Hypothetical scenario : The NSA, ATF, and FBI all existed before the civil war, and through a network of informants and very advanced techniques, they had the same information on their citizens that those agencies have now.
That is, it’s the 1850s, and all the technology is the same, but somehow the NSA knows about every single letter written anywhere in the country (they only know who it was sent between unless fill out a FISA form). They know about every conversation that occurs between any two people they care to tap. (equivalent to today where unless you hold the conversation in person, they can probably tap it)
Anyways, they tell the FBI and ATF what they find out. The ATF has the authority to regulate what it does today, and can go after all those illegal owners of “assault cannon” who don’t have the proper paperwork. The FBI has similar jurisdiction and resources to today, although, of course they have 1850s tech otherwise.
How many people, thereabouts, would they have needed to arrest and send to jail to stop the entire war cold? Assume these agencies have similar power to today, where they can arrest someone, charge them in a court of convenience, and have them tried by a jury in a Union state with a 97% conviction rate. Also, they have “mandatory minimums” for rebel activity…
I’d doubt it. It wasn’t like the secession was some secret conspiracy. The secessionists were pretty open about what they were doing and they appear to have had widespread support. And the Buchanan was about as ineffective in a crisis as any American President has ever been. So I don’t see him ordering sweeping special operations to round up the secessionist leadership.
One interesting related “what-if” would be how history might have been changed if the Presidential inauguration date had been changed a hundred years earlier. What if Lincoln had become President on January 20, 1861 rather than March 4? At that point only five states had seceded and their secessions were much more recent. There also had not yet been any meeting between the seceding states to form a new government. Lincoln would have had a chance to deal with the secession crisis when it was still forming and before the new Confederate nation had become an established fact.
At worst, the widespread arrest and conviction of Southern leaders (governors, Congressmen, state legislature members, ets.) would have hastened the start of the war. At best, the war would have been shorter due to the large number of Southern military officers being arrsted before war broke out and therefore unavailable to lead the Southern armies. The only thing that could have prevented the Civil War would have been if leaders on both sides had tried to reign in the extremists on each side and find a compromise that both sides could live with. Sadly, this is something that politicians are rarely capable of doing.
Confiscating guns in a rural nation would lead to a lot of hungry people, which would only fuel Southern resentment. Arresting military officers would be difficult, since the US wanted those officers to lead its military; remember that Robert E. Lee was offered command of the US Army.
Sure it was. And Abraham Lincoln was totally in on it. See my YouTube channel for THE PROOF!!!1!
I don’t personally think it would have changed anything, and in fact may have hastened the path towards secession. Lincoln and his allies were doing everything in their power to prevent secession even before he took office (up to and including the infamous Corwin Amendment, which was proposed by a free-state Congressman and endorsed by Lincoln himself) but the Civil War was probably predestined from the moment the first slave ship arrived on American soil.
I think it is equally likely that these espionage networks would benefit the Confederacy as they would the Union. It isn’t like this hypothetical NSA/ATF/FBI would be completely filled with people loyal to the Union.
The Union did have Allen Pinkerton, who did have a lot of information at his disposal. Still, even a drone strike at the first Confederate Congress would not have shortened the war. Perhaps the opposite, since internal squabbling did as much damage as Sherman’s March to the Sea.
BTW, Lincoln authorized the creation of the Secret Service only a few hours before he was shot. I propose we use this object lesson in not putting things off to make April 14, not March 10, annual smoke detector battery change day.
Exactly - if anyone would have suffered at their hands, it would have been the abolitionists, not the secessionists. After all, people like John Brown were terrorists who opposed the rule of law.
No. The problem wasn’t lack of information, it was lack of will to act until the insurrectionists forced the government’s hand. Hell, the Union Army let officers quit to make war against them (as if the modern US just shrugged and told John Walker Lindh “good bye, good luck, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out”).
