The Civil War--again (What if???)

Great Debates
1

What if the Southern states had seceded, and not fired on forces loyal to the Union. Does Lincoln send in the troops, or does he just say “OK, see ya.”
BTW, for my own belief (this is such a minority belief that I’ve never seen anyone else echo it), I think the secessions were illegal, that they did not retain a sovereign right to secede, and that since states can be admitted only with Congressional approval, that they “discharged” only with Congressional approval.

Feel free to set me straight on that matter, too.

2

Hello Mjollnir
I dont know about the other states but Texas was a republic before entry into the union.
As part of the agreement Texas retained the right to secede or subdivide into five smaller states.

t lion

3

that they “discharged” only with Congressional approval.

How do I get permission to revolt?

All this science, I don’t understand. It’s just my job 5 days a week-- Rocketman

4

(Carefully avoiding smartalec cracks on Metroshane’s post and the word “revolting”) :slight_smile:

Lion, IIRC, the post-Civil War Supreme Court decision that determined that states have no legal right to secede involved the State of Texas. I’m curious whether the treaty of admission was brought up, and if so, how they reasoned around it.

Texas also has the right to its own Navy, and the Battleship Texas is still legally commissioned by the State, right?

5

Oops.
That should read:

'. . .that they could be “discharged” from the Union only with Congressional approval."

6

The whole Texas thing and seceeding thing have been discussed around here before. I hope some enterprising person will find it and post a pointer to it. :slight_smile:

7

WAG ALERT:

Lincoln was pretty passionate about his beliefs that the Union should be preserved at all costs (his writings and speeches tend to support this). Had the Southerners not gotten hasty and fired on Union troops, it’s likely that the War would have started anyway, albeit a few months later. Lincoln probably would have exhausted all diplomatic possibilites first, but I’m guessing that those diplomatic possibilities were few.

8

Re Texas succession
http://www.urbanlegends.com/politics/texas_secession.html
http://www.urbanlegends.com/politics/texas_secession_more.html
http://www.urbanlegends.com/politics/texas_secession_rights.html

From the last link:

Back off, man. I’m a scientist.

9

I’ve always felt that the secessionists jumped the gun a little too early. With a little more planning, they probably could have gotten out of the Union peacefully. After Lincoln was elected and the Southern states decided it was time to go, they should have delayed and kept all their Representatives and Senators in Congress. They would almost certainly have had enough votes to pass laws guaranteeing individual states the right to secede. Then if they chose to leave, Lincoln would have been unable to use military force to stop them.

The idea that Texas has or had a guaranteed right to secede is an urban legend. It is true that Texas was admitted to the US with the right to split up into five smaller states if they wished. But keep in mind, Texas was admitted to the US twice, once in 1845 and again in 1870. The second time was made under conditions much less favorable to Texas and the right to divide may no longer be true.

10

Mike King wrote:

Er … no. As far as the Supreme Court was concerned, the southern States were never allowed to secede in the first place; therefore, they were part of the U.S. all the way through and after the Failed War for Southern Independence. Texas wasn’t “admitted” to the U.S. in 1870; the martial-law garrisons were simply removed.

Quick-N-Dirty Aviation: Trading altitude for airspeed since 1992.

11

As to the Original Post:

I doubt it would have made any difference. If the Union was really willing to let the South secede, there wouldn’t have been as much effort to compromise the issues involved during the first half of the Nineteenth Century.

The federal union of states would be of little value if individual states retained a right to remove themselves from the union at their own will. Canada is wrestling with this issue now, and it has a far more province/state oriented union than we ever did. Imagine the result: a state gets huffy over a proposed federal law that ‘unfairly’ affects it, and threatens to secede. The officials at the time, foremost Lincoln, understood implicitly the difficulty inherent in secession.

Fort Sumter was evidence of the determination of the federal government to retain the southern states in the Union. No divorces allowed! :wink:

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The United States government regarded the Confederacy not even as a de facto government, but merely as an organized rebellion with no status in international law. The Confederacy was conceded “some
belligerent rights . . . in the interests of humanity” so that the laws of war would apply to the conflict; but this concession did nothing to sanction the existence of the Confederacy as a sovereign state (Williams v. Bruffy, 96 U.S. 176, 184-187 (1877)). These principles are officially stated in J. Moore, A Digest of International Law, 8 vols. (1906) For a modern discussion of the
role the Civil War played in developing the international law of civil conflict, see Wright, The American Civil War, 1861-65 in R.
Falk, ed., The International Law of Civil War 30-110 (1971.

The Confederacy, like the United States, had both federal and state courts. On the federal level, the Confederate Supreme Court sanctioned by the constitution was never created because of sectional and political conflict. The only national law officer in the Confederacy was the Attorney General,
whose opinions therefore took on accentuated importance. For these opinions, see R. Patrick, The Opinions of the Confederate Attorneys General, 1861-1865 (1950), and for a biography of the leading Confederate attorney general, see E. Evans, Judah P.
Benjamin, the Jewish Confederate (1988). Some federal district courts were created, however, and sat in the individual states of the Confederacy. Their opinions were never
formally reported. On the state level, the court systems of the individual states continued without interruption, the only
difference in proceedings being that a new country, the Confederate States, was recognized as sovereign. The opinions of the state courts can be found, insofar as they are reported, in the official reports of the states for the years of the Civil War. Volumes 38 and 39 of the Alabama Reports, for instance, provide unbroken
coverage of the proceedings of the Alabama Supreme Court during the war years, mingling mundane civil actions with suits by the Confederate authorities to enforce conscription and federal (that is, Confederate National) taxation.

In the eyes of the United States, Confederate courts, as creatures of insurrection, had no existence–“they were as if they were not.” Nevertheless, insofar as courts in the Confederacy continued ordinary civil law business, apart from insurrection or war, their acts were accorded recognition as the ordinary acts of
civil government. “No one . . . seriously questions the validity of judicial or legislative acts in the insurrectionary States. . . where they were not hostile in their purpose or mode of enforcement to the authority of the National government. . .” (Horn v.Lockhart, 84 U.S. (17 Wall.) 570, 580 (1873)). In other words, the Confederate courts “were not,” but what they did often was.

I have been reading a very interesting book on the reasons why the Confederacy lost the War. Unfortunately, its sitting by my bedside, and I am at the office, So I can’t give you the correct title (something to the effect of “Studies in the Confederate Defeat,” a series of essays by scholars from Universities in the former Confederacy published in the 1960s). The primary reason why these scholars believe the Confederate cause failed was an ill-defined sense of nationalism. That is, the South and North, despite its societal differences, shared the same heritage and basic cultural acouetrements, and the citizens of the Confederacy were still “Americans,” fighting to preserve an economic system. It was eventually a difficult sell to fight, kill, die, and sacrifice for. Indeed, a majority of secessionists considered secession as the lesser of two evils, the first being the abolition of slavery. (Which, by the way, could not have been accomplished by normal constitutional process at that time; the war allowed the acceleration of the process).

I do not think the Confederacy could have succeeded even if they had remained pacifist. First, it was the threat of northern invasion that pushed Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee over the edge to secession, providing the CSA with the manpower and military leaders it needed to wage the war. Second, the CSA’s appropriation of Federal property (particularly military bases and equipment) is what sparked the Ft. Sumter crisis. The Federal government would have eventually sent troops in to “quell” the rebellion, even if just to reassert control over these federal bases of power. With Secession, war was inevitable.

I’ve always felt that the secessionists jumped the gun a little too early. With a little more planning, they probably could have gotten out of the Union peacefully. After Lincoln was elected and the Southern states decided it was time to go, they should have delayed and kept all their Representatives and Senators in Congress. They would almost certainly have had enough votes to pass laws guaranteeing individual states the right to secede. Then if they chose to leave, Lincoln would have been unable to use military force to stop them.>>>
Mike King

I don’t think this sort of peaceable solution would have worked. Laws guaranteeing the “right to secede” would have only been passed after compromise, which would have required some sort of reparation from the seceding state to the rest of the union. Such laws probably would have required a consitutional amendment anyway - - in those days of difficult compromise, I doubt such a compromise could have happened.

What might have happened if the CSA had not resorted to armed conflict? I think that after things had cooled off, the Confederate states would have “negotiated” a “re-entry” into the Union which would have protected the right to slavery, perhaps with the compromise that there would be no further spread of slavery. The aforementioned book metnions that in 1963 or so, there was a growing peace movement in the South which wanted to accomplish just this goal.

I don’t think

SoxFan59
“Its fiction, but all the facts are true!”

13

The last “I don’t think” should have been deleted.

I suppose its because “I don’t think” before I hit the “send” button.

SoxFan59
“Its fiction, but all the facts are true!”

14

I never bought the idea that Slavery was THE cause of the Civil War. The South had plenty of other cultural,social and economic differences from the North and West to push them to the point of seccession.

I also never bought Lincoln’s position that seccession was illegal and unconstitutional. Not only is there nothing in the Constitution to prohibit a state from secceding but, if the issue had come up, guys like Jefferson and Patrick Henry would have gone ballistic and the Constitution would never have been adopted.

To draw a parrallel (some day I really need to learn how to spell that word), the Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms in order to maintain a well regulated militia. It does not, as the anti-gun people correctly claim, protect the right of the citizens to keep weapons for personal sporting, subsistence and self defense use. The reason it doesn’t is that the issue never came up. It never occured to anybody in the US, at the end of the 18th Century, that the government would ever try to prohibit the personal use of weapons. Same reason the Bill of Rights doesn’t contain a guarantee of the right to breathe the public air.

The Framers were concerned with the guys at Concord Bridge. They weren’t out there with their muskets to shoot squirrels or to chase off British Tax Collectors, but to stop troops who were there to conficate the arms of their militia.

So with Seccession. The Constitution doesn’t mention it one way or another because it never occurred to the Framers that states which had joined freely wouldn’t be able to leave the same way. The original United States put the emphasis on “States”, not on “United”. These were free, independent nation states joining voluntarily for very limited and specific purposes. Two hundred years later the “nation” is the United States. In those days your “nation” was Virginia or Connecticut.

Remember also that the South wasn’t the only hotbed of seccession. New England kicked the idea around several times and there was a convention to consider it here in Hartford. It never came off here in New England because it wasn’t worth the aggravation, not because anybody believed that we couldn’t hit the bricks if we felt like it. The Southerners were just a lot more alienated than the New Englanders were.

All of which leads up to two points:

  1. Slavery was, if not the cause of the war, the issue that decided it. There was vast opposition to the war in the North and it got worse as the war continued. There were plenty of people who didn’t thnk it was worth the blood and money to force the Southerners to stay when they obviously didn’t want to. It was the Slavery issue that gave the North the indisputable moral highground (which put the anti-war people at a disadvantage and kept the Brits and French out) and political will to prosecute the war.

  2. Lincoln, without a shred of legal or constitutional authority, looked at the situation and said “Whoa…if these bozos can seccede from us, five minutes later they’ll be secceding from each other and every tin pot demagogue who buys an election is gonna want to start his own little kingdom. If we don’t nip this in the bud we’ll be Balkanized like Europe in no time and murdering each other for the next thousand years.”

He was, of course, precisely correct. And that is the mark of a great President: knowing when to toss the rule book and having the guts and ability to do what’s neccessary, even when you sorta have to make it up as you go along. (Compare the agrarian, limited government, strict constitutionalist Jefferson tossing the rules into the compost heap when he got the chance to snap up the Louisiana Territory for pocket change).

So, to answer the original question: “Does Lincoln send in the troops, or does he just say “OK, see ya.”” You bet he sends in the troops and he would have sent them whether the Fort Sumpter was fired on or not. Much as he hated Slavery personally, Lincoln’s war was to preserve the Union, because the alternative was unthinkable, and the Slavery issue was just a tool to do the job.

Of course, a REALLY great President (anybody old enough to remember that last time we had one?) can kill two birds with one stone. :slight_smile:

JB
Lex Non Favet Delictorum Votis

15

I also noticed at the end of my last post, the date “1963” should read “1863.” And to think, I was once an editor. Sheesh!

JBENZ states that “I never bought the idea that Slavery was THE cause of the Civil War. The South had plenty of other cultural,social and economic differences from the North and West to push them to the point of seccession.” I would challenge him to name one, and then distinguish it from the slavery question.

The book I mentioned in the earlier post is “The Elements of Confederate Defeat: Nationalism, War Aims, and Religion,” by Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattawy, Archer Jones and Willam N Still, Jr., published by the University of Georgia Press in 1960 and re-published in 1988. It is an abridgement of a longer work by the same authors called “Why the South Lost the Civil War,” published by U of Ga Press in 1986.

SoxFan59
“Its fiction, but all the facts are true!”

16

Quote:
JBENZ states that “I never bought the idea that Slavery was THE cause of the Civil War. The South had plenty of other cultural, social and economic differences from the North and West to push them to the point of seccession.” I would challenge him to name one, and then distinguish it from the slavery question.
Well, I can thnk if a few. Not to say that I buy all of them but a lot of Southerners did:

  1. Cultural: The South, being primarily agricultural, had developed a fairly rigid 3 Class system. A small, rich, white, landowning, anglophilic sort of hereditary aristocracy that controlled most of the wealth was on top. The rest of the white folks being mostly agricultural workers, small land holders or trade and business people made up the middle class (not to be confused with what we call the Middle Class today). Slaves and other indentured servants were the bottom of the heap.

In the North a similar 3 class system existed. But in the North the rich were a lot richer and more diversified, their wealth being in industry (manufacturing, ship building, railroads and canals etc)and the upper class had lots of utterly unaristocratic immigrants who didn’t give a damn if your great granddaddy had partied with Patrick Henry.

The Northern middle class was much bigger and more diversified as well. Lots of farmers to be sure but the mass migration of farm workers to the industrial cities had already begun. And nobody hates a landed aristocracy more than urban factory workers and tradesmen.

The Northern lower class was economic rather than racial as in the South. Poverty was the only qualification. Lots of ethnic discrimination against immigrants, of course, but nothing got you out of the German or Irish or Italian ghetto quicker than your first million. The Black population in the North was comparatively small and not seen as an economic or social threat as it was in the South. Paradoxically the most violent racial conflicts were generated later in the war when whites reacted in massive race riots when they were conscripted into the army to “free the darkies.” Today we admire Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (not always for the right reasons) but in New York, at the time, whites massacred blacks wholesale and damn near burned the city down.

  1. Social: Mid 19th Century America was profoundly religious, in ways we find hard to believe today. Religious leaders in the North and South were prominent and influential in politics. But, claiming to speak for the same God, they promoted very different social views. In the North Abolitionist preachers railed against slavery as an abomination in the sight of the Lord. In the South they proclaimed Slavery as biblically ordained and a part of the Divine Order.

Yes,I’m overgeneralizing, lots of exceptions on both sides. But the point is that there was strong religious support for the secular, racial and political positions on both sides. There’s nothing like Divine approval to to push people to extremes.

Aside from religion, the societies were very different. Southern society was very rigid and upward mobility rare. Johnny Reb’s chances of getting himself a plantation and a shot at Scarlett O’Hara were pretty slim. In the North any schmuck off the boat could be Andrew Carnegie with a little luck and hustle. (Nonsense, of course, but that was the perception).

There was also a profound split on the political theory side. Northerners were the philosophical descendents of the plutocratic Hamilton and the Federalists. They believed in strong Federal government and strong industrial and financial institutions. Southerners were the philosophical descendents of agrarian Jefferson and the Democrats who believed in an extremely weak Federal government with the bulk of governmental powers “reserved to the States, or to the people.”
3. Economic: The original secceding states, and to a lesser extent the ones who joined in later, were primarily agricultural states with economies based on the sale of crops like cotton and tobacco. Granted that the practice of the time was to use slave labor but that isn’t necesarily relevant to the issue. People have been growing cotton and tobacco since the war without slave labor. And farmers still hate the manufacturers, railroads and banks.

Farmers from time immemorial have believed, with no little justification, that they are routinely ripped of by the people who control the trade in their produce. The manufacturers who used their product were in the North (or in Europe) and, as manufacturers will, paid as little as they could for it.

The bulk of the nation’s manufacturing capacity was in the North. The bulk of the shipping industry that carried the produce was located in or controlled by the North. More to the point, the bulk of the financial industry was too. Many Southerners felt that the Northern capitalits used their control of capital and credit to limit industrial growth in the South as a way of keeping it dependent on agriculture and comparatively powerless. They also felt increasingly oppressed by Northern political clout on the Federal level which, as they perceived it, put them at an ever increasing disadvantage.

Ultimately it was the North’s economic and industrial power, and the South’s lack of it, that gave the Union armies the strategic advantage in the war. On equal terms the Rebs usually whipped the Yankees silly but the terms were very seldom equal and, toward the end, Confederate actions verged on the suicidal.
So…would all of this have led to war without the impetus of the conflict over slavery? I don’t know, maybe not. But I think Longstreet’s line in the movie “Gettysburg” pretty well sums it ip: “We should have freed the slaves and then fired on Fort Sumpter.” Granted there were plenty of Southerners who were fighting to preserve slavery but I doubt very much that all those small farmers and fisherman and mechanics and sharecroppers who stormed the stone wall with Pickett, Pettigrew and Trimble stuck their heads in the cannon’s mouth for the right to own their very own slaves.

JB
Lex Non Favet Delictorum Votis

17

God, I love it around here.

JBENZ, thanks for the history lesson. Makes for good reading, and it’s good for you, too.
:slight_smile:
But in your (I believe) penultimate post, you make a claim that I feel requires a bit of elaboration from you in order to justify it. To wit:

I don’t have a copy of the U.S. Constitution at hand right now. Nor do I have access to the Federalist Papers, or any other document that attempts to describe the processes that resulted in the Constitution and Bill of Rights as adopted in 1789. But I seem to recall that the Constitution does spell out exactly what has to happen in order for a state to be admitted to the Union. I also understand that the process was deliberately made difficult precisely so that admission would be a step not to be taken lightly by either side.

I submit that the reason the issue of secession was not addressed in the Constitution is that the Founders took it for granted that everyone would know that their decision to join the Union was not reversible.

Recognizing that I don’t have the historical chops that you have, I await your response disabusing me of the misconception above. Please be as free with documented references as you conveniently can, as I am in this for the education.

Oh, one more thing. Be gentle. :wink:

18

I wish Harry Turtledove were here. He’s a VERY good historian and novelist: He wrote THE GUNS OF THE SOUTH, a “What if the South had won” novel and most likely could answer this question.

(In case you don’t know, THE GUNS OF THE SOUTH is a science-fiction novel in which Afrikaners of the 21st century use a time machine to give AK-47s to Robert E. Lee. The South wins, but Lee is suspicious of those who helped him.)

I have nothing to add, except that, I, too, find it all very fascinating.

Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to relive it. Georges Santayana

19

Quote:
I don’t have a copy of the U.S. Constitution at hand right now. Nor do I have access to
the Federalist Papers, or any other document that attempts to describe the processes that resulted in the Constitution and Bill of Rights as adopted in 1789. But I seem to recall that the Constitution does spell out exactly what has to happen in order for a
state to be admitted to the Union. I also understand that the process was deliberately
made difficult precisely so that admission would be a step not to be taken lightly by
either side.

You don’t have a copy of the Constitution sitting by the computer? Shame on you, :wink:

See Article IV, Section 3 [1]:
“New states may be admitted by Congress into this Union” (and some other stuff about not making new states inside or from parts of existing states, although we’ll save the West Virginia story for another day).

And that’s the sum total of what the Constitution has to say on the subject. Ain’t a “no secsesion” provision in sight. Congress, as Congress is wont to do, made the admission process somewhat more complex.

Quote:
I submit that the reason the issue of secession was not addressed in the Constitution is that the Founders took it for granted that everyone would know that their decision to join the Union was not reversible.
I submit that it is just the opposite, witness the X Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” There is nothng in the Constitution, then or now, that delegates to the US the power to stop a state from leaving the Union and nothing that prohibits a state from doing so.

While today, states are litle more than life support systems for football teams, in 1860 no one had gotten around to telling the states that they weren’t sovereign nations which had merely delegated a few of their powers to a limted communal government. That got decided at the point of a bayonette in 1865, not in the Constitutional Convention. Good thing it did from our standpoint today, but it was a military and political decision, not a constitutional one.

Amenment X has been beaten silly by the State’s Rights people who tried to justify endless screwy social, political and religious practices under it. The underlying principle was sound though and well understood. Until the Civil War, the States were sovereign and the final authority on anything which they hadn’t specifically delegated to the Feds.

The best argument the Confederates ever had was real simple: “Hey…is this a democracy or what? Since when don’t we get to choose our leaders and our form of government? Is that why we went to all that trouble to kick out the friggin Brits 70 years ago? To get enslaved by a pack of Yankee moneylenders? You don’t like the way we live? Screw You, we quit.”

The Rebs had their faults but excessive subtlety wasn’t one of 'em. :slight_smile:

JB
Lex Non Favet Delictorum Votis

20

JBENZ

Thank you for your succinct response. I had been hoping for some anecdotal evidence concerning whether the subject of secession was ever brought up during the Constitutional Convention, but I did get what I specifically asked for, so I have no right to complain.

I stand corrected regarding my assumptions about the Constitution’s delineating the process, and I thank you for that, as well.

Does anybody have anything to contribute about whether deliberations on the issue of pulling out of the Union took place?

I’ve been contemplating the story Eurema’s Dam by R.A. Lafferty for quite some time, particularly a rule that the protagonist made up for himself: Never make anything unless you know how to un-make it. This contemplation has informed my thoughts on the Law of Unintended Consequences for the better part of twenty years.