Was the Civil War “worth it”?

So let’s talk about the Civil War.

The simple explanation of the war is that “it was about slavery” but it is certainly not as simple as that.  The South seceded in part because they feared that the North would ultimately take away their ability to own slaves, but that doesn’t explain why they chose to do so at the particular time that they did, and there were Southerners who genuinely believed they were fighting for independence and (yes, ironically) self-determination.  And the decisions of Southerners, both their leaders and the common people, would have likely been different had they not been convinced, to start with anyway, that their cause would succeed.

On the part of the North, Lincoln was most definitely resolved to “preserve the Union,” not to abolish slavery, though I imagine many of the common folk did perceive the cause as anti-slavery, or, at any rate, were more determined to win the day because the South, being slave-holding, was alien to them.  But plenty were conscripts who fought because they had to.

Could the war have been avoided?  What if Lincoln had not been elected, but instead someone squishier on the subject?  What if the outgoing government had offered the right combination of carrots and sticks to get the southern states to rescind their declarations of secession?

From the vantage point of 2017, there’s a certain simple response, for instance, in this morning’s Dahleen Glanton column in the Tribune:

In the Civil War, one side had to step aside before America could move forward. There was no room for compromise. The ideals of the two sides were so mismatched, their views of right and wrong too diabolically opposed and their visions for America too different. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

It’s a point of view that says that war was inevitable, since only with war and total vanquishment of slaveholders could slavery have been ended, and the North had the obligation to end slavery in the South.  In fact, it seems to me there was a cable movie that claimed to be presenting (in a comedic fashion) an alternative history in which the South had won the Civil War and slavery continued unabated to this day.

Now, I don’t know that there’s much value in speculating on questions like, “how long would slavery have continued?” — but bear in mind that Brazil, in 1888, was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to have banned slavery.  How much longer would the U.S. have continued, on its own?

But I think there is a more worthwhile discussion on the question:  what was the right thing to have done?  Imagine that there was no established expectation that the U.S. must always stay in its present form — after all, if I remember correctly, de Toqueville not long before proclaimed that federalism and the individual rights of the states, were so strong that any state could indeed secede without complaint.  Would it have been just, a “just war” (in your own peception, not following the “official rules” on such things), for the Union to fight the Confederacy with the explicit intention of ending slavery?

What if the South had never seceded?  At what point, if at all, would abolitionists have been justified in using force to end slavery?  And is the answer different in the case of an abolitionist gaining power and using military force, vs. guerrilla actions?  Or would it have been better for the federal government, or voluntary organizations, to buy the slaves’ freedom, perhaps with laws requiring that slaveowners sell at market price?  Or should abolitionists have been content with working to “change hearts and minds,” as they say, indefinitely as long as the South didn’t push for expansion on their part?

Image:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ACivil_war_reenactment_1.jpg; By Daniel Schwen (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons