# What could President Buchanan have done differently? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 29, 2020, 1:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140 "2020-12-29T01:19:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Deeg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/deeg/32/2955_2.png) [@Deeg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Deeg)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2021, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/61 "2021-03-04T15:44:27Z")
I’m largely with ECG on this. > [@Odesio](#): > > The only reason our peculiar institution existed was because some people benefited from it economically. The idea that Africans were inferior and incapable of civilized life were just inventions to morally justify the practice of keeping them enslaved. If there were no economic incentive for slavery it would not have existed. Originally it was economics but by the time of the war slavery was a drain on the southern economy. I think by that point the culture of slavery was so ingrained and widely believed that it became one of the main buttresses of slavery, even more than economics. ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2021, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/62 "2021-03-04T17:21:03Z")
I don’t either; the two regions of the U.S. were different culturally and economically, with two distinct groups of regional elites who had very different views on what “union” meant. The South was initially assured that its institution of a slave-based economy would survive, but this was because the political establishment from the northern states hoped that the ban on the importation of slavery would eventually cause slavery to die out. Not that they expected it in their lifetimes, but eventually - a political punt. Industrial economic power and migration/immigration gave the north more population, and thus economic and political power than the South. The problem for the South was perceived as an existential one: how do we protect our institution of slavery when the balance of power is tilting rapidly in the north’s direction (not the case at the time of the Constitution’s framing)? This is why Westward expansion was a flash point: every new territory that wanted admission was a potential threat to the South’s political power. And the North, in turn, much like the Democrats vis-a-vis Republicans today, resented the South for its attempts to use machinations to salvage power and to keep an institution that was increasingly regarded with moral disgust. Conflict was inevitable because there was no way to reconcile the differences in a way that satisfied both parties. The North could have simply let the South secede and it would have been rid of slavery, at the expense of a nation - that of course was unacceptable. Likewise, the South wasn’t going to just give up slavery over time in exchange for gradually incorporating the North’s industrialization. There was a wealthy elite there that had its own power establishment. Moreover, society there was entirely based on a racial caste system. So even if the elite had consented to some changes, there’s no guarantee that society as a whole would have embraced these changes. ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2021, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/63 "2021-03-04T17:28:49Z")
Slavery could have existed indefinitely; it could have used industrialization to increase production, but it could have still used free labor. Your second point is correct: slavery was indeed culturally ingrained. The South was arguably more class-conscious than the North in part because of the institution of slavery. The idea of Blacks becoming equals to whites as free men was in part what motivated the post-civil war violence and repression against them ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2021, 5:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/64 "2021-03-04T17:36:11Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > So oddly enough, if Buchanan had been a better President, the national outcome may have been worse–legal slavery not coming to an end in 1865. I can see a argument that Lincoln’s plan to end slavery might have been better than a bloody war with a early end to slavery. 1 Stop the expansion of slavery to more states, all new states are Free states. 2. Get rid of the Fugitive slave act a decade later 3. Children are not born slaves, they are born free. 4. No more slave auctions 5. The Federal government starts buying slaves and freeing them. etc etc . Now, getting rid of the long and bloody war a good thing. No more “lost cause” again- good. Leaving slavery in place for a generation or two more- bad. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2021, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/65 "2021-03-04T17:49:26Z")
> [@engineer\_comp\_geek](#): > > Slavery wasn’t just about profit. Most southerners did not own slaves. For the southerners who did not own slaves it was about racism. Blacks, to them, were inferior beings. A… > If the South had somehow managed to secede without the Civil War resulting from it and if the Confederacy had somehow managed to survive, then slavery would have continued long past the time of it being the economic backbone of the South. Even if outright slavery eventually ended up being abolished, blacks would still have been treated as second class citizens. It would have been like Apartheid in South Africa. Yes, even if slavery had become economically infeasible , the South would have never voluntarily given up it’s “peculiar institution”. Maybe the vast majority of field slavery would have ended. But house slaves, etc- certainly. There is a sort of slavery going on even today, so slavery has never stopped having _any kind_ of economic value. Sure, Lincoln’s plans for slowly cutting off slavery might have worked without a long and bloody war. ---
**Author:** ![MEBuckner](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mebuckner/32/2896_2.png) [@MEBuckner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MEBuckner)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2021, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/66 "2021-03-04T18:31:14Z")
I do come down on the side of “the Civil War was necessary to end slavery”. In particular, any idea that industrialization or mechanization would inevitably have made slavery “economically unproductive” and therefore–_ta-da!_–the slaves would have been set free, strikes me as a rather Whiggish view of history. Back in 2008, Douglas Blackmon published a book, _Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II_, detailing the ways in which African-Americans in the Jim Crow South weren’t just “discriminated against”, but were in fact in many cases coerced into hard labor under appalling conditions. [As Blackmon documented](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89051115) > [@](#): > > In Alabama alone, hundreds of thousands of pages of public documents attest to the arrests, subsequent sale, and delivery of thousands of African Americans into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, and factories. Clearly, slave labor is not somehow magically “unprofitable” when applied to anything other than antebellum cotton plantations. Blackmon does point out that this 20th century form of slavery was different from antebellum slavery > [@](#): > > It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery—a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion. But, in an alternate universe “timeline”–either one where the United States never fights a civil war and abolishes slavery in its Constitution, or one in which the Confederate States somehow wins its independence–it seems very hard to credit the idea that full-on legalized chattel slavery would have been abolished _sooner_ than _de facto_ slavery was abolished in the real-world Jim Crow South. In particular, in an independent Confederate States, slavery would still have been potentially profitable to the slave masters until _at least_ 1940, with slaves being forced to work in places as diverse as “mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, and factories”. And as Blackmon also notes, this system wasn’t dismantled in the 1940s simply because the magic of industrialization made it “unprofitable”, but also because the U.S. feared the whole evil mess could be used as enemy propaganda in World War II. * * * I also agree that the system of slavery in the American colonies and the antebellum United States was clearly instituted for economic reasons–in other words, pure greed–and the persistence of the oppression of African Americans after the Civil War was certainly also due partly to economic incentives. But I do also think that by the time of the Civil War, the system of racialized slavery (and the various intellectual contortions used to try to morally justify it) had become deeply entrenched, and had taken on something of a life of their own. So, in addition to the fact that slavery wasn’t just going to magically become economically unprofitable because of industrialization or mechanization, by the time of the outbreak of the war there was also a whole “superstructure” of cultural, social, (im)moral, and even religious “justifications” for the South’s “peculiar institution” that would have made it damned hard for Southern plantation owners to have simply “cut their losses” and voluntarily begun the process of formal emancipation (let alone true legal equality). ---
**Author:** ![Thing.Fish](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thing.fish/32/9168_2.png) [@Thing.Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thing.Fish)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2021, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/67 "2021-03-04T18:59:49Z")
I would recommend Ibram X. Kendi’s _Stamped From the Beginning_ for those interested in the history of racism in America. (TLDR: racist ideology and economic exploitation of blacks fed off each other in an ever-expanding spiral, you can’t really say that one “caused” the other). I don’t believe Southern society was capable of reform from the inside. Short of losing a war, the only way slavery was ever going to end there was if the slaves and/or poor whites made a revolution (which I guess is actually just a subset of “losing a war”). No way in a million years would the Southern elites ever agreed to any gradual abolition along the lines Lincoln proposed, no matter how gradual it was. ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2021, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/68 "2021-03-05T01:49:44Z")
I’ll do some name-dropping here, heh heh. I actually took a class when I was at LSU by a Dr William Cooper, who is regarded as a pretty significant Southern and ante-bellum historian (hell of a lecturer, by the way). He made a fairly convincing case as I recall that slavery would have been economically feasible until the early 20th Century. For those who talk about how industrialization would have made slavery obsolete, it was actually industrial-era innovation that enabled slavery to become more productive in the early 1800s. Etienne de Bore granulated sugar and Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which although were not exactly a Henry Ford assembly line invention, were nevertheless responsible for more firmly establishing the slave-based economy, rather than rendering it into obsolescence. But back to Dr Cooper – he explained (and I think even wrote about) extensively about how ante-bellum Southern society viewed the institution of slavery as a symbol of the Southern white man’s freedom. It’s ironic, but when you think about it, it’s probably not different than Henry Frick and Andrew Carnegie associating their economic “freedom” on the broken backs of their laborers. Indeed, one of the prongs of pro-slavery propaganda was that Southern slavery was more “humane” than pro-industrial exploitation. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2021, 3:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/69 "2021-03-05T03:37:12Z")
Buchanan may not have been able to look into the future and see what Lincoln would do. But he could have looked into the past and seen what Andrew Jackson [had done](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Bill) when South Carolina acted up. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2021, 3:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/70 "2021-03-05T03:39:45Z")
> [@asahi](#): > > Indeed, one of the prongs of pro-slavery propaganda was that Southern slavery was more “humane” than pro-industrial exploitation. I guess that explains all of the factory workers who ran away to the southern states to seek a better life working the cotton fields. ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2021, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/71 "2021-03-05T03:42:33Z")
As I said, “propaganda.” They also invented cranial studies and scientific racism (the Nazis actually borrowed that from the US). ---
**Author:** ![Odesio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/odesio/32/20003_2.png) [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2021, 4:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/72 "2021-03-05T04:33:11Z")
Scientific racism has its roots in the Enlightenment and even in the 19th century the foremost scholars on the issue were people like Arthur de Gobineau (French) and Carl Vogt (German). Americans didn’t invent the concept. Even when it comes to phrenology we’ve got Pieter Camper (Dutch) though American George Morton did pick up where Camper left off. Americans certainly embraced the ideas of pseudo-scientific racism but they didn’t invent it. ---
**Author:** ![Odesio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/odesio/32/20003_2.png) [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2021, 4:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/73 "2021-03-05T04:39:58Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I guess that explains all of the factory workers who ran away to the southern states to seek a better life working the cotton fields. It’s nice to know that whataboutism has been around for a while. I can’t remember the exact quote, but I remember reading the narratives of a former slave talking about her desire for freedom. She said something like, “If you told me I would die within a minute of being freed I would gladly make that choice.” As miserable as the factories were, you won’t find many workers willing to make a similar choice. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2021, 5:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/74 "2021-03-05T05:08:41Z")
The southern scientific racists invented a theory of [drapetomania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania); this explained why slaves tried to escape from the wonderful conditions they were experiencing in the plantations. They had a mental illness which was caused by masters being too lenient. ---
**Author:** ![Martin\_Hyde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/47e85d/32.png) [@Martin\_Hyde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martin_Hyde)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2021, 1:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/75 "2021-03-05T13:51:03Z")
> [@Deeg](#): > > I’m largely with ECG on this. > > > [@Odesio](#): > > > > The only reason our peculiar institution existed was because some people benefited from it economically. The idea that Africans were inferior and incapable of civilized life were just inventions to morally justify the practice of keeping them enslaved. If there were no economic incentive for slavery it would not have existed. > > Originally it was economics but by the time of the war slavery was a drain on the southern economy. I think by that point the culture of slavery was so ingrained and widely believed that it became one of the main buttresses of slavery, even more than economics. There were actually early economists in the 19th century making this very argument–and I tend to agree with them. But slaveholders don’t equal the “economy” and in the 19th century states didn’t really manage the economy on a macro level to any serious degree. So it’s not terribly relevant that slavery wasn’t good for the broader Southern economy (which included far more non-slaveholding whites than slaveholding ones); what is relevant is that even up until the Civil War was lost, most slaveholders benefitted from the practice economically. It may not have been good for everyone, but it was good for them. And if you ever look at the way the political system of the antebellum South was arranged, it was a true “slaveocracy”, all positions of relevant political power were held by plantation owners and they made all important political decisions. ---
**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2021, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/76 "2021-03-05T15:45:22Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > So it’s not terribly relevant that slavery wasn’t good for the broader Southern economy (which included far more non-slaveholding whites than slaveholding ones); what is relevant is that even up until the Civil War was lost, most slaveholders benefitted from the practice economically. This is an important point. The Southern plantation system subsidized and supported chattel slavery at the cost to everyone who did not own a plantation. While it’s obvious that the slaves carried a disproportionate share of the burden, the white poor also were greatly disadvantaged by the system, either through an unfavorable tax system or through the costs of lost opportunities. Racist ideology does not fill your children’s bellies. ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2021, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/77 "2021-03-10T18:59:54Z")
Imagine a “correct” Dred Scott decision (and I say correct only in the climate of the times; slavery was abominable). The correct decision would have been to recognize that the Constitution permitted local law to allow slavery and also permitted local law to prohibit slavery. A person of African descent could thus be bound to slavery in which he had few, if any, rights. He could also be a free person, entitled to such rights as local law allowed, including the right of citizenship and equality to a white person. The Constitution did not define citizenship, therefore it could only be a matter of local law. A slave owner who takes his slave to a place which does not recognize it, loses his property interest, much like a person who takes fireworks from a state where fireworks are legal to a place where they are not. As such, when Dred Scott set foot in Illinois, he was a free man, entitled to all of the privileges and immunities of every other citizen in Illinois. Forcibly taking him back to Missouri was kidnapping, no different than if Mr. Sanford had plucked a random black dude off of the streets of Springfield, IL and taken him back to Missouri. This was even Missouri law up until the state supreme court overruled its prior decisions. A decision for Dred Scott would have subsided the passions of those in the north. They would have been secure in their belief that they could prohibit slavery within their borders. The South would have known the fair rules as well. Also Lincoln never gets elected. As another poster said upthread, perhaps in this alt-history, things turn out worse. But it would have saved 600,000 American lives. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2021, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/78 "2021-03-10T19:16:32Z")
Taney would probably have been okay if he had just focused on Scott himself and not tried to rewrite the Constitution. If he had just declared Scott was a slave, most white northerners wouldn’t have been all that upset. (Especially as a deal had already been worked out and Scott was freed shortly after the decision was made.) And most northerners probably wouldn’t have been that worked up over Taney’s declaration that black people could never be citizens. Because racism. What outraged far more northerners was Taney announcing that he was overturning the Missouri Compromise, declaring that Congress could not prohibit slavery in federal territories, and establishing owning slaves as a protected constitutional right. This was the kind of judicial activism that later generations of conservatives would protest against. ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2021, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/79 "2021-03-10T19:33:20Z")
But I think one flows from another. If the Court had ruled against Scott and ruled that blacks can never be citizens, how do you then not overturn the Missouri Compromise or indeed all antislavery laws? A white dude (with help) could kidnap 100 free blacks from Boston and once he made it to Maryland, the free blacks had no remedy. Conversely, the white guy could always sue in federal court to get his runaway slaves back. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2021, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140/80 "2021-03-10T20:07:12Z")
Not necessarily. They could have been non-citizen residents like Native Americans were. People who lived in the United States but were essentially seen as being outside of its political and legal system. Or black people could have been seen as having very limited rights, akin to what women or children had. But this is beside the point I was going for. As I said, Taney probably could have denied black people their rights and not provoked any major outrage. But by overruling Congress, he was essentially infringing on rights that white men felt that had. They didn’t like the idea that the court could overturn a law they had voted for. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-could-president-buchanan-have-done-differently/929140.md?page=5)