"Establishing slavery as the Civil War's central issue has fostered an acceptance of the conflict's inevitability among academic and popular historians alike. Marvel, author of several prize-winning books on the Civil War (Lee's Last Retreat, etc.), combines an iconoclastic approach with extensive research to challenge this conventional wisdom. Focusing on the North's road to war in 1861, he argues that Abraham Lincoln made armed force a first choice, rather than a last resort, in addressing the Union's breakup. While conceding the complex problems Lincoln faced, and the corresponding limitations on his options, Marvel describes the president's course of action as 'destructive and unimaginative.' The confrontation at Fort Sumter ended any chance of avoiding conflict, he writes, and the North's amateurish conduct of initial military operations, culminating in the defeats at Bull Run, Wilson's Creek and Ball's Bluff, encouraged an emerging Confederacy's belief that war was its best option. More generally, Lincoln's early and comprehensive infringement of such constitutional rights as habeas corpus set dangerous precedents for future autocratic executives. Marvel's ... willingness to consider the positive prospects of accepting secession is informed by a barely concealed subtext: the existence of the United States as we know it has not been an unmixed blessing." [Reed Elsevier]
> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 8:42 AM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.
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