Ethics

Sandefur on the End of Slavery

By Ed Brayton

Sandefur has an excellent essay on the silly notion that without the civil war slavery would have just withered away and died out on its own. I've heard this claim repeated innumerable times, to the point of it being a cliche, but I've never heard anything like a coherent argument for why it might be true. Certainly there is no example of slavery ever ending in any society by anything but government decree.

Sandefur notes the additional irony that the neo-confederates who repeat this claim today are actually taking the position that their arch enemy Abraham Lincoln took.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on June 12, 2008 (boomark / email).