Over Christmas lunch we debated as to whether President Lincoln was right to go to war to keep the union together. Such doubts probably cause mild heart attacks in some quarters, but the fact is that the political quagmire we now find ourselves is a continuation of the civil war (or the War of Northern Aggression, depending on your perspective) by other means. Had the slave states been allowed to secede peacefully, as they wished, not only would bloodshed on an industrial scale have been averted, but there might now be a social consensus and political in the north, and the South would have stayed put as a throw-back agrarian society. Thoughts, anyone?
Answering my own question: the real issue was slavery in the new American states in the west, and particularly in California, just discovered to have gold. The argument was really about whether the West was to be slave owning or not and who was to control the emerging empire with its huge resources.
One argument is that there would have been local violence between Northerners and Southerners over control and slavery, but that since the Western population was small the bloodshed would have likewise been reduced. A messy compromise might have emerged.
The counter-argument is that the cotton and tobacco barons of the South were desperate to control new,virgin land, (much of the southern agricultural land was becoming exhausted). They also feared the growing industrial north and wanted expansion then and there to prevent northerners getting there first. War was hard to prevent, although possible. As usual it was about money, but also about the perception of the US as being a slave owning society when everywhere else (e.g the British Empire among others) had abolished slavery a generation previously.
Several “real” issues, were at play, it seems to me. First, there had already been a “messy compromise” regarding slavery. It was built into the Constitution. Unless a major political movement was willing to revisit the issue, the compromises would have continued to be “messy,” incremental, and morally imperfect to be sure.
Second, the most “real” political debate in the years following the adoption of the Constitution, was not slavery it was the control and nature of wealth. And it is the chief subject in the voluminous correspondence and political writings of those early decades of the Republic.
A crucial aspect of that issue is reflected in the fact that during those early years Massachusetts and South Carolina, NY, PA, for example allied on commercial policies. Hamilton and Jefferson were the major protagonists, pitting commercial coastal wealth in trade, finance, banking and later manufacture, vs. rural agrarian wealth, i.e. land and agriculture.
Davis himself gave the real reason for the South’s secession: “to escape majority rule.” The significance of the territories was who would control the Senate and, thus, federal policies. Jefferson Davis knew that the western territories were inhospitable to slavery, as did many politicians in the North and, indeed, it wasn’t until almost a century later that those areas were worth heavy investment to irrigate and develop.
When the radical Republicans in the 1850s framed the question in moral terms, Democratic politicians like Stephen Douglas suggested popular sovereignty as a viable solution. In effect, this acknowledged slavery as a moral evil but asked: “now what?” A truthful answer, as it turned out, was a to kill 600,00 men, a slaughter which took three times the number the U.S. lost in WWII. It also resulted in a century of Southern political domination in Congress after the removal of northern troops from the South in 1876. That is, Southern control of congressional committees well into the 20th century via seniority rooted in safe districts, the almost total vulnerability of African-Americans in the South after the Civil War, injustices which were not seriously addressed until the 1950s.
To have let the South go its way would have been an incremental solution, messy, long-developing — what happened in the century after the Civil War and 600,000 dead was also messy, long-developing, and a century of injustices. And we were the only nation to end slavery by a civil war.