A Fiery Gospel Writ in Burnished Rows of Steel
I’m totally behind the idea that all right-thinking folks should share the same opinion of chattel slavery: it’s an abomination! And you’ll get no argument from me that perpetuating slavery was the core motive of Confederate-state secession. I further credit Lincoln with firmly believing that if he kept the Union together it would mean slavery’s end. That, after all, was the point of the House Divided speech. But it doesn’t follow that we should all love the American Civil War because one of its effects was to end chattel slavery in North America. Matt is only partly correct when he writes
The South, though, decided that rather than abide by the results of the election, they would secede from the country and establish a new herrenvolk democracy committed to slavery uber alles. They, not Lincoln, put resolution of the slavery issue through the political process out of reach.
Rather, they put the resolution of slavery through a peaceful political process of “The United States of America” out of reach, because they decided not to be in it any more. There are all kinds of bad things that might have attended the North letting the South go – one possibility is decades worth of border wars in the western territories as the USA and CSA tried to expand at each other’s expense. Imagine a “bleeding Kansas” stretching from the Great Plains to the Pacific Ocean. That might have happened. And Saddam Hussein might have decided to underwrite a biological terror strike on Chicago. Or, maybe not! But the bad possible alternatives are distinct from “American slavery lasts forever.”
Meanwhile, the long-term trend among “white” countries was abolition. Russia and Brazil were among the last to end chattel slavery, and Brazil abolished it by 1888. Britain and France were firmly against the slave trade specifically and slavery generally, and would have brought some pressure to bear on the Confederacy. (In the history we “enjoyed,” their revulsion against slavery helped keep the two countries from intervening militarily on behalf of the South.) The remaining Union states had, of course, complete authority to end slavery in their own territory.
Matt writes frequently and eloquently about making resource and attention choices today, and often points out how the country can do good around the world much more cheaply in blood and treasure without resort to war. A Union who wanted to prioritize ending slavery without war for Union could have freed slaves in the border states, repudiated the fugitive slave law, formally welcomed all escaped slaves from Confederate territory and/or guaranteed passage to Canada. It could have homesteaded former slaves on the Plains or beyond. It could have offered to buy slaves from individual “foreign” (Southron) slaveowners, while tendering Reunion offers diplomatically. The Confederacy would have had to decide whether to try to launch an offensive war against a superior industrial power or adjust to an ever less viable institution. The probable end result was many fewer than, as crazy old Ron Paul reminds us, 600,000 dead, none of that Lost Cause nonsense bedeviling the transition to post-slavery America, and the near certitude that American chattel slavery as such would end within the generation that saw 1865.
Would the lives of American blacks by 1890 have been better than the lives of American blacks in the 1890 we actually had? I think it’s very likely. Would the Confederate States have ended up coming to some political rapprochement with the North, possibly even including reunion? Seems possible. Maybe not, in which case, in the end there would have been two formerly slave-holding countries between the Saint Lawrence and the Gulf of Mexico instead of one. This would rank pretty far down the list of world-historical tragedies.
Utopia? Hardly. You’ve probably noticed that the Western Tribes get shafted in my history too. (I have conceived a marvelous solution to this problem but it is too long to fit into the margins of this book.) But no 600,000 dead. No cadre of guerrilla fighters to become the Ku Klux Klan. Maybe no Jim Crow. With the homesteading option, former slaves having the property stake we denied them in the real world.
There’s a tendency when looking at American wars to assume they must have been “the right thing to do” or all for the best. We especially seize on any positive outcomes as justifying them, and the certain end of chattel slavery in America is about as positive an outcome as one can imagine. It’s a version of the fallacy of sunk costs. But wars are so destructive and wasteful that it is always worth at least asking, “Was this really the best way to go about things?” And if you’re a democracy, it’s a very good thing if at least some people err on the side of answering “No.”
Contemporaneously, massive Northern racism and pro-Union passion precluded “soft options” like I sketched out above. But that just shows how farcical the idea of a bloody civil war as humanitarian charity really is.
Comment by Abraham Lincoln —
December 25, 2007 @ 1:01 am
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Comment by foolishmortal —
December 25, 2007 @ 1:31 am
Why does Abraham Lincoln hate America?
But seriously, nice try, Jim, but it didn’t happen that way. The Civil War wasn’t about the maintenance of slavery, but rather its expansion. If the Corwin Amendment wasn’t enough to keep the South in the Union, repeal of the fugitive slave laws sure as hell wouldn’t do it.
Comment by Avram —
December 25, 2007 @ 2:20 am
A Union who wanted to prioritize ending slavery without war [...] could have offered to buy slaves from individual “foreign†(Southron) slaveowners
How would this have helped? Wouldn’t making more money available for the purchase of slaves have the effect of making slave-shipping a more profitable endeavor?
Comment by Jim Henley —
December 25, 2007 @ 8:42 am
foolish: You’ll see on rereading your comment that you are confounding aims and attributing to me an argument I did not make.
Avram, I suppose. But the slave-trade itself was pretty much dead by 1861. Even Brazil had outlawed it a decade before, and the British Navy was committed to enforcing the ban. But if you like, remove it from the package. Or is your argument that any argument for an alternative to the US Civil War has to be perfect in every particular or it gets ruled out of order, since what actually happened was so fucking awesome?
Comment by cfw —
December 25, 2007 @ 8:48 am
Hindsight is 20/20 but that does not mean we should ignore what hindsight can tell us. Jim does not even touch on the things that could have been discussed and worked out differently in the 8o years or so before 1860 to help defuse the known problem. Matt was way off base in saying 600,000
(I had thought more like a million) had to die to end slavery just because they had to die for that end. Poppy cock.
Three million slaves existed, as I recall. At $1000 each, we end up with a $3 billion core economic/legal problem (if eminent domain had been used).
Lincoln was one of the best legal minds but forgot to fully use his legal skills at a critical time. The ancestors were penny wise and pound foolish.
Comment by bryan —
December 25, 2007 @ 8:50 am
“Would the lives of American blacks by 1890 have been better than the lives of American blacks in the 1890 we actually had? I think it’s very likely.”
So, Brazil ended slavery quite late. How late do you think slavery would have ended in a Confederacy? Considering the conditions of life for Brazilians of African descent in the early parts of the last century do you think the life of Confederate ex-slaves would really have been better?
Comment by Jim Henley —
December 25, 2007 @ 8:54 am
By 1885. (Brazil ended slavery in stages beginning with the ban on the slave trade in 1850.)
Yes. At the least, they’d have been no worse than the lives of most ex-slaves in 1890. And without, you know, the massive war.
Comment by Jim Henley —
December 25, 2007 @ 8:55 am
But you know, you should answer the question too. How many extra years of emancipation did your massive war buy?
Comment by Scott —
December 25, 2007 @ 9:39 am
Let the south leave, and have a USA, UK, French boycott of slave grown cotton. End of slavery w/ no markets for its products.
Comment by matthew hogan —
December 25, 2007 @ 9:47 am
No way, Henley. Do you honestly think it would be more fun to have “Fugitive Slave Law Repeal” or “Treaty of Secession” re-enactors than Blue versus Grey. Have you no esthetics, dude?
Besides the war between the Original Neocons and Paleocons gave us great songs, as the caption indicates. Plus that cool X flag.
Easily worth five years of carnage of over half a million dead, and decades of southern white ravanchism expressed in Jim Crow and lynch mobs.
Comment by Dave W. —
December 25, 2007 @ 9:51 am
This is one of those issues that American children get brainwashed on in school at a young age. It is hard to make headway.
Comment by matthew hogan —
December 25, 2007 @ 9:57 am
On a more serious side, the military machine created and financed in the Civil War and occupation of south was the institution that enabled the stampeding of the Redder Ones so ruthlessly efficient. (No accident that the unit that became or was Custer’s Seventh Cavalry in the West was also the one that suppressed the Ku Klux Klan in the south.)
I do believe the South was wrong for the reasons generally held, (contra Southern apologists, it was about slavery; also they did fire the first shots to undermine an election they were part of), but considering alternatives is not a bad idea.
Speaking of human carnage, the USA took sides in China’s more bloody civil war (worst one ever!) at the same time, in part because of the principle of fighting against southern secession. A US filibuster (person not the procedure) was key in organizing the rebels’ suppression.
Comment by Rob —
December 25, 2007 @ 10:07 am
Jim-the slave trade had been outlawed in the Constitution. The south seceded because they knew that in time enough states would come in that their filibuster would be broken and slavery declared illegal.
Comment by Jim Henley —
December 25, 2007 @ 10:11 am
Rob, no shit on both things you say. But what’s your point? I already said preserving slavery was the motive for secession.
Comment by Robert Waldmann —
December 25, 2007 @ 11:25 am
There is a problem with your argument. The CSA *did* “launch an offensive war against a superior industrial power” and one which had taken none of the provocative actions you list. The Confederates fired the first shots in the civil war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Sumpter
I don’t see any way to avoid war with a self proclaimed new nation capable of such insanity.
Thus they not only “put the resolution of slavery through a peaceful political process of “The United States of America†out of reach, because they decided not to be in it any more.” but also made it impossible for the resolution to be peaceful at all by shelling union soldiers.
It is wise to check up on the history, before claiming that someone else got it wrong.
Comment by Jim Henley —
December 25, 2007 @ 11:33 am
Robert, don’t be an ass. Your last sentence is utter trollitude. You’d have a case if firing on a fort along your coast was equivalent to launching an invasion of the north to compel obedience regarding fugitive slaves. It’s, like, not though.
Comment by Sasha —
December 25, 2007 @ 1:05 pm
Personally, I’ve always felt that as a matter of simple justice, a nation that was founded on the right of self determination, had no just cause to prevent the south from seceding. I have no sympathy for the South ; I am the descendant of slaves. I despise the current willingness of many southerners to throw away the future out of some futile desire to vindicate the past. Slavery is a vile institution and those who practiced it had to blind themselves to the great pain they caused others. But, the South had every right to secede and I largely agree with what Ron Paul said.
We have some real hot button issues in our society and he surely pushed one but an honest reading of our history should at least raise the possibility that war was not the best solution or the right choice.
Comment by y81 —
December 25, 2007 @ 1:19 pm
Clearly, large-scale counterfactual history poses unanswerable questions, but it is wise to remember that “long-term” historical trends are capable of reversing. Turning to another civil war, Laud, Strafford and Charles I certainly would have been justified in looking around the world and noting that the trend everywhere was to eliminate the vestigial representative assemblies of the late middle ages in favor of government by efficient autocracies. With history so clearly on their side, it’s a wonder they lost.
Similarly, with a prosperous and expanding slaveholding republic established on the North American continent, defenders of slavery in the rest of the Americas would have been encouraged. So would defenders of serfdom in the Prussian and Russian hinterlands. I have no idea how this turns out, but I am sure slavery lasts longer in Brazil than it did, and serfdom maybe does better in Eastern Europe. God knows what happens in the non-Western world.
Comment by Mithras —
December 25, 2007 @ 2:32 pm
Preventing an additional 30-50 years of chattel slavery for millions of people seems worth 600,000 lives to me, but I guess it depends on whether you identify more with the slaves or the soldiers.
Anyway, it’s typically said the South died of states’ rights – that is, the weak form of federalism that it championed was insufficient to ward off the military of the North. If that’s correct, imagine what would have happened if the North had explicitly sanctioned that version of federalism. It would have made the whole continent a ripe target for foreign powers.
Comment by Thoreau —
December 25, 2007 @ 4:04 pm
Jim does not even touch on the things that could have been discussed and worked out differently in the 8o years or so before 1860 to help defuse the known problem.
That’s a good point. As important as it is to consider the range of options available in 1861, it’s also important to remember that 1861 didn’t come out of a vacuum. America had 80+ years before the war to address this issue.
I don’t claim any insights on what should have been done before 1861, but I think it’s important to remember that wars happen because of things that took place before the shooting started. The best way to avoid war is to make good decisions before it reaches a crisis point where the possibility of war is on the table.
Comment by Azael —
December 25, 2007 @ 4:43 pm
This Ron Paul thing is so going to rock.
Comment by mds —
December 25, 2007 @ 5:35 pm
Um, that would be nice, except that Britain was initially on the South’s side. See, the British were led to abolish slavery throughout their empire in 1833, but comforted themselves with the flow of cheap raw materials produced by slavery in the American South. And all of their bold moves against the slave trade based on the Act of 1873 would have done little to affect the slave population of the South, either. So we have a CSA full of states that seceded wholly because their desire to expand slavery to western US possessions was being thwarted; whose continued near-term revenue stream was assured by European demands for their goods; whose populace had demonstrated, in an earlier generation, that they would violently seize the property of other nations in order to spread the peculiar institution (see Texas); and who shot first. I’m really not seeing them going their way in peace, if only the mean ol’ North would just leave them alone. Then again, if the clash had been postponed, perhaps changing attitudes would have softened the inevitable conflict. Because if it’s one thing the South is known for, it’s moral evolution in its race relations. (Yes, perhaps the “Lost Cause” is behind a lot of that, but it manifested itself in rather suggestive ways. It usually wasn’t Yankees that were getting hanged from trees.)
Comment by mds —
December 25, 2007 @ 5:50 pm
I was always creeped out by the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” though. Real Prince of Peace vibe there, all right. So there were some disturbing seeds planted by the whole nasty business. (Or, in keeping with Thoreau’s follow-up, weeds that had already been left untended over the decades went to seed.)
By the by, given the apparent attachment to the plantation lifestyle, what makes the British-style “manumit all slaves with cash payments” approach so likely to work here? If I recall, most British beneficiaries of slave labor had become absentee landlords (or stockholders) by the time of abolition. But when one’s “way of life” is perceived to be under attack, people sometimes react less rationally.
Comment by Scott —
December 25, 2007 @ 7:56 pm
Um, that would be nice, except that Britain was initially on the South’s side.
.
Did you not see this in the original post “(In the history we “enjoyed,†their revulsion against slavery helped keep the two countries from intervening militarily on behalf of the South)”, or do you disagree with it? The South’s big problem was that enough cotton was being produced in the British Empire that they didn’t have the international leverage they expected to have.
.
I love it when the “war is the last resort” left demands war, War, WAR in response to slavery. I guess if y’all had known TX and OK had oil, the left would have opposed the war.
Comment by Tom Scudder —
December 25, 2007 @ 7:57 pm
The “Bleeding Kansas” from Mississippi to Pacific scenario looks pretty likely to me; and there’d always be the possibility of fun border skirmishes all along the Mason-Dixon line for decades; and maybe even a nice American annex to the Great War to End All Wars in 1914.
(Odd thought: has anyone written an alternate history book in which the Confederacy has a socialist revolution in the late 19th or early 20th century?)
Comment by Mithras —
December 25, 2007 @ 8:07 pm
I love it when the “war is the last resort†left demands war, War, WAR in response to slavery. I guess if y’all had known TX and OK had oil, the left would have opposed the war.
Now that’s trollitude.
Comment by Mithras —
December 25, 2007 @ 10:13 pm
“[O]n April 19[, 1861] a Baltimore mob attacked the Sixth Massachusetts Infantry as it traveled to Washington. Four soldiers were killed, several wounded. A committee of fifty, representing the Young Men’s Christian Associations of Baltimore, appealed to the President to avoid future disturbances. [Lincoln replied:]
April 22, 1861
You, gentlemen, come here to me to ask for peace on any terms, and yet have no word of condemnation for those who are making war on us. You express great horror of bloodshed, and yet would not lay a straw in the way of those who are organizing in Virginia and elsewhere to capture this city. The rebels attack Fort Sumter, and your citizens attack troops sent to the defense of the government, and the lives and property in Washington, and yet you would have me break my oath and surrender the government without a blow. There is no Washington in that – no Jackson in that- no manhood nor honor in that. I have no desire to invade the South; but I must have troops to defend this Capital. Geographically it lies surrounded by the soil of Maryland; and mathematically the necessity exists that they should come over her territory. Our men are not moles, and can’t dig under the earth; they are not birds, and can’t fly through the air. There is no way but to march across, and that they must do. But in doing this there is no need of collision. Keep your rowdies in Baltimore, and there will be no bloodshed. Go home and tell your people that if they will not attack us, we will not attack them; but if they do attack us, we will return it, and severely.”
-Paul Angle and Earl Schenk Miers, “The Living Lincoln”, 1955, p. 398.
At this point he had already had to travel in secret to avoid an assassination attemtpt. If Lincoln had only let them kill him and take over D.C., all this unpleasantness could have been avoided. Very short-sighted of the so-called great man.
Comment by Leonard —
December 25, 2007 @ 10:26 pm
Mithras, I agree that “Scott”s 2nd sentence was trolling, but the first does contain a point worth discussing.
Many of y’all left are good about future wars — against. But you are really bad on past wars, outside of a hard core of real pacifists. Now, this is not necessarily a contradiction. It may be that all of our past wars were happy, just and good. But it does leave you wide open to the right, who continually analogize the latest new potential war to something in the past. Is our current situation in Iran more like Fort Sumter, the Maine, the Zimmerman telegram, Pearl Harbor, or the Gulf of Tonkin? Our enemies, the war party, will proffer these analogies, and many others, to your affirmation that in that case war was good, good; but… . But the audience stops listening at your “but”, and you’ve just affirmed war to them.
The only way to reject future wars is on principle, not on the basis of expected utility. And any principles strong enough to reject war will impel you to reevaluate the past. If you have not rejected most of America’s past wars, you’re still part of the problem.
Put more concretely, y’all have internalized America’s pious self-justification that slavery justifies war. Yet, the Iraqi people were de facto slaves of the Iraqi regime. If slavery justifies war, then the Iraq Attaq was just! I can say no, and I did before the war, because I know that war is the health of the state; that war is always wrong except in self-defense, and several other libertarian-type memes. These also preclude war for “Union”, an utterly bogus justification on the face of it (much less, war against slavery, which is at least something worth opposing). How do your memes reject Iraq and Iran and the wars to come, yet accept the Civil War and WWII and WWI, etc.?
Comment by Bill Woolsey —
December 25, 2007 @ 10:52 pm
The Deep South left the union because of fear that the Republican Party would eventually outlaw slavery, impose high tariffs, etc.
The rest of the South left when Lincoln insisted that they provide troops to attack the Confederacy. That included Virginia. Not only was Virginia a very influential Southern state, the key “hero” of the South, Robert E. Lee, was a Virginian.
Comment by Mithras —
December 25, 2007 @ 10:58 pm
Leonard-
I’m getting a good number of chuckles out of some of y’all’s arguments, but maybe I should take them a tad bit more seriously. I am curious about this principle of secession that you and Jim (and others! I don’t want to leave out anyone who wants to be included) are implicitly arguing for. Is it a group right, as they say, or an individual one? Can only states secede, or can individuals opt out of the political system as well? I could see the advantages if I could declare that the laws don’t apply to me because I had left the union. Although, I think you’d have to deal with people who wanted to skip back and forth across the line – one day sovereign, the next a citizen, depending on whether they wanted to avoid paying taxes or call a cop because their car had been stolen.
As for the rest of your comment, it’s pure concern trollery. The purest.
Comment by Anonymo —
December 25, 2007 @ 11:23 pm
As for the rest of your comment, it’s pure concern trollery. The purest.
I’ll stay out of the larger debate here, but I’ve wondered this since the term became widespread in the blogosphere in the last year or so: Isn’t the charge of “concern trolling” fundamentally ad hominem? To call someone a concern troll isn’t to say that their argument is incorrect for reasons X, Y and Z; it says that they do not have the right to make that argument because of who they are.
I don’t mind calling a troll a troll, but the charge of “concern tolling,” levied against an on-topic argument, seems a shortcut around legitimate debate.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
December 25, 2007 @ 11:56 pm
Jim: The problem is that all the things that might have been done to end slavery peaceably were being closed off via legislation. One might compare this to the potential for restoring the rule of law and ending our occupation of Iraq right now, versus the laws actually getting passed. To say that a thing is structurally possible and even seriously discussed in some quarters (as pretty much all the steps you mention were, in the 1850s) is not to say that they had a snowball’s chance in hell given the people and institutional pressures involved. And if you start changing the entire life histories, as is necessary, of dozens of key legislators and hundreds of other participants in the struggle, may as well throw in ponies all around.
There’s productive room to argue about when the cutoff for viable alternatives is, but…we’re talking about careers as long and vile as Dick Cheney’s. You’d have to go back to the 1820s, probably.
Comment by Jim Henley —
December 26, 2007 @ 12:01 am
Bruce, I take your point, but the real question is, if the North had let the South secede, when do you think American chattel slavery would have ended? Tim Russert implied in his Paul interview that it would still be around today. That’s obvious nonsense. But how long do you think it would have lasted? How vexed do you think the post-slavery history would have been? How much would we have gained from not having the “Lincoln Precedents” to hand every time a President wanted to justify massive abridgements of civil liberties.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
December 26, 2007 @ 12:36 am
But how long do you think it would have lasted? How vexed do you think the post-slavery history would have been? How much would we have gained from not having the “Lincoln Precedents†to hand every time a President wanted to justify massive abridgements of civil liberties.
First off, I think we’d have had executive action to make Lincoln look meek and mild. (And if I’m wrong about that, we still have the examples of the first three presidents.) But cases…
Optimistic: The North goes on a farewell-jerks bout of anti-slavery legislating and abolishes slavery in 1861-2. The South drifts into it piecemeal in the 1880s.
Realistic: Neither country abolishes slavery in the 19th century. At least one experiences a Communist revolution in the 1920s-30s; if one escapes that, it does so via fascism.
The problem is a sufficiently determined slaveowner culture. We’ve seen what such a culture can manage, in the careers of Dick Cheney and his associates – they can via force of will negate a whole lot of popular wishes and preferences. There was a core of slaveowners with economic, medical, and other theories backing up their practices who had that level of confidence, and maybe then some. They were demonstrably willing to risk the destruction of everything at hand rather than compromise, and what leverage could the anti-slavery impulses of the European powers bring to bear against that? Unnecessary poverty and hardship? That was already part of the deal, and would be defended with language about how adversity builds character. And just as the presence of a pro-tyranny faction in the US emboldens similarly minded folks elsewhere now, so with slavery, I think. I would expect the mid-19th century wave of abolition to come to an abrupt end, and for the remaining slave powers to reinforce each other. Some nations that had abolished slavery might even go back to it.
It seems to me that if slavery can survive a relatively brief crisis period in the mid-19th century, then it could have a good long run and become an expected part of the industrial capitalist era – say, as ignored and accepted as prison labor of varying degrees of servitude is now. Nice people would mostly look away; self-styled realists would explain how we can’t get along without it. The US has a real history that includes finding rationales for various kinds of miseries demonstrably unavoidable in modern, industrialized nation-states. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that our alternative selves could manage to do it with slavery, too, nor that they could build long-term working alliances with like-minded folks elsewhere.
Comment by Leonard —
December 26, 2007 @ 1:24 am
Mithras, all rights are individual rights. Or at least, all “rights” as a libertarian would have them. The right of secession is just one manifestation of the right of free association. Put more simply, it’s the bedrock principle that you’re not the boss of me.
Like any individual right the right to secession proxies into groups because they are made of individuals. So, for example, you have the right to disaffiliate yourself with your church, regardless of what they, or anyone else but you, say. Similarly your church has a right as a collective to disaffiliate itself with other churches, regardless of what they say.
The South had the right to secede, quite plain and simple. Because the citizens of the South did. It does not matter what the Constitution does or does not say on the matter. (In fact the Constitution is silent on the matter, a woeful oversight but understandable given that it was written by secessionists.)
Obviously there’s a big difference between what is naturally right — namely, that you cannot be coerced into any relationship with others — and what goes in politics. When it comes to the political means, none of us have the de facto right of secession, and that goes at the individual level straight through every level of the state. We do have the analogous right to disaffiliate in the private sector, as customers at least. It’s called “taking your business elsewhere” and it works pretty well.
Your concerns about people unilaterally making and breaking affiliations take us into the realm of contract, that is, the idea that it is useful to each of us to be able to bind ourselves. And this is the solution to your next step in the argument. Note that contract is itself a thorny subject, since one should be able to bind oneself only so much (in my opinion, at least). I am fine with contracts lasting a day, generally OK with a year, but when it gets to 5 or 10 years (or the rest of your life), I’m not too sure such contracts are a good idea. But this moves outside of the scope of this discussion.
As for your charge of concern trolling — I guess you don’t really know what that is.
Comment by BruceR —
December 26, 2007 @ 4:12 am
Jim, I think you do dismiss the Fort Sumter issue too lightly. Seizures of public (federal) property without negotiations or compensation (resisted by Maj. Anderson in Sumter’s case) was rash. There were lots of anti-war moderates (Crittenden, Winfield Scott, etc.) who could conceivably have prevailed if Charlestoners hadn’t started shooting first.
Your counterfactual also does not consider the impact the first secession would have had on subsequent secessionists. If not resisted once, it’s unlikely future such defections would have been resisted either. There’s no reason to assume you’d only end up with two component parts at the end of it, and the North’s ability to do anything for American blacks consequently diminished (the CSA, of course, having outlawed secession in its own constitution, would presumably have stayed together).
As a Canadian, I’m also mindful that a federal government does have some responsibilities to loyal citizens in seceded territory in the case of a secession, who might not want to be taken forcibly out of the reach of the laws they had grown accustomed to. In the Canadian case, that would be English Canadians and natives in a secessionist Quebec, in South Carolina’s, the slaves themselves. I don’t believe those responsibilities can be as easily dismissed as you make out (which is, of course, the assumption underlying a surrender-of-all-federal-property-pre-negotiations scenario which is the necessary condition for any kind of “Great Peace of 1861″ counterfactual).
Comment by Dave Woycechowsky —
December 26, 2007 @ 7:11 am
Britain and France were firmly against the slave trade specifically and slavery generally, and would have brought some pressure to bear on the Confederacy. (In the history we “enjoyed,†their revulsion against slavery helped keep the two countries from intervening militarily on behalf of the South.)
Are there any countries that the US should be boycotting now due to dehumanizing labor conditions, or was 1800s-style slavery uniquely horrible?
Comment by matthew hogan —
December 26, 2007 @ 8:43 am
I do tend to think in the final analysis that those eager to defend the way it all rolled out in a civil war as more or less the best way or the only way are frankly attracted by the sense that it was BETTER if it was done by apocalyptic violence (isnt “grapes of wrath” from the Book of Revelations?), because the most justice-imbued way to deal with slavery was not merely to rapidly free all slaves, as indeed happened, but also to whip and slaughter the racist trash that made slavery happen, and also make bleed the nation that protected and enabled it.
Only that way was it most righteously done; come on folks, admit it, thats what you feel.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Comment by stuck in 200 —
December 26, 2007 @ 9:25 am
1800’s style slavery as practiced in the Western Hemisphere was, at least in some ways, uniquely horrible. While slavery had been somewhere between common and universal across human cultures, the racial nature and the expectation that the descendants of slaves would remain in bondage forever was unusual. I’m not sure what current labor practices compare, but I’m also not well enough informed to say none exist.
To get back to the point of the post, I’d argue it’s very likely that if the South had been allowed to secede slavery would still have been in place in the CSA and that progress toward abolition would have slowed in places like Brazil as a result – competition against other slave economies was an important argument against abolition, and the continued presence of such a competitor in the CSA would have had an impact.
There was little movement toward abolition within what was to become the CSA, and even under the Union Constitution slave power legislators had managed to make discussion or publication of such arguments illegal for most of the 70 years leading up to secession. Such suppression would have been even stronger in a successful CSA (especially one established without the need to fight a debilitating war at its inception), so it’s hard to see how the political landscape would change to support abolition within 30 years.
Some argue that the economic inefficiencies of a slave labor system would have become so clear as to force the CSA to move to free labor within a generation or two. That hardly seems certain – history is full of examples of political elites clinging to failed systems far past the point where their shortcomings have become obvious. Even when the need for change is clear to such elites, change will be faought because they can’t find a way to preserve their power and position in the new system.
It also seems naive to present racial tensions in the South over the last 140 years as a result of the decision to resist secession by fighting the Civil War. The defeat of the South and the lost cause ideology certainly conditioned the form white supremacy took, but it’s clear that it was fully present long before the first shell fell on Ft. Sumter.
If you believe, as I do, that the political and economic elite of the CSA would have been likely to cling to slave labor all the way to economic collapse, it’s hard to believe that race relations or conditions for the slaves and their descendants would be even as good as they actually proved to be in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Comment by Scott —
December 26, 2007 @ 10:30 am
Or the whole CSA experiment could have failed and emancipation would have been a requirement for readmission into the Union.
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Ft Sumpter was there to collect taxes. If the British set up in NY harbor to tax incoming ships, the Union would have considered that an act of war and we would have been taught how justified attacking them was.
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The Constitution itself is founded on secession. We not only seceeded from the British Empire, but every state that ratified the Constitution seceeded from the Articles of Confederation. The AoC required a unanimous vote to change it, but the first 9 of 13 states to ratify the Constitution started forming a new govt under it.
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Would we have been better off losing the Revolution instead? After all, the UK did end slavery in its colonies, and the UK and northern colonies would have made the southern colonies face even more overwhelming odds if they tried to leave over slavery.
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If the North should have won the Civil War because of slavery, then to be consistent the Colonies should have lost the Revolution.
Comment by First Little Pig —
December 26, 2007 @ 11:28 am
More fundamental to this discussion is the fact that each state was closer to being an autonomous entity (county if you will) at that time that at any time since the end of the Civil War…. The Confederacy was a looser construct than the Union and was unlikely to become a de facto governing body over the various states.
What seems likely to me is that different states would have ended slavery at different times… Texas might well have agreed to abolish slavery in exchange for Mexico’s assistance in retaining the large and rich slice of the New Mexican Territory it claimed (possibly also with a return of other bits to Mexico). Consider: would the Union have fought a protracted guerrilla war all the way out here to maintain those far away possessions if it did not really have any significant way to back it up by force and supply lines?
Libertarian New Mexican
Comment by Barry —
December 26, 2007 @ 11:38 am
Bruce Baugh:
“It seems to me that if slavery can survive a relatively brief crisis period in the mid-19th century, then it could have a good long run and become an expected part of the industrial capitalist era – say, as ignored and accepted as prison labor of varying degrees of servitude is now. ”
IIRC, slavery was getting stronger in the years before the Civil War, due to industrial processing of cotton.
Also, the trend in the 19th century, IMHO, was for vastly increased bureaucratic control, both governmental and corporate. A late-19th century slave system would have been horribly efficient.
Comment by Barry —
December 26, 2007 @ 11:42 am
Comment by Scott —
“Or the whole CSA experiment could have failed and emancipation would have been a requirement for readmission into the Union.”
The above statement is true, IMHO. ‘could have’, ‘would have’. But *why* would the CSA experiment have failed? It had a demonstrated economic model which was working (for those making the decisions, of course).
Comment by Scott —
December 26, 2007 @ 11:54 am
But *why* would the CSA experiment have failed?
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For the same reasons socialism keeps failing – freedom works? I suggested it as another thing that could have happened – there’s no reason to just assume all counterfactuals are worse than the historical outcomes.
Comment by Eric Scharf —
December 26, 2007 @ 12:11 pm
If the North should have won the Civil War because of slavery, then to be consistent the Colonies should have lost the Revolution.
To echo Matthew Hogan @38, many people feel that some ideas (the divine right of kings, negroes deserve enslavement) are so vile that it’s worth many deaths to defeat them. This sentiment is a failure of the “marketplace of ideas,” and therefore makes some of us pluralists uncomfortable.
Whether Ron Paul is actually intended to spend his political capital courting the counterfactual-wonk vote, the clear and present result is a ham-handed (what’s the opposite of “dog-whistle;” “air horn”?) shout-out to racists and irredentists.
I sympathize with what I take to be Jim’s goal: strengthening the argument for considering long-term strategies short of war, and possibly deflating romantic, theologically-fraught notions of “humanitarian war.” If asked by Jim, Ron Paul might even agree. But that’s clearly not the Monday-morning “take-away” from Russett’s show.
I also agree with the implication of Jim and other commenters that initially responding to secession with force did not require courageous leadership on Lincoln’s part; it would have taken a stronger Union president to head off war after Ft. Sumter, or even to significantly limit the curtailment of civil liberties during the war.
I’m agnostic about how much of a precedent Lincoln set; Americans people are notoriously forgetful, and I imagine we no longer needed to invoke Abe by the Wilson Administration at the very latest.
Has anyone thought to ask Ron Paul about the Whiskey Rebellion?
Comment by Jennifer —
December 26, 2007 @ 12:13 pm
(Odd thought: has anyone written an alternate history book in which the Confederacy has a socialist revolution in the late 19th or early 20th century?)
In Harry Turtledove’s alternate histories, Abraham Lincoln, after making a name for himself as the biggest failure in American presidential history, becomes a Marxist, and Marxism becomes VERY popular among blacks in the Confederacy. However, the Confederates were able to defeat the Communist rebels.
I have to agree with previous posters who said that the Civil War was likely inevitable due to the belligerency of the South. All the rational, practical economic reasons why slavery should have died out would be offset by the joy the elites felt in being the elite. Hell, some of the worst racists were the exact same poor whites who would have benefited economically by the removal of slave-labor competition, but they didn’t want to give up the thrill of thinking “I may be a toothless illiterate poor white with pellagra, but by-God at least I ain’t a slave!”
Go back in time a few decades and I can tell you all sorts of rational, practical reasons why the United States of America will never be so asinine as to outlaw alcohol, drugs or any other intoxicants, and if you claimed otherwise prior to 1913 I could easily make you look like an overly cynical fool.
Comment by mds —
December 26, 2007 @ 12:16 pm
Indeed, massive estates worked by slave labor became the basis of elite wealth during the late Roman Republic, even though one of the checks against unbridled executive power depended upon the existence of farms owned and worked by rank-and-file citizens. Yet every attempt to mitigate this trend was shouted down, or met with deadly violence. And lo and behold, client armies loyal to particular generals destroyed the Republic. But it took a long time, and Rome remained a slave-intensive economic and military power for long thereafter.
As to all that condemnation from Britain, which could apparently get all the cheap cotton it needed from its Empire (presumably through the not-yet-constructed Suez Canal), it’s a shame that The Education of Henry Adams is no longer on default college reading lists. If nothing else, it deals with the frustration of Union ambassadors in London, watching a British government that had already tacitly recognized the Confederacy allow Confederate vessels to slip in and out of British ports, listening to Palmerston’s government debating whether to merely continue to give indirect support to the CSA or to reinforce Canada in the event of full recognition, and hence war with the North, quoting Gladstone’s reports of the “impatience in the cotton-towns of Lancashire,” etc, etc. All combined with a press that championed the Southern side against the tyrant Lincoln… because of Britain’s deep and evident respect for the principles of federalism, apparently. The UK was primarily concerned with weakening the growing strength of the United States (which might have been a good idea, all else being equal), and only began to switch from Confederacy to Union when it looked like the Union was winning. Truly, the way they washed their hands of the whole Confederacy in disgust over slavery was a beacon for the ages.
Comment by Gsnorgathon —
December 26, 2007 @ 12:26 pm
“Maybe no Jim Crow”? The notion that horrifically blood warfare isn’t necessarily the best way to solve political problems is well met, and (alas!) bears repeating. But “maybe no Jim Crow?” You really lost me there, Jim. Maybe too much Christmas cheer?
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Or maybe you meant they’d call it something else? Like, if there’d been more Dutch settlers in the south, “apart…something“?
Comment by dhex —
December 26, 2007 @ 12:37 pm
1800’s style slavery as practiced in the Western Hemisphere was, at least in some ways, uniquely horrible. While slavery had been somewhere between common and universal across human cultures, the racial nature and the expectation that the descendants of slaves would remain in bondage forever was unusual.
from my recent readings, this is not the case at all. there are plenty of examples within continental african slave traditions that such descendents are marked for life, and for the lives of their children, and often several generations going forward.
though i would agree it was uniquely horrible, especially in terms of the long-lasting damage done. some countries have dealt with it far better than others, but all of them have been touched for at least a few hundred years more, most likely.
Comment by Thoreau —
December 26, 2007 @ 12:39 pm
If we want to speculate on how the South would have treated blacks in an alternative history, keep in mind that in South Africa a white minority managed to oppress a black majority until the late 20th century.
Now, that’s admittedly only a few decades longer than legally codified racism lasted in the US, but it’s something to keep in mind.
Comment by Jesse Walker —
December 26, 2007 @ 1:44 pm
What you fail to recognize, Jim, is that those people would all be dead by now anyway.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
December 26, 2007 @ 1:47 pm
Matthew Hogan: I like to believe in the peaceful defeat of evil. I have a great respect for the desirability of the quiet life, and more so as I age – conflict always charges full price, and seldom delivers full value in return. But sometimes there doesn’t seem to be any other alternative, because an evil is so deeply entrenched. Slavery is one of them, I think. if I had reasons to believe otherwise, I’d be glad of them.
In the field of fiction: Terry Bisson’s 1988 novel Fire on the Mountain is set in the modern day of a world where John Brown’s raid did provoke a general slave uprising, leading eventually to a socialist nation in the former slave-owning states. Darned good book.
Comment by Scott —
December 26, 2007 @ 2:02 pm
If we want to speculate on how the South would have treated blacks in an alternative history, keep in mind that in South Africa a white minority managed to oppress a black majority until the late 20th century.
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So we should have invaded South Africa?
Comment by Thoreau —
December 26, 2007 @ 2:47 pm
Scott-
I’m not trying to justify any war. I’m just offering cautionary notes for those trying to sketch out alternative scenarios.
Comment by Barry —
December 26, 2007 @ 3:12 pm
Comment by mds —
“Indeed, massive estates worked by slave labor became the basis of elite wealth during the late Roman Republic, even though one of the checks against unbridled executive power depended upon the existence of farms owned and worked by rank-and-file citizens. Yet every attempt to mitigate this trend was shouted down, or met with deadly violence. And lo and behold, client armies loyal to particular generals destroyed the Republic. But it took a long time, and Rome remained a slave-intensive economic and military power for long thereafter.”
The *Roman Republic* was destroyed; the *Roman Empire* was born, and survived. Or perhaps, shed the shell of the republic. The only problem for the elites was surviving the transition without ending up on the wrong side in a civil war. Similarly, if the CSA could have transitioned into a very nasty thing indeed, while the elites (in general) prospered mightily.
Me: “But *why* would the CSA experiment have failed? ”
Scott: “For the same reasons socialism keeps failing – freedom works?
It’s not socialism, and ‘freedom works’ is a slogan with limited predictive power.
Comment by Barry —
December 26, 2007 @ 3:18 pm
Sorry; Scott’s comment ended after ‘freedom works?’.
Comment by mds —
December 26, 2007 @ 4:41 pm
Yes, but this was a rather frequent and often quite fatal problem. And the definition of “elite” changed quite a bit by, say, the time of the Flavian dynasty. So I’d still suggest that it was against the long-term interests of many particular members of the elite to undermine the Republic’s fragile balance; yet they did it anyway. And I see a similar blindness in the South’s plantation class, or alternatively a lamentable desire to reign in Hell rather than serve in Heaven, which modern authoritarians often fall prey to.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
December 26, 2007 @ 4:53 pm
mds: It’s not just authoritarians, though, it is quite conceivably you, me, and nearly every poster and commenter here. We almost all have things which we deem valuable in themselves, and worth inconvenience, rather than valuable insofar as they produce this or that result. Moral jugment isn’t about capitulating on all of them, but (in part) about making sure we’ve chosen our turf and tools wisely. But we can all screw up in that way, if we have any principles at all.
Comment by Scott —
December 26, 2007 @ 6:17 pm
It’s not socialism, and ‘freedom works’ is a slogan with limited predictive power
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The question was why wasn’t slavery pretty much guaranteed to survive forever, so I brought up all the authoritarian systems that have failed in recent history. And who says slavery isn’t socialism? Didn’t those in authority over the slaves feed them and house them, and take all they produced?
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Sounds like socialism to me.
Comment by Nell —
December 26, 2007 @ 6:39 pm
Tom Scudder: has anyone written an alternate history book in which the Confederacy has a socialist revolution in the late 19th or early 20th century?
That would be extremely awesome. Let me know if you hear of one — or, alternatively, if you write one! ;>
Comment by Carlos —
December 26, 2007 @ 7:36 pm
Jim, the problem was, in 1860, cotton was a high return, expanding industry in the South. A lot of regions which we historically associate with cotton cultivation in the South hadn’t even been planted yet: much of Texas and the Delta region of Mississippi. Plenty of room to grow.
And the South held market power. Cotton in India and in Egypt only accelerated as a result of the Civil War, just as the American chemical industry took off as a result of German products being unable to reach larger markets during World War One.
When I look at the data, I don’t see cotton slavery disappearing for economic reasons within two decades. I see it lasting until the development of the mechanical cotton picker. That would be in the 1930s. It was a difficult thing to invent.
It takes some doing to view cotton slavery as anything but capitalist. There were probably fewer non-market transactions on cotton plantations than on the family farms of the North, which practiced a domestic mode of production.
(With prison unfree labor, which was practiced after the Civil War throughout the South, and gets much less press, there might be a better point — and free labor did manage to outcompete prison labor in Southern states! In large part because the prison labor kept on dying.)
The South wasn’t like the Soviet Union, where there weren’t functioning price signals for decades (and still aren’t, in much of the area). The South was all about price signals. But that gets overlooked in the mythology.
Anyway. I doubt the South would have seceded if slaves had the right to vote. Run that counterfactual, libertarians.
Comment by Doug —
December 27, 2007 @ 1:09 am
Another way to look at it is: if we could only of waited another 20 years both sides could have had the Maxim Automatic Machine Gun, proper artillery, and other marvels of modern science to help us beat the 600K casualty mark. Maybe the south could have bought some of that nice hardware with the money earned from selling slaves to freedom in the north. I’m sure that if there was a way to make big money, all those countries that phased out slavery might have found a reason to stay in business a little longer by supplying slaves to the south to be resold to the north. Really though, this post is about Iraq, isn’t it Jim?
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
December 27, 2007 @ 3:36 am
This is incredible to me, but if you go to Google and search for “I have conceived a marvelous solution to this problem but it is too long to fit into the margins of this book” this blog post comes up first.
Unqualified Offerings shows up a second time in the search, because you used the same quote in 2003.
If you add the word “conjecture” to the search, Google still doesn’t tell you where the quote is from. You actually have to type out “”Fermat’s last conjecture” for Google to give the right answer.
These are the moments that make me question Google’s search algorithm (It also can’t find me Edward Bain, the economist, no matter what I type into it.)
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
December 27, 2007 @ 3:47 am
Would it be possible to look at the question as “Is it worth 600,000 lives to enforce an election?”
If elections can be rejected when you don’t like the result, then what is the result of the rejection?
I guess I’m wondering how important it is to have people submit to the results of democratic elections.
Comment by Scott —
December 27, 2007 @ 8:17 am
The South was all about price signals.
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Except for the price the slaves got to freely choose for their labor, of course.
Comment by Carlos —
December 27, 2007 @ 10:39 am
But the slaves weren’t taxed or drafted, Scott. It must have been *paradise* for them.
Comment by Barry —
December 27, 2007 @ 11:01 am
Me, concerning elites supporting a transition from republic to empire:
“The only problem for the elites was surviving the transition without ending up on the wrong side in a civil war.”
Comment by mds —
“Yes, but this was a rather frequent and often quite fatal problem. And the definition of “elite†changed quite a bit by, say, the time of the Flavian dynasty. So I’d still suggest that it was against the long-term interests of many particular members of the elite to undermine the Republic’s fragile balance; yet they did it anyway. ”
One obvious reason is that the elites were acting in their short- and medium-term interests. They wanted a concentration of money and power amongst themselves. They could compete (sometimes lethally) amongst themselves, but cooperate when it came to squeezing and oppressing the weaker.
Please note that above, I mean ’short-term’ to mean several years, and ‘medium-term’ to mean a decade or two. The long-term would be generational.
We’re seeing the endgame play out in Russia, where Putin seems to have castrated those oligarchs who weren’t on his side, using the recentralized power of the state. A major factor seems to be media control; if a small set of oligarchs have dominance in the mass media, that can be converted to increased political power => more dominance in the mass media, etc.
In the USA, a successful Republican revolution would have lead to a situation where the rich would have far more wealth and privilege (social and legal). However, for almost all of the elites, this would be fragile – a person could be destroyed within a day, by arrest/torture/confession, cooperation of subordinates under threat of above, a quick trial and guilty verdict in a rigged court, followed by life imprisonment (or ‘heart attack) and confiscation of assets. All with mass media cooperation. Abetted by ubiquitous surveillance.
But many of the elites seem to support the concentration of wealth and power, destruction of the traditional constitutional protections and checks & balances. The reason for that is that the gains appear now and are easily forseeable; the risks are longer term and fuzzier. The only reason that the Bush/Cheney regime is running into problems is demonstration lack of skill in managerial execution – or rather, stunning lack of skill, because the elites seemed rather comfortable for the first several years.
Comment by Leonard —
December 27, 2007 @ 11:15 am
To a secessionist? The result is you leave the polity. You lose whatever benefits were gained from membership.
This is no different than any other kind of membership. For example if my job suddenly moves to Zimbabwe, I am not bound to go. But say the corp I work for held a vote among its employees, and the votes came down 80% for moving to Zimbabwe, with me voting “no”. Am I then bound to move? Of course not. Now, I suppose it might be possible for them to offer me a contract stating that I am bound by the result of the vote. But, (a) I would not sign it, and (b) they are relying on there being a higher power to enforce the contract.
The main thing is (a). If the state offered us a contract wherein we are allowed to vote, must abide by election results, and get certain benefits, I’d be willing to view results of the elections as binding. That is, unless duress is used to force me to sign the contract, in which case the entire thing is null and void, and the elections in particular are not binding. Since the state does not allow non-signing of its “contract”, voting is never binding.
Another way to think about this is to consider voting on something you think is matter of right. Abortion, perhaps, for lefties in attendance. But use whatever you want, so long as you think it is an individual right. Can a vote make it OK to violate that right? Seems to me that if you answer yes, then you are far outside the liberal tradition, and it’s a wonder you are even reading this. So what happens if there is an election and the result violates rights? Are you bound by that election?
Comment by Leonard —
December 27, 2007 @ 12:02 pm
Well, the dictionary? Socialism is the state ownership of the means of production. An analogical extension to the state “owning” its subjects may be warranted, since when you own all the capital, you de facto own what is produced, including food, housing, health care, etc.; and that is power.
But socialism still requires the state, definitionally.
Yes, and these features are similar to what obtains in socialism, in the abstract. But slaves were still privately owned. The private ownership, as versus public ownership, had real effects that made slavery different from socialism. Thus, two words.
There is one important common feature in modern single-party socialism and a slaving society. In both cases the state must enforce emigration restrictions against the subjugated classes. And that is that why both systems require a geographically extensive state to work; otherwise the slaves or subjects can exit. In the US case, slavery was tenable in the South in part because travelling to freedom unaided was difficult verging on impossible. Even with aid it was difficult. If the North had let the South go, then the free/slave border would have moved, from Canada down to Tennessee. This, combined with the abolition of slavery in the North including the unpopular fugitive slave laws, would have ensured a stream of slaves self-freeing, and made the peculiar institution much less profitable everywhere in the South.
Comment by Carlos —
December 27, 2007 @ 1:01 pm
Pity how difficult it was to remove slavery in the Eastern Shore of Maryland. In Delaware, it was moribund, but the Union’s Marylanders held onto slavery until the last day.
You didn’t see the expected mechanism of fugitive slaves rendering slavery unprofitable working before the war, or in the case of Maryland, during the war. This tells me that under regular agricultural conditions, enforcement costs were relatively low. I should note that barbed wire would be invented in the 1870s, which would almost certainly lower enforcement costs further.
A bit of thought suggests that one would need a general fugitive rate comparable to the rate of return on cotton — about 10% — for this to work.
Comment by Robert Waldmann —
December 27, 2007 @ 1:39 pm
Sasha we can debate whether “The Confederacy would have had to decide whether to try to launch an offensive war” implies an invasion (I don’t see the word).
The fact is that Henley’s proposed alternative to Lincoln’s approach is much more radical than Lincoln’s actual approach. The North continued to return escaped slaves to the South long into the civil war, which was, among other things, fought in Pennsylvania.
When he was elected, Lincoln’s stated position on slavery was indistinguishable from Jefferson’s (should be banned in the territories as in the draft governance of the territories bill introduced by Jefferson) “In 1784, Jefferson’s draft of what became the Northwest Ordinance stipulated that “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” in any of the new states admitted to the Union from the Northwest Territory.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson#Jefferson_and_slavery
Lincoln always held that congress could not abolish slavery within states (without a consitutional amendment) and accepted slavery in states which did not join the confederacy until the war was over.
That the CSA chose to wage aggressive war in spite of all this, makes it clear that war could not be avoided.
Comment by matthew hogan —
December 27, 2007 @ 3:31 pm
“That the CSA chose to wage aggressive war in spite of all this, makes it clear that war could not be avoided. ”
The Union could have replied: “OK, you can leave. No war.”
Im not saying that’s the right, best, or an easily workable option, but its physical plausibility makes war not unavoidable.
Comment by diana —
December 27, 2007 @ 7:28 pm
“The “Bleeding Kansas†from Mississippi to Pacific scenario looks pretty likely to me;”
Me, too. I don’t understand why you put that possibility on the same level as And Saddam Hussein underwriting “a biological terror strike on Chicago.”
Regarding what would have happened to black Americans (or black CSAers, as they would have been ) in 1890, if we’re going to indulge in historical fantasizing, I find it revealing that no one in this thread has conjectured that a victorious but impoverished South, depleted of 25% of its white male pop’n, might well have been vulnerable to a series of slave rebellions.
It happened in Haiti.
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
December 27, 2007 @ 8:27 pm
I think the Constitution should allow some mechanism for states to leave the Union, if they wish. I think, generally, regions of each nation should have a method of leaving, if the nation has the kind of strong regional differences that cause strong regional strains. But should regions be allowed to leave unilaterally, without asking the permission of the rest of the country? Isn’t that a bit like leaving a marriage, without any divorce agreement in place, and without any willingness to respect whatever settlement a court comes up with? How are the assests and debts divided?
This might be a ridiculous comparison, but what if, tomorrow, Califonia decided it would be better off if it was free of the rest of the country? Should it be allowed to leave without first negotiating some contribution toward the national debt? The U.S. has run up 9 trillion of debt, and Califonia represents more than 10% of the U.S. economy. It will be hard to pay off (or, if you prefer, “service over the long-term”) that debt without the help of California. And Califonia certainly helped the nation run up that debt: agricultural subsidies, corporate subsidies, military spending.
If we accept the thesis that it is acceptable to leave a nation if you don’t like the outcome of an election, then what are the limits of this thesis? Does it apply only to U.S. states, or can it apply to cities too? Neighborhoods? It is a general thesis, applicable to all nations everywhere, or is it specific to the U.S., because of the unique way the U.S. was built out of once separate states (colonies)?
Again, I’m open to the idea that 600,000 lives is too high a price to pay for seeing the results of an election enforced. But what would be an acceptable price for enforcing an election? 400,000 lives? 100,000? 5,000? Do we agree that, in general, respecting the outcomes of elections is important?
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
December 27, 2007 @ 8:33 pm
“And who says slavery isn’t socialism? Didn’t those in authority over the slaves feed them and house them, and take all they produced?
Sounds like socialism to me.”
Those owning the slaves were private=sector actors, rather than agents of the government. If your definition of “socialism” revolves the for-profit motivations of private-sector individuals, then you’ve a unique definition of socialism. Why not, instead, call the system “slavery”? Why does it need to be compared to socialism, in order to be evil?
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
December 27, 2007 @ 8:40 pm
“To a secessionist? The result is you leave the polity. You lose whatever benefits were gained from membership.”
Couldn’t something similar be said of divorce? And yet, don’t we have divorce laws that are enforced by the courts (that is, enforced by the potential violence of the state)? Can you think of anywhere where someone is allowed to leave a marriage and say “I’ve had it with this marriage and so I am leaving unilaterally. I will pay nothing toward whatever debts we’ve run up during this marriage. I am keeping all the assests I currently possess, and I’m not willing to discuss the issue.”
Comment by Barry —
December 27, 2007 @ 9:40 pm
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
“Those owning the slaves were private=sector actors, rather than agents of the government. If your definition of “socialism†revolves the for-profit motivations of private-sector individuals, then you’ve a unique definition of socialism. Why not, instead, call the system “slaveryâ€? Why does it need to be compared to socialism, in order to be evil?”
Most people have these concepts in their heads, like ‘capitalism’, ’socialism’, etc.. However, some people seem to think that the corresponding things exist in the real world in pure form. They get disturbed when (for example) successful capitalists increase governmental powers for the purpose of making money. They want to classify those people as non-capitalist; ’socialist’ seems to be a useful (dirty) bucket into which those examples can be flung.
Comment by Leonard —
December 27, 2007 @ 10:04 pm
Lawrence, marriage is a contract. As I said before, I’m not too sure of the wisdom of lifelong contracts, because while a given individual is more or less the same person day to day, over the long run people do change, sometimes fundamentally. But in the case of marriage the terms are fairly well-known ahead of time and it’s easy to get out of. So I don’t see a lot of problems with it.
Back to the point: marriage is a contract (at least from the POV of the state). It is freely entered into by two people who presumably know what they are doing. They freely choose to bind themselves in certain ways because they expect that overall they gain from it. So there’s not really a comparison to political secessionism. Unless, of course, you’re thinking about “social contracts” and all, but those are pure state-apologist bunk.
But most marriages do end much as in your scenario, in no-fault divorce which is the law of the land in every US state. One party just files, unilaterally, and that is that. The only difference is that courts will assign out mutual debts. But for many people there are no mutual debts of any substance.
Comment by Leonard —
December 27, 2007 @ 10:18 pm
Lawrence of course regions and subregions, etc. should be allowed to leave unilaterally. As I said above: the right to secede is the right of free association. It’s an individual human right, so it proxies all the way up.
As for how to divide debts, that is a real problem in any secession. It’s clear how to handle it in any contract situation: the superior 3rd party (i.e. the state in our system) assigns a division. But in secession neither party is superior, and there is superior 3rd party. So there is no procedure for it, and there cannot be in the general case.
Note that it would be possible to outline terms of secession in a state’s constition. But people still have a right to secede regardless of that, and not necessarily on those terms. I agree that it would be very nice to have terms, though, so long as they were reasonable, as a means to reduce the conflict inherent in the process.
If California wanted to secede (more power to them), I’d expect that the debt would be divided up. They’d find a trusted 3rd party — Canada? — to adjudicate. California would do this because their biggest trading partner by far would be the USA, and they’d want amicable relations. The USA, if it felt aggrieved over the terms of the breakup, could easily assign a tariff on Californian goods until the debt as they saw it was paid off.
Of course, if the world thought it at all likely that California might secede, they’d probably be a lot less likely to be interested in US debt exactly because it is based on part-ownership of us all, including Californians. (Another good feature of secessionism.)
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
December 28, 2007 @ 1:04 am
“Lawrence of course regions and subregions, etc. should be allowed to leave unilaterally. As I said above: the right to secede is the right of free association. It’s an individual human right, so it proxies all the way up.”
There is a strain of libertarianism that insists that it is immoral to force someone to accept the laws of a given state, if the person never consented to belong to that state, and never agreed to be bound by the laws of that state. I’m not sure if that is what you’re arguing, and I don’t mean to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like you are arguing something like that. A comparison is usually made to contract law, where both parties must freely consent to the contract for it to be binding. If one party to a contract is forced, under duress, to agree to the terms of the contract, then the contract is invalid.
I’ve no judgement about the merits of that case, although the reasoning behind it strikes me as having a kind of innocent morality. The idea that possibly most people, most of the time, want to kill one another (or, put another way, that life in a state of nature is “nasty, brutish and short”) is treated as so immoral a consideration that it can not be allowed into the conversation. I’m reminded of a certain kind of religious person who seems horrofied by the reality of sex: “Omigod, people are having sex! This has got to stop!”
Faced with a group of people who might say to the individual (the libertarian) “We want all of your property, therefore we are going to kill you and take all of your property” such libertarians respond with: “It would be immoral if you did so.” And, of course, it would be immoral if they did so.
There is a different argument that can be made regarding government, and which fits within the intellectual tradition that some people call “classically liberal” or “libertarian”. Rather than starting off with a comparison to contract law, it starts off with the utility of having government. I associate the argument mostly with John Stuart Mill. It starts with the idea that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men” and then goes on to ask what methods of securing those rights offers the most utility.
A preference for utility based arguments might simply be an expression of my personal tastes, and I suppose the comments on a weblog are not the appropriate place to resolve the never ending argument between those whose thinking begins with contract law and those whose thinking start off with considerations of the pragmatic (rather than moral) ways of best securing people’s rights.
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
December 28, 2007 @ 7:47 am
Sorry, I wasn’t clear, not even in my own head. I think I have more of an opinion on this subject than I thought.
What I perhaps should have said is that I think government is needed for us to secure our rights. While the right to consent to contract is an important right, there are other rights that are also important, and the best way to secure the largest amount of one’s rights is probably through a society that has a government. I suspect that the attitude “I can leave whenever I want” allows for you to violate other people’s rights.
The whole, long libertarian/classical-liberal critique of government power and its potential for abuse is certainly valueable. But a lack of government is also open to all kinds of abuse, and a world in which you can drop out of a polity any time you want (or declare all its laws invalid because you didn’t agree to them) is basically a world without any government.
Comment by Scott —
December 28, 2007 @ 8:43 am
Govt debt is debt politicians run up in my name, not my debt. I’m all for Washington DC itself owing trillions while surrounded by 50 debt-free republics.
Comment by Doug M. —
December 28, 2007 @ 10:23 am
Jim, you know I love you. But “emancipation by 1885, and by 1890 blacks would be about as well off as otherwise”… ow. I’m sorry, but that is just some wince-inducing historical ignorance there.
It’s not just wrong, it’s way bad wrong.
I could go into exactly why, but 80+ comments down a dead thread may not be the venue. Happy to take it up at your convenience, though.
Doug M.
Comment by frankdawg81 —
December 28, 2007 @ 6:18 pm
As has been stated several times the South did indeed attack the North to start the hot war. But missed in all the back-n-forth is what the continent would have looked like through the rest of the 19th century. There would have been constant battles of armies across the West and raids that made ‘Bloody Kansas’ appear mild. It would have been decades before an end came and the potential for 600k dead is easy along with several generations of resentment and vendetta.
Also missed was that the South sponsored repeated incursions into Cuba and Latin America before 1860 with the goal of annexing them as slave states. There is no reason to believe this would have ended (particularly is the SOuth lost battles in the West). Spain had already indicated that further military action in Cuba would be met with invasion. Perhaps it was a bluff but maybe not. Worse would be if they had succeeded in one of those countries and expanded slavery there for even longer.
I also don’t believe that Europe would have boycotted slave cotton. They bought what they could during the war & would have been a steady source of funds to slave owners while pretending not to notice the slaves.
I do agree with you that property given to the ex-slaves would have helped ease their transition but the history of violence against black communities. Particularly in the early 20th century with entire towns burned to the grown & hundreds if not thousands killed during the period argues that the land might not have made things better after all.
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
December 28, 2007 @ 6:43 pm
“But missed in all the back-n-forth is what the continent would have looked like through the rest of the 19th century. There would have been constant battles of armies across the West and raids that made ‘Bloody Kansas’ appear mild.”
You are not reading the comments. Jim Henley already made the same point.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
December 28, 2007 @ 9:04 pm
Another angle…
If I voted next year and was sufficiently horrified by the winner, the next day I could get on a plane, leave the country, and never come back. Should I be stopped from doing so?
Slavery and the Civil War aside, it strikes me that the particular arguments raised in this thread against allowing states or regions to secede apply identically to the issue of allowing people to emigrate – or at least don’t make a distinction. My scenario above is a terribly unilateral one, after all, and I’m explicitly opting out of the polity because I don’t like the results of an election I was part of.
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
December 29, 2007 @ 4:18 am
“If I voted next year and was sufficiently horrified by the winner, the next day I could get on a plane, leave the country, and never come back. Should I be stopped from doing so?”
Can the state ask you to pay a small deposit upon leaving? You get the deposit when you come back to the country. This has never been tried (as far as I know) because it is a silly idea, but on a wholly theoretical level, does it go against the classical liberal tradition? Does it violate your rights (any more so than any other tax)?
Comment by stonetools —
December 29, 2007 @ 12:40 pm
Counterfactual, cont’d:
The North grudgingly allows the South to secede in 1861 , despite calls for impeachment of Lincoln.
In 1862, the citizens of west Virginia, east Tennessee, and west Texas decide they want to secede from the confederacy and rejoin the Union. The South, having outlawed secession in its own constitution, forbids such secession and sends troops into these seceding areas to put down this “Rebellion”. The Northsends troops into those areas to defend the rights of the ‘Re-unionists”. Civil war breaks out in 1862, rather than 1861.
I think the probability is that there would have been a war between North and South in the 19th Century no matter what. Harry Turtledove’s history sees three major conflicts breaking out in an 80 year period.
FWIW, Lincoln wanted a gradual end to Slavery, including a compensation scheme and the return of the freed slaves black to Africa. Under Lincoln’s scheme, slavery would have lasted in the South for decades longer. But that compromise wasn’t good enough for the secessionists, who wanted slavery guaranteed everywhere and forever. Most Northerners didn’t want that, and didn’t want to be in the business of enforcing Southerner’s rights to own other human beings. for the most part, northern whites didn’t even like black people. But they didn’t want to be forced to help enslave them. The Southerners insisted that they had to and if not, then the Southerners would leave the Union. And so war came.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
December 29, 2007 @ 7:03 pm
…What does that have to do with my questions?
Or is this a “yeah, sorta” answer to the questions?
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
December 30, 2007 @ 12:01 am
If the answer to my question is “yes” then the answer to your question must be “no”. If the state can ask you to pay a small fee, then we are not talking about a right to leave for another country, we’re talking about something that government has given its permission to.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
December 31, 2007 @ 3:00 am
Lawrence, you’ve lost me in my-question, your-question. Next time, maybe start with an answer to a question.
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
January 1, 2008 @ 12:08 am
If you have a right to leave a country, then the government can’t insist that you pay a fee. It’s your right – the government can’t say “It’s only your right if you pay us $50.” It’s the same argument against the poll tax – if you have a right to vote then a poll tax is immoral.
You wrote:
“If I voted next year and was sufficiently horrified by the winner, the next day I could get on a plane, leave the country, and never come back. Should I be stopped from doing so?”
So do you feel the government can ask you to put down a $50 deposit toward coming back? If the answer is “Yes” then leaving is not a right. Do you feel such a fee would violate your rights?
Again, no government, to my knowledge, has ever done this, because doing this would be silly. It’s a hypothetical question, meant to test the limits of the “I can leave whenever I want” argument.
Comment by Mark —
January 4, 2008 @ 1:45 am
“It could have offered to buy slaves from individual “foreign†(Southron) slaveowners, while tendering Reunion offers diplomatically. The Confederacy would have had to decide whether to try to launch an offensive war against a superior industrial power or adjust to an ever less viable institution. The probable end result was many fewer than, as crazy old Ron Paul reminds us, 600,000 dead, none of that Lost Cause nonsense bedeviling the transition to post-slavery America, and the near certitude that American chattel slavery as such would end within the generation that saw 1865.”
So, how many “probably fewer” dead would there have to be for it to make it worth it?
Seriously, spouting this ignorant rhetoric makes you look like an idiot.