Robert William Fogel

Robert William Fogel is director of the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago and the author of several books, including Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery, from which the following viewpoint is excerpted. Fogel responds to the idea, first proposed by historian David M. Potter, that slavery could have been ended without the bloodshed of the Civil War. Fogel argues that the peaceful abolition of slavery was impossible as the Civil War began. He further maintains that the defeat of the Confederacy and the end of slavery in the United States had global ramifications that greatly strengthened the antislavery movement and other struggles for human rights worldwide. If the Confederacy had been allowed to establish itself peacefully, Fogel posits, slavery would have continued indefinitely and...