What if the Confederacy had been allowed to secede peacefully?

[RKMBrown]

Try to imagine what would have happened if the eleven states of the Confederacy had been allowed to secede peacefully from the United States in 1861.

The South has always been the problem child of the United States. I think what remained of the United States would have been better off without the South. If the United States had been able to peacefully unite with Canada the results would have been even better.

In the South slavery impeded the development of industry, and of labor saving agricultural machinery. The vast majority of whites did not own slaves. Those who did not own slaves usually had a lower standard of living than their skills would have earned for them in the North.

Negro slavery discouraged the development of a work ethic among Southern whites, because they thought hard work was something slaves did.

An additional advantage of letting the Confederacy go peacefully is that the Negroes would have remained slaves. They would not have been able to move to the North and turn downtown areas of Northern cities into crime ridden slums.

They probably could have, but the south fired the first shots and the rest is history.

Did they? If say Canada or Mexico blockaded one of our harbors, would THAT have been firing the first shot? Or would the first shots have been our defending ourselves against what we would clearly see as an act of war? However there are historians who believe there was no actual blockade but that the Confederates knew one was in the planning and they took the first move. In which case the sympathy for that could shift to the North. And in the interest of intellectual honesty, a few months earlier, some Confederate rebels took some unauthorized shots at a Union ship that was coming into the harbor to supply Fort Sumter. There is plenty of blame to go around, but in my opinion, it was a war that did not have to happen.

The north should have abandoned the fort, it wasn't on their land and the south had paid taxes for it at any rate.

 

[Foxfyre]

They probably could have, but the south fired the first shots and the rest is history.

Did they? If say Canada or Mexico blockaded one of our harbors, would THAT have been firing the first shot? Or would the first shots have been our defending ourselves against what we would clearly see as an act of war? However there are historians who believe there was no actual blockade but that the Confederates knew one was in the planning and they took the first move. In which case the sympathy for that could shift to the North. And in the interest of intellectual honesty, a few months earlier, some Confederate rebels took some unauthorized shots at a Union ship that was coming into the harbor to supply Fort Sumter. There is plenty of blame to go around, but in my opinion, it was a war that did not have to happen.

The north should have abandoned the fort and sent the south a bill for it. It wasn't on their land and the south had paid taxes for it at any rate.

In hindsight yes, that would have been a far less provocative way to have handled it. But that is hind sight that makes 20 20 vision a lot easier.

 

[RKMBrown]

Did they? If say Canada or Mexico blockaded one of our harbors, would THAT have been firing the first shot? Or would the first shots have been our defending ourselves against what we would clearly see as an act of war? However there are historians who believe there was no actual blockade but that the Confederates knew one was in the planning and they took the first move. In which case the sympathy for that could shift to the North. And in the interest of intellectual honesty, a few months earlier, some Confederate rebels took some unauthorized shots at a Union ship that was coming into the harbor to supply Fort Sumter. There is plenty of blame to go around, but in my opinion, it was a war that did not have to happen.

First shots? Who cares who fired the first shots? The important thing was that no one was shot. It was more an angry disagreement with some folks firing in the air than a battle, I don't believe a single person was injured and they should not have been there in the first place. The northern occupiers were not wanted on confederate soil, and were somewhat peacefully evicted. They were asked to leave nicely and refused. So there was a minor disagreement and the northern forces then left of their own free will.

However, what Lincoln did in response.. yeah that was declaring war. The jerk sent an Army of 70k men down onto confederate soil to take back the southern territory no matter what the cost.

While I won't sugar coat the Lincoln of our childhood history books, I won't call him a jerk either. If you are President of the United States and a number of our states decide to split off from the union, along with a lot of stuff that ALL the people have paid for, what do you do?

Did he handle it in the most productive way? In the 20-20 prism of hind sight, no he didn't. But at the time did he do the best he could as he saw it? I believe he did.

You can equate the same kind of thing, with far lesser consequences of course, of the current stalemate in Washington. Did the Republicans have their priorities straight? Yes, I believe they did. Did they handle the situation in the most productive way possible? No way. They blew it.

But blowing something does not necessarily make somebody evil or even a jerk.

Uhmmm he started a war that killed over 750k Americans, and he did it using over 500k European conscripts. Calling him a jerk was me being nice. Mass murderer is more apt.

 

[RKMBrown]

Did they? If say Canada or Mexico blockaded one of our harbors, would THAT have been firing the first shot? Or would the first shots have been our defending ourselves against what we would clearly see as an act of war? However there are historians who believe there was no actual blockade but that the Confederates knew one was in the planning and they took the first move. In which case the sympathy for that could shift to the North. And in the interest of intellectual honesty, a few months earlier, some Confederate rebels took some unauthorized shots at a Union ship that was coming into the harbor to supply Fort Sumter. There is plenty of blame to go around, but in my opinion, it was a war that did not have to happen.

The north should have abandoned the fort and sent the south a bill for it. It wasn't on their land and the south had paid taxes for it at any rate.

In hindsight yes, that would have been a far less provocative way to have handled it. But that is hind sight that makes 20 20 vision a lot easier.

It does not take hindsight to know that sending an Army of 75k men to take a Fort on someone else's land is going to start a War.

 

[Foxfyre]

Okay RKM. Let's just paint it in stark black and white - all evil or all virtue - instead of the varied shades of gray with a variety of understandable motives in the mix. How is that any different than the nonsense Thanatos has been spouting?

 

[hangover]

What if the Confederacy had been allowed to secede peacefully?

Well 750,000 wouldn't have died for one thing. Imagine how many more people would have been born. About 8 generations x three kids x 750,000. eh, only 18 million more unemployed.

But the Civil war really wasn't about ending slavery, it was about the republicans trying to protect the profits of the corporations in the north. Lincoln wanted to deport the blacks to Panama after the war. Lincoln was a bigot, as are most other republicans today.

Abraham Lincoln 'wanted to deport slaves' to new colonies - Telegraph

Abraham Lincoln Quote

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.”
Racist Quote by Abe Lincoln (Happy Black History Month!) | darwinian remiix

 

[bendog]

I disagree that Lincoln failed spectacularly. I did not post on the OP, and began posting when the issue of morality arose. I posted on the social realities of majority of people living in the South, and their reactions to events that impacted them, and the reasonableness of their reactions.

The OP was "what if the North just let us go." The North couldn't; Buchanan foretold that. There were legal arguments pro and con, but there was a practical reality. Basically, Buchanan warned that once the political/economic interest of a minority justified the minority leaving the union, there was nothing to prevent it happening again, so there would be no union. But once slavery was bottled up in the old South, and the South lacked the equal political power in the Senate, the attempt to succeed was inevitable. Society simply ran out of compromises on that issue.

Lincoln responded to events. First whether congress could regulate slavery in the territories. Then to succession. Then to total war (the social and economic destruction of a foe) and the emancipation proclamation. But, it seems to me, that saying he failed is akin to saying either of the world wars was avoidable. I like Alan Furst’s spy novels, which explore the beginning of WWII. Nobel protagonists trying in the face of what inevitably will be Chamberlin’s appeasement, and the loss of the only chance .... which of course is to say there was no chance. Chamberlin did what his electorate wanted. If he didn’t, somebody else would have.

And yes, the South mounted expeditions to cuba, nicaragua and mexico ... and all failed. They sure weren’t gonna grow rice or cotton in west Texas or the Southwest. While even today, African Americans are concentrated in the South, the first migration was from 1910-30. In the Great Flood of 1927, Mississippi planters effectively jailed black labor on islands, so they couldn’t escape to Chicago. The second migration was from 1940-70, and it was larger. The South no longer needed the cheap agricultural labor.

I don’t know if slavery would have existed in the South until 1940 or so. As I said, imo, the war was inevitable. And, it was inevitable the North would win. It shouldn’t have taken five Aprils. But a byproduct was the South was a defeated nation in the classic sense, and have no doubt Sherman used the threat of rape, if not the act itself, as he marched through the South in total war. There wasn’t much interest in industrializing the South, and the capital left with the emancipation and reconstruction. So the question of whether it would have lasted seems to me to be irrelevant. But the war’s effect was to leave the South’s economy dependent upon cheap agricultural labor, and the laborers’ lots weren’t greatly improved.

Of course slavery is evil. But not all slaveholders treated slaves inhumanely, especially in light to the mores of the day. Abraham is revered as a kind man ... yet, there was that thing with Hager. Did Sally Hemmings have any choice to refuse Jefferson’s advances? People live within the society they have within the legal mores. I'm sure some of the clothes I'm wearing were made by indentured child labor.

These men were most likely all sociopaths.

American slave owners

A subsistence farmer with a slave laborer who eats what the farmer eats was a man living in a society.

 

[RKMBrown]

Okay RKM. Let's just paint it in stark black and white - all evil or all virtue - instead of the varied shades of gray with a variety of understandable motives in the mix. How is that any different than the nonsense Thanatos has been spouting?

What did I say that was nonsense? I don't see a reason to hide behind some imagination of romantic history writers that the killing of 750k people was for a good cause. One could find some good out of all the mass killings in history if you squint hard enough. But the truth is, yeah I hate it when people say that too, that our Civil War was an unnecessary blood war started by Lincoln that pitted brother against brother and was settled by starving European conscripts.

To compare, Thantos said "Why dont you Neo confederates with your revised history go back to the democrat party? I am proud us Republicans saved the country and FREED the slaves."

So how is it different? Thantos is proud of the killings and I rebuke them.

If you don't see the difference between waiving the flag proudly over the dead bodies of of many hundreds of thousands of people and rebuking the mass killings, then I really don't know how to help you find it.

 

[Political Junky]

It would be one more in a long list of countries we send foreign aid to.

True, they already take more federal money than they contribute in taxes.

 

[thanatos144]

Okay RKM. Let's just paint it in stark black and white - all evil or all virtue - instead of the varied shades of gray with a variety of understandable motives in the mix. How is that any different than the nonsense Thanatos has been spouting?

What did I say that was nonsense? I don't see a reason to hide behind some imagination of romantic history writers that the killing of 750k people was for a good cause. One could find some good out of all the mass killings in history if you squint hard enough. But the truth is, yeah I hate it when people say that too, that our Civil War was an unnecessary blood war started by Lincoln that pitted brother against brother and was settled by starving European conscripts.

To compare, Thantos said "Why dont you Neo confederates with your revised history go back to the democrat party? I am proud us Republicans saved the country and FREED the slaves."

So how is it different? Thantos is proud of the killings and I rebuke them.

If you don't see the difference between waiving the flag proudly over the dead bodies of of many hundreds of thousands of people and rebuking the mass killings, then I really don't know how to help you find it.

Proud of the killings? Suck my dick! Republicans didnt start the fucking war ! They just won it.

 

[RKMBrown]

Okay RKM. Let's just paint it in stark black and white - all evil or all virtue - instead of the varied shades of gray with a variety of understandable motives in the mix. How is that any different than the nonsense Thanatos has been spouting?

What did I say that was nonsense? I don't see a reason to hide behind some imagination of romantic history writers that the killing of 750k people was for a good cause. One could find some good out of all the mass killings in history if you squint hard enough. But the truth is, yeah I hate it when people say that too, that our Civil War was an unnecessary blood war started by Lincoln that pitted brother against brother and was settled by starving European conscripts.

To compare, Thantos said "Why dont you Neo confederates with your revised history go back to the democrat party? I am proud us Republicans saved the country and FREED the slaves."

So how is it different? Thantos is proud of the killings and I rebuke them.

If you don't see the difference between waiving the flag proudly over the dead bodies of of many hundreds of thousands of people and rebuking the mass killings, then I really don't know how to help you find it.

Proud of the killings? Suck my dick! Republicans didnt start the fucking war ! They just won it.

Won it with European conscripts, are Europeans republicans now? If you are not proud of the killings why did you say you were "proud" and then continue on with your bragging?

 

[thanatos144]

What did I say that was nonsense? I don't see a reason to hide behind some imagination of romantic history writers that the killing of 750k people was for a good cause. One could find some good out of all the mass killings in history if you squint hard enough. But the truth is, yeah I hate it when people say that too, that our Civil War was an unnecessary blood war started by Lincoln that pitted brother against brother and was settled by starving European conscripts.

To compare, Thantos said "Why dont you Neo confederates with your revised history go back to the democrat party? I am proud us Republicans saved the country and FREED the slaves."

So how is it different? Thantos is proud of the killings and I rebuke them.

If you don't see the difference between waiving the flag proudly over the dead bodies of of many hundreds of thousands of people and rebuking the mass killings, then I really don't know how to help you find it.

Proud of the killings? Suck my dick! Republicans didnt start the fucking war ! They just won it.

Won it with European conscripts, are Europeans republicans now? If you are not proud of the killings why did you say you were "proud" and then continue on with your bragging?

Go cry me a river you cock sucker. You will now be on ignore because I refuse to debate a ignorant fuck who accuses me of being proud people died. Go to hell and burn asshole.

 

[RKMBrown]

Proud of the killings? Suck my dick! Republicans didnt start the fucking war ! They just won it.

Won it with European conscripts, are Europeans republicans now? If you are not proud of the killings why did you say you were "proud" and then continue on with your bragging?

Go cry me a river you cock sucker. You will now be on ignore because I refuse to debate a ignorant fuck who accuses me of being proud people died. Go to hell and burn asshole.

You said you were "proud" I quoted it. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed. Apparently you think they all deserved to die for the cause. Otherwise why would you be proud of one of the results. Means justify the ends. You said it. Not me.

 

[oldfart]

First, it's great to have someone who is familiar with the history and the historiography as obviously are participate.

I disagree that Lincoln failed spectacularly. I did not post on the OP, and began posting when the issue of morality arose. I posted on the social realities of majority of people living in the South, and their reactions to events that impacted them, and the reasonableness of their reactions.

The OP was "what if the North just let us go." The North couldn't; Buchanan foretold that. There were legal arguments pro and con, but there was a practical reality. Basically, Buchanan warned that once the political/economic interest of a minority justified the minority leaving the union, there was nothing to prevent it happening again, so there would be no union. But once slavery was bottled up in the old South, and the South lacked the equal political power in the Senate, the attempt to succeed was inevitable. Society simply ran out of compromises on that issue.

The rules for a counterfactual history are to take what actually happened, change something, and then see what logically entails. This is not entirely an exercise in fiction because it reveals motives and alternatives available to the historical participants and breaks down the "inevitability" arguments. I do not view the Civil War as inevitable, but I do not see how it could have been avoided without massive disruption. So I argued that the only was to approach the OP would be to posit a condition where the call for volunteers was never made. The most likely such condition IMHO would be the Buchanan administration turning over all property to states as they succeeded. Perhaps the North could not have "just let them go", but all federal property were in the hands of the states when Lincoln was inaugurated, the Sumter sequence would not have happened and Lincoln's political problem would have been daunting.

I found your comments on Buchanan intriguing and ask if you have a good source for the subject. I am particularly interested in two issues; to compare those comments to Lincoln's analysis of the drawbacks of succession in the First Inaugural (enforcement of fugitive slave laws, etc), and to see how much Lincoln new about what was going on in the Buchanan administration (he was receiving reports of private conversations in the Buchanan cabinet at the time).

Lincoln responded to events. First whether congress could regulate slavery in the territories. Then to succession. Then to total war (the social and economic destruction of a foe) and the emancipation proclamation. But, it seems to me, that saying he failed is akin to saying either of the world wars was avoidable.

Lincoln's mental processes included an extremely rare combination of two attributes; he was habitually prone to allow the facts to develop and the situation to ripen before taking action, and he was stunning rapid in processing the changing information, re-examining his basic analytical framework, and coming up with a new approach. He went from the First Inaugural to holding the border states to compensated emancipation in the border states to drafting the Emancipation Proclamation in a little more than fifteen months. I can think of no similarly rapid evolution of thought on so complex a set of issues. He transitioned from being all-in to avoid a war to all-in to win a war faster than any contemporary.

And yes, the South mounted expeditions to cuba, nicaragua and mexico ... and all failed. They sure weren’t gonna grow rice or cotton in west Texas or the Southwest. While even today, African Americans are concentrated in the South, the first migration was from 1910-30. In the Great Flood of 1927, Mississippi planters effectively jailed black labor on islands, so they couldn’t escape to Chicago. The second migration was from 1940-70, and it was larger. The South no longer needed the cheap agricultural labor.

Filibusters and floods, oh my! Did you take (or teach) a course in either Southern history or black history? Mention of black migration patterns and the '27 Flood are a giveaway.

I don’t know if slavery would have existed in the South until 1940 or so. As I said, imo, the war was inevitable. And, it was inevitable the North would win. It shouldn’t have taken five Aprils. But a byproduct was the South was a defeated nation in the classic sense, and have no doubt Sherman used the threat of rape, if not the act itself, as he marched through the South in total war. There wasn’t much interest in industrializing the South, and the capital left with the emancipation and reconstruction. So the question of whether it would have lasted seems to me to be irrelevant. But the war’s effect was to leave the South’s economy dependent upon cheap agricultural labor, and the laborers’ lots weren’t greatly improved.

I think the experience of South Africa and Rhodesia demonstrates that a system very close to slavery could persist into the late twentieth century. Social stability would have required "black codes" even if the economic basis for slavery were ended.

Of course slavery is evil. But not all slaveholders treated slaves inhumanely, especially in light to the mores of the day. Abraham is revered as a kind man ... yet, there was that thing with Hager. Did Sally Hemmings have any choice to refuse Jefferson’s advances? People live within the society they have within the legal mores. I'm sure some of the clothes I'm wearing were made by indentured child labor.

These men were most likely all sociopaths.

American slave owners

A subsistence farmer with a slave laborer who eats what the farmer eats was a man living in a society.

Some very good points. Philosophers still are at work on the question of what a good person should do in an evil institution or society. The antebellum South makes an excellent case study; as does the South of 1920-1965. Good topic for another day!

 

[bendog]

I didn’t mean any diss on historical hypotheticals. Most of the stuff down here is like “The South was Right” or “What if the South Won.” Well, slavery was wrong, and the South wasn’t gonna win. On Buchanan and secession, this was from a state of the union address. I admit I read something else, but can’t find it, and this is a primary source anyway..

In order to justify secession as a constitutional remedy, it must be on the principle that the Federal Government is a mere voluntary association of States, to be dissolved at pleasure by any one of the contracting parties. If this be so, the Confederacy is a rope of sand, to be penetrated and dissolved by the first adverse wave of public opinion in any of the States. In this manner our thirty-three States may resolve themselves into as many petty, jarring, and hostile republics, each one retiring from the Union without responsibility whenever any sudden excitement might impel them to such a course. By this process a Union might be entirely broken into fragments in a few weeks which cost our forefathers many years of toil, privation, and blood to establish.

State of the Union Address | Teaching American History

So, as I understand it, he felt secession illegal, but he also felt the federal govt lacked the power to militarily prevent it. That may be evidence of why his dithering has him rated as one, if not the, worst ever. But, I’m not competent to offer a historical opinion on this. I’ll shoot LegalEagle a PM, and he may offer something. (-:

As you suggested, from Lincoln’s First Inaugural:

If the United States be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it? One party to a contract may violate it—break it, so to speak—but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?

Abraham Lincoln: First Inaugural Address. U.S. Inaugural Addresses. 1989

Once Slavery was locked into a minority of States, and the South lost it’s political and economic power, it’s hard for me to see any other outcome. Perhaps a more activist potus than Buchanan could have formed a compromise, but wouldn’t it have had to involve almost a nullification effect so the South could opt out of tariffs?

For the North, I dunno. This isn’t something I’ve studied. But, to let Texas go? They fought a war over that. And Lousiana? They bought it. Even today, the Mississippi River, and how its joined by others like the Ohio and Tennessee. (They got a 3 billion dollar lock project (-

In 1860, War actually became a goal of itself, at least to the South’s elite (slaveholders) no matter how clearly Lincoln said “keep your slaves.”

So, to me it seems that the powers that were in both the North and South were only concerned with their own perceived interests, some being greed and even a perverse enjoyment of torture, and some being hubris and a religious mania. The abolitionists ended slavery, but very few of them had any interest in educating the former slaves. The South was in poverty. And that has a very bad effect for society even today. The elite always endures by pitting one set of have nots against another. Mississippi’s a great place to watch that dance. LOL.

But overall, yes on an alternative history. Aside from the elitist planters and abolitionists, the War was certainly contrary to the interests of common farmers and laborers. And, it’s absolutely fascinating to see how visiously the common men prosecuted it. The war became very unpopular with citizens suffering at home on both sides. But the Eastern Armies were amazing. In 1862 and 63 the Confederates invaded the North partially to steal food! The AOP turned on McClellan and saved Lincoln’s bacon in 1864 after losing every major battle except Antetim (draw) and Gettysburg. They’d seen so much hell, they were gonna finish the thing by winning. They voted their own death sentences. The WWII troops in the Western Theatre came close to mutiny over being told they got to help invade Japan. But, peace was in all the civil war combantants’ interests, and there was close to universal literacy, so why was there such a war? That’s a question I’ve never answered.

The Flood of 1927. There is a really great book on that, Lanterns on the Levee by William Alexander Percy, who wanted to evacuate the blacks to safety only to be overruled by the planters, including his father. William Alexander Percy was a poet, and I believe gay. He stopped writing poetry after that, and went to Japan. He returned to take over the plantation, and adopted a deceased brother’s three children, one of whom was Walker Percy, author of the Moviegoer, sort of tale of an existentialist watching lives march by.

As for apartheid, it was before I moved here, but I understand that into the 1970s some Mississippi cities had laws prohibiting African-Americans from being in town after dark. But then, I’ve seen a dowager queen taken care of by black servants who treated her in a proprietary way. I don’t pretend to understand it.

I’m no Lincoln scholar.

 

[gipper]

He then goes on to say the Union is perpetual and began before the Constitution and even before the American Revolution. So since the Union is perpetual, how can the Union ever be broken? What government in the history of the world is perpetual?

Lincoln's speeches were not unlike BO's. Full of distortions, misrepresentations and strawmen. Most were very lengthy and nonsensical.

He also said...

I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments.

So, no matter what ALL national governments do, they can never be dissolved...it must last forever. I wonder what he would have thought of the Founding Fathers rebelling from Merry Old England.

Two days before Lincoln's first inaugural the Morrill Tariff was signed by Buchanan. Doubling taxes...and remember the federal government got all its revenue from tariffs, which hit the South much harder than the North...and ironically the Confederate States had already stated that their new nation would not impose tariffs of any kind...in effect creating a trade free zone....uh oh!!!...can't have that!!!

The CSA offered to pay for any federal property on southern soil and for their share of the national debt....but guess what? Lincoln said, in the parlance of today, FUCK YOU!

He goes on in that First Inaugural to sing the praises of keeping slavery legal. BUT...guess what??? When it comes to collecting TAXES...well you better pay up or else YOU DIE SUCKER! This here is so nice...

In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.

So...lets see now...slavery is wonderful and you can keep it forever...but if you don't pay me all Hell is coming down on you. Nice guy Olde Dishonest Abe...not unlike Obama...

...when will we ever learn?

 

[thanatos144]

The CSA was a scurge that started a war that it lost... It caused the deaths of many many many Americans for no other reason them petty greed and the evil of slavery.

 

[bendog]

Imo, the only chance for some political compromise really passed with Buchanan. The South believed they'd never see a friendly potus and have senate majority again.

I've really forgotten the connection between the emancipation proclamation and the peace Democrats. Lincoln really issued two of them, but the second, after Antitem, was the one that set the peace democrats into violent copperheads, and the draft riots with lynching of african-americans. I've looked online for information on the connection of the second proclamation, and Lincoln's embrace of total war, but haven't found anything.

Oldfart is definity correct that Lincoln spun from appeasing slavery to radical emancipation in less than two years. My recollection is that this had a connection with Lincoln's frustration with any hope for negotiations to end the war. (and yeah, the speilberg movie). I will have to visit a library.

However, I did think of an alternative history possibility. What if the Union had a better battle outcome in 1862 or 63. Might that have led the South to reconsider its chances, and perhaps sue for peace.

John Pope was a disaster at Second Bull Run in August of 62, but what if Lincoln summoned Grant from the west instead of Pope. Further John Fitz Porter was one of the more competent union generals, but his career was sacraficed both at that battle when he refused to carry out Pope's incompetent orders, and by his connection to McClellen. Two competent defensive commanders might have turned the tables. A draw at Second Bull Run might have led to the AOP being more active after the Pennisula Campaign, or at least mitigated McClellen's disaster.

Antitem was the North's big chance. As long as McClellen was in charge, I think the Union was doomed to at best a draw ... when in fact a competent commander would have ended the war right there.

Chancellorsville in the spring of 63 was Lee's masterpiece. And led him to his second invasion of the North, and his disaster of hubris on the third day. However, Hooker, the Union general at Chancellorsville was not all that bad. At the height of the battle, he went hors de combat from a near miss by a cannon ball. Chancellorsville allowed the Southern politicans to continue their delusion that one confederate was worth seven yankees.

 

[gipper]

Imo, the only chance for some political compromise really passed with Buchanan. The South believed they'd never see a friendly potus and have senate majority again.

I do not believe that. The entire western world eliminated slavery peacefully, except the USA. Now how the hell does that happen? In fact, slavery was outlawed in several Northern states a few years before the Civil War and no war resulted.

The fact is the war WAS NEVER ABOUT SLAVERY. It was about POWER AND WEALTH...and centralizing it in Washington DC under the total and complete authority of the Republican Party.

There were terrible extremists on both sides who desired war. Had Lincoln been a real leader and statesman in the mold of Jefferson, he would have sought a compromise. Lincoln NEVER sought a compromise. He wanted war and he got it.

His philosophy can be summed simply as "Pay up or die."

 

[Foxfyre]

Imo, the only chance for some political compromise really passed with Buchanan. The South believed they'd never see a friendly potus and have senate majority again.

I do not believe that. The entire western world eliminated slavery peacefully, except the USA. Now how the hell does that happen? In fact, slavery was outlawed in several Northern states a few years before the Civil War and no war resulted.

The fact is the war WAS NEVER ABOUT SLAVERY. It was about POWER AND WEALTH...and centralizing it in Washington DC under the total and complete authority of the Republican Party.

There were terrible extremists on both sides who desired war. Had Lincoln been a real leader and statesman in the mold of Jefferson, he would have sought a compromise. Lincoln NEVER sought a compromise. He wanted war and he got it.

His philosophy can be summed simply as "Pay up or die."

And you see, I don't think Lincoln did want war. It is precisely because he saw himself as a representative of the people and not a dictator that he refused to do anything about slavery, a constitutional reality, even though opposed it personally. He saw his role as one to find ways to compromise being opposing factions in the country.

He was a segregationist, however, and did not want all the southern black people to flee north. And it was that which prompted the Emancipation Proclamation after the war was already underway.

I know that isn't the romantic version of history, but I do believe it is the accurate one.

But all that is sort of beside the point. The interesting component of the OP is how the two countries might have gotten along just fine side by side if Lincoln and the Union Congress had chosen to allow the secession rather than try to forcibly reverse it.