What I've Changed My Mind About: Was the Civil War the Best Way to End Slavery in the US?
Each year the Edge Foundation asks leading world thinkers a big smart sounding question. In 2008 the question was What have you changed your mind about?. I'm not a leading world thinker, and nobody asked me, but I've come to change my mind on a serious issue and it's worth talking about because it's something that not too long ago I could never have pictured myself changing my mind about.
The issue is: Was the Civil War the Best Way to End Slavery in the US? And by extension: is the military approach effective at solving a broad class of social problems?
Growing up on the West Coast of the US the need for the Civil War to end slavery was unquestioned. After all, if there's something bad we appoint a czar and make war against it. Drugs are bad so we make war. Cancer is bad so we make a war. Illegal immigration is bad so we make a war. Terrorism is bad so we make a war. Saddam Hussein was bad so we made war against Iraq.
This is a type of thinking we are comfortable with: X is bad so kill it. Kill or be killed. An eye for an eye. If we don't like it, kill it. It's an easy and conforting approach to problem solving. No thinking required.
Interestingly though when it came to the one of the biggest evils of all--Soviet Union--we did not destroy them. In fact, we never directly attacked them. We played a long game. We outwitted and outlasted until now Russia is now more or less (often less) part of Western economic life and culture. China is being handled in a similar way.
So when we think someone can hurt us we play the long game, but when we think we can win we play the short game of change through superior fire power. Notice that a long game based on values, patience, and intelligent structured interactions are the only games we seem to win.
As a child I never questioned that the Civil War was necessary. Even as an adult I followed the "if X is bad kill it" way of thinking on the Civil War, even though this approach has been proven not to work against many if not most problems.
I've recently read a book called the Greatest Emancipations: How the West Abolished Slavery by Jim Powell that changed my thinking on how the US chose to fight slavery. And I think the implication goes far beyond slavery and how we "fight" other "wars" as well.
This is a fascinating book that is filled with a history that I had no idea about before reading the book. The key points:
For thousands of years slavery went unchallenged as a way of life.
In a single century slavery was abolished in the West.
Only the US resorted to a Civil War to abolish slavery.
The more violence involved in the emancipation process the worse the outcomes were.
In the Civil War 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died. Perhaps more than 80,000 civilians died, most of them Southerners. Entire adult populations were wiped out in many communities. An estimate $1 billion to $1.5 billion in property was destroyed in the South. The South experienced runaway inflation. Most of the fighting occurred in the South and everywhere was ruin and desolation.
The point is that the South suffered greatly. And like Germany after WWI, if you suffer there's not much room for change in your heart. It fuels vengence and hate and those twin powers can last forever.
John Wilks Booth was outraged at the suffering of the Confederacy and showed his displeasure by murdering Lincoln. Booth did a good job furthering his cause. Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, was nothing like Lincoln and was prepared to let the South go its own way. The North won the war, but the white supremacists won the after-war.
What I didn't know when I was younger is abolishing slavery in the South didn't really fix the problem. Without these elements Powell asserts a society can't be truly free:
Constitutional limitations on government power.
Rule of law.
Equal rights.
After the Civil War Blacks still had none of these. The problem was after such a long brutal war it was impossible to put aside the intense hatreds and meet together in reconciliation. When Northern soldiers eventually ended their occupation, pulling out of the South, it became impossible to keep a free society. What followed was an attempt to reenact slavery by other means.
In 1865 Mississippi instituted Black Codes. The ability of former slaves to buy land, rent rooms, and enter various professions was severely limited. A pass was needed for a black person to go from one plantation to another plantation. Without their employer's permission a black person couldn't travel on a highway. In Alabama blacks could only become farmers, no other occupation was permitted. In Opelousas Louisiana only servants could live in town. In Florida, the punishment for breaking a contract was whipping for a black person. In Louisiana blacks were fined for missing work for any reason other than illness. It was illegal for blacks to hunt, fish, or own livestock because this interfered with their work on the plantation. Interracial marriage was banned as was gun ownership. Blacks couldn't serve on juries or testify against white people.
And so it went through Reconstruction and long after Reconstruction faded into a forgotten purpose. This is far worse than the separate drinking fountain story we are typically told about life after the Civil War.
The military strategy simply didn't work. The Civil War didn't change hearts or minds. The South was not convinced slavery was wrong. Blacks were barely better off. And an incredible resoluteness of purpose was forged in Southerners by the war. It became impossible to follow the non-violent abolitionist approaches that had worked elsewhere in West.
I knew very little of this history before reading Greatest Emancipations.
If a Civil War didn't really free the slaves in the true sense of the word, then the war didn't work. Easy to say of course given I'm a modern white person looking back on the lives of Black slaves. But I can't imagine a Civil War followed by another 100 years of near-slavery was what anyone had in mind.
So if war didn't work, what might have worked? What worked in other abolitionist movements? In his last chapter Powell addresses an alternate strategy for emancipation that has a lot of merit. The major points of his strategy are:
multiple strategies - no single strategy, including war, would have abolished slavery and secured equal rights in the US. Multiple strategies had to be perused to reduce the population of slaveholders and slaves, increasing the population of free blacks and the number of people who supported emancipation.
slave rebellion - a reminder that slaves were able to help themselves and that slavery was a risky business.
change public opinion - abolitionist campaigns that involved publications and speaking tours, aimed at generating public rejection of slavery and support for emancipation.
elect sympathetic politicians - campaigns aimed at electing politicians who would support restrictions, then outright bans, on the slave trade, and on slavery itself.
encourage runaway slaves - give encouragement and assistance for slaves who were brave enough to run away from their owners.
purchase and free slaves - raise private funds to buy the freedom of slaves.
pay slaveholders to get out of the business - use taxpayer funds for slaveholders who get out of the slavery business and emancipate their slaves.
The beauty of this approach is that it is an interlocking and self-reinforcing set of policies. By encouraging slaves to escape and by buying the freedom of slaves, slave-free zones are created that are beachheads for further expansion. When the North agreed to return run away slaves they dealt a tremendous blow the to abolitionist movement. In turn, as the number of slaves decline so to does the power and influence of the slaveholder. This puts pressure on the slaveholders to negotiate with slaves so there would be a labor force to harvest crops. And as the influence of slaveholders dwindles other people would look elsewhere for income and these people would be more inclined to support emancipation. Slaveholder power would shrink. As slaveholders came under multiple angles of attack the offer of a buy out would become more and more attractive.
These approaches had already proved themselves in other regions. For example, paying slaveholders to get out of the business was very effective in the British Caribbean and in Brazil.
At the time the couldn't have know this, but in their near future industrial inventions were soon to put an end to the need of having large number slave workers to work the land. The pressure for large populations of low cost labor would have been removed. The South would have also found itself economically isolated as all other Western nations would be out of the slave trade and actively punishing those who were still using slaves, both for economic and moral reasons.
The end result of this system of policies would have been the steady erosion and the relatively quick ending of slavery. The great divide would not have occurred between the North and South and uncountable lives would have been saved.
But in my head I still think that's all good, but what if I were a slave? What would I think then? Maybe as a slave I wouldn't be so happy about this taking it slow approach at my expense. But it's clear the war wasn't a shortcut, it didn't work, and it created deep and long lasting divisions in the US that have yet to fully heal.
I can't be sure if the likes of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois would agree, but on balance since freedom and equality for slaves was the end goal it would have made more sense to pursue a more strategic and persistent approach instead of a military solution. And that's why I changed my mind on the US Civil War.
Now, doesn't much the same logic apply to most of the other problems we are "solving" militarily?
