I think massive casualties would have shortened that time frame with a rational leader.
You constantly ignore the fact that it was the Confederacy who chose to start the conflict.
No, I do not. In fact I have pointed out to others arguing on the same side as I, that the attack on Ft. Sumter was what cost them Independence. They shouldn't have done it.
Now I will point out to you that nobody was killed in the attack, and the response to it was excessive and disproportionate.
Since slavery was not the reason why the North was fighting then no.
Oh, we have another admission that the North wasn't fighting to end slavery. Good. So what was the North fighting for?
Slavery died as a result of the war, though it was not the primary goal of the Union's fight. But it was dead; the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment saw to that.
And yet in all these discussions regarding the Civil war, for some reason the argument generally breaks down to the issue of Slavery instead of the issue of Independence. It's just like the Abortion debate where people argue "Choice" instead of "Dead Baby." It is a deliberate skewing of the issue away from the salient point into something which proponents regard as defensible.
Nobody wants to defend the violent repression of other people's freedom and independence, so they make the past actions more palatable by proffering a less objectionable reason for fighting. "To end Slavery."
That it isn't true doesn't matter. They want and need it to be true because it is the only thing of which they can think that can give them moral justification for what happened.
But instead you had Jeff Davis.
No, I do not. In fact I have pointed out to others arguing on the same side as I, that the attack on Ft. Sumter was what cost them Independence. They shouldn't have done it.
But they did. And having done so then your complaint seems to be that the North just didn't surrender right off the bat. Instead shouldn't your ire be directed at those who started the war in the first place?
Now I will point out to you that nobody was killed in the attack, and the response to it was excessive and disproportionate.
One of the most ridiculous arguments in the Confederate arsenal. Nobody was killed, so no harm no foul. It was a deliberate attack on a federal facility, a conscious act of war. The fact that nobody was killed is meaningless. The Confederacy was certainly trying to force the fort into surrender, and kill as many as was necessary to accomplish that.
Oh, we have another admission that the North wasn't fighting to end slavery. Good. So what was the North fighting for?
Because they had been attacked. So their goal was to preserve the Union in the face of armed rebellion. Why did the South start the war?
Again you distort what people here are posting.
The south went to war because they perceived the election of Abraham Lincoln as the death knell of slavery in America and they would do ANYTHING to keep it. They didn't care that he said that he wouldn't steer any effort at ending slavery - only keep it from spreading. The south's primary motivation wasn't independence - it was control.
There was no violent repression of anyone except for that which the south perpetrated against its neighbor. When they went to war against America all bets were off.