Here’s what we need to notice about southern slavery. That time of insitutionalized, large-scale slavery had been stopped elsewhere in the Americas earlier in the 19th centruy. Only the American southerners failed to do so. Obviously they could have and should have ended this particular human rights abuse long before 1863. They chose not to do so, thus necessitating the Civil War.
This can’t be compared to thousand-year-old events. Primitive tribe A may technically have committed human rights abuse against primitive tribe B. That was before the concept of human rights was brought into existence, however. They had no guiding light, no moral exemplar, nothing to tell them that a more civilized way of life existed.
Southerners, by contrast, should have known better. They had a guiding light of freedom in the North (or in Canada, Britain, France, etc…) The South collectively chose to reject freedom. The primitive tribes or Ancient Romans or whatnot had no such choice.
Humanity history is littered with events so horrible that people who have lived sheltered lives can’t imagine them. The existence of any other crime against humanity doesn’t even slightly reduce the magnitude of the crime that was slavery. It is 1861. President Lincoln faces the decision of whether to start the war to liberate the slaves. If he chooses “no war”, then the lives of many soldiers and civilians are saved immediately, but slavery in the South continues. If he chooses “war”, many soldiers will die immediately, but slavery ends once the war is over. The relative costs of the two choices are all that matters. Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward ninety years later does not affect those relative costs.
If I may quote from Paul Boyer’s The Enduring Vision:
“When abolitionist socities first formed in the 1820’s and 1830’s, they gained some traction in the South, though not enough to wield serious influence at the state government level. As time went on, however, the number of abolitionists in the South dwindled, as Southerners were unable to devise a means of shifting to a post-slavery economy. By the 1850’s, southern support for abolition had almost disappeared.”
Sure, economic pressure worked against slavery, but it didn’t work hard enough. The Southern elite were so cemented into their backwards, barbaric way of life that they resisted every incremental step towards progress and freedom. There were absolutely no signs that slavery would end on its own accord. In fact, in the generation prior to the Civil War, Southerners were fighting tooth and nail to have slavery spread into the western territories. And they were succeeding. Slavery was growing in the United States, right up to the moment when Abraham Lincoln killed it.
Here’s an interesting historical tidbit that WillMagic would probably prefer that you not know. The greatest crimes against the Native Americans were committed by the Confederacy. In the 1820’s and 1830’s, the United States had shoved the eastern Native American population onto the Oklahoma Territory. After secession, Southerners wanted to take Oklahoma and cover it with plantations worked by slaves. Problem: Oklahoma was occupied by Native Americans. Solution: kill those Native Americans. The Confederacy set about this goal by deliberately sparking wars among the tribes living in Oklahoma. Armed Native American units backed by small groups of Confederate soldiers were sent to exterminate the bulk of the population. Of the Native American inhabitants of Oklahoma in 1861, more than half were dead by 1865.
If you would like to read further about these events, I recommend Okla Hannali by R. A. Lafferty. This is a book which combines fiction and non-fiction. It’s one of the most powerful stories I’ve read. The OK Press edition contains a solid discussion of the history behind the story, with appropriate references.
