How could the civil war have been avoided?

Great Debates
1

As I understand it, the problem is this. The actual “fair market value” for all the slaves owned by the major stakeholders in the South was a sum of money greater than the value of all the land and buildings in the entire South. The Federal government could not have offered fair compensation because the expense would have seemed enormous.

Without compensation, the wealthier plantation owners were not going to give up their property without a fight, and they had the power to convince the majority of the citizens in those states to stand with them.

Furthermore, once fighting began, neither side could rationally look at the losses they were taking and agree to a settlement because of a human reasoning error called “Sunk cost - Wikipedia”

Once a sufficient number of soldiers had died in the early battles, neither side could give in without making their sacrifices seem “in vain”. George W Bush gave similar reasoning for why the U.S. could not pull out of Iraq immediately during his term (even though at that point, the WMD hunt had been concluded, Sadaam was deposed, and there was nothing more the United States was likely to gain by remaining. However, G W B wanted to leave the country as a stable friendly democracy as intended, not a warring wasteland)

Thus, the fighting went on until it became physically impossible for it to continue in any meaningful way.

And, as I understand it, the numerical cost of the civil war, including opportunity costs and the losses of 600,000 able bodied workers who would otherwise have lived perhaps 30-40 more years on average, vastly exceeded what a compensated buyout of the slaves would have cost.

This seems like a paradox. The actual decisions made were counterproductive to the people who made them, yet they seem unavoidable.

There’s some real Civil War buffs here on SD : how could it have gone down differently?

2

It was my understanding that the American civil war was caused by the Confederacy ceding and attacking federal posts in the south as an angry response to the election of Lincoln (an election result that publicly marked the death of “Slave Power”).

Where does federal purchase of slaves fit into this? Was their some abandoned plan that I’m not aware of?

3

“…the Confederacy**'s demands for secession** and attacking federal posts…”

4

By tolerating slavery for another 100 years.

The north had begun the move to a machinery-driven economy. The south still relied on slaves; to give them up (even to replace them with subsistence workers) would have - and did - destroy their economy. I don’t see any path that would avoid some form of war and end slavery within a generation.

5

I think this thread is more Great Debate material. Moving it there from IMHO.

6

Tolerating slavery alone wouldn’t have done it. Lincoln flat out said that the south would keep its slaves. They seceded anyway.

Preventing the Civil War would have been difficult. For several decades, the northern industrialists were in conflict with the southern agriculturalists. Rather than try to work out any kind of compromise, what happened instead was that whichever side had the most votes in Washington rammed their agenda down the other side’s throat whether they liked it or not (a century and a half later and we’ve never learned the lesson - we still do the same thing). This is why the issue of the western territories became so important. No one in the southern states really gave two hoots about whether or not someone out west could have slaves or not. But they very much cared how those western states would vote, because that would decide who ruled Washington.

Note that while Lincoln promised the south that they could keep their slaves, he also said that the new western states would be free states. He didn’t back down on that, and the south seceded just from him winning the election.

Paying the southern slave owners for their slaves wouldn’t really solve anything. The southern entire way of life was built around slavery. Keeping the lowest class of people as slaves prevented them from rising up and having any political power. The economy was built around slave labor. The only way to get rid of the slaves was to destroy the south, politically, economically, and socially. Offering to pay for the slaves to be freed was basically saying here, we’ll give you a tiny amount of cash while we totally destroy your way of life. Good luck with that.

There’s no way that the south would have ever backed down on the slavery issue, so the only way to avoid the war would have been to allow slavery to continue. You also needed to start way back in about 1820 or 1830 or so and put an end to all of the back and forth fighting between the southern agriculturalists and the northern industrialists. By the late 1850s, both sides hated each other so much that war was pretty much inevitable.

While the southern point of view during the war was all about slavery, the northern side was a lot more complex. There were some in the north who were strongly against slavery, but a lot of folks in the north really didn’t care that much about the issue, at least at first. The northern industrialists were mostly against the agricultural economy, as this (the northerners thought) was holding back progress for the U.S. and was preventing it from becoming a major economic player worldwide. As time went on, everyone in the north kinda rallied against slavery as the country polarized, and again, by the late 1850s everyone just hated each other. If you wanted to prevent the war, you needed to stop all of that hate from building up, and that means finding a solution to the agriculturalists vs industrialists conflict.

Temporarily diffusing the slavery situation wouldn’t prevent the Civil War. It would only set you back to about 1840 or so. If you don’t resolve the underlying conflicts elsewhere, war breaks out again in a couple of decades, once the hatred builds up to the point where people are willing to start shooting at each other again.

7

By accepting the popular will of the southern states, and not force them into membership of a political entity they had no wish to belong to. It’s a little bit odd how a nation for which the independence war meant so much, so soon after went to war to ensure its own hegemony.

8

I have a few responses to this:

  1. Slavery was such a vile institution- such a stain on humanity and on our country- that it must be ended, no matter the cost.
  2. By “popular will” of the southern states, you must mean the popular will of selected white people- because there were millions of people in the South that did not want to secede.
  3. Armed men attacked and shot at United States soldiers. When people attack US soldiers, it’s appropriate to meet that with force. I say that as an American and as a veteran.
9

“popular will?” In 1860 about 40% of the Confederacy were slaves (some states like Mississippi and South Carolina had numbers close to 60%); but yeah, the total capitulation by the Union to all Confederate demands would have avoided the Civil War.

10

In large part because they didn’t believe they’d be allowed to keep slaves very long, not with all the forces of the north (nongovernmental included, such as the abolitionist movement) pressuring them.

I have a little analogy that I’ve found useful in putting the situation in context. Suppose Canada (1) became very powerful militarily and economically and (2) went entirely to a non-fossil fuel energy base. When they look down here and say, “Hey, you polluting pigs, drop the oil habit NOW”… what would happen? Something a lot like 1860-1. We’d justify and bluster and move troops around and call it sovereignty and (hee hee) States’ rights, but in the end it would be about keeping an economic basis with a huge downside, or committing economic suicide.

The south knew the only way to preserve their economic base was to secede; everything else follows from that.

11

Note that The Perfect Master did a column on the cost of the slave buy-out: Could we have saved money by buying out slave owners rather than fighting the Civil War?:

12

And then led to a plain old regular war within 10 years. Slaves would still be escaping and fleeing to the North, and the Confederacy would push and push until the USA was forced to bitch-slap them into rubble. The result would be the same, only delayed a few years.

Good riddance.

13

Another interesting point to remember is that limiting the spread of slavery doesn’t just destroy the political power of the southern states, it destroys them economically. The south depended on cotton, and cotton destroys the soil. By the time of the Civil war, Virginia was farmed out, and made money selling slaves to the deep south. The deep south saw what was coming, and was trying to expand the plantation system westward. If there was no westward expansion of the plantation system, slaveholders get stuck with slaves that they cannot monetize, through sale or labor. Thus their flipping the chessboard and walking away when Lincoln is elected.
Cotton was such an important commodity that, despite being an agricultural society, the south imported food, and starved under the blockade. Idiots.

14

The thing I have long wondered about is what would have happened if the hotheads in the South could have restrained themselves from attacking at Fort Sumter. I think how Castro (and bro) have avoided making any issue over Git’mo for over 50 years. Were there really that many fugitive slaves for that to have been a real issue? I didn’t know, till I read this thread, about soil depletion, but they could have turned to tobacco and peanuts. I mean there is plenty of agriculture in the south today.

Suppose the situation had simply gone on for 10, 20, 30,… years. The north would have prospered, the south stagnated. But secession would have de facto succeeded.

I once read that there has never been a war in which the winner (never mind the loser) came out ahead. Its probably not true, but it makes you wonder. Especially today with all those hotheads ready and willing to start another middle east war. But that’s for another thread.

15

Another flashpoint would have occurred within months.

16

Not capitulation- all that was needed to prevent a war was for Lincoln to say, “Goodbye, and don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.”

17

Today, the hotheads pressing for war with Syria are the Northern liberals, not the Southerners.

18

The reliance on slaves was probably holding the South down economically. Slave labor is not very efficient.

19

Probably true, but you could make much the same case for our fossil-fuel economy. We expend some large percentage of GNP on just maintaining the supply and ameliorating the effects.

Freeing the slaves would have, and did, destroy the South’s economy. Only decades of life near the poverty line and an extralegal continuation of slavery (through Jim Crow suppression and control) kept it from utter ruin. Forcing the US to drop fossil fuels would have much the same effect, no matter how many rainbows and daisies the replacement brings in the future.

There are many cases where something good and necessary could be accomplished if it wasn’t across the ruins of what it replaces.

20

Thanks for your post.

Can you give some examples (even theoretical ones, not necessarily solid historical cites) where there is antithesis between an industrial and an agricultural economy? Thanks!