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.
There was no reason it could not have happened in the USA. Except that the group in power in the South insisted not only on the preservation of slavery, but also on its expansion.
There is some evidence that a plot was underway for the Supreme Court to declare slaveowners had the constitutional right to take their slaves not only into the territories, but also into any state. This would essentiallly have made all states slave states.
Those with this point of view in the south were the leading proponents of secession. Their POV had been gaining power for decades. As I’ve said in earlier posts, by 1860 the political elite in the Soouth saw slavery as a positive good, not as an evil to get rid of in the least disruptive way.
You can believe anything you wish, but my opinion is based on decades of studying the prewar and war periods, including a great many original sources.
I agree with you the war need not have happened. We just disaqree on who the responsible parties were for creating and environment in which the war became inevitable. I believe it is the southern fire-eaters. You believe in some nebulous conspiracy of northerners.
I happen to think the facts are on my side. You are welcome to continue believing otherwise.
BTW, every single one of the gradual and compensated emancipation plans you mention were rejected by slaveowners whenever they were proposed.
Jefferson stated very clearly that the slaveowner, due to the conditions in which he grew up and lived his life, was peculiarly susceptible to arrogance and hubris. I suspect this attitude, clearly seen in many though not all southern pols before the war, especially pretty much all the fire-eaters, was a major contributor to making war inevitable. They started believing they could push everybody around, just as they had always domineered over their slaves.
Didn’t work out that way.