Right and then you suggested my counterexample was offering justifications for a war that Lincoln never used. But what I was doing was showing that your counterfactual was not as simple as you made it sound that it could have lead to far worse consequences than the war.
>
> It also seems worthwhile to consider whether a US citizen should have
supported or opposed Lincoln's resort to war.
Well just to point out: Karl Marx seemed to think it was worth giving support to. He congratulated Lincoln. The British Labor Unions who opposed the Brits taking the Confederate side. Throughout the war, British help to the Confederacy was limited to what they could pay for in cash - no credit. Many attribute that to the actions of the British working class in opposing the Confederacy. Not U.S. Citizens, so Frederick Douglas. Harriet Tubman who actually served as a spy for the Union. The entire Abolitionist movement. If there were Abolitionists who supported the "Erring brothers, go in peace" position I'm not aware of them.
And again, if by some chance the Confederacy had been allowed to leave and somehow had not gotten into a war with Mexico or the Union, then the suffering of the slaves during that period would have been worse than the Civil War. But given the structural need of the the slave system for expansion and the extreme war-hawk rhetoric of Confederate leaders, the odds that if Fort S. had not been the flash point something else would have been. The slave system and conventional capitalism were not compatible. And I share Marx's analysis that conventional capitalism represented an improvement over the slave system , which I consider a deformed form of capitalism rather than a reversion to feudalism. (Though that is not a slam dunk; there are reasonable counter-arguments. ) And yes
it would have died a natural death if left alone long enough. But aside from the harm to slaves in the meantime, it seems foolish to assume the slave masters would have accepted the slow demise of their system peacefully. The mob violence used in the initial formation of the Confederacy is pretty strong refutation of that. So I think the Confederacy would have ended up in war either against Mexico or the U.S. soon enough, Maybe over failure of those nations to return fugitive slaves. Maybe as Carrol said there would have been another attempt at a large scale slave rebellion, which would have been blamed on the Union. Given the economic dependence of financializes slavery on expansion, I can't imagine a Confederacy allowed "to go in peace" not starting a war with a few months, or a few years at the most.
>
> --CGE
>
> On Sep 22, 2012, at 8:29 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
> > What might or should have been always generates a pretty chaotic
discussion,
> > and I'm not sure what is achieved by it.
> >
> > But John Brown and the significant forces (national and inter-national)
he
> > represented has to be included n the calculation. Attempts to foment a
slave
> > rebellion were not loony, and almost certainly would have continued,
> > probably intensified.
> >
> > Carrol
> >
> >
> >
> > ___________________________________
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>
>
> ___________________________________
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