Excepting, of course, all the violence used to keep the slaves as slaves in the first place I assume? Because, what? That's not real violence?

Come on man. It's slavery. There was already grotesque violence. Only question was, what were different nations willing to do to stop it? But where slaves were concerned, every nation involved was already perfectly ok with massive, grotesque, and global scale violence. It was kind of a necessity for that kind of thing to work.

It's real violence, sure, but it's there in all of the cases, so it drops out of the comparison we're making. We're not talking about the costs of slavery itself; we're talking about the costs to end slavery. A million lives seems to me like a much bigger cost to end slavery then paying off the slaveowners.

Not to mention the fact that all those other countries that didn't have to fight a war to end slavery ended it sooner than the US did; so actually we should be considering the costs of slavery itself--for all the extra years that it existed in the US compared to those other countries. Which just makes the "fight a war to end slavery" option look even worse by comparison.

And I mean come on guy? What's with these ideas? Any violence against slaves just "drops out". But other violence does not? We should pay off slaver owners? A million lives is too much to pay to end slavery?

A million lives is far less than the body count of 400 years of the slave trade. How many lived and died as slaves? How many were killed, beaten, or left for dead? Or maybe just thrown overboard? etc etc etc.

As to the question of paying off slave owners, what part of our history to 1860 would lead you to believe that it was our policy to pay money for freedom? You either didn't pay attention in history class, or you are willfully ignoring the nature of how we got our start. Presumably because it is inconvenient, and doesn't fit with your narrative.

And, yeah, on the question of just ignoring the violence against slaves, that's just not even worth commentary.

But hey man, we can just agree to disagree. Obviously we're just different people. You have a nice rest of the day.

Paying off the slaveowners is not just an "idea". It actually happened. In every other country that ended slavery. That's why I'm drawing the comparison. Every other country managed to end slavery without fighting a war that cost a million lives. So why did the US have to?

> what part of our history to 1860 would lead you to believe that it was our policy to pay money for freedom?

You're missing my point. Of course it wasn't our policy to pay money for freedom. That's why we had to fight a war that cost a million lives to free the slaves.

My point is, why wasn't it our policy to pay money for freedom? Why couldn't we do the obvious thing that all the other countries did to free slaves without it having to cost a million lives?

And if your answer is "we should never pay money for freedom", why not? The slaves were freed either way. Wasn't freeing them the goal? Wouldn't it be better to achieve that goal without it having to cost a further million lives?

> on the question of just ignoring the violence against slaves

You're missing my point again. I'm not ignoring the violence against slaves. I'm pointing out that that violence happened regardless of how the slaves were freed. So when counting the cost of freeing the slaves, you can't factor in the violence that happened while they were slaves, because that violence had already happened; freeing the slaves with a war that cost a million lives didn't make any of the violence against the slaves while they were slaves go away, any more than paying the slaveowners for the slaves' freedom did. The million lives it cost in the US Civil War wasn't instead of the 400 years of violence against the slaves; it was in addition to it.

You don't negotiate with terrorists.

Maybe I should just ask you to get a better idea of how you're thinking about this whole thing, do you think we should have paid the British?

So you think the slaveowners were terrorists? You think the British in Colonial times were terrorists? On what basis?

> do you think we should have paid the British?

I answered this in another part of this subthread: yes, if the British would have accepted payment in exchange for our independence, and we could have afforded the payment, we should have paid them.

Uh... on the basis of them beating, torturing and even killing slaves maybe? Or again, are we not counting any terrorism against slaves?

I mean, what would you call slavery but terrorism? Violence to achieve and maintain a political objective. What is war but terrorism really? When you're dealing with a terrorist, you use their tactics and prove to them you're willing to go further.

But coming to the central point, I think it's clear we just disagree fundamentally about when it's appropriate to use treasury to pay settlements. Paying terrorists or bullies is completely inappropriate. Paying someone you may have wronged inadvertently, or paying for land, is more appropriate. So paying, say, France for Louisiana, or Russia for Alaska, is entirely appropriate. It's just making an offer for a piece of land that's not ours. We don't own it. We don't farm it. We weren't the people making that land valuable. But we wanted to move there so we could do so. An offer of purchase is appropriate under those circumstances.

But paying southerners to free slaves, is tantamount to paying a kidnapper to release their hostages. If you're smart, you just don't do that. The only thing it does is embolden other kidnappers.

And paying someone for land you live on, you farm, and you make valuable, but they take the profit off of it with no input from you at all? Yeah, that's not even something you should consider doing. Just as you shouldn't pay mafia "protection" fees. It's just asking for more trouble down the line.

But you and I just think differently about these things. No worries. I just firmly believe if you tried to do things your way, you would find in very short order that the world is not unicorns and rainbows. There are significant dangers to doing business with bad actors.

So by your definition, the Union fighting a war to free the slaves was terrorism. So your argument is basically to fight terrorism with more terrorism.

> paying southerners to free slaves, is tantamount to paying a kidnapper to release their hostages. If you're smart, you just don't do that. The only thing it does is embolden other kidnappers.

This claim is obviously false when applied to paying slaveowners to free slaves. Great Britain and other countries paying slaveowners to free slaves did not embolden other slaveowners. In fact it did the opposite.

> paying someone for land you live on, you farm, and you make valuable, but they take the profit off of it with no input from you at all?

Huh? We're not talking about the slaves buying their freedom. (Although that did happen in the South--it wasn't common, but it happened.) We're talking about the United States Government paying the slaveowners to buy the freedom of the slaves, in exchange for the slaveowners' agreement to outlaw slavery. Just like Great Britain did with its slaveowners. Do you even understand what actually happened in the latter case?

> you and I just think differently about these things

As far as I can tell, you are thinking not about what I actually proposed, but about straw man versions that you have made up.

Yes, exactly. Some nations were willing to tell their moralizers to shut up, and just pay off the slaveowners. The US wasn't willing to make that compromise; we let the moralizers drive the process, so we had to fight a war and kill a million people.

Yeah, "moralizers" like Hamilton, Washington, and Ben Franklin, who were so obstinate and short sighted they refused to simply pay the British Crown instead of fighting such a destructive war. Too bad you couldn't be there to show them the error of their ways.

/s

Yeah, this is another case where you and I are just different people. We'll just agree to disagree. Have a nice day though.

You think the Colonies could have paid the British Crown to become independent? Where are you getting that from? What makes you think the British would have accepted it?

But if you are just asking as a pure hypothetical--should the Colonies have paid for independence, if the British would have accepted that resolution--then my answer would be yes, of course. Independence was the goal; if we could have gotten there without having to fight a war, so much the better.

But no, I don't believe we should have paid the British either. Of course not. Pay off every world power hard up for money that comes along? No way. You start off that way, you've set yourself up for extreme and painful failure. Best to have one war at the outset so that all the other global powers get the message loud and clear.

You can try paying off bullies if you like in your own life, but I can guarantee you that it won't work. The only thing it will create is more opportunists.

You're being a bit naive man.

I have not proposed any such thing. Being willing to pay money for a specific valuable objective--independence for the American Colonies, freedom for the slaves of the American South--is not at all the same as being willing to pay money to anyone who comes along and asks for it.

> You can try paying off bullies

So you think the British were bullying the American Colonies? You think the South was bullying the North before the Civil War? On what basis?

If you look at the historical record, you will see that, if anything, it was the Colonies bullying the British until the British got fed up, and the Northern abolitionists bullying the South until the South got fed up.

> You're being a bit naive man.

No, I'm simply taking to its logical conclusion a premise that seems obvious to me: that paying for something with money, if you can, is better than paying for it with human lives.