Who is right about the causes of the Civil War?

[Little_Nemo]

@engineer_comp_geek

The industrialists saw other countries becoming more industrial and saw that as their competition (as well as competition amongst themselves). The industrialists saw the South, and by that I mean the entire South, both the big plantations and the small farmers, as holding back progress and ruining the country’s chance to become a world player economically, due to the South’s focus on agriculture. The industrialists wanted tariffs, taxes, economic policies, etc. that all favored industrialism, since they saw that as the future of the country, and were extremely frustrated that the South was fighting them every step along the way in Washington.

Of course, since a lot of the things that favored industrialism also hurt agriculture, this caused the South to believe that the industrialists were out to get them. And when the industrialists allied themselves with the abolitionists, then the South really thought that they were being unfairly persecuted. The northern industrialists just wanted the South to get out of their way. The South, on the other hand, felt personally threatened and attacked.

If it had been a battle between industry and agriculture, why did the divide split along the lines of slavery? The Mid-Western and Far West states were at least as agricultural as the Southern states was - but they sided with the Northern states.

The divide was very clear: places where there was slavery seceded and places were there wasn’t slavery did not. Even in the border states, the slave holders were secessionists and the non-slave holders were Unionists. Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri stayed in the Union because slave holders were outnumbered in those states. West Virginia and Eastern Tennessee also had fewer slave owners and these areas counter-seceded back into the United States. Kentucky was split enough that it ended up with two governments.

[MEBuckner]

@Little_Nemo

If it had been a battle between industry and agriculture, why did the divide split along the lines of slavery? The Mid-Western and Far West states were at least as agricultural as the Southern states was - but they sided with the Northern states.

The divide was very clear: places where there was slavery seceded and places were there wasn’t slavery did not. Even in the border states, the slave holders were secessionists and the non-slave holders were Unionists. Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri stayed in the Union because slave holders were outnumbered in those states. West Virginia and Eastern Tennessee also had fewer slave owners and these areas counter-seceded back into the United States. Kentucky was split enough that it ended up with two governments.

Quite so. Where were the Northern “little farmers” in all this? There were more farms in the free states than there were in the slave states (over 1.2 million versus less than 700 thousand), and over two-and-a-half times as many farms in the Union (including border states: Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri) as there were in the eleven Confederate states. How come states like Vermont or Minnesota (one farm for every nine or ten people) never seem to have made common cause with the “agrarian” states of Mississippi or South Carolina (one farm for every 21 or 25 people)? In fact, such agriculture-intensive states as Minnesota or Iowa were staunchly Unionist. (The states with the fewest farms per capita are a weird mix of industrializing states like Massachusetts and New Jersey and Deep South states like South Carlina, Florida, and Mississippi.)*
*Census data is from the Historical Census Browser at the University of Virginia Library. I don’t think it will let you link to results of searches, but you can play around with the data there in lots of different ways.

It wasn’t “agriculturalists” versus “industrialists”. It was a particular form of plantation-based slave-labor-using agriculture–and, in the seven “Deep South” states which seceded first (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas), a slave/plantation economy dominated by the production of a non-food cash-crop commodity, cotton, for trade on the world market*–which was at the heart of the sectional conflict, with the big plantation owners dragging their less-wealthy compatriots along with them using a variety of arguments, appeals to racial prejudice, and fear-mongering.
*Before the war, cotton accounted for over half of the exports of the entire United States, and cotton production was heavily concentrated in the Deep South states, not by coincidence the most heavily enslaved states–over half the population of South Carolina and Mississippi were slaves, and in most of the rest of the Deep South the slave percentage of the population was over 40%–and the most gung-ho for secession, having all seceded before Fort Sumter.

[engineer_comp_geek]

@Little_Nemo

If it had been a battle between industry and agriculture, why did the divide split along the lines of slavery?

The post of mine that you quoted was directly related to the plantations vs. the industrialists, as it was in response to another post.

If you look at my first post above in this thread, I said that the north basically started out as two groups, the industrialists and the abolitionists. Even though most of the industrialists really didn’t give two hoots about slavery as a humanitarian issue, and the abolitionists really didn’t care much about fostering the country’s fledgling industrial base, the two groups joined together. After that, they were one big group that was pro-industry and anti-slavery.

The Republican Party’s platform in the 1860 election was not just about slavery. There were four main points to it.:

1. Slavery would not expand into the western territories.
2. Tariffs to protect workers and industry would be put in place
3. There would be a homestead act granting free farmland in the west
4. Funding would be provided for a trans-continental railroad.

So as you can see, it wasn’t just about slavery. The first point played to the abolitionists, and the second to the industrialists. While these were all united under one party, they were still two distinct groups (although as abolition was gaining ground socially, more industrialists were also becoming abolitionists, especially since they were now allies). You can sometimes see how distinct they are in some of Lincoln’s speeches as he was trying to get elected. Sometimes he played up the slavery issue, other times he toned down the slavery issue and focused more on industry issues. It all depended on whether he was addressing a group of mostly abolitionists or industrialists.

The slavery issue was seen by the South as an attack on their way of life. Even though both Lincoln and the Republican Party Platform both said that the South could keep their slaves, having the new territories become free states meant that the South would be a minority in Congress. Once Lincoln was elected, slavery was doomed, and the South wasn’t about to willingly give it up.

The tariff issues mostly affected southern agriculture and its trade with Europe. The western states, even though they were agriculturally based, didn’t have so much trade with Europe and weren’t affected by the tariff issues so much.

If you look at the South though, the Southern Democratic Party isn’t composed so much of different groups. The whole reason the Southern Democrats existed was that they split from the Northern Democratic Party over the issue of slavery.

So if you take just a shallow superficial look at things, then it’s a simple divide, pro-slavery vs. anti-slavery. But if you dig deeper and see what’s really going on, the North wasn’t quite so unified against slavery. The Republican platform wasn’t an abolitionist platform. It was an abolitionist and industrialist platform.

[KAlmquist]

@engineer_comp_geek

As time went on, the small southern farmers realized that the northern industrialists were basically trying to ruin their entire way of doing things economically. So the southern farmers began to ally themselves with the big plantation owners, since they both wanted to keep an agricultural focus on the economy.

I haven’t seen any evidence to support that view. When secessionists tried to get support from non-slaveholders, they mostly relied on the connection between slavery and white supremacy. A typical example from Stephen Fowler Hale of Alabama, December 27, 1860:
If the policy of the Republicans is carried out according to the programme indicated by the leaders of the party, and the South submits, degradation and ruin must overwhelm alike all classes of citizens in the Southern States. The slave-holder and non-slave-holder must ultimately share the same fate; all be degraded to a position of equality with free negroes, stand side by side with them at the polls, and fraternize in all the social relations of life, or else there will be an eternal war of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting and destroying all the resources of the country. Who can look upon such a picture without a shudder? What Southern man, be he slave-holder or non-slave-holder, can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters in the not distant future associating with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality, and the white man stripped by the heaven-daring hand of fanaticism of that title to superiority over the black race which God himself has bestowed? In the Northern States, where free negroes are so few as to form no appreciable part of the community, in spite of all the legislation for their protection, they still remain a degraded caste, excluded by the ban of society from social association with all but the lowest and most degraded of the white race, but in the South, where in many places the African race largely predominates, and as a consequence the two races would be continually pressing together, amalgamation or the extermination of the one or the other would be inevitable. Can Southern men submit to such degradation and ruin? God forbid that they should.

One exception to this pattern is DeBow’s December 5, 1860 December 5, 1860 missive, which lists 10 (somewhat overlapping) reasons why non-slaveholders should support slavery. But I have not seen any examples of slaveholders arguing that non-slaveholders have a shared interest secession because both want to keep a primarily agricultural economy.

[LinusK]

@raventhief

At the risk of being jumped on here, for hijacking or just idiocy, I am curious about something my history professor said:

“Any time you hear someone talking about ‘states’ rights,’ what they mean is making someone else a second class citizen.” Or words to that general effect. If someone is shouting about states’ rights, they are shouting that they want to have the right to treat someone else badly. He gave some specific examples, beyond the Civil War, but naturally I don’t remember them now.

In the same semester, I had an English professor adamantly declare that most of the Southerners during that time were angry that the North was trying to control them, and that the majority of boys in the War (Southern side, anyway) were just concerned about states’ rights.

Is the phrase “states’ rights” some sort of code?

“State’s rights” is meaningless. The South wasn’t fighting for “state’s rights” anymore than the colonialists were fighting for “colony’s rights”. They were fighting for independence. It’s a strawman meant to distract from the real issue.

[LinusK]

@Tzigone

Too true; the thing is, they left because they were outvoted (not because they had no votes/representation, and they had the 3/5ths compromise which totally gave them too big a say for their free population, anyway). And as for Lincoln getting no votes from the South…they refused to put his name on the ballot in 10 southern states. Not that he would have won the region, anyway, but it’s not exactly honest to say he wasn’t getting votes in those area when they don’t put his name on the ballot.

Lincoln got 180 electoral votes, which was more than the #2, #3, and #4 candidates put together. He would still have won in the Electoral College, 169 to 134, even if all anti-Lincoln voters had united behind a single candidate.

Basically, the South said “we didn’t win and get our way, so we’re leaving.” And while the South certainly had a reason to feel increasingly marginalized (growing population in the Industrial North meant the South was losing power), it’s not like they’d always been downtrodden and oppressed, or anything. I think something like 11 of the 15 presidents before Lincoln had owned slaves. I think 8 were from states that ultimately seceded. The South really dominated politics for a while, but change happens, and it happened to the Unites States. Demographics changed, industry and big numbers of people who didn’t want slavery. There’s two ways to look at it: “this country no longer represents our needs, so we want a new one” or “the rules were fine as long as we were winning, but now that we’re losing, we don’t want to play by those rules anymore, so we’re going home.” They’re kinda hurt by not actually obeying the rules before they left.

Interestingly, there was a Democrat and Southern Democrat in the general election, due to the Democratic National Convention hijinks. That virtually guaranteed the Republicans the election. I’ve heard it speculated that was done on purpose so they’d have a reason to secede (Lincoln’s election), but I don’t think academic consensus supports that. Didn’t really matter, because Lincoln would have won the election anyway, even if all the votes for Breckenridge and Douglas had been behind one candidate. They would have won the popular vote, though (presuming no other votes changed as a result, and they would have, since Douglas lobbied his supporter for the Union after secession and Breckenridge joined the Confederacy), and that would have made a more compelling case to me.

I did a little bit of googling, and didn’t come up with an answer, but I was always under the impression Lincoln was allowed on the ballot in Southern states, he just didn’t bother. In other words, he didn’t do whatever it takes to do it. (Today you have to get a certain number of names on a petition, or some such thing, or have had someone from your party run in the previous election - at least that’s the rule in my state.) Which makes sense: there’s no point in putting money or effort into getting your name on the ballot where there’s no chance you’ll win.

I did come up with this:

In the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana. Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas Mr. Lincoln received a combined total of no votes. None. True, his name wasn’t even listed on the ballot, but that seems to be a mere technical oversight that would have had no great consequence. After all, in Virginia, the largest and wealthiest southern state, Mr. Lincoln was on the ballot, and there he tallied a total of 1,887 votes, or just 1.1 percent of the total cast. The results were even worse in Kentucky, his place of birth. One might have thought that sheer native pride should have earned him more than 1,364 of the 146,216 votes cast, but perhaps Kentuckians resented that he deserted them at such a tender age.

I’m curious where you got the information that Lincoln “wasn’t allowed” on the ballot in Southern states.

[PatrickLondon]

Interesting point about the financial value/capital attached to slavery, above. When Britain finally abolished slavery in the Empire, the political price was that the owners were compensated (at considerable expense to the taxpayer) - the slaves, of course, got nothing but the formality of freedom.

[2sense]

@engineer_comp_geek

In the South, you had two main groups, the big plantation owners and the little farmers.

This is misleading. The planter class completely dominated Southern politics. The economy of the antebellum South was extremely primitive. They didn’t even have very many towns. If you needed to buy a shovel or shoe a horse or repair a plow or, (most importantly of all to a farmer) if you needed credit, you had to go to a plantation. Small farmers had to remain on good terms with their local planters or they wouldn’t be small farmers any more. That doesn’t create a situation where they could exercise much political muscle. Remember, literacy wasn’t common in the South either so all voting was done out loud in public.

In the North, the two biggest groups were the abolitionists and the industrialists.

I’m afraid this is even more misleading. The North had a more diversified economy. Industrialists were certainly important but so were merchants and farming and even shipping. Abolitionists do not make the list. Their position in society was approximately that of a pre-Great Depression socialist. That is, they were objects of ridicule and fear that their ideas might inflame the masses. There was no gradual upswelling of political power or influence of abolitionists. When the Republican coalition was forming from the ashes of the Whig Party in the 1850s, prominent abolitionists were discretely asked not to publicly support them. Even as the Great Unpleasantness began they were still being labelled as troublemaking zealots. It was only when it sank in that the slave owners were now (mostly) the enemy and there was no going back that abolitionism began to grow in popularity.

The northern industrialists wanted the country to focus on industry and abandon its agricultural roots.

Industrialists didn’t want more industrialists. That would just mean more competition. They wanted higher tariffs to discourage foreign competition and also to fund canals and railroads to improve their access to markets. They were happy to allow the Southern elite to foolishly pretend to be medieval barons. They just wanted to be the ones supplying the goods the Southerners were too stubborn to make for themselves. They had no problem with slavery because they were profiting from it.

Back then, as now, instead of trying to come together and reach any kind of compromise that would satisfy everyone, whatever group ended up with the most votes in Washington basically forced their agenda down the other group’s throats.

The American political system is not set up in a way to make this type of behavior feasible. We don’t have a parliament where one side can get a majority and ram everything through on party line votes. We have a decentralized system where the president’s party (assuming there was more than one major party at the time which wasn’t always the case) rarely also controls the House and the Senate. And even within a party there are a variety of interests which affect different issues in different ways. As such compromise is the norm. When compromise breaks down then our system stops working as we see today.

One thing that there could be no compromise on was the expansion of slavery. Northern whites didn’t want to compete directly against slave labor so they wanted new states to be free so their children and grandchildren could eventually move there and take up new land or businesses. Planters needed new slave states because cash crops are land intensive. After a while tobacco and cotton would suck the nutrients from the soil and the land would become unproductive. Slavery had to constantly expand to reach new fields and to allow plantations in older regions to remain profitable by providing the new plantations with labor. That is, breaking up families by selling slaves down the river. In opposing the expansion of slavery you were opposing slavery itself.

That then was the source of the growing anti-slavery feeling in the North. It wasn’t a humanitarian abolitionist movement but a practical matter. Slavery was evil as everyone in the North (and many in the South before 1830) agreed. But so long as the blacks stayed safely in the South where Northerners could join in the profits of their exploitation without seeing it first hand, it wasn’t a big issue. That changed in two major ways. For regular folks in the North slavery struck home when authorities were obliged to return black refugees. Here actual abolitionists helped influence public opinion by organizing mobs to remove escaped slaves from custody. Southerners were outraged. They felt “decent” Northern whites should form their own mobs to lynch the abolitionists. This led to calls for more stringent enforcement which became more intrusive in the free states which led to more opposition to slavery.

This led Southerners to become even more cynical about Northerners which led to a 2nd way that slavery came home for Northerners. Southerners stopped trusting outsiders with positions of power. This infuriated Northern elites who saw all the important political jobs they were hoping to fill now or in the future going to planters and their allies. When Northern and Southern Whigs stopped cooperating the party fell apart and the path to the birth of the Party of Lincoln was open.

The election of Lincoln was important in a way that isn’t widely understand today. If the North could elect a president over the objection of the unified power of the slave states then it wasn’t just that eventually free states could significantly overpower slave states in the Senate as they already could in the House. An anti-slavery president could begin undermining the institution right away. No longer would trusty slave owners or allies be running Washington DC or overseeing the interests of the planters as ambassadors in Europe. What if President Lincoln started appointing opponents of slavery as postmasters across the South? Then the embarrassing tide of abolitionist literature could no longer be held back. You couldn’t lynch every federal official in the South. What if the Navy actually worked to enforce the prohibition on the importation of slaves? What if customs officials in the South started going over every ship manifest and passenger and crew list with a fine tooth comb to maximize revenue and prevent the illicit importation of slaves?

With the appointment power alone a president could do a lot of damage to the institution of slavery. It’s not that the planter class overreacted to the election of Lincoln. It spelled the death knell of their way of life sooner rather than later. They went to war to leave the Union knowing that now was their last best hope to remain the masters they saw themselves. Fortunately they lost and the South is no longer the backwards shithole they were trying to preserve.

[Mr.Miskatonic]

@LinusK

“State’s rights” is meaningless. The South wasn’t fighting for “state’s rights” anymore than the colonialists were fighting for “colony’s rights”. They were fighting for independence. It’s a strawman meant to distract from the real issue.

Not so much a straw man as a post hoc way of distracting from the real cause. In the post reconstruction US there was a sense of needing to pander to the 'Old South’s touchiness so a new series of myths was created wholesale: “It wasn’t about slavery”, “Call it the War between the states, not the Civil War”, “General Lee was a perfect guy in every way, Grant was a drunk butcher”, “Lincoln was a borderline tyrant, please ignore that Davis had even greater executive powers and abused them”, “Sherman burned everything and raped an pillaged his way through to poor misunderstood South”.

Most of these were revamped for the Centennial as Civil Rights and segregation was still in place at that time. It is only recently that we are starting to realize what a bill of goods we were given in history class.

[Mr.Miskatonic]

@kopek

Not to be flip but probably everyone. One of my old history prof’s at Pitt described it as probably being one of the few unavoidable conflicts. There had grown to be too many differences between the northern and southern states for peaceful means to have worked.

I would disagree, but avoiding war would require the slave states to not act like spoiled children, that might be the tricky part.

[MrAtoz]

@raventhief

Oh, the English professor had several students jump on her statements, with some of the same arguments above. I pointed out that declarations that states put out specifically mentioned slavery as a reason to secede- she responded with a snippy tone that most of the boys fighting didn’t even have slaves, and they didn’t care why their states were seceding; they were fighting a war of northern aggression.

I read some book (I wish that I could remember the title, but I’m afraid it’s lost in the mists of time) which mentioned that argument. The author’s response was that while this is true, it’s answering a different question. The reasons why any individual soldier chooses to fight may not have any connection to the reasons why a war is occurring in the first place. If we’re trying to figure out “what caused the Civil War,” the question of “why were the boys willing to fight” isn’t really on point.

[RickJay]

@MrAtoz

I read some book (I wish that I could remember the title, but I’m afraid it’s lost in the mists of time) which mentioned that argument. The author’s response was that while this is true, it’s answering a different question. The reasons why any individual soldier chooses to fight may not have any connection to the reasons why a war is occurring in the first place.

This point is so mind-bogglingly obvious that, frankly, I would question whether a person putting forth the “that’s not why many of the soldiers joined up” argument was even attempting to argue honestly. It’s a disingenuous argument from anyone who has ever, say, attended five days of school.

[The_Stainless_Steel_Rat]

@2sense

This is misleading. The planter class completely dominated Southern politics. The economy of the antebellum South was extremely primitive. They didn’t even have very many towns. If you needed to buy a shovel or shoe a horse or repair a plow or, (most importantly of all to a farmer) if you needed credit, you had to go to a plantation. Small farmers had to remain on good terms with their local planters or they wouldn’t be small farmers any more. That doesn’t create a situation where they could exercise much political muscle. Remember, literacy wasn’t common in the South either so all voting was done out loud in public.

I’m afraid this is even more misleading. The North had a more diversified economy. Industrialists were certainly important but so were merchants and farming and even shipping. Abolitionists do not make the list. Their position in society was approximately that of a pre-Great Depression socialist. That is, they were objects of ridicule and fear that their ideas might inflame the masses. There was no gradual upswelling of political power or influence of abolitionists. When the Republican coalition was forming from the ashes of the Whig Party in the 1850s, prominent abolitionists were discretely asked not to publicly support them. Even as the Great Unpleasantness began they were still being labelled as troublemaking zealots. It was only when it sank in that the slave owners were now (mostly) the enemy and there was no going back that abolitionism began to grow in popularity.

Industrialists didn’t want more industrialists. That would just mean more competition. They wanted higher tariffs to discourage foreign competition and also to fund canals and railroads to improve their access to markets. They were happy to allow the Southern elite to foolishly pretend to be medieval barons. They just wanted to be the ones supplying the goods the Southerners were too stubborn to make for themselves. They had no problem with slavery because they were profiting from it.

The American political system is not set up in a way to make this type of behavior feasible. We don’t have a parliament where one side can get a majority and ram everything through on party line votes. We have a decentralized system where the president’s party (assuming there was more than one major party at the time which wasn’t always the case) rarely also controls the House and the Senate. And even within a party there are a variety of interests which affect different issues in different ways. As such compromise is the norm. When compromise breaks down then our system stops working as we see today.

One thing that there could be no compromise on was the expansion of slavery. Northern whites didn’t want to compete directly against slave labor so they wanted new states to be free so their children and grandchildren could eventually move there and take up new land or businesses. Planters needed new slave states because cash crops are land intensive. After a while tobacco and cotton would suck the nutrients from the soil and the land would become unproductive. Slavery had to constantly expand to reach new fields and to allow plantations in older regions to remain profitable by providing the new plantations with labor. That is, breaking up families by selling slaves down the river. In opposing the expansion of slavery you were opposing slavery itself.

That then was the source of the growing anti-slavery feeling in the North. It wasn’t a humanitarian abolitionist movement but a practical matter. Slavery was evil as everyone in the North (and many in the South before 1830) agreed. But so long as the blacks stayed safely in the South where Northerners could join in the profits of their exploitation without seeing it first hand, it wasn’t a big issue. That changed in two major ways. For regular folks in the North slavery struck home when authorities were obliged to return black refugees. Here actual abolitionists helped influence public opinion by organizing mobs to remove escaped slaves from custody. Southerners were outraged. They felt “decent” Northern whites should form their own mobs to lynch the abolitionists. This led to calls for more stringent enforcement which became more intrusive in the free states which led to more opposition to slavery.

This led Southerners to become even more cynical about Northerners which led to a 2nd way that slavery came home for Northerners. Southerners stopped trusting outsiders with positions of power. This infuriated Northern elites who saw all the important political jobs they were hoping to fill now or in the future going to planters and their allies. When Northern and Southern Whigs stopped cooperating the party fell apart and the path to the birth of the Party of Lincoln was open.

The election of Lincoln was important in a way that isn’t widely understand today. If the North could elect a president over the objection of the unified power of the slave states then it wasn’t just that eventually free states could significantly overpower slave states in the Senate as they already could in the House. An anti-slavery president could begin undermining the institution right away. No longer would trusty slave owners or allies be running Washington DC or overseeing the interests of the planters as ambassadors in Europe. What if President Lincoln started appointing opponents of slavery as postmasters across the South? Then the embarrassing tide of abolitionist literature could no longer be held back. You couldn’t lynch every federal official in the South. What if the Navy actually worked to enforce the prohibition on the importation of slaves? What if customs officials in the South started going over every ship manifest and passenger and crew list with a fine tooth comb to maximize revenue and prevent the illicit importation of slaves?

With the appointment power alone a president could do a lot of damage to the institution of slavery. It’s not that the planter class overreacted to the election of Lincoln. It spelled the death knell of their way of life sooner rather than later. They went to war to leave the Union knowing that now was their last best hope to remain the masters they saw themselves. Fortunately they lost and the South is no longer the backwards shithole they were trying to preserve.

^^This^^

Wouldn’t add a thing, 2Sense. Might disagree with your last sentence a bit, having lived in Alabama for the past 18 years…:dubious:

[kopek]

@Mr.Miskatonic

I would disagree, but avoiding war would require the slave states to not act like spoiled children, that might be the tricky part.

Flipping the coin to check both sides - or require the northern states not to act like bullies forcing their will on others by bayonet point and armed occupation. Allowing the CSA to form their own country and then trying to solve their differences by economic and political means (think more the kind of embargoes and pressure preferred today) was a viable option.

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve gone back and forth on the subject. But the more I’ve read and looked at the conflict, the more I think Dr (and the name escapes me) may have been onto something.

[RickJay]

@kopek

Flipping the coin to check both sides - or require the northern states not to act like bullies forcing their will on others by bayonet point and armed occupation. Allowing the CSA to form their own country and then trying to solve their differences by economic and political means (think more the kind of embargoes and pressure preferred today) was a viable option.

No, it simply was not.

A federative state cannot allow its subordinate jurisdictions to simply break away at will or else the state cannot continue to exist, because there’s nothing holding it together. Under such allowances, the CSA itself could not possibly have survived; eventually, Texas or Florida or whomever would have found some reason to leave. Hell, the western part of Virginia left as soon as they could hold a convention on the matter, and other portions of the CSA were grousing as well; Tennessee might well have split in two; East Tennessee counties tried to pull a West Virginia and secede at one point and had to be occupied by CSA troops, and in effect East Tennessee was occupied Union territory until liberated by Union troops. And why not? Why was Virginia leaving okay and the Union fighting to keep it in “bullying,” but West Virginia leaving Virginia wrong and Virginia fighting to keep it not bullying?

For that matter, had the CSA been allowed to leave, what would hold the remaining USA together? Why couldn’t California have formed its own country? Every state, either alone or joining with a few others, could perpetually hold the federal government hostage with the threat of leaving the Union.

If there is a legitimately pre-determined separation of two countries, it can work - as happened with, say, Czechoslovakia. But “we’re leaving, you can all go to hell” is a recipe for dissolution and disaster.

[Mr.Miskatonic]

@kopek

Flipping the coin to check both sides - or require the northern states not to act like bullies forcing their will on others by bayonet point and armed occupation. Allowing the CSA to form their own country and then trying to solve their differences by economic and political means (think more the kind of embargoes and pressure preferred today) was a viable option.

Let us remember that it was the South that first fired on the Union troops. The Union troops at Ft. Sumter were not occupiers. It was Federal funds that built that fort and Federal land they were sitting on . Just because the South was having one of its frequent temper tantrum was no reason to hand it over for free.

Short of patting the CSA on the back and sayig ‘have a nice country, here’s all the stuff in your region we paid for’ I don’t know how many more kid gloves the Union could have used. THey were looking for a fight, and if troops in Sumter weren’t the excuse then trade embargoes would be.

[Tzigone]

I’m curious where you got the information that Lincoln “wasn’t allowed” on the ballot in Southern states.

Like you, I did some Googling. But I didn’t come up with a solid answer, either. I did see a reference to state legislatures saying someone couldn’t be on a ballot, and simply not including Lincoln (which is what I would have meant by a not being allowed when a credible national candidate was not included). But other sources talked about petitions to gather signatures to put names on state ballots. Another said the party made their own ballots and simply didn’t print any there, as there was no Republican party representation there. Neither of those would count as “not allowed” for me. But I’ll retract the statement, as I cannot find precisely how each state’s ballots were determined (and they probably weren’t the same in each state, judging from what I have found).

[Johnny_Ecks]

I’m going to add something here that is really important to the analysis, and that everyone seems to have overlooked: cotton depletes the soil. This cannot be overstated. Cotton is the profit maker that makes the planters rich, it is the reason that they have slaves in the first place and it destroys the soil wherever it is grown. By the time of the Civil war, Virginia was dotted with abandoned plantations, and the existing ones grew no cotton, but tried to be self sufficient and make money by selling off slaves. Literally breeding farms. The planter class wasn’t stupid. They knew that they needed to buy fresh land as the old wore out, or be ruined. That is why westward expansion was so important to them. Political control was a great bonus, but starting new plantations was a necessity. That is why the Confederates talked about creating an empire. They literally had to expand or die.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Johnny_Ecks

I’m going to add something here that is really important to the analysis, and that everyone seems to have overlooked: cotton depletes the soil.

It was in a long post, so it was easy to miss, but it has been covered. Still a good point.

@2sense

One thing that there could be no compromise on was the expansion of slavery. Northern whites didn’t want to compete directly against slave labor so they wanted new states to be free so their children and grandchildren could eventually move there and take up new land or businesses. Planters needed new slave states because cash crops are land intensive. After a while tobacco and cotton would suck the nutrients from the soil and the land would become unproductive. Slavery had to constantly expand to reach new fields and to allow plantations in older regions to remain profitable by providing the new plantations with labor. That is, breaking up families by selling slaves down the river. In opposing the expansion of slavery you were opposing slavery itself.

[Tzigone]

cotton depletes the soil. This cannot be overstated. Cotton is the profit maker that makes the planters rich, it is the reason that they have slaves in the first place and it destroys the soil wherever it is grown.

Off on a tangent here, but this made me think of Old Rotation. Of course, this didn’t start until well after the civil war (1896), but it’s still just cool to me by virtue of being so old (the experiment’s been going on 100+ years). Rotate cotton with legumes, and they replenish the soil, and yields remain high.