I guess I’m in the minority being supportive of Sumner getting walloped. I think personally I’d have preferred to administer a more publicly humilating back-handed bitchslap. To bad he had to sacrifice a perfectly nice gutta-percha cane, though (but lots of people mailed him new canes, a lot of folks were quite happy to see this loudmouth demogogue get what was coming).
We were thinking of the same thing with the Dick Gregory quote, I’ve referenced it many times. ;-)
Ultimately, you’re probably right on the war being inevitable, but had I been an elected official at the time, would’ve tried to find every possible solution to averting war (even if it meant the feds buying up slaves from the South in exchange for a phase-out of slavery, and relocating them to the Plains states (such as Kansas) and granting them property). Without going into a protracted discussion here, in a lot of ways, Blacks were worse off in the South after the Civil War then before (up until prior to the 1960s). At least as slavery was an institution, it legally required the owners to care and provide for them (so much as that was), but afterwards, freed slaves were owed nothing, and if they could not be subjugated, they were to be run out or exterminated.
The North pretty much exposed itself when they were not willing to go to the mat for Black Civil Rights in the Reconstruction period, reaching the point of just letting bygones be bygones, and left Blacks to twist in the wind. I can’t even imagine were I Black in that period what I would’ve felt. To have a brief taste of de facto equality, only to have it violently taken away by the people I was liberated from, and to have my so-called liberators shrug their shoulders and look away. It makes one wonder why the Civil War was fought at all, as hardly anything changed aside from removing the institution itself, only to be replaced with another injustice of second (or third) class status, where you had even less protections as a free man (or rather, the protections were only guaranteed on paper from a gov’t that wouldn’t enforce them, less than worthless). Shameful.
Now, I know you really haven't thought this out cause you are way too bright for this: "even if it meant the feds buying up slaves from the South in exchange for a phase-out of slavery, and relocating them to the Plains states (such as Kansas) and granting them property"
What happens to the price of scarce goods? Without slave importation, each new emancipation would have driving up the price of the next slave, theoretically to the point that the government couldn't POSSIBLY have freed slaves as they neared the theoretical end point of zero, because each succeeding slaveowner would have started to say, "Well, if they are paying x for Bill's slaves, I'll charge y." The only answer was force.