[lbo-talk] Civil War - was Catalonia the latest flashpoint in the Euro crisis

Carl G. Estabrook galliher at illinois.edu
Sat Sep 22 17:37:09 PDT 2012


The war was obviously a war between two ruling classes with incompatible ways of exploiting labor - chattel-slavery and wage-slavery. Lincoln was among those who realized that from early on - as the "House divided" speech (1858) shows. (Cf. what was perhaps his clearest statement on the point, his State of the Union address of December 3, 1861).

Launching a war on the basis of what the South was "inevitably going to do" does sound a lot like later US justifications for aggression, up to and including Bush and Obama's preventive wars against Iraq and Iran. But that of course was not Lincoln's motive, either in propaganda or fact. --CGE

On Sep 22, 2012, at 6:33 PM, Gar Lipow <gar.lipow at gmail.com> wrote:


> On Sat, Sep 22, 2012 at 3:53 PM, Carl G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:
>
>> William Marvel, "Mr. Lincoln Goes to War" (2006)
>>
>> "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.
>
>
> 1) This is not iconoclastic - but for a good long time was the
> conventional wisdom. That Lincoln had as an alternative letting the South
> secede has never been in doubt though whether that would have lead to peace
> or a better civil war are very doubtful.
> 2) There is a sense in which the war was not about slavery - in that
> Lincoln did not run on eliminating slavery, and in negotiating to avoid
> secession offered a number of further concessions. These included
> guaranteed continued enforcement of the Fugitive & Slave acts. But
> fundamentally the Confederates would not accept any continued participation
> in a Union where they were not dominant. Among their demands:
> A) No judicial determination of whether someone was actually a slave before
> slave catchers could recover them in the North
> B) Continued admission of new slaves as slave states to restore the slave
> state majority the South had previously enjoyed.
> C) Suppression of Abolitionist newspapers in the North.
>
> In short the Confederates were only in willing to stay in the Union if they
> could rule it. They wanted not only for Black people to be slaves. They
> wanted Northerners to be servants. They could not feel free in a Union
> where Northerners were accepted as their equal.
>
> And the reason for this was the reason given in my last post. Lincoln was
> not going to suppress slavery, but he was not going to let it expand. The
> particular highly financialized form of slavery that existed in 19th
> century North America depended on continued expansion for survival. So the
> only "peaceful solution" the North had was to let the South establish the
> confederacy - a confederacy that, as I mentioned in my previous post, was
> established from the beginning by force. In fact one of the "non-peaceful"
> actions the North took was to refuse to let the same type of mob violence
> used to force state legislatures to secede in many other states to take
> control of the Maryland state legislature. So Maryland remain in the Union
> thanks to "undiplomatic" use of force. I suppose Lincoln should have let
> the South grab Maryland in your view. At any rate, given the need for
> expansion a "peaceful" secession would have led to war soon enough as the
> new Confederacy sought new territory to expand slavery into. In that sense
> the Civil war is about slavery. If the South had been allowed to secede, it
> would soon have started a war to expand slavery . If the South had use a
> delay in war to build ties with Britain which would have allowed it buy
> from Britain on credit once the actual war started rather than have to pay
> cash for anything i received as actually happened, the resulting war might
> have been longer and bloodier.
>
>
> 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]
>>
>
> I will agree that Lincoln violated civil liberties widely in ways that were
> often (but not always) unjustifiable. But that is a very different
> argument than he should have let the South secede. Ag
>
>>
>>> 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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>>
>>
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>
>
>
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