Over at The Atlantic blog, Ta-Nehisi Coates has a terrific post on Ron Paul's suggestion that the Civil War didn't need to be fought -- that we could have freed the enslaved people of the South with a federal government program that would have paid slave owners.
As an initial matter, that would have been seen as unconstitutional according to the Southern doctrine of the time -- the federal government could not purchase freedom for slaves. This was something southerners worried about and they found it a nineteenth century version of redistribution of wealth. I'll need to go back to Calhoun's writings to get chapter and verse on this, but that's my recollection.
But let's leave aside the constitutional arguments; I find them so often to be constructed covers for ideology. That was certainly the case for the old South. Southerners blended their belief in the centrality of slavery with their interpretation of the Constitution to create a doctrine that would not allow the federal government to interfere with slavery. They took several pieces that recognized slavery -- like the fugitive slave clause and the three-fifths compromise and combined that with the idea that all states are equal and that the federal government could do nothing that would interfere with a state's equality. That meant to Southerners that the federal government could not exclude slavery from the territories, because that would have been discriminating against south states' citizens. South Carolina Theology Professor James Henley Thornwell summarized in an article in the Southern Presbyterian Review in early 1861 the Southern argument about equality of the states:
The Southern man, politically is the slaveholder; the Northern man, politically, is the non-slaveholder The rights of the South are the rights of the South as slaveholding; the rights of the North are the rights of the North as non-slaveholding. This is what makes the real difference betwixt the two sections. To exclude slaveholding is, therefore, to exclude the South. By the free-soil doctrine, therefore, she, as South, is utterly debarred from every foot of the soil, which belongs, ofvright, is much to her as to her Northern confederates.
Just so happens that I've been spending time of late reading pamphlets on secession and they often join talk about their constitutional rights to slavery with their emphasize the centrality of slavery to Southern society. Thornwell -- a minister, not a lawyer -- wrote in sophisticated terms about the South's constitutional rights. Quite simply, Southerners weren't going to abide the loss of slavery. It was the centerpiece of their society. There are so many people one could turn to to make this case -- let me also invoke one of my favorite pre-war law professors here -- James Holcombe of UVA. Holcombe gave an extensive speech at the Virginia secession convention at the end of March, 1861. He began with a haunting image -- drawn, apparently, from a trip he took in the North Atlantic. That imagery served as a warning of what the slave-owning South faced -- the potential for the complete destruction of their society.
Who can recall the feelings of a landsman, unfamiliar with the terrors of the sea, overtaken by a night of storm and dnager in the midst of the Atlantic, the ship pitching upon the waves, the fog too dense to be pierced by any human eye, the shrill tones of the alarm pipe sounding every moment in his ears, and more feaful by far, than wave, or mist, or blast, the rapid fall of the barometer indicating the close proximity of that most appalling because most irresitable enemy of the sailor, the tremendous iceberg, by whose fatal contact the most powerful vessel may be dashed to pieces in an instant.... We, sir, are tossing upong the surges of revolution; clouds and darkness cover our future track; an unerring moral instinct warns us of approaching collision between repulsive masses, in whose awful shcok all that we love and value may perish.
And yet, he went on to argue for aggressive action. Holcombe argued for that because of the belief -- so common to Southerners at the time it almost didn't need to be stated -- that slavery was the foundation of their society and that President Lincoln's election threatened slavery:
The institution of slavery is so indissolubly interwoven with the whole framework of society in a large portion of our State, and constitutes so immense an element of material wealth and political power to the whole Commonwealth, that its subversion through the operation of any unfriendly policy on the part of the Federal Government, whether that operation is extended over a long or short period of time, would, of necessity, dry up the very fountains of the public strength, change the whole frame of our civilization and inflict a moral wound upon our liberties.
If you're interested in this, here's Holcombe's full speech. No serious Southern politician was going to give up slavery -- and they could not be convinced to do so, because the money to buy out slavery would have to come in part from southerners. Why give up something when you're convinced that you're going to be able to keep all of it. What Holcombe addressed in the remainder of his speech was the need for stronger constitutional protections for slavery -- that probably even included a separate state.
This is the problem of arrogance, that Southerners (and Northerners, too) could not see the extraordinary cost of the Civil War. (Then there's the other issue that thought the costs of the war were extraordinary -- extraordinary -- the benefits of it may have exceeded the cost. I never like to balance the benefit of war against its costs, because that seems so heartless. And the burdens of war are often fall hardest on those least able to bear them.) Certainly, if we knew in December 1860 what we knew in April 1865, the calculation to go to war would almost certainly have been different. But that's not the linear way we live our lives. Culture prevented us from seeing our nation's best interest. This is a story that is, tragically, repeated with great frequency.
But there was consideration -- as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out -- of a more modest scheme, the idea of compensation to owners who agreed to send their slaves to Liberia for colonization. The idea of colonization was debated and resoundingly rejected in the wake of Nat Turner's rebellion -- for several reasons. Beginning with the extraordinary cost of the emancipation and colonization. But they also rejected it because so many thought slavery so central to Virginia society that Virginia could not afford to give up its enslaved labor. William and Mary professor Thomas R. Dew was central to stopping the colonization movement.
Great post, Al. You might add that the South continued to reject compensated emancipation right until the very end. Lincoln offered it at the Hampton Roads conference in February 1865, but the Confederacy refused.
Posted by: Steven Lubet | February 04, 2012 at 09:15 AM