The Confederate government was aiming at detaching as much (slave) territory from the union as it could and dividing the rest of the country as much as possible. If there'd been a serious effort to sit down in Congress and hash out a separation agreement before any state took unilateral action perhaps the country could have been peacefully divided, but in the hurried and panicked circumstances of the time that wasn't going to happen. If you couldn't guarantee whether the capital city would be in the same country from one day to the next , you weren't going to get a peaceful separation.
What has become evident to me, is that the North did not have to fight a war, causing 600,000 deaths and the ruination of the South for a century thereafter, solely because of an attack on one fort.
They didn't start the war. Why attack the fort in the first place? What was Davis aiming at? Did he expect the union would just crumble and let him have everything he wanted? Did he expect to best the United States on the battlefield? Or was he as caught up in the rush of events as everyone else and trying to maintain his position at the front of the wave? One thing we've learned from history is, don't push the US around. We stand up for ourselves -- and we should. What made Davis think we wouldn't?
We have already established that this was a time when passions were at a fever pitch. Economic systems, like the slavery fueled South were not going to change overnight. My previous post described how the period from 1820 to 1860 was fraught with challenges, with new states coming into the Union,and whether they would be allowed to have slavery or not.
The Constitution had already established that there could no more importation of slaves after 1808. That was a 20 year concession made at the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787.
Slavery could not be ended overnight, or in one fell swoop.Nor, did the North desire it to be so. After all, the North did not want to have black people migrate northward. Plus the Federal government got the majority of its operating revenue from the South’s agricultural exports.Those taxes were the major source of government funding before there were corporate and personal income taxes, which would not happen for another 50 years(excluding the Civil War income tax, which was short lived, in the North).
Abraham Lincoln did not really care about the slaves, only about what the solution might be to what everyone realized would be a huge dislocation in the fabric of the nation and how it would operate going forward, should the institution of slavery be abolished. He was an early supporter of the nation of Liberia, to export blacks back to Africa. When he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, it was not for slaves in the North, or in the border states, nor was it even for all of Louisiana. And until the 13th Amendment, it was not even legal for him to do so.
The states in the South saw an overreaching and interfering Federal government and reasoned they should be able to leave the Union the same way they came into it. After all, the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence expresses that very thought.
Now as far as Jeff Davis goes, it appears that before the start of the Civil War, there attempts to peacefully negotiate the separation of the Confederacy from the Union, including the payment for Federally owned facilities. Lincoln did refuse that offer, which was made directly by Davis, a former US Senator from Mississippi.
Davis did not what Beauregard to fire upon Sumter, but only agreed when Lincoln moved to resupply the fort against the express wishes of the Confederacy for him not to do so.
Some can argue that was like lighting a fuse in a bomb factory. The result is a known quantity for that action.
When it is said not to push the US around, it can argued that the folks in the South WERE the US, just as much as those in the North.
And of course, war was extremely profitable to those engaged in the supply of weaponry and supplies, on both sides. So there were less than idealistic reasons for some to beat the drums in 1861.
As far as the military defeat of slavery, the ultimate defeat of slavery would have come with mechanization of the agricultural processes starting in the mid 1870s. The economics of the situation would have settled the issue with far less bloodshed than a war. And face it, was slavery really “ended” in 1865? We had apartheid in the South for 100 years after the Civil War, and the Northern powers did not give a whit for the rights of the black man until Lyndon Johnson came along and saw political power to be gained by it.
As for Thomas Jefferson, when he died in 1826, he was found to be in tremendous debt. He did not release his slaves becasue they had nowhere to go. They liked being at Monticello. When Jefferson’s heir released them, they refused to leave as Monticello was their home. They wanted to stay and work the land. That was a microcosm of what faced slaves— the fear of the unknown, and a society that could not and would not be structured to assimilate them.
The North gave a wink and a nod to the South’s Jim Crow laws, the Ku Klux Klan, and a two tiered economic system that stripped the black man of any economic power.
The victor writes the history, and history tells us that Lincoln was a saint. He was a decent fellow, but how was keeping States that already expressed a desire to part, worth a four year war that killed 600,000 men out of a population of 30 million a reasonable trade, for the hundred years that followed?
That is what troubles me. The human cost, then, and since then, was more than man could imagine. So how was it the right course?
That is still a valid question, and one which still animates us today, obviously.
Thank you for sharing your perspectives.
Arrogance.