It’s
one thing to read about history; it’s quite another to be staring down at a
letter written by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862.

In
the letter, addressed to Senator James A. McDougal, Lincoln makes a bold
suggestion: the Civil War could be ended if slave owners were compensated
monetarily. In other words, instead of fighting for the freedom of the slaves,
the Union would buy it.

“This
letter presents one of the great ‘what if’ scenarios of the 19th century,” says
Richard Peek, director of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections
of the University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees Library, where the letter is
housed. “Here Lincoln is faced with the real-life crisis which Thomas Jefferson
predicted the United States would eventually have to confront; slavery was ‘the
wolf by the ears,’ which the nation could neither hold, nor safely let go.”

The
UR had the letter on display for a brief period in 2000; it can now be viewed
only by appointment (call 275-4477). The letter is on deposit at the UR and
could eventually be reclaimed by its owner.

Because
the letter is written in his own hand, with no secretary present, you can
almost imagine Lincoln alone in his office at night, wrestling with ideas about
how to end the horrific conflict. The three-page document provides a palpable
sense of Lincoln’s dilemma.

“There
is not a historian alive who does not get a special buzz from handling an
original document; the older the document, the bigger the buzz,” says Larry
Hudson, a professor of history at the UR who plans to use the letter in his
courses on the Civil War and a new course called “Lincoln, Douglass, and Black
Freedom.”

“Of
course, what is crucial is the content of the document,” says Hudson, “but to
feel and smell the paper on which the words appear is to take a step closer to
the moment of writing and with it a deeper immersion into the historical moment
under investigation. Original documents provide a quick and sure way to
transport the student historian into the past.”

By March 14 of 1862, the
war had been raging for a year and the North was not doing very well. Just a
week earlier, the South’s ironclad battleship, the Virginia, had destroyed two
Northern ships and disabled three more. Lincoln was desperately trying to come
up with a solution. And an economic strategy had its precedents.

“The
US is the only place where slavery ended without some sort of compensation,” says Dr. Stanley Engerman, John H. Munro professor
of economics and professor of history at the UR. Engerman goes on to cite
examples involving the British, the French, the Danes, and the Swedes. “In all
cases of slavery which ended before 1860, there was compensation paid in cash
and bonds to slave owners. So the whole idea of compensating slave owners was
something that was accepted as the appropriate thing to do. No one ever thought
of paying off the slaves.”

Compensation
was not new to the US.

“Most
of the Northern States had a very peculiar form of compensation,” says
Engerman. “Those who were born after a certain date were free, but they had to
work for their mothers’ owners for 18, 20, 25 years, depending on the state.
Effectively, that was done deliberately to cover the cost of raising a slave.”

While
Lincoln uses the figure of $400 as the cost of a slave, slaves were selling for
more than $1,000 before the war started. Under wartime conditions, says
Engerman, the slaves would be worth less.

In
From Slavery to Freedom, John Hope
Franklin writes that abolitionists were vehemently against Lincoln’s plan. They
argued that slave owners should not be compensated for something that was not
their rightful property in the first place.

But
even some freed slaves realized that compensation might be part of the
solution.

“Two
ex-slaves in Britain wrote major books at the turn of the century: Equiano and
Cugoano,” says Engerman. “Cugoano argued, as did most abolitionists, that
slavery was theft and therefore it wasn’t appropriate to pay.” But, he says,
Cugoano realized that the owners would have to be compensated, and suggested
seven years of work before freedom. “So even a very strong abolitionist was
willing to undergo some from of compensation in terms of labor time rather than
immediate emancipation.”

Does the
Lincoln letter have any relevance to the world we live in 142 years later?

A
recent strategy in the United States’ war in Iraq involved purchasing the
weapons of militiamen loyal to rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. The buy-out
was recently extended in an effort to stabilize the situation there before
elections scheduled for January.

But
purchasing thousands of weapons does not seem to have made a dent in the number
and severity of attacks on Americans and their Iraqi allies.The supply
of weapons there appears to be endless and the hearts and minds of the
insurgents have not followed the weapons.

The
idea of purchasing the freedom of slaves is also very much alive.

Last
January, New York Times Op-Ed
columnist Nicholas D. Kristof wrote several columns describing his attempt to
buy the freedom of two female sex slaves in the town of Poipet in northwestern
Cambodia. Kristof’s columns revealed the enormity of the problem and the complex
web of social circumstances that stood in the way of any solution. Cambodia is
one of many countries where forms of slavery still flourish.

“There
are two places where slavery exists almost legally,” says Engerman. “One is
Mauritania, which used to be French Morocco. The other is Sudan, where they
seem to be enforcing laws of slavery. The American anti-slavery movement, a few
years ago, got involved in the policy of buying off slaves in the Sudan to free
them. That led to a major controversy. One, if it’s immoral you shouldn’t
purchase slaves. But what happened is the Sudanese would sell the slaves, get
the money, and then either the same person or someone else would be enslaved.
So, effectively, they were just supporting slave owners.”

In
areas of the world where human beings are subject to the laws of supply and
demand, an act of goodwill can have unforeseen consequences.

“If
you pay money to buy slaves, what you’ve done is increase the market for
slaves,” says Engerman.

Engerman
believes that most people today have a distorted picture of the extent of
slavery through the course of civilization.

“Most
people think slavery existed in one place — the American South before 1860,”
he says. “Slavery existed everywhere, all times, every place. Everyone’s ether
been a slave or has enslaved. There are no societies up to fairly recently that
haven’t had slavery.”

Although
slavery is in the past in the United States, its legacy is still with us. When
UR history professor Hudson uses the Lincoln letter in his classes, he also
will make connections to current-day arguments concerning reparations for the
descendents of slaves.

“Lincoln’s
comparison of the daily cost of war with the market value of slaves suggests
the incredible financial cost to the Union of compensated emancipation,” Hudson
says. “For those who support reparations, however, it was a missed opportunity
to end the war and with it the growing bitterness between white and black
Southerners. Furthermore, while Lincoln was calculating the cost of slavery, he
should also have given some attention to the cost of compensating former
slaves.”

The UR letter
reveals another side of the man known as the Great Emancipator. In it, Lincoln deals
only with financial aspects of the issue.

“The
moral concepts were missing,” says Dr. Walter Cooper, a retired scientist and
African-American history scholar. “The moral argument has less relevance than
the economic aspects. In this way it’s related to the civil rights movement of
the 20th century. People shouldn’t have been opposed to what [Martin Luther]
King was saying in terms of the Constitution, but fear of economic competition
always takes precedent over moral arguments.”

In
fact, according to Engerman, the biggest threat Southerners used against the
North was the idea that if freed, Blacks would go north and take jobs away from
whites. They also said blacks would take white women. As late as 1868, Iowa was
passing legislation to keep blacks from settling there.

Lincoln
also makes no mention of the mounting casualties of the war. The fact that he
offers only the cold calculation of a financial solution does not necessarily
mean that ethical and human concerns were not among the underlying reasons for
his proposal, but Engerman does not view the North as occupying the moral high
ground. In 1820 there were 10,000 slaves in New York, he says. And there were
only two Northern states that allowed blacks to vote and receive an education.

Engerman
points to a term used in the antebellum South: the peculiar institution of slavery.

“Many
people took that term to mean that slavery made the South different than the
North, that Southerners were somehow aberrant people,” he says. “My sense is
that most of these slave owners felt that they were doing what was a nice,
decent thing to do; they were, with a certain degree of harshness, taking care
of people. People have marvelous techniques for covering up what they’re doing,
rationalizing. The idea that they felt guilty was absurd.”

Other
examples of rationalization included long debates about the biblical
justification for slavery.

Bible
scholars have told Engerman that pro-slavery advocates can find more in the
Bible to support their position than people who say the Bible is anti-slavery.
“These people have always worked out systems,” he says “In the North, they
figured out how to have Irish women work as servants and work in factories. We
know where the highest ground is, but it’s not very high.”

Lincoln
is often accused of being more pragmatic than ethical in his handling of
slavery. But it can be argued that the political realities of his time would
have made it impossible to accomplish the goal of eliminating slavery on purely
ethical grounds. 

Lincoln’s
cautious policy toward Kentucky, a slave state fighting on the side of the
North, was an example of this, says Engerman. Because Kentucky had a lot of
troops and was well positioned, Lincoln had to compromise on slavery in
Kentucky just to keep the state fighting for the North. When he was accused of
being soft on slavery in Kentucky, Lincoln said, “To win the war, it would be
really nice to have God on our side, but we really have to have Kentucky on our
side.”

Given
the fact that the Civil War raged for three years after the UR letter was
written, resulting in the death of a total of 620,000 soldiers, Lincoln’s idea
certainly appears to have had merit.

“Clearly
[Lincoln’s proposal] would have been the right answer,” says Engerman. “It
would have been very expensive. But if you compensate the slave owners, some
people wouldn’t like it. It’s not fully thought out in terms of labor, but it’s
basically a very shrewd calculation.”

Lincoln’s
plan was coupled with the idea of the voluntary immigration of slaves to
colonies in Haiti and Liberia. According to John Hope Franklin, Lincoln met
with prominent free Negroes in the White House in 1862 and urged them to
support his plan on the basis that “Your race suffer greatly, many of them, by
living among us, while ours suffer from your presence.”

But,
for the most part, the problem was not solved through immigration. Most
ex-slaves stayed where they were.

“In
all slave emancipations, including the US case, no land was taken away from the
slave owners,” says Engerman. “They had to hire workers and ex-slaves had to
eat. They weren’t given any land. ‘Forty acres and a mule’ didn’t take place.
What happened was the slaves basically became workers.”

“That’s
what happened after manumission until the 1920s and 1930s, a quasi-servitude
operation,” says Cooper, whose great grandfather was a slave. “I met people in
my childhood who had escaped from quasi-servitude on a plantation down South.
They were called Hatchet, Riverside, Cherry Red, and Roughhouse; I never knew
their full names because they feared they would be caught and returned to the
South. They would have debts to the ‘company store.'”

This article appears in Dec 1-7, 2004.