A real statesman, as opposed to a monstrous, egomaniacal patronage politician like Abe Lincoln, would have made use of the decades-long world history of peaceful emancipation if his main purpose was to end slavery. Of course, Lincoln always insisted that that was in no way his purpose. He stated this very clearly in his first inaugural address, in which he even supported the proposed Corwin Amendment to the Constitution, which would have prohibited the federal government from EVER interfering with Southern slavery. He — and the U.S. Congress — declared repeatedly that the purpose of the war was to "save the union," but of course the war destroyed the voluntary union of the founding fathers.
Jim Powell's book, Greatest Emancipations: How the West Ended Slavery, provides chapter and verse of how real statesmen of the world, in sharp contrast to Lincoln, ended slavery without resorting to waging total war on their own citizens. Among the tactics employed by the British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Danes, and others were slave rebellions, abolitionist campaigns to gain public support for emancipation, election of anti-slavery politicians, encouragement and assistance of runaway slaves, raising private funds to purchase the freedom of slaves, and the use of tax dollars to buy the freedom of slaves. There were some incidents of violence, but nothing remotely approaching the violence of a war that ended up killing 800,000 Americans.
The story of how Great Britain ended slavery peacefully is the highlight of Powell's book. There were once as many as 15,000 slaves in England herself, along with hundreds of thousands throughout the British empire. The British abolitionists combined religion, politics, publicity campaigns, legislation, and the legal system to end slavery there just two decades prior to the American "Civil War."
Great credit is given to the British statesman and member of the House of Commons, William Wilberforce. After organizing an educational campaign to convince British society that slavery was immoral and barbaric, Wilberforce succeeded in getting a Slavery Abolition Act passed in 1833, and within seven years some 800,000 slaves were freed. Tax dollars were used to purchase the freedom of the slaves, which eliminated the only source of opposition to emancipation, wealthy slave owners. It was expensive, but as Powell notes, nothing in the world is more expensive than war.
Powell also writes of how there was tremendous opposition to ending slavery in the Northern states in the U.S, especially Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, where violent mobs wrecked abolitionist printing presses; a New Hampshire school that educated black children was dragged into a swamp by oxen; free blacks were prohibited from residing in Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, and Oregon; abolitionist "agitators" in Northern states were whipped; and orphanages for black children were burned to the ground in Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, Northern state abolitionists persevered and ended slavery there peacefully. There were no violent and enormously destructive "wars of emancipation" in New York or New England.
Cuba, Brazil, and the Congo also ended slavery peacefully in the nineteenth century by real statesmen in those countries. But not in the United States. "Some people have objected that the United States couldn't have bought the freedom of all the slaves, because that would have cost too much," Powell writes. "But buying the freedom of the slaves was not more expensive than war. Nothing is more costly than war!" In fact, the North's financial costs of war alone would have been enough to purchase the freedom of all the slaves, and then ended slavery legally and constitutionally.
It is a myth that Lincoln toiled mightily in his last days to get a reluctant Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, as portrayed in the Spielberg movie. What he did spend his time on was micromanaging the waging of total war on Southern civilians, who he always considered to be American citizens, since he denied the legitimacy of secession. More importantly, as documented by historians Phillip Magness and Sebastion Page in their book, Colonization After Emancipation, Lincoln spent many long days at the end of his life communicating with foreign governments and plotting with William Seward, among others, to "colonize" all of "the Africans," as he called them, out of the United States once the war was over.
