Another important factor is that we never fought a European power that was able to focus its full attention on us. During most of the American Revolution and all of the War of 1812, Britain devoted the majority of its resources to fighting France. America was the secondary front.
Did the Founders ever consider just forming a "northern" country and a "southern" country instead of
And what about the Missouri Compromise of 1820?
Absolutely.
John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary, in February 1820, about the debates over the issue.
Feb. 20:
Feb. 24:
We did a thread once focusing on how the American Revolution was taught in history class in the UK, and the general response was something like (paraphrased and slightly exaggerated for effect): Do you guys have any idea how many wars the English/British fought over the years? That little spat with the colonies barely makes a footnote!
Along that line, also slightly exaggerated for effect, the history of America until the Civil War was trying to control the split between the North and South over slavery. Every issue either came down to slavery directly or to the economic differences that a reliance on slaves produced.
The notions that slavery wasn’t important, or that the war didn’t need to happen, or that the North was bullying the poor South, or any of the other excuses and rationalizations for the South’s behavior from 1789 to 1860 are impossible to rationally accept. People don’t want to admit how fundamental this issue was and how rabid the South was on the subject.
But the question is not how important the subject was in 1860, but how important it was in 1787. And although it was significant in 1787, it was far less so than it became after the massive increase in plantation agriculture after 1800. In the late 1700s the importance of slavery was decreasing, so that it was possible to think that it could be done away without a cataclysmic conflict. The invention of the cotton gin is what changed that.
The question in the OP is whether the division was strong enough in 1787 to lead anyone to propose that it would be a rationale for the creation of two separate countries, one in which slavery was permitted and one where it wasn’t. Can you provide any cite for anyone suggesting such a division?
Vermont is an interesting case - before the revolution, the area was claimed by both New York and New Hampshire, who had some ugly confrontations over it. After the revolution it became the Vermont Republic for 14 years. The United States wasn’t prepared to admit them yet, although it’s what a majority of its citizens wanted. In addition to getting New York to agree, there WAS the issue of slavery. Vermont’s constitution specifically forbid it, and they did not admit Vermont until they were prepared to admit Kentucky at the same time.
Does “further north” mean Maine? At the time, Maine was claimed by Massachusetts, even though it was physically separated from the rest of the Massachusetts colony. Maine wasn’t made a state until that was settled in 1820. Even then, the Aroostook War which settled the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick didn’t happen until nearly 20 years after that.
So I shall have to unpack my comments to clarify.
I was not contradicting; just replying. I did not forget the importance of tariffs to the early American Republic, or far more significantly, the mercantilist laws that seriously injured the colonies.
What I am saying is that, while the Colonies in 1776 were certainly outmatched on paper, the population resources they did have were not trivial. For comparison, their population was roughly akin to that of Portugal, and it would obviously risky and probably insane for England to attempt a conquest of Portugal. The rough numberic odds were 3-to-1, and that’s important.
I didn’t go into the six million complicating factors, including the information the British had about the Colonies (or the embarrassing lack thereof), the exact quantity of troops tied down in Ireland, the need to keep forces available in Europe, the relative overstretch of the Navy, the cost of supplying armies across the Atlantic, the relative numbers and usefulness of Loyalists, & etc. These factors exist and entire libraries can, and have, been written about them.
My position is that there was no idea to cut America into two at the time, but even after the adoption of the Constitution the possibility of foreign wars wouldn’t necessarily have made such a split unthinkable. Even during the mismanaged War of 1812, England had no real chance to reabsorb the nascent United States.
This is true.
However, I would argue they should be more interested, as I have a theory that the Revolutionary War, and the subsequent split, had a profound impact on Great Britain, both good and bad. With a stroke of the pen, the British lost, as I mentioned above, more than a quarter of their population and easy access to a vast stockpile of material resources, as well as a huge market. They could, and would, still make up much of this balance in trade, but still at some cost, and also faced a rising competitor over time. This also may have served to damage to long-term prospects of the British Empire, as without the land and population growth in the Colonies, they eventually would be overstretched. Had the British somehow kept the Americas in the fold, it may have allowed them to dominate the entire North American continent, and even keep the Empire as more than a vestige, in the end. Who knows? Perhaps today we would have a Parliament centered in New York, ruling a British state that encompasses Britannia, North America, Australia, and India.
On the upside, the changes wrought by the Revolution would unleash similar forces within England, forcing it to become more democratic, to rationalize its Empire in India, and build a stronger foundation for the modern British State. Without getting into the details, I believe it had a significant impact on the peoples of Britain, although of course one can’t prove these would not have happened anyway.
Independence was pretty much inevitable.
I can’t because that was never the issue. The threat by the southern delegates to the Convention was more specific; that they would each go off on their own. As Charles Pinckney put it, South Carolina would “do of herself what is wished.”
The question of what would have happened if the states had not compromised has been long debated. My take is that a North and a South along slave lines would inevitably form out of necessity, but that’s just an opinion.
Probably, but it could have come about non-violently as it did in Canada and Australia.
It’s an interesting historical what-if to consider what might have happened if the American Revolution could have been avoided, or if Britain had won, when the Britain decided to ban slavery throughout its Empire in 1833 (with compensation to slave owners). Britain of course would have tried to implement this in a way that would not disrupt its supply of cotton. Perhaps abolition of slavery might have provoked a rebellion in the southern colonies, but with even less chance of success than the Confederacy against the combined forces of Britain, the northen colonies, and Canada.
Well, Rhode Island was almost left out.
I think if you look at the context, that quote isn’t actually a threat of secession:
The international slave trade had been prohibited in Virginia in 1778 and in Maryland in 1783 (see W. E. B. Du Bois); so what Pinckney is actually saying is more on the lines that if those meddling outsiders will just quit interfering with things, the South will of course work things out on its own in its own time (i.e., South Carolina will eventually get around to banning the international slave trade as Virginia and Maryland had already done)–a common line of argument over the generations from “moderate” Southerners on race issues (the slave trade, slavery itself, and later Jim Crow).
Eventually, yes. I’d argue that the American Revolution itself was not an entirely foregone conclusion however. Not only could it conceivably have failed completely early in the war ( if Howe had been a bit more aggressive ), it is also remotely possible that the British late war “Southern Strategy” could have been a partial success and ended with a negotiated compromise.
How the south would have developed if the British still held everything from the Virginia on down through the 19th century is anybody’s guess.
Thanks for the context. I pulled that out of a book on the Constitutional Convention where it was making my point. However, I think you have to concede that Pinckney was one of the hotheads. When he says “South Carolina can never receive the plan if it prohibits the slave trade.” he was also issuing the common line of argument.
That is, however, the question in the OP.
However, there might well have been nine or more states that might have ratified a Constitution that was less accommodating to slavery than the one that was implemented (if not necessarily calling for its immediate prohibition). There were six northern states that later abolished slavery, plus as MEBuckner points out Virginia and Maryland had already made some accommodations (and Delaware might be expected to be similar). With some compromise, the holdouts could perhaps have been limited to the Carolinas and Georgia.
IIRC it was Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly where she discusses the British attitude to the American Revolution. It seemed at the time it was an annoyance - to the point where they could not raise the troops needed internally and ended up hiring a lot of Hessians. The attitude from the opposition seemed more apathy than hostility to the rebels; they didn’t want the inconvenience, didn’t want to spend the money, etc.
You have to remember that opposition to the international slave trade didn’t always mean opposition to slavery. People in places like Virginia and the Carolinas were opposed to the international slave trade because they were engaged in the domestic slave trade. They wanted to cut off the supply of slaves from Africa in order to increase the value of the slaves they were selling.
Which has been answered, and the discussion went beyond it.
I don’t see any chance of this happening. The South got the better of every argument by playing the slavery card.
BTW, to further Little Nemo’s point, there was little battle in 1808 about continuing the slave trade because Virginia had surplus slaves that could be sold internally. Importing slaves was no longer necessary, and New England created other sources of income for its shipping industry that hadn’t been as economically powerful in 1787. The North was chastised for its hypocrisy during the Convention. It had incentives to accommodate slavery.
More than an annoyance, to be certain, but one that the British government didn’t really understand. That is, they didn’t quite comprehend until very late just how serious the colonists were, and had a major blind spot to the idea that they might not be terribly interested in the British point of view. Specifically, they believed before the war, and even during it, that the rebellion was formed or caused by “anarchy”, not realizing that the rebels had in effect already formed a separate government well before the war started.
The opposition was split somewhat awkwardly, since it was not a unified faction as we would understand and the main Whig group had climbed a hill on Parliamentary superiority and couldn’t climb down again easily. So while sympathetic to the colonists, they also backed the main reason for the war. At the same time, Britain was by no means crippled or weak, but still heavily stressed from the last war with France, and desperately needed the time to recover. Getting into a civil war at this point was a serious blow.