Comments on: Henley on Paleos.

By: blabla

blabla — Wed, 25 Dec 2002 20:28:35 +0000

Radley,
Yes, please read the Hummel book. Not only will you see that the Civil War was not a war for freedom, but also that Ms. Rohweder’s reading comprehension skills leave much to be desired.

By: Nicholas Weininger

Nicholas Weininger — Fri, 20 Dec 2002 18:00:52 +0000

I second the recommendation of Hummel’s book. However, it’s worth pointing out that

(a) Hummel reaches the conclusion that Lincoln could and should have let the seceding states go, in opposition to what Ms. Rohweder says;

(b) there is considerable evidence to dispute Ms. Rohweder’s claim that “by the time the Southern states seceded hardly anyone in the Union was willing to let them go.” On this subject I’d recommend Thomas DiLorenzo’s _The Real Lincoln_. While DiLorenzo, unlike Hummel, is at times too soft on the Confederacy (which makes DiLorenzo, surprise surprise, a paleo darling), he musters an impressive array of Northern editorials from 1860-61 arguing for letting the secessionists go. No less an abolitionist luminary than Horace Greeley wrote that “We hope never to live in a republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets.”

By: Jane Galt

Jane Galt — Fri, 20 Dec 2002 14:03:48 +0000

To be fair, libertarians aren’t really arguing that slavery was uneconomic for the slaveholders, an argument Fogel has refuted; rather, they generally argue that it retarded the economy of the South as a whole. Poor whites in the South were much poorer than people occupying the same niche in the North, and of course the slaves were worse off still, although I’ve heard convincing arguments that materially they weren’t as bad off as the Irish.

I’d also point out that slavery produced substantial economic issues that would have determined its success or failure even if they hadn’t succeeded. With industrialization, it was simply becoming impossible to run the country half-slave/half-free; everything from tariffs to taxes to land use and industrial development had to go one way, or the other. Bigger navy to protect cotton shipments, or bigger army to pacify the territories where the raw materials were drawn from? And so on, ad infinitum.