(08-20-2013, 06:33 PM)kandrathe Wrote: You know how I stand on ANY war. It would not have been glorious for Lee to have marched through New York either. I just would ask, "How long could slavery have lasted in the South without the war?" and "What would a political reconciliation without a war have looked like?"
My best guess is that slavery would have endured about another 50 years without the civil war, and that the political bargains necessary to keep the South appeased politically, as their economic base drifted further and further from the productive frontier, would have been increasingly awful. There would likely have been no "reconciliation," just more of the same bitter free/slave state infighting that marked the early 19th century.
We don't have the benefit of clear counterfactuals. What we do know, is that the South bitterly and increasingly feared and opposed abolition, and went to war over it, despite being in a weaker position.
Quote:It was held by Union troops. It was in South Carolina.Maj. Anderson could have moved from Fort Moultrie north, but instead chose to occupy Fort Sumter. After four months of attempts to get the Union troops to leave peacfully, then South Carolina militia under Beauregard having exhausted negotiations with Maj. Anderson took the fort.
Until the South seceded, South Carolina was in the United States of America. Secesion was a choice of the South, and so was opening fire on Fort Sumter. They could have left it as a Gitmo-style enclave, if they really wanted to avoid war. But they didn't. The South seceded, then started the civil war, full stop.
Quote:Why did every other European power eventually emancipate their slave colonies, and work to stop slave trading?
An interesting question, and one which takes a great deal of time and history to answer. I think the majority case goes like this: Slavery was always a contentious and difficult system to maintain. Revolts were common enough, and the costs of slavery were often higher than the benefits, in most places in the world. Britain won the Napoleonic Wars, and afterwards, ruled the waves. Britain had colonies that did not profit much from slavery (too cold, too big, too far away, too populated), and a political culture that was slowly turning towards industry over slave trading. And so, using their navy, they began shutting down the international slave trade. Once the trade was abolished, slavery stopped being the international norm, and instead only persisted in the places where it was immensely profitable, and supported an entrenched ruling elite: Brazil, Cuba, and the Southern US.
The waves of immigration of the 1880s and 1900s would have also eroded the benefits of maintaining a slave class, relative to increasingly cheap free workers. But only slowly.
Brazil and Cuba abolished slavery in the 1880s. I can't say for sure, but I suspect it would have persisted in both countries until 1914, had the US maintained its own system. The fall of the Confederacy was an enormous blow against slavery, not just in the US.
Optimistically, then, 20-30 more years of slavery, to go by our existing models. Pessimistically, 50 or 60. Or, to make a realistic political economy story out of it: Whenever free states outvoted slave states in congress.
Quote:I'm not a revisionist, only a seeker of truth. It requires a level of dispassion toward either sides cause. It was not as simple as Union vs Confederates, Confederates lost, the Union was right, and the Confederates were wrong.
History is not a morality play. The North was not "right," nor the South "wrong." What is true, however, is that the South fought the war predominantly to preserve a racist system of slavery. To understand the South, in all its nuance, is a matter of truth, and in that, we are agreed.
But we are not talking about someone seeking understanding. We are talking about Jack "Southern Avenger" Hunter. That's a pretty dark period of history to be invoking. He is not a re-enactor, he is not an antiquarian or a history buff. He is pushing an ideology of racism in the present, not just trying to understand the past, as you keep suggesting. Anyone who accepts that kind of support, has lost mine, and I think, should have lost everyone's.
-Jester