Why We Didn't Just End Slavery

Millsaps and Reconstruction

When just a few people refuse to do what they recognize is the right thing, it's often due to hate and prejudice. When an entire culture refuses to do what they insist is right, money is almost always at the bottom of it.

For a hundred years, the British Empire had been nibbling away at slavery, which they recognized as wrong. They made it illegal to enslave previously free people, and they made it illegal to transport slaves on English ships, but they refrained from making slavery itself illegal, and people throughout the empire still had slaves, including some in England itself.

The problem was that, for around a hundred years, banks had been lending money and accepting the value of slaves as collateral. Should they just end slavery, then enough people would become insolvent overnight to crash the entire British economy.

To resolve this, they came up with the Slave Compensation Act of 1837. In it, they offered Slave owners annuity bonds in the English government to replace the value of the slave. Payable at 3%, some of these bonds didn't finish paying off until the beginning of the twenty-first century, but it did finally and very effectively end slavery in Great Britain.

The United States had the same problem. Most people agreed that slavery was wrong and should end, but they didn't know how to pay for it. Enough Southern farmers had placed debt throughout the country that ending slavery could make the entire national banking system collapse. This is why, when elements of the Republican party started talking about ending slavery anyway, people started calling them religious zealots. Some of which was true.

There was talk about putting through the same sort of plan that Britain had, but since there were so many more slaves in the Americas, nobody was willing to burden the still-young country with that kind of debt. To make matters worse, American banks were lending money using Caribbean and South American slaves as collateral.

Since so many Southern Farmers kept their debt in England, there was an effort to add them to the Slave Compensation Act. However, the British (I suppose still a bit sore about the whole war thing) decided that compensation was only available to British people.

Lincoln won the election. He never had a chance to enact the measured ending of slavery he had previously proposed before the South succeeded, forcing the issue.

When the war was over, the entire South defaulted on its debts. It also had not paid taxes in four years. Whatever financial difficulties the fledgling country had faced before, none were like this.

After Lincoln’s death, as much of the financial burden of this new economic depression and banking crash as they could was placed on the South by the new, quite angry and vindictive, Republican Party.

This is the part of the story where I make it all very local.

Ruben Webster Millsaps, by every way we use the word now and at the time, was a scallywag. Before the war, Mississippi had more millionaires than the entire rest of America—more than many entire countries. After the war, we were desperate and desolate. The poverty you see today in Mississippi is the direct result of the economic crash of that time.

Even though Millsaps had achieved the rank of Major, he wasn’t a military man. He was allegedly a very good lawyer, but in the wake of the Civil War, being a really good lawyer meant nothing because nobody could pay you. Millsaps became a financier. He placed the few people who had money (usually Northerners) with those who still had the financial strength to take on debt and buy up these thousands of acres of farmland sold when the pre-war owners were bankrupt.

You’ve probably heard that Southern People hated scallywags. That doesn’t seem to be the case with Millsaps. He seems to have been very highly thought of by the community, although that may have been colored by the philanthropy he took part in for the last third of his life.

I’ve always believed we could have avoided the Civil War and many of the painful things that followed had we resolved the debt issue the way the English did. That still leaves us with the issue of what to do with all these millions of previously enslaved people.

Lincoln proposed three plans before he died. He suggested returning them to Africa. Some Republican-led efforts to do just that resulted in the country we now know as Liberia. He also suggested taking control of one of the politically unstable countries in South America. However, that leaves the problem of what to do with the people already there. His last option, which was probably the most viable but least popular, was to move them into the recently added Western territories. That idea ended up being rejected because there were too many white people banking on the idea of finding their fortunes in this new West.

Lincoln died. With him died most of the Republican resolve to do anything at all with the recently freed people. As the Republican party grew, it became more focused on financial issues, and soon became a key factor in the massive financial entities created by the Industrial Revolution, although almost none of them benefited the South , and none of them at all benefited Mississippi.

America has never been very good at avoiding really terrible things heading straight toward us. History teachers in the South used to avoid ever saying the Civil War was about slavery, insisting it was “States’ Rights” instead, although the state right in this case happened to be slavery. It wasn’t all just prejudice and hate, though. There was a huge financial incentive to keep slavery going, but one we could have avoided had we taken the same path Great Britain took.