Could the American Civil War have been avoided?
More than one monstrous war is marked in anniversary this year. A hundred-and-fifty years ago, Union forces were pressing their advantage in Tennessee and opening a new front in Louisiana. The Confederacy's last real chance of victory had been lost at Gettysburg the previous summer, but few were ready to admit it. The war had already claimed more than 600,000 lives – equivalent, in proportionate terms, to six million Americans today, or 1.2 million Britons – yet the South would fight on for another 14 months, showing a heroism in defeat that would, in later years, come to sanctify an unworthy cause.
I am on a mission to promote the Anglosphere, and it took me, for about 12 hours over the weekend, to the Confederate capital: Richmond, Virginia. Stomping the chilly streets, I was struck by how excruciating the decision over secession must have been for Virginians. A short stroll from Jefferson Davies's White House is the state capitol, designed by Thomas Jefferson. Not far in the other direction is the church where Patrick Henry gave his "Liberty or Death" speech. How mortifying for the heirs of Washington and Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, to have to repudiate the country whose leadership they once assumed as their right.
We tend to think of the South hurtling into war with the rebel yell on its lips, as in Gone with the Wind. Perhaps that's how it happened in some places; but Virginia held back, conflicted, until ordered to join the federal attack on the secessionists. The state's ambivalence was personified by Robert E. Lee, who turned down command of the Union armies before resignedly offering his services to the Confederates. Lee called secession "a calamity" and slavery "a moral evil" but, when the moment came, he could not bring himself to draw sword against Virginia.
Might slavery have been abolished without bloodshed? It's hard to say. The ban on the import of new slaves would eventually have finished the institution, but at a price of decades of suffering for those already in bondage. Peaceful manumission, as had happened much earlier in Britain, was the obvious alternative, but the slave-owners were in no mood to sell. Then again, had they been able to foresee the future, they would surely have grabbed at compensated abolition.
The Greek tragedians understood that poignant sorrow requires a measure of missed opportunity. The American Civil War saw many good men, acting from sincere motives, leading their compatriots to a slaughter whose extent no one had imagined possible.
"Was it needless death after all?" asked W.B. Yeats in a different context. Probably. That's what makes the whole thing so exquisitely sad.
UPDATE: James Bennett has some interesting thoughts, which are worth sharing:
Fascinating post as usual. This is a great question – of course the war could have been avoided, or at least postponed, but like most wars, at what cost? Lincoln tried very hard to get slaveowners to accept compensated emancipation, but they refused, even in Delaware where there were very few slaves. Of course the Southerners should have negotiated a peace right after Gettysburg and Vicksburg, but they would not give up their dream of independence. Sunk cost is hard enough to write off in money, but even harder top write off lost lives.
A reasonable peace in July 1863 would have included compensated emancipation for any slave in bondage as the date of secession, Federal assumption of at least a fraction of the value of Confederate bonds, and a period in which Confederate money could be exchanged for Federal notes at a reasonable market rate, as well as a Federal pension to disabled Confederate veterans. All this would have been less expensive than fighting to the end of the war. It would have insured that the South could have entered the postwar era with the capital to establish an industrial economy to replace the plantation economy. In return the South would have had to accept the separate statehood of West Virginia and probably the other Unionist mountain areas like East Tennessee, and probably also allowing the black majority areas to form separate states of their own. All this with the wisdom of hindsight!
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