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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7868435" data-attributes="member: 4937">That wouldn't have worked either. Economic hardship always falls hardest on the poorest, and since the slaves had no rights slave owners would have just lowered their wages and demanded more from the task masters. The slave owners would have probably taken out yet more loans, and then they would have been even more reluctant to part with the slaves.Only the opposite would have worked without bloodshed. But it tells you much of what you need to know about humanity that the Union alone was willing to raise and spend $5.2 billion dollars to fight a war to plunder, pillage, and destroy one half the country, but would have never been willing to raise the same amount of money to buy and liberate the 3 million slaves in the first place. If the same money that was used to fight the war had been used to liberate the slaves, the might have been freed without blood and there might even have been some money left over to provide them the land and mules that they never received. There could have been a compromise. It would have been ugly. The slave owners wouldn't have received all the economic compensation they felt they deserved. Slaves probably wouldn't have been freed all at once in a grand gesture. People in the north and south who weren't responsible for the problem and who had never benefited from would have had to have pay for it. The freed slaves wouldn't have immediately received the rights and privileges that they were due. But a half million Americans need not have died, and the economy of the South need not have been wrecked for 80 years.Honestly, if the South hadn't been arrogant and hadn't fired a shot, people probably would have kept kicking the ball down the street for decades. But, that's not the way people think.</blockquote>

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