American civil war question

[Bomb#20]

Watch the movie again, Lincoln says it clearly: the emancipation proclamation was a war measure to help win the war. ... But when he started the war he called himself a moderate on the issue of slavery.

Lincoln didn't start the war. Jefferson Davis started the war. Lincoln was determined that the North not be the side to fire the first shots. If the Confederates had been smarter they would have continued the blockade of Fort Sumter but sent the Union troops there all the food they needed, along with a note explaining that South Carolina was giving its Northern guests permission to stay in its fort as a gracious act of Southern hospitality, and telling Major Anderson that if there was anything else they needed to make their stay more comfortable he had only to ask.

 

[Bomb#20]

Accurate history also agrees that there is no path to secession in our constitution before and after the civil war as far as the most recent zeptosecond ago.

Sure there is: the Singapore path. You make your state enough of a pain in the neck to the feds that Congress votes to kick you out.

 

[Bomb#20]

... Not clear how the federal government was supposed to take a fortress to the other side of the room.

Not to mention that the line in the ground itself was an act of war.

Not seeing how that qualifies. You can call yourself a sovereign citizen and declare a line around your house to be an international border if you like, and that's not an act of war. It's just a vanilla act of (really dumb) free speech. The government would be completely out of line if they machine-gunned your house over it. Even if you took it to the next level and resisted a legal search warrant or something, it would still be just a police matter, not a military one. If the South had never fired a shot and secession had amounted to southern courts and legislators all of a sudden no longer complying with federal law, that would likewise have been a problem of law enforcement, not a war.

what big dummies they were. It's almost as if they didn't read the constitution or something. Did they really not see what was coming?

Oh sure, they saw what was coming, but they thought they'd win. The South had a much more military culture than the North; they had better troops and better generals and they calculated that this would be what would determine the outcome. The Southern view of the North was pretty much straight out of Napoleon: they figured their enemy was a nation of shopkeepers. The minor detail that this theory didn't work out so well for Napoleon seems to have been lost on them.

But it's a little facile for us now to go all Rhett Butler on them and say what big dummies they were -- hindsight is twenty-twenty. It really wasn't obvious at the time that the war was going to last long enough for the North's economic advantages to prove decisive.

 

[Bomb#20]

... It's perfectly possible for the South to have seceded over slavery and for the North to have stopped them for some completely different reason; more than possible, it's a near certainty.

We don't mind you having slaves and are willing to take what we said back but hundreds of thousands of us have to die over this threat to Secede over the slaves we don't mind you keeping. Yup, fits right in with the rest of European history.

Well, pretty much every other country in Western Civilization somehow managed to abolish slavery in the 1800s without having to kill 600,000 people. The British Empire did it by paying ransom to the kidnappers. But we did it the Theban way. The slavers of Sparta had to give up their slaves right after they spectacularly kicked Athens' ass because Thebes observed that the war against Athens had weakened Sparta enough to create an opportunity -- so they invaded, they turned the slaves loose, and without its slaves to feed its armies Sparta was never again a major power.

So what would have happened if the South had been allowed to secede? Hard to say for sure, but what fits in with the rest of European history is the C.S.A. would have eventually abolished slavery too. But the rump U.S. would probably have ended up as a much weaker country, much more able to be pushed around by the European great powers; that was probably the top underlying motive for the North going to war over this threat to secede.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

So what would have happened if the South had been allowed to secede? Hard to say for sure, but what fits in with the rest of European history is the C.S.A. would have eventually abolished slavery too. But the rump U.S. would probably have ended up as a much weaker country, much more able to be pushed around by the European great powers; that was probably the top underlying motive for the North going to war over this threat to secede.

Maybe the confederate racist states of america would have abolished slavery due to international pressure. In such a case they would have ended up like South Africa but likely much worse.

Did the whites of South Africa regularly lynch blacks like was the habit in the south? Did South Africa have its version of the KKK?

 

[Bomb#20]

Maybe the confederate racist states of america would have abolished slavery due to international pressure. In such a case they would have ended up like South Africa but likely much worse.

Yes, that sounds about right.

Did the whites of South Africa regularly lynch blacks like was the habit in the south? Did South Africa have its version of the KKK?

Yes, they called it "the government".

South Africa probes apartheid-era death in police custody

 

[bilby]

Maybe the confederate racist states of america would have abolished slavery due to international pressure. In such a case they would have ended up like South Africa but likely much worse.

Yes, that sounds about right.

Did the whites of South Africa regularly lynch blacks like was the habit in the south? Did South Africa have its version of the KKK?

Yes, they called it "the government".

South Africa probes apartheid-era death in police custody

Well, they also have the AWB, founded in the 1970s, by and for people who didn't feel that the Apartheid regime was sufficiently racist.

Their logo seems vaguely familiar; I wonder what political philosophy they espouse...

 

[Gospel]

I concede (not secede because that's not a real thing in America) that it is indeed possible that the confederate states of America may have abolished slavery. I'm just very happy that my white niggas from the north didn't decide to wait (whatever you think their reasons were).