Heather Cox Richardson’s January 1 newsletter recounts events leading to Lincoln’s January 1, 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. From the war’s outbreak, Blacks knew the war would have to address slavery.
Days after Union troops stopped the Confederate advance in Maryland on September 17, 1862 at the Battle of Antietam, Lincoln prepared a Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation under his war powers. He told a visiting judge, “It is my last trump card…. If that don’t do, we must give up.”
Striking in Richardson’s account is earlier debate over the value of slaves and of Black labor:
As Confederate armies racked up victories, Republicans increasingly emphasized the importance of Black workers to the South’s war effort. “[I]t has long been the boast of the South…that its whole white population could be made available for the war, for the reason that all its industries were carried on by the slaves,” the New York Times wrote. Northerners who before the war had complained that Black workers were inefficient found themselves redefining them. The Chicago Tribune thought Black workers were so productive that “[F]our millions of slaves off-set at least eight millions of Northern whites.”
At the same time, Republicans came to see Black workers as crucially important in the North as well, as they worked in military camps and, later, in cotton fields in areas captured by the U.S. military. While Democrats continued to harp on what they saw as Black people’s inability to support themselves, Republicans countered that “No better class of laborers could be found… in all the population of the United States.”
Compensating Southerners for their lost “property” was on the table by December 1862:
Northerners recoiled from the plan. One newspaper correspondent noted that compensated emancipation would almost certainly cost more than a billion dollars, and while he seemed willing to stomach that financial hit, others were not. Another correspondent to the New York Times said that enslavers, who were at that very moment attacking the U.S. government, were already making up lists of the value of the people enslaved on their lands to get their U.S. government payouts.
While Americans considered the financial costs of compensating slave-holders for emancipation, did anyone add up the cost of the lives lost to the war? U.S. deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic now exceed a recent estimate from the Civil War by nearly 100,000. Current estimates place U.S. deaths from Covid at about 825,000. Who is calculating the cost of those lost lives the way southern accountants once summed the value of four million “head” of human chattel?
Do we value human beings by one metric when they are property and by another (or not at all) when they have no cash value? What the question says about a world viewed through a capitalist lens is unsettling. As is the dismissal by some of the Covid body count as no big deal.