[Getting It Right: Markets and Choices in a Free Society by Robert J. Barro (The MIT Press, 1996; x + 191pp.)]
Robert J. Barro is a free market economist often rumored to be a candidate for the Nobel Prize and, unlike some people in that category, he is able to address the general reader in a comprehensible way. In this week’s column, I’d like to discuss some comments he makes about the War Between the States that challenge mainstream and “politically correct” views of that conflict. The reigning orthodoxy holds that the war was necessary to rid America of slavery and that Abraham Lincoln counts as an authentic American hero. As we’ll see, Barro disagrees.
He approaches the issue obliquely, through a consideration of American foreign policy around the time he was writing his book. The 1990s saw the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of many successor states which had seceded from it. The United States—under the presidency of George H.W. Bush—was surprisingly reluctant to support the breakup of the Soviet Union, its foe in the Cold War for some three decades. Barro suggests that the events of the 1860s had something to do with this reluctance. The “obvious” reason for the reluctance was fear that secession might lead to instability, but this is not, Barro says, the full story:
Stability is a sensible concern, but the intense opposition of the U.S. government to secession also reflects the specifics of American history. The U.S. Civil War, by far the most costly conflict ever for the United States, was fought primarily to maintain the union. . . . If the U.S. government had supported the right of secession in some other part of the world, such as the Soviet Union, then it would have indirectly challenged the basic premise of the Civil War. Why was it desirable for Soviet republics to have the right to secession and undesirable for U.S. States to have the same rights? Americans would then be forced to reconsider whether the enormous cost of the Civil War in terms of lives and incomes was worth it. Instead of being the greatest of American presidents, as many people believe, Abraham Lincoln may instead have presided over the largest error in American history.
It is significant that Murray Rothbard, who regarded the Southern war for independence as one of the two just wars in American history, also supported the breakup of the Soviet Union. In one of his last papers, “Nations by Consent,” he said:
It is now well known that the collapse of the centralizing and imperial Russian Soviet Union has lifted the lid on the dozens of previously suppressed nationalisms within the former U.S.S.R., and it is now becoming clear that Russia itself, or rather the Russian Federated Republic, is simply a slightly older imperial formation in which the Russians, moving out from their Moscow center, forcibly incorporated many nationalities including the Tartars, the Yakuts, the Chechens, and many others. Much of the U.S.S.R. stemmed from imperial Russian conquest in the nineteenth century, during which the clashing Russians and British managed to carve up much of central Asia.
What were the enormous costs of the war? According to Barro,
The war caused over 600,000 military fatalities and an unknown number of civilian deaths and severely damaged the southern economy. Per capita income went from about 80 percent of the northern level before the war. . .to about 40 percent after the war. . . The fall in per capita income reflected the destruction of capital—plant and equipment, livestock, and educated labor—and the end of the plantation system based on forced labor. Although only the first part of the fall in measured per capita income represents a true cost of the war, the overall setback in the economy was striking: it took more than a century after the war’s end in 1865 for southern per capita income to reattain 80 percent of the northern level.
However costly the war in lives lost and in a ruined economy, wasn’t the price “worth it” in order to free the slaves? Barro doubts it:
Although the desire to free the slaves was not the primary cause of the Civil War, one might argue that the elimination of this disgraceful oppression nevertheless made the war worthwhile. Two problems with this argument are, first, that the setback in the southern economy harmed the southern blacks along with the whites and, second, that the elimination of slavery did not prevent blacks from suffering nearly an additional century of semilegal discrimination and segregation after the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s. Everyone would have been better off if the elimination of slavery had been accomplished by buying off the slaveowners—as the British did with the West Indian slaves in the 1830s—instead of fighting the war.
I would add that discrimination against blacks was rampant in the North as well as the South. Free blacks were kept out of some of the Northern states altogether.
But couldn’t it be argued against this, that—without war—slavery would have continued indefinitely? Barro thinks this would have been unlikely:
Some relevant information is that slavery was abolished without war in other parts of the Western hemisphere (except Haiti in the 1790s) and the last country to act, Brazil, began the process in 1871 and finished it in 1888. Thus, the experience of the rest of the hemisphere suggests that slavery in the U.S. South would have been eliminated peacefully in not very many years.
I hope that Barro’s remarks did not make it too politically toxic to award him the Nobel Prize.
