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Passing Along a Rumor   How Smart Do You Have to Be to Read ...
Nov 5 2007 6:14AM EST

Could the South Have Won the Civil War?

Two years after the Civil War began in 1861, the Confederacy issued gold bonds that were actively traded in Amsterdam until the war ended.

The price movements in these bonds revealed how European investors felt about the chances that the South would meet its debt obligations in a timely manner.

Marc Weidenmier of Claremont McKenna College and Kim Oosterlinck of the University of Brussels use these price swings to estimate the probability that the South would have won the war.

Prior to the defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July of 1863, Weidenmier and Oosterlinck put the slave states' chances of victory at about 42 percent. When news of the defeats reached Europe, the value of the gold bonds took a dive and by the end of that year the probability of victory had dropped to 15 percent:

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