) would have enabled the US to abolish slavery without the bloody civil war.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21570717)
posted on November 19, 2019 09:05 PM by
u/sue_me_please
67
u/NotARussian_199134 pointsat 1574205121.000000
The slaveowners started the war, and they seceded before Lincoln’s
inauguration.
Also Lincoln tried to get Delaware to pass a bill for compensated emancipation that would be paid for by the federal government and they rejected it. It's wrong on every level.
What I find myself looking for in posts on this topic is tells about whether the poster understands that the civil war ending slavery in the southern states worked out very much like how capturing Saddam Hussein instantly turned Iraq into a peaceful liberal democracy. Not awarding a whole lot of points to these guys.
I fucking love how one of the comments that explains why this
attitude is wrong got downvoted, presumably because the tone was too
mean to slaveowners.
Hello again, listeners. First off, we need to do some housekeeping. As usual, I have to clean up the mess made by dishonest so-called "journalists" and posters at Hacker News (who are morally equivalent to the KKK, of course). I am being smeared as being sympathetic to slave-owners. This is a straw man and intellectually dishonest. My claim is in fact more sympathetic to the slaves than the regressive left. Compensated emancipation would have led to fewer deaths among slaves. Furthermore, this would have prevented the Civil War, making me more anti-war than the so-called pacifist "left." As usual, the regressive left has slimed my reputation to the point that I am considering a defamation lawsuit. In any case, on to our main topic of skull sizes....
Now, I'm getting some attention from some bad faith leftists, likely pornographers of race, who outrageously mobbed me on twitter for my calm, rational calculation of dead vs bought-out slaves. Now, although I haven't read anything about this, I think it's patently absurd to claim that a dead slave is better off than a free one. It boggles the mind that anyone would suggest otherwise; it's well known that such nihilistic arguments arise from some kind of mental illness. Now, I've spent too much time dealing with mind-reading, bad faith 'wokescolds'. I'd rather move onto my next guest, a repeat of one of the Murray's, who never talk about such things.
It is quite possible that The United States could have abolished
slavery without any major bloodshed or violence. The reason why it
didn’t was that many of the people in charge of making decisions did not
want to give up the power over life and death. 👑
So some back-of-the-envelope math: There were about 4 million slaves
in 1860, and the market price of a slave was about 00, so say they could
have bought all the slaves and freed them for .2 billion.
The US civil war cost the US Federal government 5.2 billion (not
including lives lost and property destroyed). Allowing some price impact
/ transaction costs it still would have been cheaper in dollar terms,
not to mention avoiding tons of death.
Would we have been better off not fighting the war and just buying
out all the southern slave owners? Seems kind of fucked up to be
“rewarding” slave owners but it also seems like everyone would have been
way better off, including emancipated slaves.
Dude can you not read one post above yours?
>In the fall of 1861, Abraham Lincoln proposed to Delaware Congressman George P. Fisher a plan that would compensate the state’s slave owners from federal funds if they would free their remaining slaves (approximately 1800). Lincoln believed that if compensated emancipation was successful in Delaware, it could be extended to the other Union slave states. But even though slavery was not essential to the Delaware economy, the plan was rejected on the grounds that it represented Federal interference in what was regarded as an internal matter.
>An act for the gradual emancipation of slaves in the state of Delaware: with just compensation to their owners. [Dover, Delaware?: s.n., 1862].
>This document prints the proposal for emancipated compensation in Delaware. Although the plan was introduced into the General Assembly, its two sponsors, Congressman George P. Fisher and his fellow republican Nathaniel P. Smithers withdrew the bill before a vote could be taken because of widespread opposition to it.
http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/exhibits/lincolnbicent/01_slave.html
Excellent math. It is definitely some back-of-the-envelope math and hare-brained accounting which will answer this question for you. Not reading about history and politics, which is a waste of time.
it was an early-Web [testament](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube) to how deep into nonsense land you can drive yourself if you're convinced that you've discovered a unique way of knowing the truth that even the so-called experts are unable to comprehend
That guy was definitely full schizophrenic though, not just a "maverick genius" like, uh, [Terence Howard](https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-features/terrence-howards-dangerous-mind-37057).*
\* also me
Assuming you are serious:
The price of buying my pizza off my hands is $15.
The price of buying my pizza + getting me to agree to *never buy a pizza again* is significantly more.
It's not even that. It's buying the pizza oven for the list price, with the agreement that the pizza place is now unable to make pizza. Slaves weren't some product that happened to be sitting around on plantations. They were productive capital.
Multiplying spot price by quantity is pretty bad econ. More so when you're talking about buying the entire market. Most slaveowners would not have sold at that price.
You're also underestimating just how deep the ideological commitment to slavery and white supremacism had become in the south. They would reacted with hostility to any buy out program. Why can't we just pay the Taliban to be liberal?
> Hmm, what would it cost to buy out the entire New York pizza industry, shutting it down forever? Well, the ovens in current operation cost about $2500 each,
I think the core issue is the assumption that Southern slave owners would have accepted abolition of slavery and the reordering of southern society in exchange for the market value of their slaves.
As far as I can tell, no evidence is provided for that; the assumption is made that support for slavery is purely financial in nature — slaveowners just didn’t want to be out the money that they paid for their slaves and if they got a refund then they would be fine with blowing up the system and starting over.
To me, making that argument requires a lot more evidence than is ever given to back it up.
They would be even better if the abolitionists had just persuaded all the slaveholders to voluntarily free their slaves through the power of friendship!
oh wait, we're not living in fantasy land? the south refused all overtures of compensated abolition, were ideologically committed to slavery,had no interest in freeing slaves under any circumstances, and were the ones who started the civil war in the first place?
Perhaps before breaking out the back of the envelope, you could spend five minutes actually reading the bare basics about what you're talking about.
I wasn't really sure, if I agreed with your quote on ignorance.
But if the owner of said ignorance is the gardener of said flower, it surely applies to op in their enthusiastic struggle to keep it from being even breathed upon.
The slaveowners started the war, and they seceded before Lincoln’s inauguration.
Does NOBODY know that the South started the Civil War? Does NOBODY know that?
I fucking love how one of the comments that explains why this attitude is wrong got downvoted, presumably because the tone was too mean to slaveowners.
John Brown’s body lies a spinning in the grave/ he can’t believe how bad people still want to own slaves 🎶
How naive does a person need to be to reach this level of fantasy?
It is quite possible that The United States could have abolished slavery without any major bloodshed or violence. The reason why it didn’t was that many of the people in charge of making decisions did not want to give up the power over life and death. 👑
So some back-of-the-envelope math: There were about 4 million slaves in 1860, and the market price of a slave was about 00, so say they could have bought all the slaves and freed them for .2 billion.
The US civil war cost the US Federal government 5.2 billion (not including lives lost and property destroyed). Allowing some price impact / transaction costs it still would have been cheaper in dollar terms, not to mention avoiding tons of death.
Would we have been better off not fighting the war and just buying out all the southern slave owners? Seems kind of fucked up to be “rewarding” slave owners but it also seems like everyone would have been way better off, including emancipated slaves.