I’m not “suggesting” that the southern states were “willing to give up slave ownership”....it’s a fact.
Look, no offense intended, but it’s not my place to write a treatise on slavery and the Civil War here in a post on FR. I will respectfully suggest you forget the drivel you were fed in public school and actually research it.
Slavery was dying in the South; that is a fact. The war was fought over States’ right, end of story. Here in the South, the average Southerner knows FAR more about the war than the average northerner....for many reasons. Long memories down here. They don’t call it “The War of Northern Oppression” for nothing.
The South still needed slaves to drive its economy, big time. But 2 decades time would have seen automation and immigration make slavery obsolete.
I have long felt that the smartest thing the South should have done was declare all slaves freed. They would have fled to the north, where northern racism would have shut them out of all northern social life. While a few of the slaves would have found work in the north, they were unwanted as freed men in the north, and the vast majority of them would soon have found themselves back working the same plantations for slave’s wages.
The only other option would have been that blacks would have been limited by practice, not law, to only the worst and least popular of jobs in the north, Irish, Italian and Chinese immigrants would have found themselves working the Southern plantations for slave’s wages.
The South was noble in their zeal for free autonomous government, and they equated their own effort to the Revolutionary War of just 2 generations earlier (wasn’t Light Horse Harry Lee, Robert E. Lee’s father?). So many, many Southroner felt they were fighting a noble fight against tyranny, every bit the equal to the founders fighting King George.
That said, they were stupid politically. They made a bold move they knew the North would have to respond to, when all they had to do was free the slaves and hire them back at minimal wages. This would have completely disarmed the motivation of Northerners against the south.
I agree that the power of State’s Rights has never been the same since the Constitutional abuses of power by Lincoln during the Civil War.