Yes, slavery was on its way out, but as I pointed out and you ignored, southerners did not believe it and were planning to forcibly extend the institution both in time and space. Who knows how successful they might have been?
I agree other countries abolished slavery with minimal violence. You seem to think any violence that was involved in our case is obviously by definition the fault of the winners. Why does the South, the only large body of people on the planet willing to fight and die to preserve and extend slavery bear no responsibility for deciding to do so? Takes two to tangle and all that.
Had southern slaveowners been willing to follow the laws as Brazilian slaveowners were, there would have been no war.
In actual fact, when you get into the numbers, the USA faced a situation with number of slaves, their financial value, number of slaveowners and their concentration and ability to form a political force that does not begin to compare with any other country. In all likelihood other countries' slaveowners would have been willing to fight to protect their property and position, but it just wasn't a practical possibility for them to do so.
Southerners were planning warlike expansion to the south and west had they secured their independence. They would have failed, of course. A united United States would have found conquest of Latin America to re-impose slavery difficult. A CSA faced with virulent British opposition and a hostile USA at its rear had no chance of doing so successfully. Any such expansion would have had to be primarily naval in nature, and the RN ruled the waves and had complete veto power on the water.
That popular southern leaders didn't recognize this fact is just another example of their delusions.
Actually I disagree that Southerners did not believe that slavery was coming to an end.
Here’s a book I recommend :
Dwyer, John J., The War Between the States: America’s Uncivil War. Texas: Bluebonnet Press, 2005
If you read the history of the American Civil War by John J. Dwyer, THERE WERE 4 TIMES ( yes, 4 times ) MORE Anti-slavery societies in existence in the South than in the North.
The two generals who fought for the South... Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee both called slavery a “moral and political evil”.
Dwyer himself quotes a few large slave owners who were seriously considering divesting themselves of their slaves through selling them because of the trouble of keeping them and the difficulty it was causing in their relationships with their Northern neighbors. Were there stubborn holdouts? Of course.... but then why believe that it would not slowly die because of outside pressure and because of the increasing UNPOPULARITY of slaverym YES, EVEN IN THE SOUTH?
Look at it this way:
If, in April 1861, it could have been known that the civil war would drag on for 4 years and result in 620,000 persons dead (1 in 50 Americans, and thousands more maimed for life, INCLUDING BLACKS), huge swaths of the country decimated (especially after Sherman’s March to the Sea), a President assassinated, and decades of military occupation of the South during reconstruction... if that could have been known, it is difficult to say that the fight was worth the staggering cost.
And yes I DO DISAGREE WITH YOU REGARDING THE ECONOMICS OF SLAVERY. Economically slavery was rapidly becoming simply not viable. We had already banned the importation of new slaves (though the internal trade was self-sustaining), and the problem could have been resolved legislatively within one generation or a little beyond.
In 1860 dollars the war cost in excess of 6 billion.
By 1860 there were apx. 4 million slaves in America. The average market price for a slave in 1860 was about $1500.
It would have been cheaper, and saved 620,000 lives, to have simply bought every slave and released him or her. AND YES, WE COULD HAVE DONE IT SLOWLY EVEN IF THERE WERE SOME STUBBORN HOLDOUTS.
When the facts are considered the Civil War becomes very difficult to justify. Legislatively a compromise could have been reached to ban all newborn slave children from being slaves, and to release all current slaves from bondage after X number of years, and in turn some financial payment made to the owners for loss of value.
The opportunity of returning to Liberia was rather popular, and would have eased the social tensions from so many new persons entering the work force. That, combined with the opening of the West, would have further reduced social tension from the event.
The war was unneccessary.
President Lincoln himself said that his “paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or destroy slavery” (John Dwyer, pg. 87). The President continued to say that if reuniting the Union meant freeing all, some, or none of the slaves, he would do it. Although the South was wrong in the slavery issue, that was not what the war was fought over. The war “was at root a debate over geographical equality and superiority in the Union… the slavery debate masked the real issue – the struggle for power and dominion”.
IF SLAVERY COULD BE ABOLISHED WITHOUT KILLING EACH OTHER IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD (in fact ALL OTHER COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD), I SEE NO REASON WHY IT COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED IN THE UNITED STATES.