If this is true, do you think this was a bad thing?
Cite?
Of course not. I am just wondering what would have happened if Lincoln had not been elected and Republicans had failed to get abolition effected.
The seeds of the crisis were sown in the Constitution. The slavery question was unsolvable just after the revolution, and the only way a union was possible was by ignoring it, as much as possible.
The crisis was inevitable. The only way war would have been avoided was by allowing secession . I wonder whether allowing succession would have led to a Confederate Union, or simply a set of seceded states – I suspect the former would have been more likely for practical reasons. I suspect we’d still have two countries today, and both would be far weaker than they are united.
I sure am glad I didn’t have to get a visa to move to NC from MI.
The only thing the Republicans were planning to force was preventing the extension of slavery into new territories. The Republicans would have gladly let the existing slave states continue as they were indefinitely.
The North did not attack the South in order to end slavery.
The South attacked the North in order to EXPAND slavery.
Emancipation Proclomation? Ever hear of it?
So, my question is:
Would slavery have ended ‘naturally’ if the Republicans had not formed a political party and Lincoln had not become president.
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_Republican_Party
The Republican Party, also commonly called the GOP (for “Grand Old Party”), is the second oldest existing political party in the United States after its great rival, the Democratic Party. It emerged in 1854 to combat the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which threatened to extend slavery into the territories, and to promote more vigorous modernization of the economy. The Party had almost no presence in the South, but by 1858 in the North it had enlisted former Whigs and former Free Soil Democrats to form majorities in nearly every Northern state.
With its election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and its success in guiding the Union to victory and abolishing slavery, it came to dominate the national political scene until 1932. The Republican Party was based on northern white Protestants, businessmen, small business owners, professionals, factory workers, farmers, and African-Americans. It was pro-business, supporting banks, the gold standard, railroads, and tariffs to protect industrial workers and industry.
That happened after the war started.
Here is something of interest:
That was federal expansion of slavery, not abolition.
Precisely my point. My question is, when would slavery have died out?
But you’re completely wrong about the Republican Party planning to force the issue. Most of the party - including Lincoln - were content to contain slavery int he states it already was established in.
There’s no reasonable argument to be made that the south did not start the war. Anything else is revisionist history and pointless.
Judging by the actual policies pursued by the Slaveocracy, never. Or more realistically, over their dead bodies, which is what it took to eliminate slavery in real life–the military defeat and occupation of the South.
You think the southerners were worried that on the day Lincoln was sworn in, he’d issue a law outlawing slavery throughout the country?
Of course not. They were worried that he was going to prevent the expansion of slavery into the western territories, leaving slave states as a minority in future generations. You know, the nightmare scenario they started the Civil War to avoid. If preventing the expansion of slavery was that intolerable, the only way slavery could have ended in the United States without a war was if the slave states were allowed to leave the Union peacefully.
That would have preserved slavery in the seceding states though.
It isn’t like slavery was naturally doomed, it took actual people deciding to actually fight against slavery for it to be abolished.
Or when cotton picking became mechanized and there is no longer a need for a huge labor force.
I’d agree with Odesio here: advances in technology did mean that slavery was naturally doomed.
However, a permanent underclass was entirely likely to continue to exist, even if formal chattel slavery was gradually phased out. (Hell, a permanent underclass did continue to exist, for at least century.) So, even if slavery went away, that’s far, far from any promise of equal justice under the law.
That’s assuming they were allowed to live at all. If the South had a huge population of slaves, and no work for them to do, are they just going to free them, after more then a century of constant self-indoctrination that blacks were subhumans unfit for any but the most menial labor? I don’t think so. In a world where the South never lost the Civil War, Auschwitz would be in Mississippi.
I can see “ethnic cleansing.” Forced migrations, exilement, laws so strict that raising families would be difficult (although babies just seem to keep coming, no matter how dire poverty gets. It seems to be a human universal.)
I think even the Old South would have stopped short of genocide. There were enough good people, with honest moral values, to have made that unlikely.
Complete and utter horseshit. The only reason I won’t ask for a cite is because you won’t be able to produce one.
Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, two years after the South started the war. You should also note that it only freed slaves of states in rebellion, not those still in the Union. That’s right, border states that stayed with the Union had slaves; see the map here, only states in red, those in rebellion against the Union were covered in the proclamation. Those states in blue had slaves but stayed with the Union. None of the slaves in those states was freed by the proclamation.
Yes, the South started the war, but that is irrelevant to my question. I am asking what if there were no significant opposition to slavery at all?
Would it not have died out anyway?
What a lot of people don’t realize is it wasn’t just Lincoln the southerners didn’t like. Many southern delegates had already vowed to secede if Douglas was elected. And Douglas made it clear after the southern states seceded that he was as opposed to secession as Lincoln was. So you would have had the same war except with President Douglas heading the United States.
The situation was that by 1860 the southern states had decided that any national government that was less than 100% dedicated to slavery was unacceptable - and they were never going to get that from the United States. Even if Breckinridge had been elected President in 1860, you would have still had a Congress and Senate that wasn’t going to give the slave states everything they wanted. So secession and an attempt to form a new pro-slavery nation was inevitable.