Thoughts on Visiting Gettysburg National Military Park

Yesterday we visited the Gettysburg battlefield. For non-U.S. readers, this was the site of the bloodiest battle in the American Civil War, with something like 50,000 casualties, commemorated in what is probably America's most famous presidential address. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia sought to bring the war to the North in the autumn of 1862 but was stopped at Antietam, and again in the summer of 1863 but was stopped at Gettysburg. These two tactical ties but strategic defeats may have sealed the fate of the Confederacy, even though the war continued until 1865.

The Park has fine facilities, but I was left profoundly moved by the sacrifices made by both sides, including nearly 8,000 killed in the battle itself.

Obviously the battle resulted from tactical decisions of many actors, from broad strategic decisions made by the Southern and by the Northern leadership, from geopolitical considerations of both sides (especially those related to the potential involvement of the European powers), and consequently I doubt any simple reasons that might be given for the battle. I understand. however, why the National Park Service has opted for a simple explanation for the battlefield tourists.

Difficulty Understanding the Past

Looking back on the Civil War from today, it seems not only obvious that slavery was morally wrong and economically a dead end, but that it was a doomed institution that would have soon been abolished even had the Civil War not lead to the Emancipation Proclamation and the 14th Amendment. European powers had outlawed the slave trade and slavery and the progress of history would surely have strengthened abolitionist sentiment in the United States until we too would have abolished slavery. Yet the South must not have seen that course as inevitable, and indeed Lincoln emancipated only the slaves held by secessionists in the Emancipation proclamation, leaving the end of slavery in the United States to the later Constitutional amendment.

The Civil War marked the change from treating the term "The United States" in the plural to treating it as singular: from "The United States are...." to "The United States is...." The unity of the union has been a given all my life. Indeed, for all of my adult life the United States has been the dominant economic and military power in the world. So how can I properly empathize with the leaders of the 19th century who properly feared that disunion to be followed by intervention of stronger European states in American affairs and a process of interstate conflict and war like that which plagued the European states through most of the history of the millennium.

I have been reading American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham. Jackson too worried about secession and Civil War, and perhaps it is easier to understand the peril he faced in 1828 when the United States was even weaker and the union less of a historical fact than in Lincoln's time. Still the need and indeed the willingness of the unionist forces to embark on the Civil War remains unintuitive for me -- intellectually reasonable but emotionally hard to accept.

Human Versus Institutional Capital

The movie shown at the Park stated that the South had lost more than half of its capital stock in the Civil War, most of which was represented by the value of the slaves who were freed.

It some sense that seems profoundly unintuitive. The former slaves were still there, still in place with the skills and knowledge that they had always possessed. There was no loss of human capital as we now conceive of it. Of course those who owned slaves in the past could and did consider the market value of their slaves as capital, and indeed they could borrow using slaves as collateral and could sell slaves to monetize that capital.

(Hernando de Soto has powerfully made the point that poverty in poor countries has been maintained in part because poor people could not legally register their property and borrow against its value or monetize that property, and there have been projects which have contributed to local development by legalizing property rights of the poor over their homes, land and capital goods. Maybe we should look for processes by which people can obtain legal rights to their human capital, borrowing against it and monetizing it via contractual arrangements?)

Considering the experience of the fall of Communism may help attain an intuitive understanding of the loss of institutional capital during the Civil War. The fall of the Soviet Union was followed by a reduction of GDP in all the formerly communist countries, yet there had not been violence nor destruction of property. What was destroyed was the institutional basis for economic production, and until a new institutional basis could be established the productivity of the societies was diminished. If we consider capital to by anything that contributes to productivity, then the institutional gap which led to the (temporary) loss of productivity must be seen as due to a loss of institutional capital; the institution building (adoption of capitalism, etc.) that led to increased productivity would then be seen as investment in institutional capital.

In the South, the institutions of slavery based production were destroyed, as well as those which attributed value to the human capital of the slaves themselves. What was lost was not the human capital, but the institutional arrangements which allowed the existing capital to be used productively. As in the case of the fall of Communism, the loss of institutional capital was temporary as the society developed new institutions that would ultimately prove more productive than an institutional system based on slavery.