There is a town in southern Georgia that has a monument to Mr Weevil. They got hit, started growing other stuff, and realized that they made more money doing so.
Putting aside the issues of nations, there’s the issue of individuals. Lincoln, like every other President, had taken an oath to defend the Constitution. That meant he had a legal and moral obligation to protect the rights of American citizens. Including those American citizens living in places where the local government was trying to prevent the American government from protecting its citizens - and even in cases where the majority of people might no longer consider themselves as American citizens.
If the United States government had agreed to secession it would have been turning over millions of American citizens to the control of a foreign government. Sure, many of those millions of citizens may have wanted this. But can anybody claim it was universal?
To be honest I thought of including this but felt I was making one point and didn’t want to distract from others.
I would argue there are situations where it is the moral and ethical thing to do to split a state in two. I don’t think every nation state MUST remain whole - it was okay for the USA to depart the UK, after all. It must, however, be a negotiated split to be a peaceful and fair one.
And then note, some of the big cities in the South were against secession, so then we have cities seceding from States, and boroughs from cities and blocks from boroughs and then Bob Smith from his block.
Nah, my comment was more generic than specific. Again, an engineer’s reading of what I said.
The engineers I know seem to see the world in black and white. They don’t do well when things are gray, and even worse when the gray things are nuanced.
That was the reason for the comment. To say “This is the cause of the Civil War” ignores the gray and the nuances.
And the Union had no Navy to withdraw them, right?
Sorry - that’s why this is a great debate and after a multitude of threads I read more than I comment. The same points over and over. I’m not saying you’re wrong and I’m not saying the pro-South side is wrong --------- I’m saying the one thing I learned about the war while at Pitt was probably right.
Well, or give up slavery in favor of a diversified economy.
Was there no fertilizer that could make cotton fields sustainable? I don’t know. But I do know that people thought slavery had to expand or die, and this did have a lot to do with cotton. I think the South agreed with Lincoln’s famous words here:
The Civil War wasn’t, until the end, about whether slavery would end right this minute. But it always was about whether slavery would be put on the road to ending.
If Fort Sumter hadn’t been the trigger, there would eventually have been war when the CSA tried to expand into what is now New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Colorado.
This is again equivalent to saying that the North should have simply acquiesced and let the South go. Whether you think that should or shouldn’t have been an option, it never was one. Certainly not with Lincoln as President, and as close to unimaginable with anyone else who could have been elected in 1860. Nor could the North as a country have survived giving in to an unutterably repugnant set of narcissistic hatemongers and having them as neighbors and business partners. There would still have been a war sooner or later; the South absolutely demanded one and would have started one as a matter of “honor” in any reasonable future. They were essentially a theocracy demanding obeisance to their religion.
That’s what makes the whole “the North caused the war by not letting the South secede” a nonsensical argument. The South’s being was the cause of the war; secession was merely a symptom of that cause.
This was back before the process of making synthetic fertilizer had been developed. Back in the nineteenth century, you had to fertilize your fields with “natural” products - ie a lot of poop.
The alternative was crop rotation. You could plant valuable crops in a field one season and then plant something that would restore nutrients to the soil in the following season. The problem with cotton was that it was valuable and nobody liked to lose a field’s worth of production. And cotton really sucked the nutrients out of soil (it also used lots of water and encouraged erosion. So plantation owners were often tempted to keep growing cotton until a field had reached the point of collapse and it was difficult to recover a field from that condition.
A vastly underestimated cause of the Civil War. Slavery was on the decline until the cotton gin took the entire Southern economy by storm. With the new technology it became highly profitable to have spend money on slaves that wouldn’t last more than a few years toiling in the fields.
A great line comes to mind from James Clavell’s Shogun. Captain Blackthorne, who was the captain of a Dutch merchantman and privateer, has been taken before Lord Toranaga, one of the leading Japanese daimyos, and is being interrogated by him. Acting as translator is a Portuguese Jesuit, who explains that the Dutch are in rebellion against the Spanish. Blackthorne admits that and starts to explain that there are mitigating circumstances, but Toranaga cuts him off angrily, crying out that “There are no ‘mitigating circumstances’ when it comes to rebellion against a sovereign lord.”
Blackthorne answers “Unless you win.”
The split between the US and UK wasn’t peaceful, and wasn’t necessarily fair, but the US won, and so that justifies it. Had the Confederacy won, somehow, and survived, it’s possible attitudes towards it and the rightness of its action might be different.
Indeed. I imagine that had the South been let go the Fugitive Slave Law would have just been ignored in the North after a while and the South would have gotten full of their usual tantrums once again and then…
Interestingly enough, there was a Missouri politician, and I forget who it was, who used the Fugitive Slave Law as an argument for Missouri Unionism. Stay in the US, he said, and legally, the Fugitive Slave Law protects our slaves. Leave, and, well, have you actually seen a map of Missouri?
Could slavery had expanded anyway, further than central Texas? For labor-intensive agriculture, you need rain-intensive climate. You can’t use slaves on land suited only to grazing: who’s going to give their slaves six-shooters and horses?
More land was made available on the Central Plains when a plow was invented to cut the tough sod, but that same industrial revolution brought harvesting equipment that negated an army of slaves with scythes (which is why the Russians could free their serfs at about the same time)
The South was destined to lose the war, but if they’d stayed in the Union, they’d have lost their shirt.