D. L. Hughley seems to agree with Ron Paul's points on the Civil War in his interview of Bill Maher.

I agree that regulation would be bad. But isn't this just an extension on being in the grey area of being unregulated and semi-legal?

Check out post 1316.

He lived in the 19th century. You can't really judge historical figures with 21st century values imo.

In order for Southern plantation owners to agree to the plan there must first have been some kind of realization in the South that slavery as an institution needed to be ended. Save for the border states nowhere in the historical record is there even a hint of abolitionist sentiment. Indeed, voicing such views in Mississippi or Alabama was a good way to get oneself dead. Anyone who has even a passing knowledge of how the political and economic power structures were organized knows that there was zero chance of the South voluntarily giving up the institution as by 1850 the defense of slavery was the raison d'etre of both. The secession crisis was sparked by southerners mainly to avoid a situation where they thought they might, someday potentially decades in the future, be put in a position where slavery would become much harder to defend politically. It is the very act of secession (and the politics that led up to it) which is the best argument against the potential success of the Just Buy the Slaves plan that Ron Paul thinks would have avoided the Civil War. I would imagine the fact that he makes this argument today says more about who he thinks his audience is than anything else.

While typing this up it occurs to me that the advocates for the Just Buy the Slaves Plan are basically making the argument that the slaves were indeed property and that their owners deserved some compensation for not continuing their enslavement. That's the Libertarian side of the argument. Go figure.

This is true. I'm sure in the 22nd century there will be those that berate us for our willingness to kill humans without much second thought.

I want them to realize that we were somewhat deluded about these things, we called it a fetus instead of calling it human. We weren't really bad people, we just grew up thinking that it was ok, society said it was ok, they taught us that in the schools and everything.

depending on what you mean by border states, i'm pretty sure this is false.

Its clear that when you are dealing aan unsavory institution, one can not simply wish it away, one has to understand and compensate people who are beneficiaries of that system. Libertarians understand the need for compromise. Its not like we can just say government is evil.

Question for anyone arguing the just let them go side:

In the counterfactual of a successful secession, how long would slavery have to endure as an institution before you would change your mind about the necessity of the Civil War as fought?

I think killing a person is worse than enslaving them. But the question is how much worse? I would say about 3x as bad. So if a human life was about 60 years back then and there were 4 million slaves in the south how much longer would it have had to gone on for it to be worse than having 600k people die? About 27 years I think.

So like if we were the war planners back then I would be telling you to allow the abolitionist movement and diplomatic negotiations (like compensated emancipation) at least 27 more years before starting up a war were 600,000 innocent Americans are going to get killed. What would be your response to this?

Two wrongs still don't make a right. The Civil War as fought was most certainly a wrong.

My response would be that the evidence of the previous 27 years is that attitudes in the South towards slavery were hardening, not softening, and even if that were not the case it was the South that stopped negotiating when it seceded. I'm not sure who you think would be agitating for abolition in the CSA and it's hard to believe that a nation founded on the principle that a Negro's right and natural place was as a slave would have been anything other than a slaveholding society as long as that government existed.

You need two parties to make a fight. Once you strip away the veneer of States' rights what's left is that the South was willing to shed blood in order to ensure that slavery endured and the fact that this is flipped onto it's head in order to turn the South into the victim is just mindboggling. If there was even one scintilla of evidence of a nascent movement towards emancipation in the Deep South I might consider other possible courses, but given the structure of the South there's just no possible way that Slavery gets eradicated without bloodshed.

And the North's willingness to burn whole towns and kill countless so they could continue to levy taxes and tarrifs against their Southern brethren.

If the North really just didn't want slavery to exist, there were other far more effective ways to get rid of it. The most obvious being economic ostracization. You don't like the way they produce stuff, don't trade with them. Pretty soon, the system of slavery becomes economically unsustainable and falls out of practice.

No, the victims were those that died as a result of such a needless political exercise.

Then sorry, but you are being a shortsighted fool. To claim that bloodshed at the behest of the state was the only possible way is to ignore a whole plethora of options on the table.

This is nonsense. Any economic sanctions against the CSA would have been thought of as an act of war and there would have been fighting soon enough anyway. The notion that the southern power structure would just sit idly by while the very foundation of their society was brought down around them is just lol worthy. I mean they seceded from the Union and fought a war because the new president was against extending slavery to the new territories, not because he was promising to emancipate their slaves.

The apologists here and elsewhere grossly underestimate the degree to which the self identification of the South was based upon the existence of slavery. To do away with the institution was to destroy the South's very essence, one need only look to the Civil Rights fights a century later for a cue on how receptive the CSA would have been to outside pressure for emancipation. Indeed the evidence is that the abolitionist presence in the border states in the decades before the war hardened attitudes in the Deep South more than anything. Now what might have happened is that the northern states in the CSA may have gradually withdrawn from the practice, but at some point there would be a core set of states where any decision to formally do away with slavery would have to be enforced at the barrel of a gun.

It is a fallacy to think that the Civil War was fought to force the South to abolish slavery. Wars are not waged over an issue like that, by other people than the enslaved or their relatives. The fact that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation only applied to the seceding states is pretty telling in that regard.

The slave emancipation was a side effect of the war (be it a very good one), and was used as an agitating factor to gain support from nations that had already abolished slavery, from the population of the states that were already slave free and from the slaves in the Southern States themselves. A lot of slaves signed up to fight on the Union's side of the war.

Saying the war was fought to abolish slavery is like saying the US invaded Iraq in defense of human rights and democracy. While it is easy to support a war for such reasons, these are never the primary reasons for the people in charge to wage a war for.

Being against the war in Iraq does not mean that you are pro a Saddam Hussein like dictatorship and likewise, saying that States should have a right to secede does not mean you are pro-slavery. This should be obvious.

To answer your question: I have no idea. I wouldn't expect it to have lasted decades longer, but it's hard to tell as the abolishment in the US may have been a catalytic event for other parts of the Americas in the abolishment of slavery. Then again, it may have been an inevitable development, that was coincidentally accelarated by the Civil War because it turned into an important mean to gain support and win the war.

This is not in defence of either side of the conflict btw, I don't know enough about the Civil War to have a well informed opinion on the broader issues that lied underneatch the conflict.

And if the South had invaded the North on those grounds, they would have been the aggressors and in the wrong. I don't see what is so hard to understand about that.

Regardless of how deeply "ingrained" such an attitude of slavery was, if it was economically unsustainable, it would have eventually collapsed. Sorry, but you can't simply ignore economic realities like that.

Instead, what happened was the North tried to exercise its political will on the South via an aggressive war, which only hardened Dixie's belief on the issue and caused them to meet violence with even more violence (and helped cement the cultural attitude in the South that still very much exists today).

The "apologists" (which is really a laughable spin on this) here do not and have not defended slavery or anyone's "right" to enslave another. What they have done is criticized the actions of the North as both an inefficient (and immoral) means to an end, as well as pointed out that the abolition of slavery was not even the real end of the North to begin with. If anyone is the apologist, it is those defending Northern aggression.

Or slave revolts. Or the changing of attitudes out of economic necessity. Or any of the other possibilities that existed.

If the South was so hardened in their belief of slavery and their identification with it, it is because the actions of the North reinforced them with their actions.

Watch me. There were plenty of people from that era who weren't bigoted like Lincoln.

What are you talking about? Slavery was already tacitly part of the Constitution (Lincoln was convinced, btw, that unilaterally freeing the slaves might be unconstitutional). When did he propose "to ship them off to Africa?" (This doesn't even seem that bad compared to perpetual slavery.) Either way, I suspect this was an attempt to placate the South. Lincoln's purpose was always first and foremost to maintain the integrity of the Union.

He drafted two versions of a bill for compensated emancipation in Delaware in 1861, addressed Congress on the topic in 1862, and wrote a letter to Senator James McDougall aruging for the proposal on the grounds that it was more efficient than war later that same year. Congress rejected the idea, and none of the states likely would have accepted these buyouts anyway.

I have some measure of respect for a person who, despite his bigoted attitudes, ultimately took dramatic action toward freeing slaves and improving the living conditions of freed blacks. There are a lot of reasons to dislike Lincoln, but he did issue the emancipation proclamation, and work for the passage of the 13th - 15th Amendments. He even went so far as to personally sign them (not a legally necessary act). Again, I mostly dislike Lincoln, but acting like he was uniformly evil (and that the poor, sweet, innocent Southerners were the victims of the war) is myopic.

He was involved in passing the 13th, but the 14th and 15th were both several years after his death.

Let's just say for a minute that the civil war WAS about slavery.

OK, now what?

Let's say Maine wants to secede today. There are no slaves in Maine. Should Maine be prevented from seceding? If so, why?

So they can't reinstitute slavery, LDO.

They should be allowed if both parties (Maine and the country) can come to an agreement accepted by both. But not unilaterally. So yes we can prevent it even if we just feel like it, it is up to Maine to give us incentives to encourage us to allow them to secede if they really want to.

Wat? Why?