It’s not as simple as there being only two sides in this case, because there were pretty large groups that did not want to secede inside Southern states, and recall that the Upper South didn’t go into secession until after Jeff Davis launched his attack on Ft. Sumter. Even then, had Virginia not . A firm stance, backed up by a credible threat, would have potentially defused the issue before it reached that stage. Buchanan was not going to do that, of course. Alternatively, Buchanan might have worked to isolate South Carolina, which acted as the ringleader of secession. Cut loose, S. Carolina might well wither and beg to be admitted back to the Union, once borders were locked down and trade dried up.
I agree that Lincoln and a lot of other people in Washington put too much reliance on unionist sentiment in the south. They felt there would be a substantial political backlash against secession but it never came. It actually flowed the other way; a lot of southerners who had spoken out against secession accepted it as a done deal once it happened and supported the new Confederate government.
I’m not sure what Buchanan could have done to isolate South Carolina. He didn’t have a lot of tools to work with other than the use of troops. I don’t feel an attempt to cut off trade with South Carolina would have worked because Georgia and North Carolina wouldn’t have supported it.
I stand by what I said about my belief that Davis made the wrong decision by starting the war. I feel if he had waited, Lincoln would have eventually been compelled to declare war because he would not have accepted southern secession and there would have been no non-military way to reverse it.
Lincoln benefitted by the fact that it was the Confederates who started the fighting. It made it a defensive war for the United States and that quieted a lot of the opposition Lincoln had faced; people who might have allowed the southern states to form a separate country were not willing to allow that country to attack the United States. And while Lincoln’s military preparations after the attack did cause Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia to secede, they did not cause Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri to do so - which might have happened if Lincoln had declared war.
How do you enforce the blockade of SC? Fortifying Sumter perhaps would be included in your plan?
Buchanan was operating under the norms of the office he held. Lincoln totally obliterated the norms of the office and basically changed the entire character of the government and the country. Short of becoming the rampaging despot that Lincoln became, Buchanan could have done nothing that would satiate today’s historians’ appetite for blood.
Historians love the presidents who kill a lot of people. See Truman’s rehabilitation by the history profession after his shit-show of a presidency.
Late to this thread but grateful to it.
Alt history is always of course who knows?
It sounds like the overall sense is that a better president (unclear if Fremont would have been such) would have lobbied to keep the Dred Scott decision narrow, kept corrupt slave owners limited in the cabinet, been forceful regarding Kansas, and prevented transfer of gold and weapons to the South. And I’ll add maybe have had some diplomatic skills.
Probably without Dred Scott the polarization would have been a bit less.
Without Buchanan’s awfulness though Lincoln might not have been elected. Maybe Douglas?
Would there have been a natural economic death to slavery? Secession anyway? Without Lincoln in place would there have been war? If so would there have been victory by the Union?
I think seemingly contradictory things can all be true at once. I think given constitutional standards of the time, Buchanan’s view on the constitutionality of secession (unconstitutional) and the constitutionality of stopping it (also unconstitutional) could have been “correct”, but I also think that falls into an area of division that “cannot be settled by legal process.” It’s kind of like the old monarchical issue of whether or not Henry Tudor (Henry VII) had legal claim to the throne of England. The reality is he did not, while he was in the line of succession, his position was significantly inferior to several other landed nobles and inferior to the King regnant (Richard III.) But Henry Tudor raised an army, that army defeated Richard in a battle, and in that battle Richard’s head was cleaved in two. Henry became King under something stronger than any law–right of conquest. The reality is something like secession sans clear constitutional guidelines is actually a very similar matter. The right of it can only be determined by force.
I would posit that Buchanan, who swore an oath to uphold the constitution and defend the country, actually had an obligation higher than his arcane constitutional meanderings, to resist secession using the full force of his office. He completely failed in that duty. That alone makes him among the very worst of American Presidents (even without the Dred Scott matter, which adds fuel to the fire.)
Now at the same time, imagine Buchanan had been a far better President. He hadn’t influenced the Dred Scott decision (thus lower the passions of the North), and he had adeptly raised up state militias and a Federal force to pre-emptively try and “dissuade” outright secession. Maybe the Southern states back down. I suspect slavery would have perpetuated into the 1880s or even 1890s if this had happened.
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. Buchanan’s incompetence in part created the political environment that allowed a Lincoln to win the nomination of his party and the Presidency; his further incompetence also meant that not only would there be a Civil War, but his months of doing nothing about secession gave the South a huge amount of time to prepare. So not only did he guarantee a Civil War, he set the stage for it to be a long and bloody one. Had he done more on the military front and taken a harder line on the South, even if the South hadn’t backed down, Lincoln would have inherited a better situation. It’s possible instead of a string of blunders they’d have had a string of early successes, and the Confederacy would have been demoralized and collapsed. Instead they were energized by early successes and that set the stage for bitter resistance until 1865.
At the same time, a quick Confederate surrender would have again, likely preserved slavery. So even Buchanan’s malfeasance as Commander-in-Chief, actually probably meant slavery ending earlier because it meant the Civil War would be long and brutal, and this gave Lincoln both the personal “come to jesus” moment on slavery and got enough of the country on board with it that he was able to actually end slavery.
But that still doesn’t mean we can say Buchanan did a good job. Failing in all of the core responsibilities of your office and it weirdly being “better” a national outcome than the alt history alternative, still doesn’t absolve you of…being really bad at your job.
You’re implicitly assuming that a hundreds of thousands of dead people and hundreds of thousands of others maimed for life is clearly worthwhile for a few decades of slavery.
I am, and I know that. Slavery was an immense moral stain on the fabric of our Republic. I do not view the sacrifice of soldiers in the Civil War lightly, but I genuinely do believe the blood price was worth the result.
Very interesting. Thank you.
How many Slaves would have died, been maimed for life, and otherwise tormented by the trauma of slavery itself during that time? And… aren’t they… you know… also people…?
There were 4 million slaves in 1860. The life expectancy at birth of slaves was 21-22 years, compared to 40-41 for whites. That would be the loss of 80 million slave person-years to premature death. Twenty more years of slavery would mean the loss of 1.6 billion slave person-years.
Leaving aside whether the discrepancy was entirely due to slavery (i.e. whether the comparison to whites in a lower socioeconomic status might not be as dramatic) and also whether one justifies bloody wars by such simplistic equations, you’ve made a very basic math mistake in treating the 80 million life years as an annual number, which it’s obviously not.
And that’s even assuming your numbers are accurate to begin with, which seems questionable.
My figures were from here. And even your cite says that the death rate of slaves was 50% higher than whites.
I concede that I screwed up the calculations, but my point stands. Slavery contributed to the premature death of millions of slaves, not to mention untold human misery. The loss of life in the war was tragic, but it no doubt saved the lives of many slaves. And many (not all) of the soldiers who died believed the cause was worth the risk.
The United States as a whole lost more than 600,000 combatants to fighting, disease, accidents, and even starvation and such casualties are generally something people seek to avoid when possible. And of course there are the attendant miseries that accompany war such as young men returning home with missing limbs or permanent disfigurements, the Civil War gave us a lot of morphine addicts (the soldier’s disease), and of course the general misery inflicted on the civilian population during and in the aftermath (not that I’m arguing the Union brutalized the South). I won’t argue that ending slavery in the 1860s wasn’t worth the cost, but I can see why people might want to avoid that cost if possible.
Would slavery have ended in the US without the Civil War? Probably. The Confederate States would have found themselves isolated from much of the world, cotton prices would have fallen regardless of the outcome of the war causing some hard times, and with the rise of farming mechanization in the late 19th century it simply wouldn’t have been as profitable to have a bunch of slaves.
That definitely does not match other sources I can find, and that citation seems questionable. My best guess is that it is comparing two separate measurements and mistakenly conflating them. There are legitimate estimations of life expectancy that run between 20 and 40 years (roughly) and every one of them concludes that the life expectancy of slaves was measurably less than white Americans. However, I haven’t seen good sources which document that large of a gap between the two groups.
Edit: In fairness, we don’t have terribly reliable sources on which to study this due to a lack of documentation of plantations.
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. After all, if they were capable of proper civilization, why did they still live in primitive tribes in Africa? If you freed the slaves, chaos, violence, and the collapse of proper civilization was surely going to be the result. Blacks were more animal than man, or so the thinking went. Heck, the white men were doing blacks a favor by keeping them as slaves. They were fed, had a place to work, and weren’t engaging in animal violence against each other. Their lives were much better than they would have been if they were free. That is the level of racism you were dealing with. It wasn’t just about profits.
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.
I don’t think you should underestimate the American unwillingness to abandon entrenched customs.
This sounds like a bunch of modern day revisionism, and I highly doubt if it has any validity at all.
Which is not to say that there weren’t many Southerners who had the attitudes you describe. Only that these were justifications for slavery, not the basis for it.
The attitude that slavery was “necessary” because blacks were largely unfit to govern themselves was a pervasive and widespread view among not only white Southerners, but even many northern whites. Lincoln had some variation of these views himself at one point in his life, which is why he believed at one stage of his life that if there was ever mass emancipation it would be best to establish a colony in Africa to repatriate the salves to, as they would never be able to integrate into white American life. His views on that changed considerably in the final years of his life.
That being said I don’t agree with the core tenet of engineer_comp_geek’s assessment, that slavery was being practiced as a form of societal control of blacks. Slavery was practiced for profit purposes–that is what white southerners were most loathe to admit. It’s hard for a lot of modern people to put themselves in the mindset to understand this, but the super racist paternalism being talked about was a moral excuse for slavery, meaning even they were ashamed of the fact slavery was largely being practiced for purely profit driven reasons, so they promoted that as a moral justification for it.
In any case, even if there were some Southern plantation owners who adamantly believed they needed to hold even unprofitable slaves in bondage to “keep the blacks governed”, the reality is plantation economies weren’t such that you could viably do that indefinitely if you weren’t a going concern. Most plantations were in debt up to their eyeballs but found ways to keep going, but if the core economic proposition of slavery completely collapsed it would have brought about massive change.
To a degree this happened in the 18th and early 19th century in the Mid Atlantic, with many tobacco plantations becoming so unprofitable they just shut down. States like Virginia dreaded the possibility of mass manumission, and passed laws that made it very difficult to just set your slaves free. That combined with the surge in demand for slaves in the Deep South lead to a major migration of slaves from Mid-Atlantic plantations to Deep South cotton plantations. If the cotton economy’s nature changed so much that American cotton plantations were no longer viable, there likely wasn’t any similar place domestically they could sell all those slaves off to in order to ‘avoid’ the issue of mass manumission. Likewise the plantation owners would not have simply kept feeding and clothing them if they couldn’t afford to do so, so you would have seen widespread societal changes regardless.
When that happened would be anyone’s guess, my guess was 1880s-1890s. But I would not at all be surprised to see the holding of “household slaves” by wealthy men who kept them as a luxury, but who made their money in other ways, or some % of plantations finding a way to continue turning a profit perpetuating for long after the large bulk of plantations became non-viable, so you easily could have seen low levels of legal slavery persisting into the early 20th century. The Ottoman Empire didn’t end slavery until 1918, as a comparison point.
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.
Once mechanization hits, a slaver would find themselves with an overabundance of slaves whose capital value would plummet. We think of slaves a “free” labor but they’re really not. A slaver has to feed them, clothe them, shelter them, and even monitor them to make sure they don’t escape or strangle him in the middle of the night. If a slaver has 100 slaves but only needs 20 he’s got 80 millstones weighing him down. He’s not going to keep them around because of entrenched customs he’s going to be rid of them as soon as possible.