So my original conjecture, the South lay low and try to hold out long enough to wear down the North, wouldn’t have worked. And there really wasn’t any foreign power that could/would come to their rescue. Okay… one last “hail mary” idea then I will shut up for a while…
What if the South had assasinated Lincoln at, or prior to, his first inaguration? Do you think Hannibal Hamlin would have had the stomach/conviction for a 4 year war? Any thoughts?
Hamlin, like many Nineteenth Century Vice Presidents, is so obscure that it’s hard to say. Despite the oceans of ink that have been spilled over the Civil War, little has been written about him. I’m not sure if he has ever been the subject of a full-scale biography. I know very little about him.
I guess it depends on whether you view history as the product of huge impersonal forces or as the result of “great men” (and women). Without Lincoln, the North would have had the same advantages is population, wealth, and industry. On the other hand, nations with those advantages sometimes lose wars.
My gut feeling is that the Civil War was a close enough fight that it required adept leadership to win, and that Lincoln, while not perfect, did provide that leadership. Most human beings can’t, so without knowing anything about Hamlin, the natural odds would have been against him succeeding.
Ultimately Britain stayed out because she had more to gain that way than by coming in.
One of Prince Albert’s last acts before his untimely death was to draft a more conciliatory version of a message to Lincoln over the Trent case that probably averted war.
Not just tests. The USS Weehawken’s fight with the CSS Atlanta in June 1863 was more or less a replay of the Monitor vs. Virginia battle, but with heavier gunpowder loads by the Union ironclad that took apart the Confederate warship in pretty short order (just five shots): USS Weehawken (1862) - Wikipedia
Freddy, there was a bio about Hamlin written in the late 1960s that I chanced across in law school. He was by no means the masterful politician that Lincoln was, but he was smart enough and his abolitionist credentials were even better. I think a President Hamlin could have guided the Federal forces to victory, but there’s certainly room for doubt. For more: Hannibal Hamlin - Wikipedia
It’s a very complicated question. The Union was materially vastly stronger than the Confederacy; given the political will to fight to the end without doubt or hesitation, it could scarcely lose. The question then becomes whether it possibly could have lacked the will to fight.
Until Sumpter, the situation was confused. The lower south had declared it’s independence; the US federal government refused to recognize it, but had precious little power to do anything about it. Some in the north hoped it might somehow all blow over, others felt that allowing secession would be the lesser of two evils. As long as the upper south states still had a vote in congress, they could paralyze a war effort. As long as the US army held southern forts like Sumpter, it mocked southern claims of independence. Both sides thought that the other could be bluffed down, or would run scurrying with their tail between their legs if it came to a fight. Lincoln’s policy was to refuse to back down, but he wouldn’t (realistically, couldn’t) make the first move. It was up to South Carolina. (“Too small for a nation, too big for a madhouse”).
The question is, would prolonging this state of uncertainty for a year or two have helped the southern cause? I don’t know, it depends on just what the south was doing, or could do, to reenforce it’s position. In 20/20 hindsight, knowing that the South faced a long strategic war, it’s easy to say that the chance to prepare was squandered. But at the time many felt a bold stroke would be decisive.
Regarding British and French intervention, some other points. The Crimean War has been mentioned. The war had concluded five years before, and had been less than satisfactory to the British. The British had found themselves in a position similar to the current US position: possessed of enormous strategic strength (via it’s navy) but sharply limited in the number of boots it could put on the ground in hostile territory. This was the war of both the Charge of the Light Brigade and Florence Nightingale’s battle to establish decent care of the sick and wounded; it had revealed shocking deficiencies in the command and logistics structure of the British forces. The British had actually had to recruit foreign mercenaries to fill out the ranks; and when the French decided they had fullfilled France’s goals and unilaterally pulled out, the British were forced to seek a truce rather than a surrender from the Russians. The British were for the time being soured on foreign adventures. Selling another war would have been like trying to sell the US public on invading Iran in 1980, five years after the end of Vietnam.
Furthermore, British strategic doctrine was built around blockades, which it had a huge vested interest in upholding the legality of. To help the South, Britain would have had to do a face turn and declare the North’s blockade illegal and not binding on any neutral party- a potentially stupendous precedent. Indeed, during WW1, the British pointed to the American precedent of intercepting ships carrying war cargo to intermediate neutrals.
The South had the supreme misfortune of going to war at a time when an economic downturn had left Britain glutted with excess cotton and unsold cloth. If not a single fiber of Southern cotton had crossed the Atlantic after 1861, it would probably have taken a year to be felt. And the British were establishing plantations of long-fiber cotton in Egypt and India, meaning that there would never have been a complete cotton famine, even in a worst case scenerio. In the meantime, the British were getting rich not only running the blockade but selling both sides as much material as they could buy. The British would have been glad to see the upstart US broken into managable pieces, but they were content to wait and see if it would happen by itself. France, as has been noted upthread, was even less in a position to back the Confederacy.
A little more definition here: both sides were essentialy invincible except in the “moral” sense. The Civil War was decided and perhaps could only be decided by a total collapse on other side: until one was simply no longer willing to fight, victory was meaningless.
Both sides had large semi-loyal and disloyal populations, but the balance favored the Union. Much of the South, including large portions of Tennessee, North Carolina, Missouri, and Virginia, were outright loyal to the Union. By contrast, the Union had at worst the Copperheads and Southern sympathizers in Maryland and Missouri.
Well, I’ll be darned: Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, Lincoln’s First Vice-President, available from Alibris for as little as $25. Damn, there goes my last hope of writing something original about the Civil War!
I just edited the Wikipedia article to take out the references to Lincoln picking Hamlin and Johnson. This is one of my pet peeves as Lincoln, like most Nineteenth Century presidents, had no involvement with the selection of his running mates.
No, please, go ahead! Hamlin’s ripe for revisiting. 
As for the Wiki article, I seem to recall that VP Hamlin actually enlisted during the war, hoping to do more than just sit around Washington, but never went into the field. Ah, yes… see the last paragraph here: http://civilwar.bluegrass.net/PoliticsAndPoliticians/hannibalhamlin.html
And here’s a good long bio, with details of his Civil War military service in the second paragraph following the subheading “Dumped from the Ticket”: U.S. Senate: 404 Error Page
I also remember a what-if short story in which Lincoln is killed in the Confederate attack on the Union works at Ft. Stevens (he really was under enemy fire briefly) in 1864. President Hamlin then wins the war and imposes a Radical Reconstruction on the South that is much harsher than the one Lincoln intended.
I’m not completely sure what you mean. The South wasn’t defeated simply because the Confederates decided they’d “had enough”: it had taken devastating losses, what troops it had left were starving, and the Confederate forces were no longer able to deny to the Union army a single acre of ground upon which it was determined to stand. The South was no longer “willing” to fight for two reasons: first, the Southern cause was lost; If the the South had fought for slavery and for territory, it could no longer hold either. Second, even if the South had decided on a die-hard guerilla strategy, the South was only “invincible” if you presume that the Union would not have used any means necessary to put further resistance down, up to and including interning and deporting entire populations, or a general massacre of white males.
Frankly I think the entire doctrine of “breaking the enemy’s will to fight” is flawed: the goal of war is to defeat your enemy, to be able to place them in a position of futility, where any further effort they extend against you only hurts them worse than it hurts you. If your enemy is well and truly defeated, you don’t NEED their surrender: if they give it, fine; if they don’t, you annihilate them.
Yes and no. You’ve pretty much just argued my point!
What you don’t realize is that the South could have kept fighting. All those measures and horrors were attempts to force their morale down enough that they simply gave up. Yes, they took horrendous damage. But they could have conceivably continued fighting indefinitely. They could have become guerrillas, even.
The Southern cause was lost; this was why they quit fighting. But they could have kept fighting had they decided it was worth it. The entire point of the Civil War was to bteak their will to fight. The material destruciton and the human laughter were ultimately just means to that end. The Union was fundamentally unwilling to commit genocide, so it was forced to break their will competely instead.
My point was that the South was like the quadruple-amputee knight in Monty Python & the Holy Grail. It didn’t matter whether the South was “willing” to fight on or not. If the Rebs had fought on as guerillas, then by the standards of “civilized conduct” they would have been considered brigands who could be summarily shot if caught. The North would have resorted to genocide if the South had been die-hard stubborn enough to resist to that point.
It’s a point I’m a bit touchy on, because in my opinion the doctrine of “breaking the enemy’s will to fight” was what led to the debacle in Vietnam.
No… they wouldn’t gone that far. That couldn’t do that, and had the South continued to resist completely, they could have held out. The example of Paraguay, though grim, is a pretty good example of this. You seem to think that there’s no limit to your power if you’r just a bastard enough. But doing what you suggest (which the North was not willing to anyhow) would have utterly destroyed the Union itself.
You’ll note that is exactly the strategy the North Vietnamese used.
Given that we don’t know what Hannibal Hamlin would have done there is little to say about what might have happened had the South assasinated Lincoln in 1861. Regardless, if the North had done basically the same thing they did it sounds like the outcome would have been more or less the same.
BUMP.
Well, I did it. I ordered and read a biography of Hannibal Hamlin. It’s a wonder I have any brain cells left.
(I say that facetiously, because it was well written and not overlong–230 pages. I wish present-day biographers could be that concise–about anybody!)
Hannibal Hamlin was the consummate “career politician”. During the rare times he was out of elective office, he had to pester the President of the day for a patronage job, because as he freely admitted he had no other way to make a living.
His saving grace was, as you say, his anti-slavery credentials. He urged Lincoln to free and enlist the slaves from the beginning of the war. He urged an attack on the South even before Fort Sumter, and he had less patience for dilatory generals (like McClellan) than did Lincoln.
We can be sure that the war would have been prosecuted just as vigorously, if not more vigorously, under Hamlin. The risk is that he would have acted recklessly–alienating Democrats and Northerners who wanted to fight to save the Union but cared little about slavery.
The real tragedy is that Hamlin was dropped from the ticket in 1864, paving the way for the racist cretin Andrew Johnson to serve during the critical early years of Reconstruction. Hamlin consistently supported African American civil and voting rights, and under his presidency a united federal government would have stood behind both.
Draper Hunt (the author) discusses the 1864 convention at length, and finds Lincoln’s influence to have been important. Other historians (and I) have disagreed. At most Lincoln may have employed associates to discreetly nudge wavering delegates in Johnson’s favor, but some dispute that he did even that much.
Well, that’s way more than anybody wanted to know about Hannibal Hamlin.
As originally discussed in the parlor at Twelve Oaks:
A somewhat old debate but my guess is that the next step Lincoln would have taken would be to “blockade” the South (for legal reasons it wouldn’t be called a blockade but it would function the same as one). This would have been something the Confederacy couldn’t have ignored; it would have been forced to respond in some military manner or concede it was unable to defend itself.
Britain had ironclads too, remember. The HMS Warrior entered into service in 1861, the Black Prince and Resistance in 1862, and the Achilles and Hector in 1864, as well as a number of other ships that started as wooden ships and were converted into ironclads (The Prince Consort, Ocean, Caledonia, Royal Oak, etc.) By 1865, there were 11 completed British ironclads. While the American navy had more, remember, first that America was at war and Britain was not, so if Britain had gone to war, its ship production would have sped up, and secondly, most of the American ironclads couldn’t operate in the open ocean…they were restricted to river and coastal operations. While this isn’t as much of a disavantage for the US as it would have been for Britain, it still would have given the Royal Navy a kind of flexibility the American navy didn’t have.