Slavery was about economics, though.
Doesn’t that make the Confederacy worse, though? Because with Japan, that’s a country that’s basically declaring war. With the Confederacy, though, you have part of the country refusing to recognize the legitimately elected government and going into rebellion against it.
What the other **Captain ** 
said. Just saying.
Failure to pass the Missouri Compromise might have been enough to prevent the war. Once the Kansas-Nebraska Act and, especially, the Fugitive Slave Act effectively made the entire country slave territory, only then did abolitionism and the inevitable Southern reaction to it become the dominant political issues of the time. The war became unavoidable because positions had hardened so much that they became matters of religious belief. Without that, containment and obsolescence of slavery might have worked eventually.
A smaller number of hotheads in South Carolina might have been enough too, but that takes too much imagination.
I don’t think this is true at all. Once you’ve established that any state may exit the union freely if it disagrees with the federal government, it’s only a matter of time before the union disintegrates entirely. And I don’t think the Confederacy had it in it to last that long, either. By the end of the war, there were already states within the Confederacy talking about seceding again. You’d end up with a dozen or more independent countries, still plagued by the disagreements and disputes that pushed them into the Civil War, but without the specter of the Civil War serving as a reminder of what happens if they can’t work together. And if even a couple of them start finding themselves drawn into the alliances and empire building that were turning Europe into a tinder box, then when WWI breaks out, there’s a good chance that you see the trenches in North America, too.
The idea that the South would have gradually phased out slavery and worked out a system to turn slaves into citizens strikes me as terribly naive. The signature feature of American chattel slavery was the extreme level of cruelty and dehumanization. When slaves are no long valuable, the slave owners are not going to suddenly rediscover their humanity and start treating them like people. They’re going to be treated like obsolete machinery, and… disposed of.
On top of all of this, the South is still fucked economically, because slavery was dying out, the plantations were over-farmed, and England’s a few years from getting it’s Egyptian cotton fields up and running, killing the demand for the South’s primary export. Except this time, they’re not part of a large, wealthy nation that’s able to help finance a transition to a more sustainable economy. They’re on their own. The Rio Grande is no longer the dividing line between the first world and the third world in North America: the Mason Dixon line is.
So, without the Civil War, you’ve basically got an American South with the economy of Mexico, and the social policies of Nazi Germany, and both it and the North gutted by war. I think the only real question in this scenario is whether the power vacuum cause by the dissolution of the United States inspires Canada or Mexico into expansionism into former US territories, or if the Balkanization of the continent drags them down with us.
No, Japan is not part of the United States. And the CSA was claiming it wasn’t part of the United States when it attacked us.
Are you pointed out the weaknesses in your position?
You may not have felt their demands were unreasonable. But the majority of people in 1861 didn’t agree with you. I don’t think the majority of people now would agree with you either.
But I’ll amend my post to “The Confederacy had demands which most people thought were unreasonable and it attacked the United States when we refused to give in to their demands. That’s about as hostile as you can get.”
It took 90 years before that was seriously tried by any state. Maybe it’s because there were no issues this serious or divisive before. Pure supposition that it would become a frequent occurrence.
Then it’s not relevant, is it?
Actually, no. In the early 19th century, there was a serious movement for New England secession. The major issue was over federal tariffs on trade with Great Britain. (Amusingly, Southern politicians at the time were very adamant that no state had the right to unilaterally leave the Union.) Prior to that, there was the Whiskey Rebellion, again over taxes. In the first case, the threat of federal violence helped keep cooler heads in control. In the second case, the reality of federal violence prevented the rebellion from spreading. Without that threat, there’s no reason for any state to follow a federal law that they find inconvenient.
A law that is followed only when it’s convenient is not a law, and government that cannot enforce its own laws ceases to be a government. At best, the federal government becomes a fiction, given faux deference during ceremonial occasions, and ignored at all other times. And I don’t see an empty suit like that surviving the turmoil of the early 20th century.
This is also overly simplistic. What the South wanted was for the entire federal government to be run solely for the advantage of the South. When they couldn’t get that, they wanted to leave - and take over ninety years of federal investment in Southern infrastructure with them. Fort Sumter was one of the most expensive federal projects to date, it had only just been completed when Lincoln was elected, and the South thought they had the right to just take it. Along with all the other federal property in the South. Not just land, but machinery, goods, and straight-out cash.
If the South felt that it was no longer in their best interests to be part of the Union, they could have at least *attempted *to negotiate their exit, in a way that was fair to both parties. Instead, they decided to shoot their way out, and as a result, showed themselves to be not just traitors, but thieves to boot.
I don’t see any relevance but it was your post.
South Carolina threatened to secede in 1832 - they said they didn’t like some laws Congress had enacted and wouldn’t enforce them in South Carolina. And that if the federal government tried to enforce them South Carolina would secede.
Andrew Jackson, who was President at the time, made it clear that he would not accept any nullification or secession - and would use troops if it came to that.
I understand, but I’m not using 21st century morals, I’m using 19th century morals. There wasn’t opinion polling back then, but it’s reasonable to believe that a significant portion of the population of the US (very possibly a majority, especially if you include the enslaved population) believed that slavery was wrong, even if most (but not all- see, for example, Thaddeus Stevens) still held other white supremacist beliefs. It was very clear to millions that slavery was evil. And I understand that “freeing the slaves” was not the only motive of the Union and Lincoln, but this still doesn’t minimize how much of an absolute moral imperative it was to free the slaves.
2a) As world and national opinion turned against slavery in the first half of the 19th century, it became quite clear to the Southern elite that staying in the Union was rapidly becoming untenable. The North was growing exponentially in wealth, industry and population and had every interest in limiting the spread of slavery in the West. To the South, expansion to the Pacific was seen as a necessity for its mineral wealth and agricultural possibilities plus a place on the Pacific rim.
2b) There was no way the North could let the South secede. To allow it would have created an emerging rival power that would eventually eclipse northern hegemony.
If the South were allowed to go their merry way, they would control the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the Caribbean and would become the gateway to Central America. And there were a number of border states which, if they had a choice, would have joined the secession.
3a) For all his rhetoric about preserving the Union on philosophical grounds, railroad lawyer Lincoln saw the necessity of the Transcontinental Railroad (completed in 1869) and had no intention of letting an upstart South and its New West get in its way.
3b) The Constitution at the time did not address the question of secession and Lincoln had really had no philosophical basis for his refusal to disarm and abandon Fort Sumter.
From the point of the CSA, Sumter and the rest of the Union forts on its coasts was nothing short of aggression.
Given our original Constitution, our Civil War was inevitable.
And were dealt with appropriately, if somewhat leniently.
Can we at least not pretend that the slave owners in New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware were not going to war to free slaves?
Don’t forget Kentucky and Missouri.
Of course the North did not go to war to abolish slavery. That’s a myth.
What’s not a myth is that the South seceded to preserve slavery. That’s a fact. The sole reason for secession was to preserve and expand slavery, every other divisive issue went back to slavery. Tariffs were about slavery, states rights were about slavery, the fugitive slave act was about–you guessed it–slavery.
Slavery, slavery, slavery. It cannot be emphasized enough. Yes, the Civil War was complicated. No, Lincoln didn’t start the war to free the slaves. That doesn’t mean that the Civil War wasn’t caused because a bunch of slavemasters were worried that someone might interfere with their right to own other human beings.
And while you can’t always judge people by modern standards, it’s clear at the time that everyone knew that slavery was horrible. The Founding Fathers didn’t address slavery in the hope that it would eventually be abolished by a future generation when slavery had grown weaker. Except by 1850 slavery had grown stronger. And a country cannot remain half slave and half free. When the southerners found that they could not make the whole country enforce slavery, they knew that the only hope to preserve slavery was secession.
IIRC, the Late Unpleasantness had something to do with a less than glorious standard of living for the South.
Nope. It was only mentioned in the Articles of Secession of 3 or 4 of same. It was cultural, national and economic. For reasons not too dissimilar to those listed in the Dec. of Independence. “When in the course of human events…assume her place with the nations of the earth” or some such.
Slavery did have some part, but, not the largest part.
The “cultural, national, and economic” reasons were all related to slavery and white supremacy. There were other reasons, but it’s ludicrous to say anything other than slavery (and the cultural, national, and economic facets of slavery) was the most important reason for secession.
Nearly 40% of the south was black at that point. There was not nearly an overwhelming majority (there were no opinion polls, of course, but it was probably a slight majority or perhaps close to 50-50) of southerners that wanted to secede, unless you think black people’s opinions don’t count. Despite some popular opinion and whitewashing, there were very, very few black people who served in the Confederate Army or supported the Confederacy.
From Mississippi’s declaration of secession (article from the Washington Post):
Further, from South Carolina:
And many other southern states had similar statements in their declarations of secession.
Back then, it wasn’t controversial at all- ask the VP of the Confederacy- he says:
It was about slavery, mostly. Not entirely, but mostly.