{"id":7633,"date":"2017-11-09T08:28:20","date_gmt":"2017-11-09T14:28:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=7633"},"modified":"2017-11-08T07:56:19","modified_gmt":"2017-11-08T13:56:19","slug":"a-civil-war-what-if","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2017\/11\/a-civil-war-what-if.html","title":{"rendered":"A Civil War what-if"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3ACivil_war_reenactment_1.jpg;<\/p>\n

You\u2019re likely seen variations on the \u201cwhat if the South won?\u201d theme before.\u00a0 There are various novels with this premise, for instance.<\/p>\n

But what if the war had never been fought?\u00a0 What if the South had been content to preserve, rather than trying to expand slavery?<\/p>\n

Two articles came across my twitter feed in the wake of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly\u2019s statement<\/a> that it was a \u201clack of an ability to compromise\u201d that led to the Civil War.<\/p>\n

The first, by Francis Barry at Bloomberg View, \u201cKelly Was Half-Right About the Civil War<\/a>,\u201d provides some background on the Democratic party convention of 1860.\u00a0 Barry writes,<\/p>\n

In 1860, the Democratic Party arrived at its national convention in Charleston, South Carolina, deeply divided. Northerners chose Charleston as the convention site in hopes of promoting party unity. Once there, they proposed a platform meant to appease Southerners.<\/p>\n

The Northerners\u2019 platform condemned interference by states with the enforcement of the fugitive slave law, a rebuke to their own home states. It affirmed the party would \u201cabide\u201d by the 1857 Dred Scott decision (which barred the federal government from regulating slavery in the territories), even though that decision was deeply unpopular in the North. And it included the annexation of Cuba (which allowed slavery), a Southern priority.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t enough. Southern delegates demanded an explicit endorsement of the principles underpinning the Dred Scott ruling; a federal slave code guaranteeing the property rights of slave owners and severely restricting those of slaves; and the protection of slavery on the high seas, a first step toward overturning the federal prohibition on the international slave trade. They drafted their own platform incorporating these positions \u2014 and refused to budge.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a consequence of these uncompromising extremist demands, the party fractured, and the upstart Republican Party was able to win the election, setting the chain of events that produced the Civil War.<\/p>\n

In the second, \u201cShelby Foote\u2019s Civil War History Defends America Against Insatiable Haters Like Ta-Nehisi Coates<\/a>,\u201d Federalist writer John Daniel Davidson says,<\/p>\n

Even someone with a cursory knowledge of the Civil War should know that the war came about, as all wars do, because of a failure to compromise.<\/p>\n

In our case, the entire history of the United States prior to outbreak of war in 1861 was full of compromises on the question of slavery. It began with the Three-Fifths Compromise written into the U.S. Constitution and was followed by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which prohibited slavery north of the 36\u00b030\u2019 parallel, excluding Missouri), the Compromise of 1850, then the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and eventually led to the election of Abraham Lincoln and the subsequent secession of the southern states. Through all this, we inched toward emancipation, albeit slowly.<\/p>\n

In other words, the breakdown of all those decades of compromise did indeed lead to the Civil War.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why, then, was Kelly subject to such criticism?\u00a0 Because, Davidson writes,<\/p>\n

for writers like [Jonathan] Chait and The Atlantic\u2019s Ta-Nehisi Coates, compromise was a bad thing because it preserved slavery. That such compromises limited slavery\u2019s spread and put it on the path to extinction carries no weight with them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A while back, I asked, \u201cWas the Civil War worth it?<\/a>\u201d in which I asked whether, in the abstract, it was the right thing for one group of people to go to war against another in order to end slavery \u2014 and that, not a new enslavement of a conquered group of people, but a pre-existing system \u2014 or, more specifically, to go to war to end slavery sooner than it might otherwise have ended.\u00a0 It was clumsily worded, and, before digging up that post, I thought I had said something along the lines of \u201cgiven that slavery likely would have ended in the next couple decades anyway, were the 600,000 lives lost worth it, in order to bring about its end sooner than otherwise?\u201d but it seems I wasn\u2019t that direct.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s striking to me that we, as a country, seem to have no ability to imagine that slavery might have ended in any other way than with military might.\u00a0 To be sure, in terms of the genre of alternate history, I can understand that writing about slavery disappearing by some sort of phase-out, or by economic changes, or abolitionism taking hold, or the boycott of slaveowning plantations, or the purchase of slaves to free them, or whatever means, would be much more boring than writing novels in which slavery exists alongside the industrialism of present-day America.\u00a0 But it stretches beyond that.<\/p>\n

It seems to me that, fundamentally, the act of slaveowning is so fundamentally evil and so fundamentally foreign to us that we (that is, Americans as a whole) are simply unable to comprehend its ending in some peaceful manner.\u00a0 Perhaps intellectually we can understand that all manner of other slaveowning countries ended slavery without fighting a war, but deep down, it\u2019s such a great evil that it\u2019s hard to really believe that any other alternative would have ever been possible.<\/p>\n

Back in March, at Spring Break time, we took a trip down to St. Louis, to see the sights and visit with an aunt and uncle.\u00a0 The Old Courthouse downtown had a display about Dred Scott and the case, and there was a bit of information about the Scott family that I hadn\u2019t know, and that never shows up in the summaries online (probably worth seeing if there\u2019s a book the library that hasn\u2019t been deaccessioned).\u00a0 It seems, if I understood it then and remember it now correctly, that St. Louis didn\u2019t have much use for slaves, what with the high number of immigrants, and the Scotts\u2019 owners weren\u2019t farmers who could put them to work in the fields.\u00a0 So they hired the Scotts out \u2014 but not in the sense of finding somewhere where they would be unpaid servants, and pay the owners for the use of the slaves.\u00a0 Instead, the Scotts basically had to find jobs with which to support themselves, and a house to live in, and pay some sort of monthly sum to their owner, almost like an income tax, or, going further back in time, like the mutation of slavery into serfdom in the Early Middle Ages.\u00a0 It was quite striking that this sort of odd form of slavery existed, and was a small indicator to me that the whole story was more complicated than I\u2019d known.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Image:\u00a0\u00a0https:\/\/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<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You\u2019re likely seen variations on the \u201cwhat if the South won?\u201d theme before.\u00a0 There are various novels with this premise, for instance. But what if the war had never been fought?\u00a0 What if the South had been content to preserve, rather than trying to expand slavery? Two articles came across my twitter feed in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":6492,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[619,777],"class_list":["post-7633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-civil-war","tag-slavery"],"yoast_head":"\nA Civil War what-if<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"You're likely seen variations on the "what if the South won?" theme before.\u00a0 There are various novels with this premise, for instance. 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