One hundred and fifty years ago this week the first shot of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter.
This is the beginning of a long sesquicentennial commemoration, so there will be plenty of time to hash over the various historical controversies in the four years to come. I would like to make just one observation at this point.
The modern world should be grateful for the brief existence of the Southern Confederacy. Without the Confederacy, and its complete and utter political and military incompetency, the institution of slavery would probably never have been abolished. On the contrary, the slave holding states were probably just one southern-dominated Supreme Court decision away from extending the logic of the Dred Scott case in such a way that slavery would be the law of the land, south and north. The South, prior to succession, had at its disposal all the political muscle that was required to protect its interests.Only by abandoning these institutions to form the Confederate states did the South deliver up to the abolitionists the necessary political power and raw numbers that would be required to make the legislative and constitutional changes necessary to abolish slavery forever.
Then, having put all its eggs into the lone basket of southern sovereignty, the South proceeded to wreck that as well by pursuing a military strategy that was out of sync with its resources as well as with its actual political objectives.
The end of slavery in this nation stands as something of a miracle. The Constitution, as written by the Founding Fathers, is rigged to make the ending of the institution all but impossible. The successive political crises of the 19th century leading up to Lincoln's election make clear that the South was not prepared to give an inch on slavery and the North had neither the political muscle nor the focused will to make a sustained frontal assault on slavery, as it existed, in the South.
Yet, in just a few years, slavery, as a legal institution, was gone.
Only the South itself had the power to end slavery. Through its own pathetic incompetence, that's exactly what it did.
You're actually wrong here. The South lost almost all of its political representation prior to the Civil War - The house and Senate were in totally Northern hands while a president (Abe Lincoln) had been elected without a single Southern electoral vote. In general things were actually not going well for the South - the Northern factory owners had created trade controls on the South that essentially turned them in to a mercantilist cotton producing colony. No longer able to trade with England and Europe, the South was forced to sell its wares at a pittance on the streets of Boston and buy all its manufactured goods from the North. This was, in fact, almost exactly what Britain had been doing to the United States before the American Revolution.
ReplyDeleteAlso, as you got further West the divide of North and South broke down (and still does actually), until finally a state South of the Mason Dixon Line, California, was brought in to the Union without slavery.
Yes, the South did lose almost all their political representation prior to the Civil War. They lost this representation because they seceded from the Union. Had the slave states decided to tough it out for four years under Lincoln, they certainly possessed enough political muscle to block any constitutional changes regarding slavery. Which is the only way it would evr be going away.
ReplyDeleteLincoln did not believe he had the constitutional power to eliminate slavery in the Union. And he was right. The Constitution of the United States, as originally written and before the additions of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, is a sickening document that both explicitly condones slavery and deliberately games the system to insure that the institution is all but impossible to abolish. This was well understood at the time. Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison would even publicly burn copies of the Constitution on the Fourth of July to make plain their abhorrence of the document. That was not, however, a view shared by Lincoln, who viewed the likely battleground for slavery to be in the territories and the decades-long political chess game over the territories would have doubtless continued. And, as I stated in my article, the Supreme Court was a complete wild card that, with one more decision, could extend the rights of slave holders from taking their slaves into the territories, which it had in Dred Scott, to allowing them to take them into free states. If slaves can be taken into free states and treated as slaves in said states, then how, in any way, are those states free at all? Game over.
The South had plenty of arrows in its political quiver. Had they chose to fight it would have taken at least decades to abolish slavery. I personally don't believe it would have EVER happened. Only the complete and total political and military stupidity of the seceding states and the Confederacy which followed could have set in motion the series of events needed to excise the cancer of slavery which from the beginning had infected and poisoned every ideal ever claimed by the young nation.
Uh, no Walt, they lost that BEFORE they seceded.
ReplyDeleteI'm not following. What do you mean when you say that the South lost "almost all of its political representation" prior to secession?
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