I’ve got a question: at what point, exactly, did the North not allow the South to secede?
IIRC, at the time of secession, there was a disputed question of Federal property in Confederate states. The Federal government believed it was still theirs, and South Carolina, at least, disagreed, firing on Fort Sumter to drive their point home.
If the South hadn’t contested this issue, or had been willing to negotiate it peacefully, was it a done deal that the North was going to try to keep the South in the Union by force?
Indeed, and this is the problem with Alt History stories where the CSA central government “wins” and decides to outlaw slavery. Many states would have left the Confederacy.
By now, we’d have no states at all. There’d be a good number of small impotent nations.
The USA not being a world power means that WWI would have drug onto a deadly stalemate.
I think so. The real decider in this case was Lincoln, and I think he’s pretty clear on his belief that no state could secede from the union without the consent of the entire union.
I think right up to the moment that Ft. Sumter was fired upon, Lincoln was open to negotiations to avoid war, but his key and nonnegotiable point was that the states could not secede, as he believed - correctly, IMHO - that the Union had to be sacredly maintained. This was by then unacceptable to the Southern leadership elite, many if not all of whom were pro-independence “firebreathers.” Lincoln’s options were quite limited in mid-April 1861, though, and there was not a massive swing in Northern public opinion in favor of his policy until Ft. Sumter was attacked. That severely pissed off most Northerners. It was only then that Lincoln called for troops to put down the rebellion, and the last remaining Southern states - Virginia first and foremost - seceded.
Read Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address. Really read it! He was a very crafty and skilled politician, but I think he was speaking from the heart. He didn’t want war, but he was willing to wage it to preserve the Union.
He died on this day in 1865, coincidentally enough.
But if the Central Powers fight WWI to a stalemate , then there is no WWII, or rather, WWII is an entirely different. That Hitler chap for example, isn’t going to rise to power by ranting the “stab in the back” theory unless the Germans actually lose WWI.
And while you can’t blame WWII entirely on Hitler, for the European theater it’s pretty close. Hitler drove the war by successive provocations and invasions, a less nutty dictator of Germany would never have taken such risks.
I’ve always had trouble understanding this.
Why was preserving the Union so critical to Lincloln? The Gettysburg address is his most famous explanation. But I don’t understand—If the south had broken away, Lincoln would still be the president of the North, and the leader of a nation whose government is truly " of the people, by the people and for the people. "
There would be no danger that this new system of government called democracy would “perish from the earth.” It would still exist, firmly, in the northern states under Lincoln’s guidance.
And a similar question bugs me about the motivation of the average soldier in the north’s army:
Why did a typical 17 year old farm kid care so much about the South’s evil treachery that he was willing to march thousands of miles and die fighting “the rebels”. Sure, they might have some sympathy for the poor black slaves, but why were so many people willing to leave their families and die fighting for them? (And ,yes,I know that the Union army had to enforce a draft to recruit enough soldiers, and there was as much resistance to it as there was to the Vietnam draft a century later. But overall, the population of the North was willing to suffer in a war that must have seemed unnecessary to the average citizen.
Because one of the key principles of democracy is that when you get voted against, you grin and bear it and seek change. You don’t take your guns and go home. If Lincoln had allowed the South to secede, it would have been Articles of Confederation all over again. Sure, New York was happy to stay in the Union for the time being. But with their ports, they could easily have split off the next time Uncle Sam wants to raise taxes.
It may be a separate debate but my understanding is that they were only able to “make the sale” because the slave trade had by then become a fairly unprofitable venture that made for a much smaller portion of Great Brtain’s increasingly industrialized economy. Easier to take the moral high ground when it is easier to do so.
As a matter of fact, the pro-Southern mayor of NYC at the time, Fernando Wood, said quite seriously that his city ought to consider declaring neutrality or even seceding. (New York merchants had a lot of business interests in the South, and really took a financial hit when Southern debtors abrogated their debts after Ft. Sumter). As much of the Federal budget at the time came from tariffs collected in the Port of New York, this could have been a big deal. Lincoln laughed it off, though, and said he “thought the front door wouldn’t be detaching itself from the house just yet.”
Brad DeLong has posted a few insights into the conditions that are opportune for slavery/serfdom here - his and Krugman’s comments on an essay by Evsey Domar:
ISTM that until the West was considerably more filled up, the first condition would apply. And the second would too, as long as demand for cotton and tobacco remained high.
Most Northerners weren’t abolitionists, but patriots. They saw the Confederate firing on Ft. Sumter as an insult to the Stars and Stripes, as a disavowal of the genius of the Framers and the sacrifices made by their fathers and grandfathers in the Revolution, and as the culmination of Southern truculence and arrogance. Many more Northerners volunteered in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Ft. Sumter than the War Department and the state governors could even accommodate in the ranks. They signed up to restore the Union, suppress the rebellion, and uphold the Constitution. The U.S. draft didn’t take effect until 1863, more than two years after the war started, after heavy casualties and the chronic bungling of Union generals discouraged volunteering.
I think you may underestimate the anti-slavery feelings in Britain. The Royal Navy went to great lengths to stop the Atlantic slave trade, starting as early as 1807. Sure, the British weren’t blind to realpolitik, very much on the contrary, but I think that would’ve been a hard sell.
Back then, the U.S. was new in the world and was a democracy and a meritocracy (you may or may not believe it yourself but many people did). It was something special. It needed to be preserved. It couldn’t be snuffed out so quickly and was very much worth fighting and dieing for. Many of the citizens were immigrants or kids of immigrants…To go back - to Monarchies and aristocracy and oppression was not to be allowed.
A telegraph clerk in India (not Egypt) worked in his garden, & selectively bred a strain of high-quality cotton that could endure disease & insects in India. Got him a Knighthood for it.
i’m reading shelby footes’ book right now. england was def. not on board with the south. france wouldn’t go with the south unless england did. southern diplomats did not do well in europe.
Shelby was a very good wordsmith, but he was a irredemable Southern Apologist. His big hero of the war was Nathan Bedford Forrest, a minor CSA general who would have been a footnote had he not founded the KKK. :rolleyes: