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What about another look at Compensation Emancipation. Lets look at it as extortion or bribery or a nicer word like blackmail.
We would be paying blood money to people so they will do the right thing. If you are going to pay them off then you might as well use force and the point of a sword so they will do the right thing.
One way is clean and you are always being extorted for more or the other is messy but once it done it done.
How can a person be property??
__________________
"States Rights are about States Wrongs" - Jesse Jackson
What about another look at Compensation Emancipation. Lets look at it as extortion or bribery or a nicer word like blackmail.
I think the South would perceive the compensation emancipation as an attempt to bribery, and therefore they wouldn't accept such an offer.
I wonder whether financial connections between plantation owners and northern commerce (i.e. merchants and industrialist) were strong enough to undermine such plans. If many plantation owners were debtors to those merchants, who invested their own money in plantations, the compensation emancipation would be of no use. The plantation owners would get money for their slaves, but would have to pay the money to their creditors. So, in the end they would have no slaves and no money. And the merchants would have their money paid back, but no prospect of profitable investments.
Or am I confusing the issue?
I think the South would perceive the compensation emancipation as an attempt to bribery, and therefore they wouldn't accept such an offer.
I wonder whether financial connections between plantation owners and northern commerce (i.e. merchants and industrialist) were strong enough to undermine such plans. If many plantation owners were debtors to those merchants, who invested their own money in plantations, the compensation emancipation would be of no use. The plantation owners would get money for their slaves, but would have to pay the money to their creditors. So, in the end they would have no slaves and no money. And the merchants would have their money paid back, but no prospect of profitable investments.
Or am I confusing the issue?
I do not know if there was a financial tries between the northern merchants and southern planters or if southern planters borrow money from the northern banks and used slaves as security.
I was thinking bribery more as payoff the southern planters to do the morally right thing or payoff the southern planters so they won't secede from the union.
Compensation Emancipation is just ugly...
__________________
"States Rights are about States Wrongs" - Jesse Jackson
I was thinking bribery more as payoff the southern planters to do the morally right thing or payoff the southern planters so they won't secede from the union.
5fish,
I understood your message to mean the same. Such bribery would be probably perceived by both radical abolitionists and Southerners as dishonor.
I added those issues concerning connections between planters and merchants to indicate another possible reason for slave-owners to reject the hypothetical offer of compensated emancipation.
Sorry for my sometimes unclear way of writing
Quote:
Compensation Emancipation is just ugly...
I must agree with Unionblue that the idea of such emancipation would be justifiable if it could really prevent further bloodshed.
I must agree with Unionblue that the idea of such emancipation would be justifiable if it could really prevent further bloodshed.[/
I was looking up the Compensation Emancipation concept and it was not well received in it day. There was a convention in 1857 that seems to be be tied to the back the Africa movements back then.
Lincoln as we know discussed it a year into the war.
In general Abolishist oppose it.
Here in America it did not have much support except from the people who would be ferrying people back to Africa.
I see no hints anywhere that the southern planters even had a interest in it.
It may sound good to us today but reason never seems to work when it comes to slavery.
__________________
"States Rights are about States Wrongs" - Jesse Jackson
The reason I brought it up in the first place, Bobbie and 5fish, is that one of the complaints is how slavery might have been better handled rather than outright abolition.
Why didn't the US simply buy all the slaves and move them to Liberia or Costa Rica or Haiti? That would certainly have been cheaper than a war.
No one was willing to sell. We're not talking about the value of a slave, we're talking about the value of a comfortable way of life. Wasn't going to happen. What would Tevye say? "Tradition."
The entire south -- planters, farmers, rednecks, city folk and crackers -- was not interested in change. Problem is, they had northern zealots on their case to change at least one thing. Don't know about you, but whenever anyone gets on my case, my spine stiffens and I resist. Doesn't much matter whether I'm right or wrong.
I kinda look at the entire affair as one of who knocks off whose chip first. And who is more responsible? The one with the chip? Or the one who knocks it off.
Looks like I need a nap now.
ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
The reason I brought it up in the first place, Bobbie and 5fish, is that one of the complaints is how slavery might have been better handled rather than outright abolition.
Why didn't the US simply buy all the slaves and move them to Liberia or Costa Rica or Haiti? That would certainly have been cheaper than a war.
No one was willing to sell. We're not talking about the value of a slave, we're talking about the value of a comfortable way of life. Wasn't going to happen. What would Tevye say? "Tradition."
The entire south -- planters, farmers, rednecks, city folk and crackers -- was not interested in change. Problem is, they had northern zealots on their case to change at least one thing. Don't know about you, but whenever anyone gets on my case, my spine stiffens and I resist. Doesn't much matter whether I'm right or wrong.
I kinda look at the entire affair as one of who knocks off whose chip first. And who is more responsible? The one with the chip? Or the one who knocks it off.
Looks like I need a nap now.
ole
I think compensated emancipation was clearly a non-starter from the first. One, the government never had the money and my guess is that many of the states, especially in the West, would have howled at paying taxes to "buy slaves" from slaveowners. Two, the difficulty of setting the price for emancipation - suddenly every slave would have been a valuable, vital commodity to the slaveowner who could not part with the slave for less than some exhorbitant price. Third, resettlement, while a nice platitude to ease the racial fears of the North as well as South, was logistically impossible. The transportation of slaves back to Africa, where the vast majority clearly did not want to go being born and raised in the United States, would have been so expensive and taken so many ships that it could not have been accomplished even if all agreed to it. Could you pack the freed slaves into the holds of ships the way you brought them over in the first place? Think about how many years it took to bring over the slaves in the first place and then think about reversing that entire process. Finally, once word of the death rates of the first "colonists" reached back to America, it would be even harder to convince blacks that the passage back to Africa was desireable and forced repatriation would have left a black mark on the United States impossible to erase. I seem to recall reading that the death rate among those "repatriated" to Liberia was tremendous.
__________________ "There must be more historians of the Civil War than there were generals figthing in it... Of the two groups, the historians are the more belligerent." David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered (1961)
The reason I brought it up in the first place, Bobbie and 5fish, is that one of the complaints is how slavery might have been better handled rather than outright abolition.
Why didn't the US simply buy all the slaves and move them to Liberia or Costa Rica or Haiti? That would certainly have been cheaper than a war.
No one was willing to sell. We're not talking about the value of a slave, we're talking about the value of a comfortable way of life. Wasn't going to happen. What would Tevye say? "Tradition."
The entire south -- planters, farmers, rednecks, city folk and crackers -- was not interested in change. Problem is, they had northern zealots on their case to change at least one thing. Don't know about you, but whenever anyone gets on my case, my spine stiffens and I resist. Doesn't much matter whether I'm right or wrong.
I kinda look at the entire affair as one of who knocks off whose chip first. And who is more responsible? The one with the chip? Or the one who knocks it off.
Looks like I need a nap now.
ole
While the war was on, Lincoln tried to get Maryland and delaware and the rest of the border states to accept compensated emancipation.
Delaware refused. This surprises me, because there were very few slaves in Delaware, and very few slave-owners. In fact, the largest slaveowner in the state was leading the charge to have the offer accepted. But the state legislature refused. Historians seem to feel theat Delaware would have taken the offer if they could have immediately sent all the Blacks (free-before and emancipated-now) someplace else, but they wouldn't take it if the former-slaves remained in Delaware.
State legislature in Delaware is tiny, representing only three counties. I think they had six state senators, so it really didn't take much opposition to block something.
Tim
__________________ "Let us, then, consider all attempts to weaken this Union, by maintaining that each state is separately and individually independent, as a species of political heresy, which can never benefit us, but may bring on us the most serious distresses."
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, 1740-1824, Revolutionary War soldier, one of the authors of the US Constitution in 1787, speaking at the South Carolina Ratifying Convention in 1788.
The reason I brought it up in the first place, Bobbie and 5fish, is that one of the complaints is how slavery might have been better handled rather than outright abolition.
Ole,
I advocate what those who came before us. Their solution of outright abolition by the sword.
__________________
"States Rights are about States Wrongs" - Jesse Jackson
They all refused. No one wanted to sell their slave or slaves. Which tends to make a mockery of the idea that the war might have been settlled differently. I have yet to see some out on that fracas. It was a given and there was no way out of it but maybe a bit of sanity. Which was in short supply.
There was no emancipation on the horizon. We had some buttheads on both sides and neither were going to back away. So we got a gosh darn kill them all war.
ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
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