Slavery was flourishing in 1860, not dying out. The property value of enslaved people ($3 billion) exceeded the value of all US industry and railroads combined ($2.5 billion). The war was not 'needless'—slavery would have lasted decades longer without it.

13:02into our history and geographically is much larger than we often study in the context of the United States. - One thing the war, the Civil War, which I'll just call the war for the rest of our discussion, I mean, one thing it did was end slavery in four years in the United States. Whereas in the absence of that war, it might have gone on for decades. I think the

13:26United States would have had the ignominious distinction of being the last place to get rid of slavery, would have been after Brazil, would have been after Spanish Cuba, because it was thriving in the United States in 1860. It was making the transition from cash crop agriculture- ... to other, to industrial applications and other applications growing of non-- not growing, growing just cotton and rice and sugar. It was--

13:54There was a time in the literature when people argued that the war was needless, the Civil War was needless because slavery was on its way out. That's absolutely wrong. It was not on its way out. It was thriving. Lincoln said at one point he thought it might have lasted another fifty years, and I don't know how many years it would have lasted, but I think it would have lasted longer than it did in either Cuba or

14:14Brazil if it hadn't, if the war hadn't taken place. - So slavery was flourishing in the United States from- - Flourishing. - ... from an economics perspective- ... especially. - The wealthiest part... The 1860 census is our friend, and it tells us that the people who controlled the most wealth in the United States were slaveholders, and their property in slaves alone, not their other holdings, not their land holdings,

14:39just property in slaves were valued at about three billion dollars. The value of all industries, all railroads, all of that put together, fewer than two point five billion dollars. So the people who controlled the most wealth, by far, were the slaveholding class. - So it was the most valuable industry in the United States, and perhaps it is the reason, Again, a bit out of scope, but maybe it helps lay out the land.

15:10Let's look at the nineteenth century. So most slave-owning societies of the era were able to abolish slavery without people dying at the mass scale that we'll discuss. So Britain freed eight hundred thousand slaves in 1833- ... By buying their freedom. Russia freed twenty-three million serfs in 1861 with a decree, so legally. Brazil, which imported more than ten times as many enslaved Africans as the United States, abolished slavery in 1888 through basic ordinary legislation.

15:46No violence. Why did the US have a civil war with an estimated seven hundred and fifty thousand people dead in order to abolish slavery? - Yes. That's-- Let's talk just for a second about the seven hundred and fifty thousand dead soldiers we're talking about. The number for years was six hundred and eighteen thousand, and that's been revised lately. I think we're probably certainly more than seven hundred thousand. By far the bloodiest war in,

16:13in our history as a percentage of the population off the charts, by far the bloodiest. I think there's a big difference between Great Britain doing it and the United States doing it, is Great Britain did it in other places. There weren't millions of enslaved people in Great Britain at the time. It's-- I think, for them, it might have been a little bit easier to free enslaved people who don't live among you than it... In the United States,