Could the Civil War Have Been Avoided?

Discovery News ^ | October 15, 2002 | Jennifer Viegas

[Aurelius]

BUMP

[Blake#1]

Another name for the hostilities is/was THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES. This was the "Southern" name and describes a constitutional issue. Can a state leave at will that which it joined at will?

[GOPcapitalist]

Thanks for the bump.

I'll patiently await the Wlat brigade's arrival. Maybe the Abratollah Jaffa can sick his mullahs on yet another book they've never read...or even better, maybe "Noam" McPherson will weigh in! ROTFLOL!

[Pushi]

Sutherland and his colleagues claimed that even if the South had been allowed to extend slave labor into the unorganized territories to the West and Southwest, slavery would have failed because these regions could not support staple plantation crops, such as cotton. According to the book, with or without war, economics, land and weather considerations would have limited slavery.

I have always maintained this premise. I lived on Aruba. It happens to be the only island in the Caribbean to have not been a slave island--and for the same reason. The land and weather conditions--mainly the lack of fresh water--made agriculture on a scale requiring the use of slaves unprofitable. Actually, the Spanish took the indiginous Arawak Indians from Aruba to Hispanola and used them as slaves.

[Pushi]

I like "War of Northern Agression" better.

[Prodigal Son]

It's an interesting Constitutional and academic point. They're still fighting in the Balkans about where exactly Alexander the Great hails from.

[DeaconBenjamin]

My theory is that the war is the fault of George Rogers Clark. If he hadn't taken Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes with a handful of Virginians, the US/Canadian border would have been the Ohio River, all westward expansion would have been south of the Ohio River, and New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania would not have had sufficient resources to fight the rest of the country.

[Texas Eagle]

In a true "civil war", one or more factions attempt to overtake the existing government.

The southern states were not trying to overtake the US government. It simply wanted to secede and form its own government.

A more accurate name for The Civil War would be The Second American Revolution.

[adakotab]

Sutherland told Discovery News that the real issue of the war was not slavery, but rather "the expansion of political power and maintaining the political balance of Congress through the addition of new representatives and senators."

The "addition of new representatives and senators" and thus the balance of power in Congress was determined by whether new territories were admitted as free states or slave states. The whole debate was over SLAVERY.

Sure there were economic hardships forced upon the South, but to state that maintaining an equal electoral representation of slave states in the Union was not based on maintaining slavery is revisionism.

[x]

This is an old view. It had its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s. The lost generation of WWI believed all wars the products of madness or of conspiracy, all evil, stupid and avoidable. The demands of reunification had led to a deemphasis of divisive issues and a distaste for abolitionists. The romantic view of Southern culture was riding high. The presumed horrors of Reconstruction had obscured those of slavery and racial oppression. And during the Depression there was plenty of reason for disliking Northern capitalists and industrialists.

Was the war avoidable? The Kansas-Nebraska Act was a malicious stupidity that opened settled questions, but even in its absence, one can imagine that the annexation of Cuba or Central America might have played a similar role in inflaming regional tensions. One can see too, that the demands for the return of fugitive slaves had a similar effect. Was it inevitable that some Southerners would demand expansion of slavery to the territories from which it had been excluded? Would, even in the absence of Stephen A. Douglas, violence between settlers from different regions have broken out in Kansas? It's certainly a possibility. And indeed, conflict was more likely than that things would simply have gone on placidly.

The argument that slavery had "natural limits" has long been discredited. The limits of cotton production were not those of slavery's possible expansion. The talk in Charleston and New Orleans was of using slave labor in mining in the West. If the political will existed and legal mechanisms were in place slavery could have taken in the Southwest or on the plains of Kansas. And of course slaveholders from the American South aimed at expansion to Central America, Mexico and the Antilles.

Theories of inevitability have a reputation for barbarism. They insult our belief in the effectiveness of human action. Words like "brute" or "blind" often procede "inevitable." There are always contingent factors that could have been different. And one can't prove in advance that anything is inevitable. It's only in retrospect that things are seen as being "inevitable." But a case for a war's inevitability and irrepressibility can be made, that is, if any conflict has ever been inevitable, the Civil War was a good candidate.

Perhaps there was a temporal window, a period in which war could and would happen. If sectional war could have been avoided between, say,1800 or 1820 and 1900 or 1920 or 1950 it wouldn't have happened. But our perception of what that window would have been is influenced by what actually happened, so we can't determine what that window would have been. And, chances are, if you have a period of a century in which war could likely happen, it probably will.

Had there been a national consensus in all sections solidly behind union or behind an orderly national dissolution of the union, perhaps war could have been avoided. But it was in the nature of country half-slave and half-free that such a consensus couldn't be reached. The fact that we were so much one country and one culture, whose substantial divisions involved slavery, made things harder to arrange than they would have been were we truly distinctive nationalities.

[wardaddy]

yes.

[Aurelius]

"The fact that we were so much one country and one culture, whose substantial divisions involved slavery, made things harder to arrange than they would have been were we truly distinctive nationalities."

I could not disagree more. I think that the cultural differences between North and South which were present independently of slavery would have been enough to warrant a separation even had slavery not existed.

Similarly, the best solution for the "red-blue" separation manifested in the 2000 election would be, as Walter Williams has suggested, for the two groups to divide up the country between them and set up separate governments.

[x]

For those who lived in the Border States and the Upper South it most assuredly was a Civil War. Armed bands fought over who would control Missouri, Kentucky and Maryland. The fate of Unionist strongholds in West Virginia and East Tennessee was also at issue and passionately contested.

Every Southern State except South Carolina had regiments in the Union Army. And there was strong pro-Confederate sentiment on the Northern bank of the Ohio. There were rebel contingents or would-be contingents in Southern Ohio and talk of detaching Southern Illinois and joining it to the Confederacy. New York City talked of seceding, and other regions or municipalities might have joined it. Texas saw Confederate suppression of unionist sympathizers, and even Mississippi had guerrilla warfare.

Things might have looked differently in Maine or South Carolina, but for many Americans it clearly was a "civil war." Given the passions of the time, there was no way of cleanly dividing state from state or unionist region from secessionist area. Fighting was the result of mixed populations with differing sentiments.

Of course, if the "Civil War" is objectionable we could always go back to the war's original official designation: "The War of the Rebellion." Perhaps "The War of Secession" might be a possibility.

[Texas Eagle]

What the south was attempting to do was not all that different from what the colonies were attempting to do. The colonists were not attempting to overthrow the Crown, they just wanted to form their own country.

The War of the Rebellion or The War of Secession would be apt monikers. I guess you couldn't really call it The Second American Revolution unless it worked.

[x]

I could not disagree more. I think that the cultural differences between North and South which were present independently of slavery would have been enough to warrant a separation even had slavery not existed.

Such as?

The fact that there may have been other differences isn't at issue. Whether they were fought about or worth fighting about is much less clear.

And, of course there are two approaches involved. One looks at the many differences and takes them as all valid. The other approach sees some differences as superficial and others as more basic or essential or lying at the root of the others. Do you take Southern and Northern self-definitions at face value or are you looking for reasons and more essential causes? Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages.

One problem with the "cultural differences" approach is that sometimes one doesn't go deeply enough. Did cultural differences in 1840 or 1940 make separation a good choice? You may think so, but most Americans in those years wouldn't have agreed. Why was 1860 different? Why was separation so much a topic of heated discussion then, rather than in other years.

You may find that separation or secession is always a good idea, but that only reflects your own subjective preferences. And of course, a preference for dissolution of nations can also be applied to states and other communities. Looking at the other side of the coin, the things we have in common, is also important.

[rustbucket]

Strange. My reply to your post 11 has never appeared. I'll try again.

...we were so much one country and one culture...

I don't agree with this assessment.

I suspect you are familiar with the book, Albion's Seed, by David Hackett Fischer. It discusses four distinct cultures or folkways of English-speaking peoples that had settled into different regions of the US by the time of the Revolutionary War: (1) Puritans to Massachusetts, (2) Royalist elite and indentured servants to Virginia, (3) the North Midlands and Wales to the Delaware Valley, and (4) North Britain and northern Ireland to the Appalachian backcountry.

The book points out that these groups shared many things in common but differed in many ways, including conceptions of order, power and freedom.

Georgia-born Mrs. rustbucket calls our years in the North our foreign assignment. North and South are two different cultures.

[onedoug]

It was the South, fired on Fort Sumter, held a league with muslim slave traders, and whose leaders were not held as traitors afterward. Sure it could have been avoided.

[x]

But Ulstermen who went to New Hampshire or New York or Pennsylvania ended up very different from those who went to Virginia or South Carolina. As did Anglicans in New York and Virginia. Some of the early Georgians came from the same areas of England and backgrounds as New Englanders who had come a century earlier, but their descendants would be very different indeed.

Fischer's book is good and well worth reading. But the question isn't just why areas were different in their origins, but why some areas did and others didn't grow closer together later on. Quakers and Puritans hated each other in the 17th century, but such animosity wasn't a factor 200 years later. It's possible to speculate about what would have happened if Puritans had landed in Virginia and Cavaliers in New England. Things would have been quite different.

Massachusans and Alabamans or Mississippians and Vermonters always seem to end up on opposite sides of political questions, but why, at this one point in our history did separation become a live consideration, and not at other times?

[LasVegasMac]

The Civil War could, and probably should, have been avoided, according to a new book authored by four Southern historians.

The First World War could, and probably should, have been avoided, according to several dumb asses with nothing better to do than attempt to convince other dumb asses that their hind sight is 20/20.

The Second World War could, and probably should, have been avoided, according to several dumb asses with nothing better to do than attempt to convince other dumb asses that their hind sight is 20/20.

The Korean War.......

My revisions of history would have A) Gen. Patton: 1) leading the North (yes, I know, his “thing” was armor. It’s his concept of war that stands before others’.), 2) leading the Allies in WW1, 3) “finish” WW2. B) Let Doug do the ChiCom’s like he wanted to. B probably would have been a moot point had A (3) happened.

No, I see much better looking ahead than behind.

I just could not resist the could / should have part of this lame attempt to make a point.

History is just that - history. One needs to be mindful of the lessons, but don't second guess it.

LVM