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Here’s a thought: what if President Lincoln had allowed the southern and the one western/southern state, Texas, to go ahead and leave the Union? Normally, playing “what if” with history can be fun, but not very productive, because all you are doing is speculating about what is now impossible. I have a feeling, however, that those diehard southern supporters, those who cling like death to the idea that the world would be a much better place if “state’s rights” were recognized, have never considered the implications of what would have happened had their ancestors gotten their way.
We know that southerners fired first, taking the shots at Ft. Sumter in the Charleston harbor. Well, Lincoln was a big man and a big thinker and he could have gotten over that. Suppose, the “north” (which was still the United States) and the “south” had held a peace conference and worked out a settlement. Okay, southern guys, you want to leave the Union, we will let you.
First off, some sort of financial compensation would have to be arranged for all the money that the other states had poured into the south but which, in the future, would not benefit the whole country. There would have been fortifications and other Federal projects to be paid for. Otherwise, the south would be stealing. Perhaps the figure would have been set low, at around a hundred million dollars. The north could give them terms, but the payments would have been a continuing burden.
What next? First, no more protection for your runaway slaves. No more returns on your “property”. If a slave makes it across the national lines into the United States, too bad. Plus, we, the north, are going to apply our laws should you come into our territory. If you kill or harm any human being in the Confederate States, we will arrest you, just as we would any common criminal. As for an extradition treaty to allow you to be sent back and face southern justice, no. Most likely, you’d stay in the US for trail and to be sentenced, considered for “repatriation” only if the Confederate states agreed to imprison you under our terms.
The South might have gone to war over the issue of returning slaves alone, it was of such importance to maintaining the system. Without the protection of sending back runaway slaves, which the north had always offered the south, the “peculiar institution” of slavery probably would have collapsed like a house of cards, or, more aptly, like a spinning, loose windmill that would cut everything in its path.
Right away, things would not be so happy in the south. Half a million slaves or more might run away in the first year or two. The rest of the slaves might stage a bloody revolt. Then, what would the United States do? Would we in the north allow the slaves to be slaughtered and put back in their place? Well, it had happened before, but the southern slaves would likely find new ways to escape and head north anyway.
In a fairly short period of two to ten years, the south might be drained of most of its slave population. The new southern Constitution, keep in mind, had banned the slave trade, so it would be difficult to get replacements in, unless the horrid, ugly process of kidnapping and transporting humans like cattle across the ocean would be renewed. The south would face a difficult decision. By 1860, the whole world was against the slave trade. Even the British, virtual originators of the triangle of death, could no longer stomach the base ugliness of transporting sick and dying people in rotting hellholes beneath the decks of rocking ships crossing the wide Atlantic.
The slaves who escaped to the north would eventually be large enough in numbers that they would want to organize an army to attack the Confederate states and free the remaining slaves. Again, this would be a huge problem for the north. Should they allow this type of small warfare to break out? Should they enter it as a just cause? Let’s just assume the north did not get in directly, but allowed the freed slaves to do anything they wanted. The south would then feel the need to attack the north and, bingo, years later you would have had a Civil War anyway.
Trade between the North and South would have been a big issue, too. Most of the manufactured goods were made in the north. Would the south, on its own, have enough money to buy what it needed? What if individuals or states in the North decided to boycott the South? Wouldn’t that just be another justified use of “state’s rights”?
My take on all of this is that the south would have become a sad sack nation in short order. It probably would have had to look to Europe, to nations opposed to the United States and wanting to weaken it, to find the means of survival. The Southern States and the United States could have been turned into permanent enemies of each other, fighting endless small wars like the Europeans did for centuries. Both sides would have risked ruin from such battles.
Within five to twenty years, the Southern States would likely have wanted to make a deal to get back into the Union. The problem of slavery, however, would still exist. If the Southern States made an offer to phase out slavery over the next forty years, the United States would have turned it down, flat. By that time, no one would be under any illusion that slavery was, in fact, the central problem, despite what Lincoln had said at the start of his presidency.
I can think forward through other events in our history and in world history to imagine very dire results from the split of the two parts of the United States. We might not, in particular, have become such a huge, prosperous nation, leading the world in science, technology and general prosperity. For nearly a hundred years after the Civil War period, the northern states were the center of learning and study and easily outpaced the south in innovation, which, in turn, led to greater general prosperity.
As the United States moved westward, the Southern States would eventually have been surrounded by the growth of the Union and would have felt like a small child lorded over by a giant older brother. They might have then decided to fight, but it would have been too late (it was always too late, but the South refused to admit that in 1861, so many people had to die to prove it beyond a doubt.)
One positive thing might have happened by not having the Civil War is the possibility reuniting of the North and South on something closer to equal terms, with less resentment from the south. The war totally humiliated the south and a large portion from north Georgia to the sea was burned to the ground, including Atlanta. Dealing with that humiliation has been part of the long project that began with the end of the conflict. If there had been no war, Jefferson Davis would never have had to write his destructive memoir, covering over the crimes of the southern leadership with lies in the name of honor. Perhaps we would have resolved the underlying conflicts in a more complete way that would have put some of these ghosts in our national past to rest.
If the south had come back into the Union as a emaciated, suffering region (something it came close to being anyway in the early part of the 20th century), then perhaps southerners would have accepted the idea that a Union is the best way to go and that whatever rights the states might have, they have to yield to the larger reality of the benefits of working together, north and south, for common goals. Instead, now, many southern descendants harbor lingering unresolved resentments while getting the benefits of being in the Union. The southern man gets to be an American, full and true, and hate the means by which his progress and that of the nation at large was assured.
The Civil War was not an unjust Northern imposition on the South. The South wanted the war and believed it would either win or fight the North to a draw. It was one of the greatest miscalculations in military history and it cost both sides a total of more than 600,000 people killed. It was a necessary war because the South relied on slave labor for its wealth and would never give up that advantage without being forced to do so. The tragedy is that those in the south could not see that slavery could never continue, just as a majority in the 1960s could not give up on segregation without a great struggle.
The war did not begin because the United States set out to end slavery in the south. It began because the South saw itself losing political power in a growing nation and believed it had no other choice but to fight its way out of a Union it had voluntarily joined. The North did not impose war on the South. The South imposed war on the whole nation, with tragic results. Given the mindset of southerners at the time, there was probably no other choice but war.
The southern leadership, the gentry and largest slave holders, started a war they could not win and convinced the poor and the near poor that it was their duty to fight for that cause. Now, all these years later, the descendants of those who died are still trying to come up with reasons to believe that they did not die without purpose. In fact, the Civil War was a necessary part of the United States becoming a single nation, the last battle of the American revolution.
As in all wars, the weaker and the less powerful died for the needs of the better off and the wealthy. Out of those deaths grew the most successful nation in the history of the world, one that has seen high levels of prosperity spread widely among all of the states. We live with the fruits of that victory every day, even if some people still find it difficult to accept.
Doug Terry, 4.11.11
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