Replies

The prosecution of a horrendous war that was the worst war in U.S. history is for me an immoral act perpetrated by Mr.Lincoln and his uncompromising attitude that the union had to be preserved at all cost.

In you mind, should the South have compromised on their insistence to expand slavery any where they chose, or did only Lincoln have the obligation to surrender to their demands.

Looking forward the failure to prosecute the war would have resulted in two separate nations on this land. Not a bad compromise given the carnage, death and destruction that so many suffered.

Pure conjecture. What is not conjecture is that separation would not have ended disagreements and disputes, over slaves, territory or trade. Lets conger this? How much additional carnage would have resulted if the shooting had been delayed another 10, 20, or 50 years until such a time when machine guns and poison gas would have been available to both sides? The Somme or Stalingrad could well have been in Virginia or Pennsylvania instead of Europe.

In my reading of history and trying to walk in the shoes of them men on both sides who lived that history, there is only one way at one individual point in time that the Civil War could have been avoided. That was at the Continental Convention in 1787. There were a strong plurality of delegates from both Northern and Southern states, who were willing to put slavery in the entire nation to an end via gradual emancipation as several of the Northern states had already done at that point. Not an abrupt end, but a reasonable phase out period. The overwhelming sentiment was also to immediately ban further importation of slaves because even those who saw slavery as ok, saw the slave trade as completely barbaric. The majority would have likely gone along with both ideas because even slave holders such as Washington and Madison saw the basic hypocrisy of fighting for such concepts as liberty and human rights while they lived in an economic system that denied even the most basic rights to a million others.

Those discussions were halted in their tracks when both the Georgia and South Carolina delegations announced they were completely unacceptable. The best they could come up with was a 20 year time limit on the importation of slaves after which it was forbidden.

Here's where the test was. Could a majority of the delegates have ignored the objections of those two small states even if it meant they would have refused to ratify the Constitution and gone their own way? The Union surly could have prospered just as well with 11 members instead of 13. In 20 or 30 years slavery would have ceased to exist as opposed to rising in that same time period as the driving force in sectionalism.

Just my thoughts. The opportunity was lost in Philadelphia in 1787. The fuse was lit then and nothing Lincoln, Davis or any other mortal could have done could have stopped the bomb from exploding.