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Odd that the north was willing to fight to preserve the union (and end slavery) when just compensation instead of spilled blood would have sufficed. In the case of the southern plantation owner the end of slavery was already at hand due to emerging technologies.
Yeah but paying for humans just makes them property–not humans.
They should never have been property in the first place.
Slavery was practiced throughout the north before the Revolutionary War. It was also practiced in most of the world at that time. It is easy to moralize the issue today but at that time it was well entrenched. While I was making the list of countries abolishing slavery it was not a cut and dry proposition as was done in the US by war. Slavery was whittled away slowly piece by piece (by an amazing array of strategies employed) elsewhere over the decades until it lost prominence in political and economic circles at which time it was formally abolished in all its forms. Saying that I do believe the computer I am using now is a product of modern day slavery but that is an issue for another day.
The upside to being a Rams fan is heartbreak.
Sprinkles are for winners.
No the computer was used as an example of slave labor today. Yes, compensating lawful owners for lawful property would have prevented war. Apparently you are also against people being sold into freedom?
No, I’m against people being treated as property. I thought that was clear.
Then why be against compensation to end the practice entirely while avoiding bloodshed?
The upside to being a Rams fan is heartbreak.
Sprinkles are for winners.
Then why be against compensation to end the practice entirely while avoiding bloodshed?
Should the government compensate me if my cat runs away while I’m on vacation?
There are reasons both moral and practical. Forget the moral aspects for now. Let’s look at the practical. First of all, who would pay? Remember “the North” isn’t actually a legal thing. It’s either the Federal government, or a state government. It can’t be the Feds because that government is of the United States. And the slave hasn’t left one country for another; he/she has left one state for another. Which state pays? The border state through which the slave entered? The state where he went next? The state he went to after that?
Whose job is it to track down the escaped slaves? How do they determine their identity, and which southerner is entitled to compensation?
Who determines the compensation? Do we set up a depreciation table? You paid $800 for this slave, worked him for 12 years, and now he’s got a bad back from an injury, and a cataract in one eye. Do you get the full $800? What if the slave was born into slavery and not paid for at all?
What are you going to do about the black market that develops where unwanted slaves (old, unproductive, etc) are helped to “escape” so that the owner can get cash for them? What about the straight up fraud cases where purchase papers are falsified to show a greater amount was paid for a slave? Now you’ve developed a secondary market for humans in the south where unscrupulous men buy slaves just to “resell” them to the north for a quick profit.
I have a better idea.
No to slavery. No to racist policies.
If you buy a slave, you assume the risk. If the slave dies, the slave dies. If the slave runs away, the slave runs away.
The federal government would have had to pay to abolish slavery and compensation would have had to be made to slave owners. Somewhat like eminent domain covered by the Fifth Amendment. I can’t imagine the north would have accepted less than complete abolition. You present interesting ideas about how compensation could have been approached depending upon the individual slave in question. None of your other concerns would be in play since the institution of slavery would have been abolished.
Your “better idea” as stated is quite odd as it supports the institution of slavery.
The upside to being a Rams fan is heartbreak.
Sprinkles are for winners.
White support for the Confederate flag really is about racism, not Southern heritage
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Much of the discussion revolves around the question of whether the flag represents “heritage or hatred” (see, for example, here, here, and here). Drawing on rare survey data on this subject, we can shed light on this question. We find that white Southerners who support the Confederate flag are actually less knowledgeable about Southern history; no stronger in their attachments to fellow Southerners (after racial attitudes are taken into account); less tolerant of interracial dating; and more likely to deny that blacks are discriminated against in the labor market.
Our data come from a survey of 522 white Georgians conducted by the Survey Research Laboratory at Georgia State University in 2004. This survey was designed to assess opinions about three different potential state flags that were being considered at the time: one of these flags prominently featured the Confederate battle emblem:
Knowledge about Southern history was measured with two questions: whether the respondent could correctly identify the famous Union general, William Tecumseh Sherman, and the number of Civil War battles the respondent could name. (In our analysis, no credit was given for additional battles named after the first two.)
The argument that respect for Southern heritage drives white support for the Confederate flag might lead one to think that flag supporters would be more knowledgeable about Southern history. We found exactly the opposite: whites with more knowledge about Civil War history are actually less supportive of the state flag prominently featuring the Confederate battle emblem:
Of those whites who got all three answers correct (identified Sherman and correctly and named two Civil War battles), only 34 percent preferred the state flag with the Confederate battle emblem. Of those who got zero answers correct, 73 percent preferred the state flag with the Confederate battle emblem. Furthermore, this relationship is present even when we statistically control for markers of social class such as income and education. White supporters of the Confederate battle emblem are distinguished not by their knowledge of Southern history but rather their ignorance of it.
Of course, it is possible that one could feel an affiliation for the South without knowing much about the Civil War. We therefore also examined whether those whites who say they “feel close to Southerners” are more likely to support the Confederate flag. This question is tricky, though, because such whites are also disproportionately likely to express unfavorable attitudes toward blacks. After taking account of racial attitudes, we found no meaningful relationship between feelings of closeness to Southerners and support for the Confederate battle emblem.
In contrast, attitudes toward blacks were strongly associated with support for the Confederate flag. Among those whites who say they would object if their child dated someone of a different race, preference for the Confederate battle emblem is a full 20 percentage points higher than it is among those whites who would not object:
Similarly, among whites who do not believe that blacks are discriminated against in the labor market, support for the Confederate flag is 30 percentage points higher than it is among those whites who believe there is continuing racial discrimination.
Of course, this survey is now over 10 years old. It is possible, though in our view improbable, that the factors affecting support for the Confederate flag have changed significantly.
Moreover, none of the above shows that the Confederate flag only represents racial intolerance. No doubt there are some whites who favor the Confederate flag for reasons that are not wholly reducible to racial intolerance.
But the results do suggest that in general, white support for the flag is associated not with a deep knowledge of Southern history or a kinship with Southerners, but with racism — that is, not with heritage but with hatred.
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