 My name is David Bowes, I'm the Executive Vice President of the Institute and I'm very pleased to be able to introduce our speaker this afternoon. I am a big fan of the movie Amazing Grace that came out last year. It tells the story of William Wilberforce, a member of parliament who spent 50 years agitating for the abolition of slavery. One of the things that inspires me about that movie is that I've been telling libertarian audiences lately, you know, if it took 50 years to persuade the citizens of the freest, most literate, most educated country in the world that it was wrong to hold their fellow citizens in chains, then maybe we should recognize it might take a long time to bring about various reforms that libertarians would like to bring about, but it reminds you that working at it for a long time can succeed. I also, just this weekend, started reading William Hague's biography of William Wilberforce and I reflected there on William Hague was recently the leader of the Conservative Party in Great Britain. He's still a leader of the Conservative Party. Can one think of a leader of either of the parties in the U.S. Congress who could write a 500-page biography of a historical figure? Now I mentioned this to a colleague who said, and I sort of laughed and said, imagine Joe Biden writing a 500-page biography of Daniel Webster and he said, well, Joe Biden might tear the cover off this one and send it into a publisher claiming it was his work. I guess that's a possibility. But it's an inspiring story and I look forward to reading the rest of the book. It is one of the greatest stories in the history of the world. I was asked once by some skeptical neoclassical economists, what's the greatest accomplishment libertarianism ever had? And I said, well, the bringing of power under the control of law. And they kind of scoffed that that was not something you could measure, so how could it be useful? And they said, well, anything else, anything more recent? So, well, the abolition of slavery, that was a pretty important libertarian accomplishment. It is a truly great accomplishment. Charles Murray, when he did his book, Human Accomplishment, said, I'm thinking of this as a resume of the human race. What would you put on your resume for the human race? Now I guess he wouldn't have counted the abolition of slavery, because he said, you don't put on your resume, I stopped beating my wife. It's not an achievement to stop doing evil things, it's only an achievement to do something positive that didn't exist before. But if you have been beating your wife, then it is a good thing to stop. And if you have been holding people in slavery for thousands of years, it is a tremendous story to stop doing that. So our speaker today, Jim Powell, is a fellow of the Cato Institute, and he has been writing the history of freedom in both its positive and its negative chapters. For the past decade or more, turning out quite a number of books. Perhaps the first one in this history of freedom series was a book called The Triumph of Liberty. A 2000 year history told through the lives of freedom's greatest champions, and this told about great men and women throughout history who had worked for freedom. Then he turned his attention to some of freedom's adversaries, and he wrote a series of books starting with FDR's Folly, and then he did Wilson's War about how Woodrow Wilson's War got us into all the bad aspects of the 20th century. And a book called Bully Boy, which was not in fact about John McCain, but rather about his childhood hero, or his adult hero actually, Teddy Roosevelt. Now Jim got tired of being depressed and he's turned his attention back to the positive side of advancements in freedom. And he has a new book out called Greatest Emancipations, How the West Abolished Slavery. And in this book he asks, how is it that slavery, which was unchallenged in principle or practice for thousands of years, disappeared in a single century? I was going to say suddenly disappeared in a single century, well to the people who lived in the 19th century it didn't seem so sudden. And yet in the context of human history it happened all at once, almost all over the world. So he's going to talk about that today. So please welcome our one man publishing house for Liberty, Jim Powell. Thank you, David. It's always great to be back here at Cato where so much important work for liberty is being done. Emancipation is a great story and I'm glad to share a little bit of it with you. It's a reminder that even when terrible things are happening and the odds seem to be overwhelming against us that it is possible to change the hearts and minds of people for the better. As David noted, slavery has been around for thousands of years. Every civilization had it. Powerful interest groups supported it. Pro-slavery interests were well represented in Western governments. And if we were to imagine the scene in 1800 slavery was approaching a peak in the West. The smartest people thought that it would go on indefinitely, if not forever. It was just very, very hard to see how could you ever get rid of anything that was that entrenched and that widely supported. And yet, again, as David noted, it was, by 1888, shadow slavery, which is the worst form, was gone from the Western Hemisphere. And in most cases, the process occurred fairly peacefully. I mean, there was some conflict everywhere, but huge amounts of violence, such as we saw in the two major exceptions, Haiti and the United States, didn't occur. In Haiti, people could not get beyond the idea that if you didn't kill, you were going to be killed. And ever since the Haitian slave revolt that started in 1791, the people there have suffered through some 200 revolts, coups, and dictatorships. In the United States, although the North won the decisive military victories, white supremacists soon regained full political control of the South. And the killing and destruction of the war gave the losers an uncontrollable lust for revenge and there was nobody who could be counted on to protect the former slaves. And civil rights were subverted for another century. How then, one might ask, how did the more peaceful emancipations occur? Because we all know that slaveholders were always trying to delay emancipation as much as possible. They would always try to avoid any kind of deadline for setting the slaves free. Then if they did have to agree to a deadline, they'd try to push it back. How else could you achieve emancipation without a lot of force? Well, the story really starts with getting a decisive moral argument against slavery. And the argument was not religious. As pro-slavery authors kept reminding us, there was plenty of support for slavery in the Bible, injunctions to obey your master and so on. A legal argument against slavery was not possible because slavery found so much support in Western constitutions, statutes, and court decisions. The decisive moral argument against slavery came from the natural rights philosophy that individuals as human beings are entitled to life, liberty, and property. And the most basic form of property is your own body, the self-ownership principle. The natural rights philosophy blossomed in England during the 1640s and among a group of writers known as levelers. Natural rights was the revolutionary doctrine made famous in the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence. And even though the principal author was slaveholder Thomas Jefferson, the radical American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison repeatedly referred to the Declaration as his gospel. The first abolitionist movement began in Great Britain in 1787. Thomas Clarkson was the organizational genius who did more than anybody else to make the movement happen. He was perhaps the first to seriously investigate slavery and the slave trade. He visited the principal slave trade ports of Bristol, Liverpool, and London. He interviewed thousands of sailors, sea captains, doctors, and many others with first-hand knowledge of slave trade. He became convinced that it was impractical to target slavery initially because it was so entrenched. Slavery had to be eroded and weakened before there was a chance that a frontal assault could work. Clarkson came to the conclusion that a powerful argument could be a powerful practical argument could be made against the slave trade because the British depended on the Royal Navy to defend their island and the Royal Navy in turn depended on their ability to recruit large numbers of sailors in an emergency. The slave trade had always been defended from a practical standpoint as the great nursery of sailors because the slave trade kept all these sailors active and in an emergency the Royal Navy would know where to go for people whose experience and skills were fresh. The Clarkson's research suggested that shocking numbers of British sailors died in the slave trade. More British sailors died in the slave trade than in any other branch of British commerce because the slaves were so racially treated that they were susceptible to all kinds of diseases and the sailors had to deal with the six slaves so they got sick and many of them died and the sailors on the slave ships were treated as badly as sailors on many of the other ships so in fact far from being the nursery of sailors the slave trade was the grave of sailors. This national security argument got the attention of British Prime Minister William Pitt. There was an additional angle here that in every Western society except the United States slave populations naturally tended to decline probably because of the harsh working conditions in the tropics and without fresh shipments of slaves the plantations were unable to maintain their workforces. So if the slave trade could be disrupted and eventually abolished that would in fact strike a pretty serious blow against slavery itself. Clarkson began to do a lot of speaking. He was dramatizing everything as much as he could. In his research he collected slaving gear, he collected shackles, he collected whips, he collected leg braces, neck braces, all kinds of thumb screws, all kinds of things that were used to discipline slaves or keep them captive in transit and he would display these things to people who had no idea because most of the people in England cared they didn't know anything about slavery it was something happening on the other side of the ocean and what they mainly cared about was to continue getting their slave produced products cotton, coffee, sugar, other things like that. One of the things that Clarkson would show would be slave ship diagrams such as this one where you can see all the slaves are fit in like sardines in as compact a space as possible it was a space that might be not much more than three or four feet high if that sometimes less it varied from ship to ship but people are just crammed in and this is where they were chained to one another so the sanitary conditions were awful people were shocked they had no idea. Clarkson talked about shocking practices in the slave trade for example the practice that the ships had of dumping six slaves overboard to drown and the reason for that was that a ship could collect insurance on slaves who were lost overboard but they could not collect insurance on a slave who was sick so if the slaves were sick this is a painting by J.M.W. Turner famous English painter he's pre-impressionist so it may be a little hard for you to see what he's depicting here and all this spectacular displays of color but this is a ship which is in the process of dumping slaves overboard so they can collect the insurance because the slaves are sick and they didn't want them to infect the other slaves and further increase their losses. Well again these were ways of trying to take home to people what the horrifying meaning of slavery which was something that was otherwise quite foreign to them. To generate pressure against slavery Clarkson organized anti-slavery societies throughout England he organized mass meetings he organized petition drives that sent Congress that bombarded Congress with petitions signed by as many as 400,000 people in a single year and these are all techniques that had not been done before they're now quite familiar of course but he was he really pioneered that. Clarkson played a key role recruiting allies in Parliament and as David noted the most important of those allies was William Wilberforce who embraced the moral case against slavery passionately and promoted it with evangelical fervor. Wilberforce displayed extraordinary dedication as he kept introducing bills to abolish the slave trade he just fought this stubborn parliamentary opposition for years before opinion changed enough that something could happen and Wilberforce played a key role in securing passage of the 1807 law that made it illegal for British citizens to participate in the slave trade. The law took effect in 1808 two centuries ago during the 1820s Clarkson Wilberforce and a younger member of Parliament named Thomas Buxton launched another movement this time aimed at slavery itself and they were able to abolish slavery in Jamaica and the other British possessions in the Caribbean by 1838. This is an illustration from the illustrated London news from the 1830s a slave in Jamaica hears of his liberation. This was a particularly important one in my opinion the British emancipation it was the most it seems to have been the most peaceful of all emancipations and a principle reason it was that the Parliament had been persuaded to appropriate 20 million pounds to pay off the slave holders to get out of the slavery business. Now this policy was denounced by American abolitionists because after all it was the slaves who were forced to work for nothing who deserved compensation the slave holders didn't deserve compensation and of course a major reason why that bill was passed was the political clout of the Caribbean slave holders in Parliament but there was also a great deal of practical wisdom in that policy because there was a recognition that after emancipation most of the former slave holders and the former slaves were going to end up in the same society together most of them probably were not able or inclined to move someplace else and the former slave holders had a lot more clout there's going to be nobody to protect them nobody anywhere could be counted on to protect former slaves after emancipation so if there's nobody who can protect the former slaves after emancipation it really made sense to minimize the incentives that the former slave holders had to terrorize the slaves as happened in the United States. There was no way to protect either no way or no means to protect the former slaves from the former slave holders if they are motivated by revenge and in fact this was a peaceful transition this was the most peaceful there were you know other events that happened later but the strategy as all discussed was also used in Spanish and Portuguese America with very similar results the peaceful methods that were pioneered by the British abolitionists were later adopted by William Lloyd Garrison and his campaign for abolishing American slavery they were adopted by Elizabeth Katie Stanton and her campaign for women's rights and later by Mohandas Gandhi for his campaign for Indian independence and by Martin Luther King and his campaign for civil rights meanwhile the British citizens having withdrawn from the slave trade their places were taken by citizens from other countries in particular France Portugal Spain and the United States. British diplomats began a decades long process of negotiating anti-slave trade treaties with the European powers that had slave colonies in the West. Britain's Royal Navy worked to enforce these anti-slave trade treaties and it was quite an extraordinary campaign by the Royal Navy that went on for more than a half century. This is a picture of a capture that occurred this is the HMS Arab that's the name of it the Arab capturing a Cuban slave ship off the coast of Cuba in 1856 the artist you might be interested to know was one of the crew on the HMS Arab he was a 15 year old cabin boy named Jonathan Starris and he looked pretty good to me. So this was a hugely important factor the British did not go around starting land wars if they didn't have a treaty to use against the slave trade as they did not get with the United States the British Navy didn't touch those ships but they're basically trying to make it harder for slave traders to go they had to fly somebody's flag otherwise they're going to be considered a pirate and it was open game on pirates and the British flag was no longer available the American flag was still available so gradually they're taking negotiating they eventually they take out the Spanish flag and the Portuguese flag so it becomes harder for the slave ships to operate. The slave the British did a great deal as I've indicated to get the movement started developing the ideas the enforcement but emancipation would never have occurred if the slaves had not taken a great deal of initiative to help themselves. If the slaves had just been standing idly by waiting for somebody to save them nothing would have happened. The first way that slaves helped themselves ironically was to revolt. Now as I mentioned in the case of Haiti if the only thing that's happening is a great deal of violence it's very hard to get beyond that in fact Haiti was not successful in creating a free society however it was very important that Haiti that the revolutionaries in Haiti gain independence and prevent Napoleon from reestablishing slavery because that sent a vital message to slave holders everywhere that slavery could consume them all and it would be better safer to negotiate the emancipation. This is a illustration gives you a little bit of an idea of what went on in Haiti. Haiti was particularly violent because it was actually a combination of strategies there was a struggle for emancipation going on and there was a struggle for independence from France going on and throughout the period there was a constant switching of sides and you had this is in the 1790s you had the British and the Spanish coming in to try to take some territory so there were a lot of people going after a lot of people. Another example of a slave revolt slaves helping themselves was the revolt on the amistad the amistad was a Cuban ship 1839 and the slaves revolted and continued killed everybody on board except two of the Cubans. The Africans wanted to go back to Africa but they didn't know how to navigate and the two survivors the two Cuban survivors tricked them and the ship ended up on Long Island and the result was one of the most famous trials in American history. Eventually it led to a Supreme Court decision in 1841 that granted freedom to the slaves the 25 men and boys and three girls and Steven Spielmerg made a great movie of the subject 1997 I think it was. Another way in many ways the more important way of slaves helping themselves involved running away and running away had a number of functions one of course you're increasing the number of free blacks you're reducing the slave population than it would otherwise be this is a picture of slaves crossing the Rappahannock is that how you pronounce it Rappahannock River and you can see there are a lot of people a lot of them got caught but there was still a tremendous outflow and I would say that runaway slaves in terms of numbers and impact on the end result was actually more important in other countries like Brazil where the number of runaways was massive toward the end of the process they were just in places where there were more opportunities to to run away this is a great painting of a runaway slave by Eastman Johnson night writer so now in the winter time you had less supervision on plantations in the winter time you had less supervision on plantations but it was also the toughest time to run away because without foliage it was harder to hide in the woods when you had snow the slaves could be tracked down more easily and nobody in the south had winter clothing that would keep them safe and healthy certainly when they got north and unfortunately because of the situation in the United States where the president of the United States and mayors and governors were all supportive of slave hunters coming north the slaves were really not safe until they crossed into Canada so they could you know anywhere in New York or Boston or any place they could be snatched off the streets without much you know without any protection at all so this was a very serious issue I'm sure you all know about Harriet Tubman but she was such an amazing person she's on the left here with a group of slaves she escorted north after having escaped herself she then went back and got another 300 on many trips it was really quite a spectacular accomplishment and another aspect of running away was that slaves came with horror stories that were publicized by the abolitionists so what's going on now and the situation was changing they were bringing essentially news from the front lines and Frederick Douglass is by far I think the best known of those since he actually became a major author and orator but this was true elsewhere as where that there was propaganda tremendous propaganda value coming from the runaways what was happening the latest in shocking abuses and so on and that was a big help to the abolitionists and overall to the cause so they're doing very important things to help themselves it was immensely important now from the 1820s through the 1850s one South American Central American country after the other emancipated slaves we don't hear about them so much Venezuela Bolivia Mexico Uruguay and so on because they had smaller slave populations but the fact was they were they also had entrenched interests we've seen in this country with with many different issues how small groups such as Alaska bridge builders can still have a lot of political clout so you didn't need a whole lot of slaves to influence legislators install the whole process so it was difficult everywhere it was most difficult in the United States because we had the largest slave population four million in 1860 but by 1860 the United States was there were only three major slave societies left the United States Cuba and Brazil there was increasing pressure against slavery just coming from the movements of people and markets because immigrants investors inventors industrialists all wanted to locate in a place that had as much freedom as possible they were not interested in moving to the American south the workers didn't want to compete with slave I mean why do you want to compete with somebody who's getting paid nothing and you know there's just too much talent that you need so and you need an environment a free environment where talent can flourish and where their incentives for people to improve themselves now in Cuba the slave holders had a lot of clout the abolitionist cause had to advance with halfway measures compromises which American abolitionists didn't like the most effective Cuban abolitionist was Julio Vizcarando he was a Puerto Rican Creole he started agitating for emancipation in Cuba and then quickly realized that decisions for Cuba were made in the mother country in Spain so he went to Spain launched an anti slavery society there he spent his high school years in the United States where he came into contact in the north with some of ideas about emancipation in individual rights he married an American Quaker and he got things started there but as I said in the Spanish America you tended to get and Portuguese you tended to get a lot of these compromises such as in 1870 law in Cuba that began to free the children of slaves the free birth law and also slaves over 60 well that wasn't much that did not free very many people in practice the children still had to work as apprentices but what those compromises did when they came was to they were sweet poison because they asserted they underscored a principle that the government that had supported slavery for so long could withdraw its support and slavery although it was formidable in many ways slavery has always depended on a great deal of government support the laws making it illegal for slaves to travel freely laws saying the slaves cannot bear arms slaves cannot even wave a stick without getting whipped slaves cannot learn how to read all these laws the reason the laws were there clearly is because if you take them away slavery was in trouble the slaves would run away there wouldn't be any workforce to take the crops in so when political support is undermined in a variety of ways such as I have mentioned there's less ability to count on government to enforce the laws that prop the whole thing up so what you find in Spanish and Portuguese America in Brazil I might mention a man named Joaquim Nabucco who started the anti-slavery society in Brazil and Brazil is one of my favorite cases because it involves perhaps the widest variety of anti-slavery methods they had Nabucco started anti-slavery societies around Brazil the Brazilian abolitionist meetings became boisterous affairs with performers emerging through a shower of rose petals when slaves would be freed they would have parties they had competitions to see who would compete for slave free streets, slave free towns, slave free districts, slave free provinces and all of which meant that as the slave free areas were expanding it became easier to run away because all of a sudden a lot more people were closer to an area where they could go and the abolitionists would send secret agents to plantations and tell them how and where to go and by the late 1880s, 1886, 1887 entire plantation workforces were just disappearing and the whole political situation began to change against them and industrialist businessmen wanted to get out of this whole thing because the view became more and more widely held that you cannot have a modern society you cannot have a prosperous society with slavery it's just too backward nobody has incentives to improve when you cannot keep the fruits of your labor you need too much cooperation from too many people and as I'm sure you all know I'm sure you all know something about the history of invention of how many great inventors have come from the most humble backgrounds mechanics and people who were simply doing their work and were very much aware of what was working what wasn't you need to harness all of this energy and anyway so in conclusion I would suggest that the process of emancipation we need to understand Americans mainly know about the Civil War but in fact a great deal was accomplished if not almost everything through voluntary processes that are changing the hearts and minds of people as we saw in the south if you simply bring an army in there you're going to get resistance and it doesn't make any difference what the cause is whether it's nationalism or it's slavery or it's something else if you do not have a substantial buy-in from the population you are going to be taking three steps forward and two steps back and you're going to get embroiled in a civil war and guerrilla matters and other things like that so I frankly happened to believe that we would have been better off if we could have avoided a catastrophic war in the United States and you can say that about other places but there's so much so many wonderful things that took place in the story of emancipation through the individuals who were trying to change opinions, speaking, writing, helping slaves run away all of those things brought us to the point where we were and it's just such an extraordinary development in a few decades I might go one step beyond this story in my book I talk about the slavery in the Congo by the 18th century in the 1980s King Leopold when he was establishing his slave society in the Congo the European opinion was so much against slavery by that point that he felt he had to do it secretly and he conducted an elaborate public relations effort to portray himself as a great benefactor of Africans he set up a society and he was the head of it and he built statues and he did all these things in case there were revelations about his dirty work so that nobody would believe it but in fact despite his money and he had a lot of it and his prestige and all of that he was exposed and forced to surrender control the Congo by an abolitionist society in another country in England and the abolitionist society in another country was based on the work of just five individuals there was an African American journalist and African American missionary a Polish novelist an English shipping clerk and an Irish diplomat and within a few years Leopold was gone shadow slavery was pretty much gone the conditions were still going to be wretched for quite a while but when you look and see what's involved in achieving any kind of change it's a huge job and they came a huge distance and I think we can all be thankful for that. Thank you Jim we want to take some questions and you might as well stay at the podium since we only have one speaker here and we'll and just call on people we'll bring a microphone around and while you're getting arranged there I'm going to ask the first question everybody knows about slavery in the United States but you talked about and of course I saw the movie Amazing Grace about William Wilberforce's effort to abolish slavery in Great Britain and yet I have no sense of slavery in Great Britain I don't see it in the Jane Austen novels and the other things I've read about the history of England is there much slavery in England or is it England's overseas empire that Wilberforce and Clarkson were concerned about? It's entirely in the overseas empire there were a very small number of slaves in England during the 1700s but there were also a number of court cases there was a famous court case involving somebody from somebody from the Caribbean a captain or somebody brings one slave in this would be in the 1770s and that became a court case and you know the British don't have a neatly written constitution like we do it consists of or had consisted of an accumulation of centuries of court cases and various things that came to set precedence and be taken as policy and that's that particular slave was freed because it was found in some case or other that the system did not the English law system in England did not support slavery but overseas was different that was the problem the people but now in southern Europe in Spain in Portugal you did have you did have a fair number of slaves you know into the modern period yes sir now go ahead Chris Grieb first of all wasn't the slave trade in the United States abolished in 1808 American imports were there slave imports okay slave imports no not participation in slavery you can you picture another if Lincoln had allowed like the first five southern states to stay on their own would there have been a trip when there have been a tremendous amount of pressure in the rest of the south to again getting rid of slavery in words of the states like Georgia South Carolina Mississippi and Alabama had left and there had been a lot of the border states have been allowed to stay in wouldn't there have been kind of a lot of pressure when is there another can you picture another scenario in the United States are getting rid of slavery other than the Civil War yes now I think I would say at the offset there are some people Lincoln is not one of my favorite presidents and then some people really say he was he was a terrible terrible person I personally don't think the outcome would have made much difference with or without Lincoln because I think a lot of it had to do with a lot of the consequences had to do with the war and I say that because now I think I think it would be hard to avoid it would have been hard to avoid a war simply because there had not been a recent terrible war to make people afraid of it you think of the Cold War period where you had two superpowers and they resist why did they why did the United States of Soviet Union not attack each other well because they were afraid of a nuclear escalation there wasn't such a thing in during in 1860 both the north and the south were flooded with recruits this was going to be a glorious brief war they were all eager for it the earlier precedent was a Napoleonic war okay if war could have been avoided and the south the southern states the slave states had succeeded peacefully my hunch is that there would have been increasing pressure on them to you know slavery would have been under increasing pressure which is kind of the contrary most people think well if we didn't force them then we're letting them go on with slavery as long as they want but in fact I think it's quite subversive to have a long border with the non-slave territory I think the first thing that may be the first thing that would have happened if we had avoided war and let the southern states to see peacefully is that the politics of fugitive slave law enforcement would have changed completely as it since when everybody was in one country we had the president of the United States and we had governors and we had the mayor of New York and Boston say you know welcoming the slave hunters to get all the because they didn't didn't want free blacks in their in their town so now if the south secedes they are rejecting the north they're insulting and rejecting the north we saw part of the recruitment for the civil war was was a nationalist response so this is south now is rejecting insulting the north by by walking out of this great country we had is it going to be politically possible after secession to have slave hunters coming in are they going to get support from the president from the governor's the states I think now that now the south is a foreign country the Canadians did not permit Americans to go into their country and seize peaceful people off the streets we didn't permit Canadians to come in are we going to permit these slave hunters to come in as they have been is the fugitive slave law I think that's basically going to be by the boards and I would guess that the slave the the runaway slaves would have been substantially safe upon crossing the U.S. border they would not have had to go several hundred miles further north to Canada and so I think there would have been an increase in the number of runaways and that would I think the south probably would have been taken ever more stringent measures to stop the runaways probably ultimately maybe building a wall barbed wire shooting on site anybody trying to escape well that would have been a I think that would have had a likely have had political repercussions this can confirming everything the abolitionists were saying about what a barbaric system slavery was beyond that you had a long established trend in part caused by runaways in part by the economics of slaves in the in the middle south being sold to the deep south so every year quite a separate issue from runaways there are fewer slaves in the in the upper south they're being sold south among other things that meant that the slave holders could get something for them if they ran away then they got nothing so that meant that every year more slaves being sold to the deep south there are fewer people in the upper south who had a direct stake in slavery the slave holders in the in the upper south their political clout was was gradually going down at the same time the concentration of slaves in the lower south was increasing about half the population that's getting to the point where there's an increased risk of slave revolt so you have some instability in the existing trend plus as I mentioned you have all the migration coming to the United States was going to the north the all the immigrants to open up farms and investors inventors the industries all that was going to north so you're having an increasing gap economically and there are already 1860 there are already more southerners moving north because of the multiplying opportunities then there were northerners going south so you have another trend now also the the heavy reliance on a few crops meant that the south much less diversified economy they were just more susceptible to falling prices of those crops and in fact you did get falling prices later in the you know the 19th century 1870s 1880s now part of that I'll grant you was related to the contraction following the Civil War inflation but you know the point remains they're vulnerable because it's a less diversified economy so it's a then people say well how when do I think the slaves would have been emancipated without the Civil War I'm sure it would have come later but I would also imagine that full civil rights would have come decades earlier because if if a variety of persistent peaceful pressures have been brought to bear on on the slave states you would have been able to achieve emancipation without the uncontrollable backlash and I personally think the uncontrollable backlash is an absolutely fascinating phenomenon how is it that the north could win the war decisively and yet have the white supremacists very quickly begin to regain full political control you have the the the the the subversion of black civil rights is promoted by Lincoln's handpicked successor if you can't count on Lincoln to pick a successor and keep his humane policies going then what what can you count on and not only that by 1876 the party of Lincoln the Republican Party what do they do that you have this contested election of Hayes and his Democratic opponent and they they have you know they have a little back and forth going to figure out who's going to get what and the Republicans decide it's more important for us to get our guy in the White House then to have anything to do with the South so the deal was Hayes goes in the White House and the Democrats the the last three states that were still under official military occupation the federal last federal troops are withdrawn and Democrats go on to you know do what they did for another another century subverting civil rights so you get back to the fact that nowhere could could could blacks count on you know somebody to protect you know no nowhere could the former slaves count on anybody to protect them as particularly if if there was revenge and and killing and so on so it was hugely important to avoid a backlash if that because it was truly uncontrollable yes sir right let's see so I was listening to you and I read an article of yours that touched on the same subject as well a little before I came here so one thing that comes to mind I really don't believe that without the Civil War the southerners would have been white southerners would have been less violent towards black people I think they had embraced an ideology of white supremacism that would that left them predisposed towards terrorist attacks against black people and or sympathy towards those who committed that sort of violence and terrorism against black people so whatever losses the union may have inflicted on them I think they just provided a pretext for the violence that they probably would have done anyway even if slavery had come to an end another way and then also if let's say there was another means for slavery to come to an end other than the Civil War maybe it would have taken several decades you know William Wilberforce took what was it 50 years to convince the British public not to to put an end to slavery so then it wouldn't have been those people who were emancipated historically they wouldn't have been emancipated right then most likely it would have been their descendants so in terms of their those people's individual liberty the Civil War would have been the only option that that war that violence with all whatever cost there was to it those people the majority of them would not have received emancipation without it now of course they had to deal with the oppression and violence and terrorism afterwards but I doubt that any of them would have preferred to remain as as slaves even with that violence that was visited upon them and their descendants so well the first thing is that in response to your first point you're you're absolutely right of course conditions were terrible before the Civil War so whatever you want to call it you want to call it racism whatever that was one thing and now if you add to it a backlash against war backlash to get even revenge you're adding revenge to racism that is a worse mix than what you had both are bad but it's and it's a very similar phenomenon to what we saw in Germany after World War one you know in many other places it's not specific to the Civil War we saw this in in Central Europe after the Napoleonic conquest he did all these wonderful reforms and he enforced them with his army and people didn't like that and at their earliest opportunity they're going to strike back we've seen the British and the Irish go on for centuries so you're adding one thing to the other it's a much more difficult situation to deal with and it was truly uncontrollable in terms of you know talking about when and how quickly can you get emancipation that the underlying issue is that abolitionists were abolitionists were a minority in the north and blacks were a minority in the south you're dealing with a majority and even in the north as we well know there's very mixed support there's support you know maybe a quarter or a third of the people in the north were very supportive of the abolitionists a lot of people didn't want blacks in the neighborhood a lot of people didn't care then there were Democrats in the north who were hostile so if you start if you're a minority you don't want to get in a fight with somebody who's bigger than you are you've got to you know use other means got to use your wits you have to but you know it's like George Washington you recognize that he couldn't he had a small rag tag army that was leaving him every six months if he got into a direct confrontation that would just play to the strength of his opponent he had to I mean this is why guerrilla tactics the word guerrilla came from the Spanish fights against Napoleon they they had to be hit and run or like the French resistance against Hitler that's what you have to do if you're if you are small in numbers small in in arm you know in armed forces and small in economic power and so on right right right that's correct they would have the slavery would have I'm sure slavery would have gone on for a few decades longer and I think civil rights would have full civil rights would have come decades earlier by avoiding the backlash now the problem is we're talking about you know it was too slow the reform emancipation it was too slow if we didn't have a war we really should be emancipated so maybe war is the only way to go but the problem with that is the assumption that that as a minority and I'm not I could be speaking of anybody of any wars is the idea that that you know some whoever we're talking about can control the outcome of the war and as we saw in the United States fine you win the war but then they turn their back the Republicans turn their backs on it you you've gotten let's get some other people asking questions okay you raise very good questions I appreciate it yes sir I think this is really the counterfactual argument is really among the weakest points of your book because the war was caused by southern intransigence at even the prospect of not allowing slavery in the territories Lincoln himself said during a cabinet meeting when the war began no one would have dared to interfere with the institution where it existed the right Republicans refute abiding by their campaign platform of not allowing its expansion in the territories provoked the C session which any constitutional president would have been bound to resist by force so I don't see and the if you talk about revenge certainly seeing blacks in union uniforms was provocative to many southern whites but if you read the speeches given by southern delegates trying to convince the border states to cc'd you get the same kind of racist paranoia that took effect after 1877 was there in its noxious form from the beginning and Alexandra Stevens trying to make a point about what the south stood for said we stand for white supremacist this was not a controversial statement in Montgomery in 1860 when he was sworn in as vice president so I really don't see how you can get a counterfactual history of an alternate path and it's very easy to temporize if you're not a slave I mean this institution had been going on for over 260 years and that should somehow last it only lasted another decade other additional decades or centuries we could have avoided the civil war that you know there comes a time when when even at the risk of bloodshed I granted both sides couldn't see how bloody the war would be or how long it would last but this noxious institution had lasted over 250 years southern there was also constitutional pressure anti-libertarian movements by southern congressmen and senators to limp gag rules to censor the males to ban abolitionist species posing a growing threat to American democracy at home and trying to steer its foreign policy abroad by acquiring Cuba Nicaragua and extending slavery where it either no longer existed or where it had been abolished so I think you could I don't see any counterfactual history that could prevent the war at any realistic way well I started out by saying in my response to another question and I agree it would be would have been difficult to avoid the war mainly because there's nothing to scare people into avoiding it so that's why I'm I hardly say anything about Lincoln in my book I think if you take Lincoln out you're just looking at how eagerly everybody volunteered and the same thing happened in 1900 Teddy Roosevelt was worst among them and war was glorious because now the Civil War horrors were 50 years behind and Europe was the same way in 1914 they were all eager to volunteer war was glorious it was the fulfillment of men and all that stuff well they hadn't seen any massive killing lately but the situation was different after World War II and the Cold War and that so what I'm really asking is if let's just imagine if we could have avoided the war then what would have been the likely consequences and I as the what most of the book is about is is trying to draw on the experience of other countries in the western hemisphere because they all got rid of slavery in the same short period and most of them did so with minimum levels of violence now the United States had the largest slave society by far four million and you know applying the insights of Wilbur forests and Clarks and they recognize that the British Caribbean which was 800,000 slaves and when they were liberated in the 1830s that's a much smaller target four million and the one paradox was it was the only slave society where the numbers were increasing without slave imports so it was a harder it's not that the methods were peaceful persistent methods of agitation and economic pressure and so on were less effective they're dealing with a much larger not to crack and that that would take long but we again the backlash that I'm referring to is if has occurred in many other places by people who are trying to get even we're seeing that in the Middle East right now among other places it's truly uncontrollable yes sir back there emancipation with compensation ever get off the ground as a I'm sorry did emancipation emancipation with compensation a buyout that ever get off the ground in the United States no no why not well I don't think they felt well there are cultural reasons historical reasons the Spanish Spanish and Portuguese America there was much more manumission and you might say this goes back to maybe a Roman times there's much more manumission the the Southerners in the United States are very much against manumission they didn't want anybody to buy anybody's freedom now there were Lincoln I believe did raise the idea of some kind of compensation but it never got very far in the United States in I'm sorry Washington DC right you're right thank you okay but there was there was much more acceptable in in Latin America and I think there are a variety of reasons for that which I probably need to go into sociological that the fact that men came to Latin America and so they often ended up with relationships with slaves and so they are much more tolerant of of Creole children and so there's much I mean it's things like that that is much more acceptable so it's a it's a shorter distance to go for for essentially paying them off to go away peacefully which is what it was and in the United States there was very strong opposition to it but again you're starting there there was opposition to to to compensated emancipation everywhere at first this is true in Brazil but eventually it became a very important thing that slave holders had to be kept under pressure and eventually they respond to what their options are and the amazing thing about the emancipation story is how long the pressure was maintained and and how much experience there is with with nonviolent means of of getting to a much better place yes man my understanding is that there certainly were racist attitudes for one of a better word there there certainly were continuing cultural views of blacks by whites but you did not have the terrorism that when in Jamaica for example I mean you still had you know elements of a you know traditional attitudes class society whatever you want to call but you did not have the terrorism that we saw in the in the American South after you know in the reaction to the Civil War in reaction you know they were driven by revenge the same thing in Brazil but you had much more you know much more diverse complicated society so it was harder for people to to you know to to to adopt those those views yes ma'am Jim Crow laws and stuff right all the other black the black codes before the Jim Crow laws yeah I mean whatever there's a sequence of quite a bit of that happen don't you think that and then with the government's passing of laws segregation the government even with Wilson taking off the you know not letting people to be in the government right all these things happened that just kept it another form of slavery shy carping and all these other things that came in and they're not being able to vote and it's the whole litany of things that went down it made it so that hey you had to go all the way up to 1964 to get civil rights right people who were emancipated in 1862 right the government has some some problems with it too like you say oh the laws in this country it went along with it right that crop is a form of slavery it's the same thing now with the immigration substandard wages for people people working at three dollars and fifty cents and sweatshops it's the same gambit all the way well it's it's a lot different than being in chains and being whipped and being owned so we're in reaction to your thought about the the aftermath of the Civil War I might say that one of the most bizarre things to me is when you say you think well the north was our favor of emancipation and I mean you know in given the sides available that was comparatively good guys but after the Civil War we had the beginning of Memorial Day celebrations and in the Memorial Day celebrations in the name of reuniting brother with brother you had Southern Confederate veterans and Union veterans getting together and for decades this began to just went on and on and the way they they they avoided anything controversial or upsetting in in their celebrations they were mourning the dead but the only thing they couldn't talk about was slavery and emancipation and so you got to 1913 the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg and Woodrow Wilson a president who many people admire both Democrats and Republicans Woodrow Wilson the 50th anniversary of of of Gettysburg gave a speech in which he described the Civil War as a quarrel forgotten the north is supposed to be on your side and yet the only thing you can't talk about is slavery and emancipation and any other related issues that so how much confidence do you have in being able to solve to achieve a social a major social reform by getting involved in a in a war you need to change people's hearts and minds and get a buy-in so you can turn your back and not having somebody coming at you with a with a lynch mob and and when you compound racism with revenge that is taking a step backward it's a much more difficult complicated thing to deal with and the ways that some of these other people I've talked about in in Spanish Portuguese America in the Caribbean and so on they were moving much more in a straight line sometimes they were taking half steps and have what might be considered moral compromises but they were they were at least moving toward the target instead of making these terrible steps backward yes sir let's take one last question and then we'll go up for informal questions what I wanted to say I may not need that no for them we like to have it on tape well first of all I'm a civil war reenactor and I represent the African Americans perspective during the civil war and I do presentations all over the country and as late as 2005 I spoke at a place called the Coastal Heritage Society in Savannah Georgia and one of the things the organizer said to me he said please do not mention William to come to Sherman but what I really wanted to say is that one of the things that the south thought about the north was that they were there was no difference between the people because all of the colonies were slaveholders because of the climate of the north it changed the economy you see slavery being abandoned by northern states simply because of the economy and a free labor system was was born out of economic just plain economics now the gentleman who said that maybe the civil war could have ended any other way other than the civil war I mean slavery ending any other way you see a lot of things that occurred by the government or by the politicians of the day to kind of end slavery you see it in the ordinance of 1787 you see it in the Kansas Nebraska Act which gave a demarcation line of demarcation they had a typography problem in the territories what would they have grown you had southerners who did not do the things that was necessary to replenish the soil cotton and tobacco were harsh crops they could not continue to grow them that was the reason for the expansion but they knew that they couldn't expand it into Texas they knew they couldn't expand it into the Oklahoma territory so slavery even though it may have taken another century it may have ended as it did in the north without violence it did not slavery throughout the original colonies there was no violence in the ending of slavery in the northern states and people forget that none whatsoever just as you had mentioned with other places around the world but the whole issue behind the civil war and the abandonment we this lady and I were talking about the abandonment of the Republican party you see a lot of changes Frederick Douglass stopped printing the north star because he thought that it was the time of deliverance and it wasn't we talk about civil rights it hasn't occurred yet to be honest with you you see all types of forms of slavery coming about in the southern states or replacement of the southern institution of slavery such as the penal institutions we still have one major prison in Louisiana and Gola that was a cotton plantation during the civil war those are for those criminals that get the sentences of two to three hundred years they never they all die in that prison but you see a lot of things such as the pig laws that was put on the books in the southern states we need to oh I'm sorry okay well my question was you know it was really a statement and a thank you for coming out a thank you for your effort to put this into print and to bringing about the comparison between the abolition of slavery and Great Britain that the case I think that you referred to was the Somerset case right the Somerset case really set the precedent for Roger Taney's decision in in 1857 when when they when you look at it it's the same principles the Somerset case was a slave who was taken to England who jumped ship a trial was held and he was determined to be free that case set the precedent for what Taney did in 1857 he took it the opposite way that any slave moving to a free territory was not free but I just want to thank you actually for doing that and just a mouthful about a few things