Your commentary regarding the Civil War reminded me of several visionaries from the past:
* Indeed Adams warning about slavery recalls the wise Greeks, in particular Pericles, who asserted that the most critical attribute in leaders is Prudence: the ability to discern the impact in the future, of actions taken/not taken, in the now.
* Another visionary was the now forgotten Rowan Helper, a self-taught economist and South Carolinian, who authored the “Impending Crisis in the South.” Helper saw slavery as an economic catastrophe rather than a moral crusade; arguing that the real victims of slavery were non slave-holding whites, as it severely retarded economic progress across the South. Producing Cotton was land, manpower and water intensive, crowding out manufacturing but the Plantation Class, which owned Southern politics wouldn’t abide any change. Further, the South depended on one buyer for its product, Great Britain. Then post-Civil War, two events occurred. Britain converted many of the rice paddies of East Bengal to lower cost higher yield cotton production and the Suez Canal opened, causing the South to lose its market virtually overnight.
* Indeed the wise Madison saw war for what it always was (in paraphrase), “The most deadly enemy of liberty as it concentrates power in the hands of the ruling class who will always use it to any extreme in order to preserve their power and survival.”
Indeed the Civil War was a watershed event for the United States and in my judgment, hardly for the better.
It’s truly unfortunate that even by the time of the Revolutionary War, the South had become so addicted to slavery that it couldn’t see the folly of it. Haiti should’ve been an enormous wake-up call. Seeing counties with demographics of upwards of 10-to-1 slave to White was a recipe for disaster. How they expected to fully control that situation for the long term, rationalizing it that the “superior intellect” of Whites could control “Black cattle” is just dumbfounding.
Either way, via Civil War or via massive uprising, this was not going to turn out well. A political and socioeconomic system of oppression, statism, corruption and immorality cannot continue indefinitely, something we face today under different dynamics.