1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [232]
16. Wilmer Carlyle Harris, Public Life of Zachariah Chandler, 1851–1875 (Chicago, 1917), p. 77.
17. Allan Nevins, The Ordeal of the Union, vol. 2: A House Dividing, 1852–1857, part I (New York, 1947), pp. 92, 96.
18. James M. McPherson, “The Civil War and the Transformation of America,” in William J. Cooper and John M. McCardell, eds., In the Cause of Liberty: How the Civil War Redefined American Ideals (Baton Rouge, 2009), p. 5.
19. See, e.g., Claudia Dale Goldin, “The Economics of Emancipation,” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 33, no. 1 (Mar. 1973), pp. 66–85. Goldin, in her much-cited study, calculates the total value of slaves in 1860 at $2.7 billion. Lincoln, like almost all antislavery politicians, believed strongly before the war (and even, to a diminishing degree, during it) that any emancipation plan must fully compensate slaveholders. Furthermore, he and many other white Americans believed that any such plan ought to provide for the newly emancipated slaves’ resettlement in Africa, which would have added (by Goldin’s calculations) almost another $400 million to the total cost. Goldin suggests that the ultimate direct and indirect economic costs of the Civil War (let alone its human toll) were higher than compensated emancipation’s would have been. This was, of course, impossible to predict in 1860–61. For Lincoln’s estimate, see William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York, 1996), p. 10. See also David Brion Davis, “The Central Fact of American History,” American Heritage, vol. 56, no. 1 (Feb./Mar. 2005). Davis notes that a single prime fieldhand in 1860 “would sell for the equivalent of a Mercedes-Benz today.”
20. George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South; Or, the Failure of Free Society (Richmond, 1854), p. 255; Fitzhugh, “Southern Thought,” DeBow’s Review, vol. 23 (1857), reprinted in Drew Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830 to 1860 (Baton Rouge, 1981), p. 279.
21. R. K. Call to J. S. Littell, Feb. 12, 1861, in Frank Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record; A Diary of American Events (New York, 1864), vol. 1, pp. 416–20.
22. Mrs. Chapman Coleman, The Life of John J. Crittenden, with Selections from His Correspondence and Speeches (Philadelphia, 1871), vol. 2, pp. 362–63; Albert D. Kirwan, John J. Crittenden: The Struggle for the Union (Lexington, Ky., 1962), pp. 15, 42, 102, 322–23; Glyndon G. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New York, 1967), p. 265. See also New Hampshire Sentinel, July 8, 1847; “Death of the Hon. J. J. Crittenden,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 7 (1863), pp. 139–42. Crittenden, who was not wealthy and had made his career as a lawyer rather than a planter, owned nine slaves in 1860, but never championed the institution. As a state legislator in the 1830s he opposed the importation of slaves into Kentucky. U.S. Census for 1860, Slave Schedules, Franklin County, Ky.; Maury Klein, Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1997), p. 124.
23. Kirwan, John J. Crittenden, p. 373; John B. Bibb to JJC, Dec. 16, 1860, in John J. Crittenden Papers, Library of Congress; Winfield Scott to JJC, Oct. 29, 1860, in Crittenden Papers, LC.
24. A. F. Ball to JJC, Jan. 2, 1861; John Grame to JJC, Dec. 8, 1860; F. R. Farrars to JJC, Dec. 31, 1860; Robert H. Looker to JJC, Dec. 24, 1860; “A Southerner & Lover of His Country” to JJC, Dec. 19, 1860; all in Crittenden Papers, LC.
25. F. Burton to JJC, Dec. 1860; Crittenden Papers, LC.
26. Buchanan’s papers (archived at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania) contain only one letter from a concerned citizen during this period, although it is possible that others have not survived.
27. John Sherman