An ACW what if

1,618 Views | 12 Replies | Last: 2 yr ago by nortex97
P.H. Dexippus
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AG
Before the war even began, southern members of congress resigned their seats. Some of the seats were subsequently declared "vacant". Even without southern representation in DC, the Congress was often narrowly divided on the issues of the war, whether to sue for peace, approve President Lincoln's initiatives, etc. How would the outcome have differed, if at all, had the south not given up its representation in the northern government (whether with the same representatives or replacements)? Lincoln was adamant not to recognize the CSA, so I would think it would have been difficult for his to have imprisoned the whole lot of them.
Rabid Cougar
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AG
If they had stayed they would have been true insurrectionist and libel for arrest as such.

You cannot be a traitor to a country that you are no longer a part of.

Sapper Redux
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You can't represent a state in rebellion. If they wanted representation in the federal government, they would have avoided secession as much of the upper South did.
P.H. Dexippus
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AG
Rabid Cougar said:

If they had stayed they would have been true insurrectionist and libel for arrest as such.

You cannot be a traitor to a country that you are no longer a part of.


I don't know. It's one thing to arrest a former Copperhead congressman from Ohio. It's another thing to try to arrest half of the legislative branch.
Sapper Redux
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Mr. AGSPRT04 said:

Rabid Cougar said:

If they had stayed they would have been true insurrectionist and libel for arrest as such.

You cannot be a traitor to a country that you are no longer a part of.


I don't know. It's one thing to arrest a former Copperhead congressman from Ohio. It's another thing to try to arrest half of the legislative branch.


7 states with 32 representatives and 14 senators seceded before Congress met. Republicans and Unionists ran the House. It wouldn't have been hard to expel them or refuse to seat them while their states were in rebellion.
P.H. Dexippus
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AG
Sapper Redux said:

Mr. AGSPRT04 said:

Rabid Cougar said:

If they had stayed they would have been true insurrectionist and libel for arrest as such.

You cannot be a traitor to a country that you are no longer a part of.


I don't know. It's one thing to arrest a former Copperhead congressman from Ohio. It's another thing to try to arrest half of the legislative branch.


7 states with 32 representatives and 14 senators seceded before Congress met. Republicans and Unionists ran the House. It wouldn't have been hard to expel them or refuse to seat them while their states were in rebellion.
You're obviously leaving out the 4 additional states that seceded at the outset of the war, for whatever reason. They would have been supported by Peace Democrats. Excluding or detaining that entire contingent would have jeopardized the loyalty of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and perhaps others.
Sapper Redux
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Mr. AGSPRT04 said:

Sapper Redux said:

Mr. AGSPRT04 said:

Rabid Cougar said:

If they had stayed they would have been true insurrectionist and libel for arrest as such.

You cannot be a traitor to a country that you are no longer a part of.


I don't know. It's one thing to arrest a former Copperhead congressman from Ohio. It's another thing to try to arrest half of the legislative branch.


7 states with 32 representatives and 14 senators seceded before Congress met. Republicans and Unionists ran the House. It wouldn't have been hard to expel them or refuse to seat them while their states were in rebellion.
You're obviously leaving out the 4 additional states that seceded at the outset of the war, for whatever reason. They would have been supported by Peace Democrats. Excluding or detaining that entire contingent would have jeopardized the loyalty of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and perhaps others.


That's seriously debatable. The Confederate position was not popular before the war. Even Northern Democrats abhorred secession and supported maintaining the Union. Heck, Stephen Douglas spent the last months of the 1860 campaign fighting secession in the South, knowing it would cost him any last shot at the Presidency. There's a reason slave states like Virginia and NC held off secession, and the 1861 peace conference failed decisively. I think you drastically underestimate the level of betrayal felt in the remaining states.
Jabin
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Didn't the southern states have enough votes, at least in the Senate, to hold off forever abolition or any other restriction on slavery?

If so, they were incredibly stupid to secede. They gained nothing by starting a war that they could not win.
Sapper Redux
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Jabin said:

Didn't the southern states have enough votes, at least in the Senate, to hold off forever abolition or any other restriction on slavery?

If so, they were incredibly stupid to secede. They gained nothing by starting a war that they could not win.


Their fear was the restriction of slavery in the territories. That meant (way down the line), enough free states to economically and politically hem them in. There was also a conspiratorial belief that the Republican Party was planning to encourage slave revolts and end slavery immediately.
Jabin
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Interesting.

Assuming that the South had been willing to consider compromise, was there any way to fashion a compromise? Early in the war, the North was not committed to complete abolition, it seems. Were there any half-measures that were even possible?

For example, what did the British do with regard for their slave owners (presumably primarily in the Caribbean) after they abolished slavery? Did they compensate them in any fashion? I suspect that compensation to southern slave owners would not have been possible given the extremely large value of the slave population.

I ask because the South clearly should have sought compromise. Any clear-thinking person should have known that it would have taken a miracle for the South to win the war.
Smeghead4761
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Sapper Redux said:

Jabin said:

Didn't the southern states have enough votes, at least in the Senate, to hold off forever abolition or any other restriction on slavery?

If so, they were incredibly stupid to secede. They gained nothing by starting a war that they could not win.


Their fear was the restriction of slavery in the territories. That meant (way down the line), enough free states to economically and politically hem them in. There was also a conspiratorial belief that the Republican Party was planning to encourage slave revolts and end slavery immediately.
This. The slave states - 14 of them if you count the ones that didn't secede - would have had the votes to block ratification of the 13th Amendment if their legislatures voted as a block. (With 49 states - remember, no WV if VA doesn't secede - you need 13 to block the 3/4 mark for ratification.)

But without expansion of slavery into the territories, they eventually wouldn't have been able to block federal legislation that would have greatly reduced the economic value of slavery and slaves. Things like repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, possibly a federal version of the personal liberty laws enacted by many Northern states, maybe even a federal ban on the buying and selling of slaves across state lines.

The slave states saw this coming, even under the Missouri Compromise law, and especially when California came in as a free state. There just wasn't enough land south of the line, which is why they pushed so hard for the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which nullified the Missouri Compromise.

The other reason restriction of slavery in the territories would eventually endanger slavery in the states where it already existed. Most of the capital in those states was tied up in two things - land, and slaves. And the prime crop, cotton, is known for exhausting the soil on which it is grown. In the long term, this could be managed, even at the time, by crop rotation. But crop rotation meant reduced income, and reduced income meant possibly being unable to maintain the kind of lifestyle necessary to maintain or improve one's social standing amongst the planter class.

And if the soil is exhausted with no new land to exploit, the value of the capital investment in slaves and land is going to plummet. What happens then? It would happen eventually anyway, because you can't grow cotton in west Texas, NM, or AZ, or north of a certain lattitude, either. But maybe they discover chemical fertilizer before that happens. Who knows? And what happens when the mechanical cotton picker is invented in the 1920s? At any rate, the socially and politically dominant planter class is going to have a huge capital investment in slaves, that would have to either be repurposed or become almost worthless.)

Overall, I would say that secession and the resulting Civil War hastened the eventual end of slavery in the U.S. by a generation, maybe two.
denied
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Jabin said:

For example, what did the British do with regard for their slave owners (presumably primarily in the Caribbean) after they abolished slavery? Did they compensate them in any fashion? I suspect that compensation to southern slave owners would not have been possible given the extremely large value of the slave population.


The British government/Crown financially compensated slave owners and only just finished making payments in the last few years (2015).

eta: the year and https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/30/fact-check-u-k-paid-off-debts-slave-owning-families-2015/3283908001/
Jabin
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Very interesting. I did not know that. Thank you very much for posting.
nortex97
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The cotton gin was primarily responsible for the doubling each decade from 1800-1860 of cotton production/profits in the south.

The southern states had risen to the point of making 75% of the world's cotton. Was that sustainable? Heck no. It was delusional.

Quote:

Increasingly, southern states viewed the north as hostile towards their way of life, and believed they could succeed without the Union. The southern belief that King Cotton could sustain them without the north was summarized in a speech to the US Senate in 1858:
James Hammond (US Senator from South Carolina 1857-1860) said:

"Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war on us we could bring the whole world to our feet […] What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? I will not stop to depict what everyone can imagine, but this is certain: England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king."
This belief, that the southern states did not need the Union and that England and/or other European nations would rally to their defense was what ultimately led to secession and the American Civil War.

This logic proved faulty and would ultimately be the downfall of the Confederacy. European nations never recognized the Confederate States of America, and with their absence of cotton imports from the south, turned to other areas of the world for cotton production.

One of the many factors of the American Civil War can be traced all the way back to the cotton gin and its transformative impact on the southern economy and institution of slavery.
The ACW was really an oddity, as slavery was declining within and without the US/confederacy, and likely would have ended within a few decades anyway, largely contemporaneously with the rest of the non-arab/muslim world. Here is a good link. https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&psid=462

It was largely a war waged (or begun by) by the landed aristocracy of the old south who felt threatened by the trends moving forward;

Quote:

Nevertheless, the South's political leaders had good reason for concern. Within the South, slave ownership was becoming concentrated into a smaller number of hands. The proportion of southern families owning slaves declined from 36 percent in 1830 to 25 percent in 1860. At the same time, slavery was sharply declining in the upper South. Between 1830 and 1860, the proportion of slaves in Missouri's population fell from 18 to 10 percent; in Kentucky, from 24 to 19 percent; in Maryland, from 23 to 13 percent. By the middle of the nineteenth century, slavery was becoming an exception in the New World, confined to Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rice, a number of small Dutch colonies, and the American South. But the most important threat to slavery came from abolitionists, who denounced slavery as immoral.

The growth of public opposition to slavery represents one of the most momentous moral transformations in history. As late as 1750, no church condemned slave ownership or slave trading. Britain, Denmark, France, Holland, Portugal, and Spain all openly participated in the slave trade. Beginning with the Quakers in the late 1750s, however, organized opposition to slavery quickly grew. In 1787, the Northwest Ordinance barred slavery from the territories north of the Ohio River; by 1804, the nine states north of Delaware had freed slaves or adopted gradual emancipation plans. In Haiti in 1791, nearly a half million slaves emancipated themselves by insurrection and revolutionary struggle. In 1807, Britain and the United States outlawed the African slave trade.

The wars of national liberation in Spanish America ended slavery in Spain's mainland New World empire. In 1821, the region that now includes Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela adopted a gradual emancipation plan. Two years later, Chile agreed to emancipate its slave. In 1829, Mexico abolished slavery.

In 1833, Britain emancipated 780,000 slaves, paying 20 million pounds sterling compensation to their owners. In 1848, Denmark and France freed slaves in their colonial empires. Slavery survived in Surinam and other Dutch New World colonies until 1863 and in the United States in 1865. The last New World slaves were emancipated in Cuba in 1886 and in Brazil in 1888.
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