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{ 2005 02 23 }

Cost of the Civil War

From Brad DeLong

Read the comments at his site, there are some very interesting repudiations of his numbers.

Cost of the Civil War:

* In perspective, it would have cost $90 per capita to buy and free all the slaves
* Cost of Civil War to North: $140 per capita (including only economic damages for dead and wounded)
* Cost of Civil War to South: $340 per capita (including only economic damages for dead and wounded)
* “Indirect” additional cost of Civil War to South: $450 per capita

via Marginal Revolution

Posted by Chris ODonnell on Wednesday, February 23, 2005, at 12:15 pm. Filed under Random. Follow any responses to this post with its comments RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

{ 3 } Comments

  1. Paul Baxter | February 23, 2005 at 12:48 pm | Permalink

    Certainly this is only a sort of intellectual game for economists. It would not, as some of the commenters mentioned, have been possible to buy all the slaves. And what would have resulted if that was tried? Where would they have lived? What would the owners have done with all the money? Could it have even remotely have been approved by the Congress? I could imagine some idealistic person of the era suggesting it, but I could not imagine it going very far.

  2. Joe Grossberg | February 23, 2005 at 3:44 pm | Permalink

    I would add to Paul’s concerns: and how would the South’s enormous agricultural economy work without slaves? How would they find the labor to work those fields on such short notice? And how would they get the money (much more than $90; otherwise slaves wouldn’t have been used!) to pay those farm hands?

  3. Ogre | February 25, 2005 at 11:35 am | Permalink

    Slavery was only part of the reason for the war — it was more about economy and state’s rights.