Another followup to the blog debate with Sandefur: I had hazarded a guess that Sobran was joking when he said billions of lives are worth expending to save a single slave. In private correspondence with Sobran, he elaborated (reprinted below with permission):

"I was joking -- I wasn't going to let him outbid me in the anti-slavery game. I was prepared to go as high as one billion and seventeen, but he dropped out.

"There has to be a sense of proportion in everything. Ultimately you may have the right to kill to protect your property, but this is a right you might waive now and then. Lincoln never really explained why maintaining Union sovereignty was worth a half-million deaths. Instead he switched to the holy cause of ending slavery and blamed those deaths on God's wrath. Odd that the Almighty didn't see fit to punish slavery so severely in other countries.

"I suppose Sandefur could justify similar extremes against, say, monarchy. Why not? He reasons like a man threatening to shoot people for walking on his lawn.

"To me one of the most interesting and neglected aspects of the Civil War is the suppression of dissent in the NORTH. Lincoln really cracked down on those who believed in the right of secession. David Herbert Donald says the period was the worst for civil liberties in US history. An understatement. Lincoln couldn't afford free discussion. I think he owed his re-election to the silence he imposed, with the help of a lot of the usual thuggish "patriots." As I say, Jefferson qualified as a traitor on his terms."