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"The Civil War might have been averted if Lincoln had realized two fundamental facts. First, the South had a different culture from the North, and placed a high value on preventing that culture from being destroyed by federal edict and government troops. Second, slavery as an institution was already being pulled into a deep grave by its own economic weight. All it needed was a little free-market push, and it would have been dead and buried.
"A slave was a huge captial investment. In 1850, an eighteen-year-old buck would bring upwards of a thousand dollars at an auction. on top of that, the owner had to keep him fed, clothed, sheltered, and realtively healthy. That wasn't free. He also had to keep him working and prevent him from running away, which meant hiring an overseer. And then, the slave had an incentive to do just enough work to avoid a beating. So slave labor was not very cost-effective, and became less and less so the more rigorous the work. The railroads showed that.
"Immigrant labor built the railroads, not slaves. Slaves were too valuable to risk. Railroad companies worked their men 'til they dropped at twenty-five cents a day. Man lost an eye from flying metal chips, or a foot from a dropped rail, that was his problem. Drag him off the line and call in another. Company wasn't out a nickel, let alone a thousand dollars.
"Sure. Lots of workers died building the railroads. The old saying was that the railroad lines had 'an Irishman under every tie.' Out in California, it was Chinese.
"Owning a machine made sense. Owning a human who could get sick, die, run away, or choose to work as slowly as possible didn't make any economic sense at all. Which was why only a tiny fraction of southerners still owned slaves as of 1860. The issue was ultimately a cultural one, and it was central to the whole secession movement. Southerners who would never have been able to afford even one slave didn't want the government telling them how they had to live. Lincoln could have easily solved the problem in the marketplace, but he chose the battlefield.
"By having the government buy all existing slaves from their owners. The number of slaves was finite; slave importation had ended a half-century earlier in 1809, as proscribed in the Constitution.
"Now that in itself is an amazing thing, when you think about it. The men who ran slave ships didn't get a nickel of government money, yet the agreed that in twenty years they woul dgo out of business entirely. Forget forcing companies out of business-can you imagine the reaction today if you just proposed a bill that would abolish government subsidies completely in twenty years and force all industries to cope with a free market?
"Anyway, with slave importation in 1860 having been dead for over half a century, the only new supply was slave women giving birth. Buy all slaves their freedom, and the slavery issue vanishes without a shot being fired. Not to mention that pesky issue of seizing property without compensation.
"Dirt cheap compared to fighting a war. Not to mention the huge cost in lives."
From "Unintended Consequences," by John Ross
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