> Carl: "announcing that he thought the Confederacy should have been
> allowed to secede. His reasoning was elegant enough — slavery was
> historically doomed in any case; two semi-continental states would
> have been more natural; American expansionism would have been checked;
> Lincoln was a bloodthirsty Bismarckian étatiste and megalomaniac..."
>
> [WS:] Interesting argument, one that I voiced myself on various
> occasions.
This a bit too "view from on high". First when one says that slavery was doomed in any case, an obvious question is "how soon", Slavery had been banned in Britain (though not in her colonies) decades earlier. Slavery in Brazil did not finally end until 1885. Given how violent slavery was do you think it would have been a trivial matter for it to have gone on for decades, decades of torture, and murder and rape - all of which were routine components of slavery?
It is also worth remembering how fundamentally violent and warlike the Confederacy was, and how damned unlikely "letting our errant brothers go in peace" would have been to have been to result in actual peace.
First the Confederacy was born in violence, and I don't mean Fort Sumter . A great many state legislators in the Southern States initially did not support secession. Their minds were changed by angry armed mobs paid by pro-secession forces. I'm not saying these mobs did not represent public opinion in some cases, but given the existence of West Virginia and North Carolina, obviously not in all cases.
As another example of violence, there was the case members of the ethnically German community in Texas who opposed the Confederacy and tried to flee to Mexico who were massacred in Texas. And Secession was in general accompanied by boasting of martial prowess and calls for war.
Another point that is worth remembering is that North American Slavery was in a financial trap in which it depended on expansion for survival. Slavery was capital intensive and all the great plantation had great debts. These were not unmaintainable, but they depending on being rolled over, paying the interest , but never the capital. And the security for these debts were the slaves. The problem is many of these debts had originated when slavery was extremely dynamic and expanding and when there was a pause in that expansion, the price of slaves would drop to the point where refinancing the debts was extremely difificult. And then a new slave territory would open up, and the new demand for slaves would drive up slave prices and debts would be rolled over. (Incidentally, in the argument over whether North American slavery was a form of capitalism or a form of feudalism, the extreme financialization and dependence on constant expansion is an argument for the former.)
So what would a violent Confederacy, eager for war have done if it had been allowed to withdraw peacefully? Would it have settled into stagnation that would have doomed the slavery it withdrew from the Union to protect? It would started a war of conquest. It would chosen one of the only two possible targets. Knowing of the Unions great industrial base and larger population, it might have found an excuse to attack the Union, hoping to conquer it before it could mobilize. Or it might have attacked Mexico, hoping to gain a base rich in population to enslave and natural resources to steal, and become a great enough power to eventually attack the Union. I don't know which of these it would have chosen, but I doubt either choice would have led to a less bloody war than the actual civil war. And I doubt either one would have led to a US labor party. Either immediately there would have been war between the Union and the Confederacy. Quite likely a bloodier war. And almost certain a war in which the US ended up as single
nation incorporating the Secessionist states.
There are a lot of fantasies both on the right and left of a world where the Civil war never happened. I think on the left (and on some parts of the right) it is a way to try to avoid having to admit that one of the first bloody modern wars was necessary, that all the other choices were worse.