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RE: Of course, the war would not have occurred had the Union just rolled over on its back, as far too many jingoist southerners (believing their own propaganda) thought it would.

Let’s just say the Union did leave the South alone and did not prevent them from seceding, what then ?

You wan tme to believe that slavery would not have ended?

You want me to believe that the South would attack the North?

I don’t believe those for a moment.

The term Civil War is a misnomer. The South did not instigate a rebellion. Thirteen southern states in 1860-61 simply chose to secede from the Union and go their own way, like the thirteen colonies did when they seceded from Britain.

A more accurate name for the war that took place between the northern and southern American states is the War for Southern Independence. Mainstream historiography presents the victors’ view, an account that focuses on the issue of slavery and downplays other considerations.

Up until the 19th century slavery in human societies was considered to be a normal state of affairs. The Old Testament of the Bible affirms that slaves are a form of property and that the children of a slave couple are the property of the slaves’ owner (Exodus 21:4).

Slaves built the pyramids of Egypt, the Acropolis of Athens, and the coliseums in the Roman Empire. Africans exported 11,000,000 Black slaves to the New World – 4,000,000 to Brazil, 3,600,000 to the British and French West Indies, and 2,500,000 to Spanish possessions in Central and South America. About 500,000 slaves, 5 per cent of the total number shipped to the New World, came to America. Today slavery still exists in some parts of Africa, notably in Sudan and Mauritania ( Horrible I know, but such is the state of the world ).

Britain heralded the end of slavery, in the Western world at least, with its Bill of Abolition, passed in 1807. This Bill made the African slave trade (but not slaveholding) illegal.

Later that year the United States adopted a similar bill, called the Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves, which prohibited bringing slaves into any port in the country, including into the southern slaveholding states. Congress strengthened this prohibition in 1819 when it decreed the slave trade to be a form of piracy, punishable by death. In 1833, Britain enacted an Emancipation Law, ending slavery throughout the British Empire, and Parliament allocated twenty million pounds to buy slaves’ freedom from their owners.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer rightly described this action as one of the greatest acts of collective compassion in the history of humankind. This happened peacefully and without any serious slave uprisings or attacks on their former owners, even in Jamaica where a population of 30,000 whites owned 250,000 slaves.

The Constitution of the Confederate States of America prohibited the importation of slaves (Article I, Section 9).

With no fugitive slave laws in neighboring states that would return fugitive slaves to their owners, the value of slaves as property drops owing to increased costs incurred to guard against their escape. With slaves having a place to escape to in the North and with the supply of new slaves restricted by its Constitution, slavery in the Confederate states would have ended without war. A slave’s decreasing property value, alone, would have soon made the institution unsustainable, irrespective of more moral and humanitarian considerations.

The rallying call in the North at the beginning of the war was “preserve the Union,” not “free the slaves.” Although certainly a contentious political issue and detested by abolitionists, in 1861 slavery nevertheless was not a major public issue. Protestant Americans in the North were more concerned about the growing number of Catholic immigrants than they were about slavery.

In his First Inaugural Address, given five weeks before the war began, Lincoln reassured slaveholders that he would continue to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.

So, Did saving the Union justify the slaughter of such a large number of young men? The Confederates posed no military threat to the North.

If freedom of the slaves was to be accomplioshed, I would submit that would be better to let the southern states go, along with their slaves.

Eventually, like the rest of the western world and South America, slavery would have died a natural death. And this would have happened without killing 620,000 men.

Let’s just say the Union did leave the South alone and did not prevent them from seceding, what then ?

Let me point out that the Union did leave the South alone until the confederacy resorted to war to seize control of a fort that did not belong to it.

The term Civil War is a misnomer. The South did not instigate a rebellion.

Rebellion is defined as open, armed, and usually unsuccessful defiance of or opposition to an established government. That is an accurate description of the Southern actions.

Thirteen southern states in 1860-61 simply chose to secede from the Union and go their own way, like the thirteen colonies did when they seceded from Britain.

Let me point out that that 'secession' of the colonies from Britain was followed by a seven year period of unpleasantness known as "The American Revolutionary War".

The Constitution of the Confederate States of America prohibited the importation of slaves (Article I, Section 9).

Oh please. Article 3 of the confederate constitution mandated a supreme court that was never established. Nowhere in the constitution does it grant the president the power to end slavery but that didn't stop Jefferson Davis from sending emissaries to Europe promising that in exchange for diplomatic recognition. The idea that the confederacy would have let something as meaningless to them as the constitution stand in the way of their slaves is sheer nonsense.

Or would it have led to an increase in their value since supply would drop but demand would remain. And that's assuming the South didn't look elsewhere to replenish its supply.

So, Did saving the Union justify the slaughter of such a large number of young men? The Confederates posed no military threat to the North.

The confederacy was the aggressor in the war. The Union fought the war that was forced upon them.

If freedom of the slaves was to be accomplioshed, I would submit that would be better to let the southern states go, along with their slaves.

As you yourself pointed out, ending slavery was not a goal of the Union. Preserving the Union was.

Excellent post. You do a much better job of presenting your side than some of the foam-flecked screamers around here.

What your argument comes down to, in the final analysis, is that “states’ rights” are more important than the rights of individual human beings. That States, if those presently in control of them so decide, have the right to commit the greatest possible tyrannies upon those subject to their control. That is not what I consider a true American conservative position.

I think any reasonable person who looks at the situation with an open mind will agree that if war had not come at Ft. Sumter, it would have come eventually. As Lincoln said, it was not possible for us to separate. A couple divorces and they can move away. The states are stuck here on the same continent. The idea that separation could have been peaceful in the long run is based on the somewhat silly notion that the states would have been able to work out their differences more equitably as two separate nations than as part of one common nation.

Fairly obvious potential causes of conflict include: borders, fugitive slaves, attempts of the CSA to expand forcibly into Latin America (an explicit goal among many of the fire-eaters), western expansion, etc. Let’s take just the last. Southerners claimed the cause of the conflict was attempts to restrict movement by slaveowners into the territories. Would they suddenly accept total cutoff because it’s now part of a separate country? Or would they demand a chunk of the territories?

BTW, 13 states did not secede. 11 did. Factions in two others, MO and KY, attempted to do so, but their attempts were unsuccessful.

I am indebted to one of the foam-flecked screamers I mentioned above for the best single definition of WHY the South wanted out. Although not the way he meant it.

The quote is from Louis T. Wigfall, one of the more unbalanced of the fire-eaters (which is quite a distinction in itself):

“Let my neighbor believe that his wife is an angel and his children cherubs, I care not, though I may know he is mistaken; but when he comes impertinently poking his nose into my door every morning, and telling me that my wife is a shrew and my children brats, then the neighborhood becomes uncomfortable, and if I cannot remove him, I will remove myself; and if he says to me, “you shall not move, but you shall stay here, and you shall, day after day, hear the demerits of your wife and children discussed,” then I begin to feel a little restive, and possibly might assert that great original right of pursuing whatever may conduce to my happiness, though it might be kicking him out of my door.”

IOW, southerners, not unreasonably, became tired of being told their system was based on an evil institution, and wanted to get away from those repeatedly saying so. The problem is that their way of life WAS based on an evil institution, and they were willing to risk and wage war simply to try to avoid looking squarely at this great truth. Actually, I refer not to all southerners, but rather to those who promoted and blew up the sense of grievance until it exploded. The fire-eaters, like Wigfall.

Eventually, like the rest of the western world and South America, slavery would have died a natural death. And this would have happened without killing 620,000 men.

I'd like to believe that, but witness if you will, just in the last 10-15 years, the vast inroads made by bond labor yoked to mercantilistic policies, in South Asia and China, into the manufacturing industries of the world and the accompanying gradual weakening of our whole economy and society.

In one form or another, there is no economic force so much like catnip as bond labor that can be paid at will, or not, according to whatever pay scale the slavedriver wishes to set.

The progressive conversion of Italian, Sicilian, and North African freehold farming to factory-farming with its slave labor and economies of scale turned those farmlands into olive-orchards, vineyards, and marshland, and relocated the breadbasket of the entire Mediterranean to Egypt, in good time to be snatched away by the arrival of the conquering Arabs.