[WS:] I do not necessarily favor that position either. All I am saying is that we cannot just look at one of many outcomes and judge the Civil War by that outcome. I'd prefer a more nuanced approach that takes into account not only all actual outcomes (good and bad) but also the "opportunity cost" i.e. outcomes foregone by entering the war path.
Nor do I necessarily agree with Carrol's position that the balkanization of the US is a good thing - had that happened then who knows, maybe my old folks would all have gone through the chimneys of Auschwitz or Treblinka - as neither England nor the USSR alone would be in a position to stop Hitler's armies. Moreover, nobody would ever heard of Mao, as China would remain under the imperial Japan's yoke (assuming that Carrol thinks that Mao is the best thing that happened to the Chinese since they had invented toilet paper :). And there would be no Vietnam war either (good thing), because Vietnam would remain under the same yoke either (a bad thing, I suppose.)
When asked about the impact of the French Revolution, the Chines Prime Minister Zhou Enlai is quoted to say "It is too early to tell." That is even more true about the American Civil War because unlike the French or the British empires, the sun has not yet set over the US empire created by the people who won the Civil War.
Wojtek
On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 2:25 PM, Jeffrey Fisher <jeff.jfisher at gmail.com>wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 8:39 AM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Jeffrey: . . . and not by the justice of their cause, in case anyone
> > wondered about
> > that . . . .
> >
> > [WS:] I am not sure about that. Abolition of slavery (a good thing) was
> > an
> > indisputable outcome of the Civil War, but another outcome was that the
> > Southern social relations and politics (a bad thing) spilled over and
> > eventually dominated the whole Union.
> >
> > So I guess the right question to ask is that of an "alternative history"
> > i.e. what would have happened had the South been allowed to secede?
> Would
> > the slavery be abolished, and if so when and in what circumstances?
> Would
> > the North follow a different trajectory, and if so how different (along
> the
> > lines of Canada, the UK or perhaps other European states?)
> >
> > Obviously, it is impossible to give empirically supported answers to
> these
> > questions, but that is what makes this 'alternative history" approach
> > intellectually interesting. One set of possible answers (yes to both
> > questions) would indicate that the Civil War was not such a good thing as
> > it
> > might appear by looking at its outcomes alone.
> >
> >
> This is something like the argument a good friend of mine often makes about
> the civil war -- that Lincoln was a tyrannical dictator (draft, suspension
> of habeas corpus, etc., nothing unconstitutional or illegal or immoral
> about
> secession, etc.), and that the end result was that the rest of the union is
> now saddled with the sort of stuff you're talking about. He'd like nothing
> more than to find a way to ditch the states of the old confederacy right
> now.
>
> I have to admit, though, that I am closer to Doug's position than to the
> position you articulate here or to Perry Anderson's (and I actually like
> him, but the position seems awfully disingenuous to me). And in fact what
> Carrol just posted might arguably have done the deed, but do
> de-nazification
> or de-baath-ification or any of those things ever work? Or I guess, what
> does it mean for them to work. Maybe I'm really just a squishy liberal, but
> I have trouble with the idea that it would be better to let them (the
> seceding states) take their ball and go home, and then we, as it were, wash
> our hands of these things.
>
> j
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