Abolishing slavery in a victorious Confederacy: not so easy

[Doug M.]

T
Actually, the Confederate amendment process was easier and simpler than the one specified in the U.S. Constitution...

In the Confederacy, by contrast, a mere three States can ask for an amendment. A simple majority vote of the States at the "Super Convention," as you call it, is required to send the amendment to the States for ratification. And only 2/3, instead of 3/4, of the States are required to ratify an amendment in order for it to become law.

In every respect, a much simpler and easier system for amending the Constitution.

Um... no.

The US Constitution has two systems of amendment. There's the familiar Congressional one, which has been used twenty-some times, and there's an amendment-by-conventions one, similar to the one in the Confederate Constitution.

That one has never been used, because it's really hard.

There have been a handful of state conventions in US history, and the record is pretty clear: it's hard to convene them, and even harder to get much of any use out of them. State legislatures hate them and are reluctant to call them, and then the conventions themselves have a tendency to collapse into slanging matches.

As for Constitutional Conventions at the national level, they're theoretically possible -- the Constitution explicitly allows them -- but there hasn't been one since the first in 1787. (We came within a few votes of one in the early 20th century, but it didn't quite come off.)

So, no, not easier.

Two other points. One, 1860s political theory saw conventions -- both state and federal -- as politically superior to the legislature, or indeed to any other branches of government. The idea was that a convention was the supreme expression of the people's will. To call a convention was to hit the "emergency override" switch for normal politics. It was to be used only in the most extraordinary situations.

This is why the states that seceded did so by means of conventions, not by passing laws: secession was seen as something so profound that only a convention could deal with it.

Summoning a convention in ordinary circumstances would be very difficult. In fact, if you look at US history before 1860, it pretty much never happened. There were only a handful of state conventions before 1860, and they were almost all bound up with local political crises -- rewriting a state constitution, or the South Carolina Nullification Convention, or the "People's Convention" in Rhode Island in 1841 (which led to the only armed insurrection against a state government in US history, but never mind that now).

And even then, they were damn'd hard to set up. For instance it took almost three years of agitation, 1828-31, to get South Carolina's Legislature to call a convention... the nullification supporters basically had to take an election cycle to campaign furiously in order to elect a narrow pro-convention majority.

Second point: I said the difficulty was a bug, not a feature. That's because, from an 1860 perspective, it seemed like writing a good Constitution was pretty simple. At that point the US Constitution had stood without amendment for over 50 years -- a record that hasn't been matched since. The 12th Amendment had passed in 1804; since then, the Constitution hadn't changed a bit.

Today we're used to passing an amendment every decade or two. But in 1860, amendment hadn't happened in so long that it really seemed like something extraordinary, to be used only in desperate circumstances. So the Confederates saw no point in making their Constitution easy to amend.


Doug M.

 

[robertp6165]

Very few wars have ever been fought over a single issue. The US Civil War is an exception. It was fought over slavery, period. True, slavery touched on lots of themes, but that was it. This "state's rights" thing is just modern apologism.

That is true only if we employ a double standard in interpreting the history of the war.

The majority of people would agree with you and hold that the Confederates "were fighting to preserve slavery" and that the Union "was fighting to free the slaves." Let's leave aside the issue of whether either of these statements is historically true (which is debateable in itself), and for the purpose of this discussion, take these statements at their face value.

However, in order to do that, we have to employ a double standard. What double standard, you ask? Well, in order to hold the position described above, we have to judge the Confederacy by what it's war aims were at the beginning of the war...while we judge the Union by what it's war aims were at the end of the war. We have to give the Union credit for EVOLVING as the war went on, whereas we deny such to the Confederacy.

The Union was not fighting to free the slaves at the beginning of the war, and indeed, this was not a Union war aim until January 1863, with the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln himself went out of his way to deny that freeing the slaves was a Union war aim, and the Congress passed a resolution that said the same thing. Indeed, Lincoln, in his First Inaugural Address, said that the only reason why he would pursue war against the Confederacy was to collect the tariff. But of course, the Union cause evolved, and by the end of the war the emancipation of the slaves was a Union war aim.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of the war, the preservation of slavery was clearly one of the two war aims of the Confederacy (the achievement of separate national independence being the other). By the end of the war, however, the Confederacy had abandoned the preservation of slavery as a war aim and was focusing solely on national independence. By July 1864, Jefferson Davis specifically denied that preserving slavery was any longer a Confederate war aim, stating, "We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for independence, and that, or extermination, we will have." The Confederates later passed a black recruitment law which historians pretty generally concede would have forced the abandonment of slavery by the Confederacy within a short time after the war, even if the Confederacy won. The Hampton Roads Peace conference of January 1865 broke down, not over the slavery issue, but over the issue of independence for the Confederacy. And the Confederate government was, in the final months of the war, making offers to emancipate the slaves as a means of securing recognition and support by Britain and France. And so it is clear that, by the end of the war, the war aims of the Confederacy were also evolving away from slavery and toward another goal...independence.

If we used the same standard to judge both, we would arrive at a rather interesting interpretation.

--If we judge both by what they were at the beginning, then we have the Confederacy going to war to achieve self-determination and to keep it's slaves, and the Union going to war to deny the right of self-determination to the Confederacy and to preserve it's right to collect tariffs in the South. Neither of these is a very noble war aim.

--And, if we judge them both by what they were at the end, we find that both of them are in essential agreement over the future status of slavery...it's going to be ended. Where they differ is over the right of self-determination...the Confederates are claiming it, and the Union is denying it.

So, you see, the issue of "what the war was fought over" is a deal more complicated than you make it out to be.

 

[Alcuin]

If HT did write that, he obviously didn't bother to read the Confederate Constitution. Or maybe he was using an ATL version of that document?

He was, of course, using a ATL version... actually, he had a convention called at the insistence of South Carolina in response to British pressure to end slavery. That convention passed an amendment that stated that no state had the right to abolish slavery.

 

[Nytram01]

Are the neo-Confederates writing the American history sections in English history books? Yes slavery wasn't the sole cause of the Civil War but it was the MAIN cause and the other reasons aren't even close to it in importance as secondary reasons. What was the immediate cause of secession?-the election of Abraham Lincoln. Why? Because he was viewed as a threat to slavery despite his promise to only curtail its expanison and not to interfer with it where it already existed. The Confederates at the time certainly knew why they were fighting-I really dont understand where the "confusion" is today.

For the record, the history of the ACW is not, or was not at least for me, taught in school.

I am a self confessed Confederate Sympatiser, as I prefer to be called, and I will openly admit to being such. I do not like the way the Union handled things leading up to, during and foliowng the ACW. My opinion of the Union began to be formed the second I read the Union's main war aim, which was to "preserve the Union." The operative word there is preserve. How can you preserve an Union that is already broken? How can you justify invading a different country, as the CSA was, just to force them to join a union they didn't want to be in? And more importantly how can you say you are trying to preserve a Union then let the likes of Sherman and Sherridan destroy half of the land your trying to preserve?

Just because I am a Confederate Sympatiser does not mean that I automatically believe the south was right. Far from it infact. I know that a lot of what the south did was wrong however the north and the Lincoln administration did many more things that caused more damage to the USA ((Southern States included)) than the war of southern secession did but because the north won you dont see as many of their bad point highlighted.

I dont think that Lincoln was a threat to American slavery and I doubt whether the Southerners thought he was either. Lincon had said numerous time before the war that he didn't care for the black man, that he was loyal to his own "superior" white race and that he would never allow the Black man to have equal rights if he could help it, and that he was in favor of deporting them back to Africa, as many in the north were. He couldn't have been less of a threat to southern slavery if he tried. Hell he even said when war broke out that his paramount objective was to preserve the Union and he didn't care whether slavery would survive the war or not.

The main cause of secession and the following war was not Slavery. It was the increasinging aggitation between Northern and Southern States, built up over many years by political and personal differences of which one issue was slavery, and the disstrust between those states. Slavery was only one issue of many issues that North and South dissagreed upon and which led to the ACW.

The Emancipation Proclamation was the thing that made Slavery the main issue and propelled it into this mythological status as a War starter and Lincoln as a man who opposed slavery. In basic terms the Emancipation Proclamation was Lincoln saying this:

"I will free all the slaves in America, that is to say, I will free all the slaves in America in the states that I have no current power to grant freedom to. States with slaves still loyal to the Union will be exempt from this law as will the areas of the rebeling states that I already control. Any state that surrenders to the Union between now, September 22nd 1862, and January 1st 1863 will also be allowed to keep their slaves and any territory that is in Union possesion as of January 1st 1863 will also be allowed to keep their slaves."

While being sheer hypocrisy of the highest order the Emancipation Proclamation made interferance from the European superpowers impossible unless the CSA began to abolish slavery and thus the war was effectively won the second Lincoln issued that proclamation. It is one of the greatest bits of polotics I have ever seen but even so it was still total hypocritical crap.

 

[Doug M.]

Ummm, no. The "right of transit and sojourn" refers to citizens of other States who are TRAVELING THROUGH (transit) or TEMPORARILY VISITING (sojourn) another State. If someone moves to another State and buys land, that person would become a citizen of that State and bound by the laws thereof, including any abolition law.

Upon consideration, I think you're right and I'm wrong. I just misread this provision.

Actually, since the right of the States to abolish slavery within their own borders was not impaired at all, it would not be any more difficult, on purely legal grounds, to eliminate slavery in the Confederacy than it was to abolish it throughout the Northern States prior to the war. It would simply be abolished in the same manner that it was abolished in the North...by State action.

SFX: sound of trap clicking shut.

Question. How many Confederate state constitutions had provisions explicitly defending slavery?

(Hint: more did than didn't.)

To give a specific example: Article VII of Mississippi's 1832 Constitution. "The legislature shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves without the consent of their owners."

So, putting aside the immense social, economic and political barriers to Confederate abolition, it would be a lot harder from a purely legal point of view. Unlike the northern states -- all of which abolished slavery by acts of their legislatures -- most Confederate States would have to first amend their state constitutions to remove the anti-abolition provisions before they could even try.

And amending a state constitution is, I think you'll agree, a lot harder than just passing a law. In the above example of Mississippi, for instance, amendment required 2/3 votes in both houses of the state legislature, followed by a majority of the popular vote at the next election

So, no... not easier.


Doug M.

 

[robertp6165]

Um... no.

The US Constitution has two systems of amendment. There's the familiar Congressional one, which has been used twenty-some times, and there's an amendment-by-conventions one, similar to the one in the Confederate Constitution.

That one has never been used, because it's really hard.

There have been a handful of state conventions in US history, and the record is pretty clear: it's hard to convene them, and even harder to get much of any use out of them. State legislatures hate them and are reluctant to call them, and then the conventions themselves have a tendency to collapse into slanging matches.

As for Constitutional Conventions at the national level, they're theoretically possible -- the Constitution explicitly allows them -- but there hasn't been one since the first in 1787. (We came within a few votes of one in the early 20th century, but it didn't quite come off.)

So, no, not easier.

Two other points. One, 1860s political theory saw conventions -- both state and federal -- as politically superior to the legislature, or indeed to any other branches of government. The idea was that a convention was the supreme expression of the people's will. To call a convention was to hit the "emergency override" switch for normal politics. It was to be used only in the most extraordinary situations.

This is why the states that seceded did so by means of conventions, not by passing laws: secession was seen as something so profound that only a convention could deal with it.

Summoning a convention in ordinary circumstances would be very difficult. In fact, if you look at US history before 1860, it pretty much never happened. There were only a handful of state conventions before 1860, and they were almost all bound up with local political crises -- rewriting a state constitution, or the South Carolina Nullification Convention, or the "People's Convention" in Rhode Island in 1841 (which led to the only armed insurrection against a state government in US history, but never mind that now).

And even then, they were damn'd hard to set up. For instance it took almost three years of agitation, 1828-31, to get South Carolina's Legislature to call a convention... the nullification supporters basically had to take an election cycle to campaign furiously in order to elect a narrow pro-convention majority.

Second point: I said the difficulty was a bug, not a feature. That's because, from an 1860 perspective, it seemed like writing a good Constitution was pretty simple. At that point the US Constitution had stood without amendment for over 50 years -- a record that hasn't been matched since. The 12th Amendment had passed in 1804; since then, the Constitution hadn't changed a bit.

Today we're used to passing an amendment every decade or two. But in 1860, amendment hadn't happened in so long that it really seemed like something extraordinary, to be used only in desperate circumstances. So the Confederates saw no point in making their Constitution easy to amend.

Doug M.

Even if everything you say is true, which I do not by any means grant, a process that can be initiated by a mere three states, rather than by TWO votes of TWO THIRDS of the States in Congress, is going to make getting amendments proposed less difficult than the OTL U.S. system. Add to this the fact that only a SIMPLE MAJORITY vote, rather than a 2/3 vote, is required to send the amendment to the States for ratification, and the fact that only 2/3 rather than 3/4 of the States have to ratifiy the amendment, and the Confederate process is certainly simpler than the U.S. one.

The difficulties you cite with conventions may indeed be an issue, but certainly not an insurmountable one. The Southern States certainly seem to have found a way to overcome these difficulties in 1860-61, and this would set a precedent in the Confederacy. Especially if, as in the scenario I posited, 2/3 of the States have already abolished slavery within their own borders. They would therefore already have the simple majority in the national convention needed to send the amendment to the States for ratification, as well as the 2/3 majority needed to ratify the amendment once it was sent to be ratified by the national convention.

 

[Max Sinister]

The southern states kept the tariffs low and thus profited from this for a long time, not caring whether what was good for them was good for everyone. Almost the minute when this changed, they seceded. Sorry, but that's how it looks to me.

 

[Derek Jackson]

For there to be a chance of abolishing slavery it would first need to be possible to debate abolition.

Of course any abolition would have been state by state(unless the CSA had its own Civil War and a President used War powers as Lincoln did in OTL, but that is ASB.

Pre the Civil War anyone arguing in the South for the wrongness of slavery faced fairly extreme hositility.

I frankly do not imagine a victorioius Conferederacy would be more open to free debate on that issue.

I think a Southern victory was never all that likely. Had it happened, and the CSA survived I suspect that the issue of slavery would still be central to the politics of that racial tyrany.

 

[robertp6165]

SFX: sound of trap clicking shut.

Question. How many Confederate state constitutions had provisions explicitly defending slavery?

(Hint: more did than didn't.)

To give a specific example: Article VII of Mississippi's 1832 Constitution. "The legislature shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves without the consent of their owners."

So, putting aside the immense social, economic and political barriers to Confederate abolition, it would be a lot harder from a purely legal point of view. Unlike the northern states -- all of which abolished slavery by acts of their legislatures -- most Confederate States would have to first amend their state constitutions to remove the anti-abolition provisions before they could even try.

And amending a state constitution is, I think you'll agree, a lot harder than just passing a law. In the above example of Mississippi, for instance, amendment required 2/3 votes in both houses of the state legislature, followed by a majority of the popular vote at the next election

So, no... not easier.

Again, I can grant you about everything you say here, without seriously impacting my main point, which was that the right of the States to abolish slavery within their own borders was not impacted by anything in the Confederate Constitution.

Some States, as you say, would have had a more difficult process to go through due to provisions in their own State Constitutions. But nevertheless, the power would have been with the States.

 

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

The fact of the matter is that the South seceded to protect slavery. National independence isn't really a separate war aim since there would have been no reason to secede if the Southern states weren't afraid that slavery would be abolished.

What was the case as far as war aims at the end of the war isn't really relevant to a discussion of why it happened. The South seceded because of Slavery, the North fought because the South seceded (not to mention that the South attacked it), which wouldn't have happened but for slavery.

To dismiss this as greed for customs duties seems a bit of an oversimplification. I think a great many people believed in the indivisible unity of the country.

Given the effectiveness at Southerners at disestablishing blacks after the end of the occupation, it seems to me to be going too far to say that any action the Confederacy took to defend itself in the way of conscripting Blacks was irreversable or would lead to a quick end of slavery.

That is true only if we employ a double standard in interpreting the history of the war.

The majority of people would agree with you and hold that the Confederates "were fighting to preserve slavery" and that the Union "was fighting to free the slaves." Let's leave aside the issue of whether either of these statements is historically true (which is debateable in itself), and for the purpose of this discussion, take these statements at their face value.

However, in order to do that, we have to employ a double standard. What double standard, you ask? Well, in order to hold the position described above, we have to judge the Confederacy by what it's war aims were at the beginning of the war...while we judge the Union by what it's war aims were at the end of the war. We have to give the Union credit for EVOLVING as the war went on, whereas we deny such to the Confederacy.

The Union was not fighting to free the slaves at the beginning of the war, and indeed, this was not a Union war aim until January 1863, with the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln himself went out of his way to deny that freeing the slaves was a Union war aim, and the Congress passed a resolution that said the same thing. Indeed, Lincoln, in his First Inaugural Address, said that the only reason why he would pursue war against the Confederacy was to collect the tariff. But of course, the Union cause evolved, and by the end of the war the emancipation of the slaves was a Union war aim.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of the war, the preservation of slavery was clearly one of the two war aims of the Confederacy (the achievement of separate national independence being the other). By the end of the war, however, the Confederacy had abandoned the preservation of slavery as a war aim and was focusing solely on national independence. By July 1864, Jefferson Davis specifically denied that preserving slavery was any longer a Confederate war aim, stating, "We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for independence, and that, or extermination, we will have." The Confederates later passed a black recruitment law which historians pretty generally concede would have forced the abandonment of slavery by the Confederacy within a short time after the war, even if the Confederacy won. The Hampton Roads Peace conference of January 1865 broke down, not over the slavery issue, but over the issue of independence for the Confederacy. And the Confederate government was, in the final months of the war, making offers to emancipate the slaves as a means of securing recognition and support by Britain and France. And so it is clear that, by the end of the war, the war aims of the Confederacy were also evolving away from slavery and toward another goal...independence.

If we used the same standard to judge both, we would arrive at a rather interesting interpretation.

--If we judge both by what they were at the beginning, then we have the Confederacy going to war to achieve self-determination and to keep it's slaves, and the Union going to war to deny the right of self-determination to the Confederacy and to preserve it's right to collect tariffs in the South. Neither of these is a very noble war aim.

--And, if we judge them both by what they were at the end, we find that both of them are in essential agreement over the future status of slavery...it's going to be ended. Where they differ is over the right of self-determination...the Confederates are claiming it, and the Union is denying it.

So, you see, the issue of "what the war was fought over" is a deal more complicated than you make it out to be.

 

[robertp6165]

For there to be a chance of abolishing slavery it would first need to be possible to debate abolition...

Pre the Civil War anyone arguing in the South for the wrongness of slavery faced fairly extreme hositility.

I frankly do not imagine a victorioius Conferederacy would be more open to free debate on that issue.

You are committing the fallacy of assuming that conditions within an independent Confederacy would be the same as they were in the antebellum South, without considering why those conditions existed in the antebellum South and whether those same conditions would exist in the postwar Confederacy.

The reason why debate on the slavery issue within the South was being stifled in the antebellum period can directly be linked to the fact that the South was still in a union with the North. It became a sectional issue, and the South got into a siege mentality, "circled the wagons," so to speak, and closed down internal debate because it was considered necessary to present a united front to the North. If the South is in a separate country from the North, and thus doesn't have to pay attention to Northern anti-slavery agitation (which, itself, will probably pretty much dry up following a successful Southern secession) anymore, then it can "uncircle the wagons" and allow debate to happen again.

 

[robertp6165]

The fact of the matter is that the South seceded to protect slavery. National independence isn't really a separate war aim since there would have been no reason to secede if the Southern states weren't afraid that slavery would be abolished.

That is only true if you confuse the reasons for secession with the reasons why the war was fought. The two are not one and the same. The fact is that the South could have been allowed to secede peacefully. The war came because of the decision of the Federal Government not to allow a peaceful secession. Therefore, national independence was in fact the PRIMARY war aim of the Confederacy from the outset...a fact that it later clearly demonstrated by abandoning the preservation of slavery as a war aim entirely by the end of the war.

What was the case as far as war aims at the end of the war isn't really relevant to a discussion of why it happened.

That is, of course, true. But we are not discussing "why the war happened," or "what caused the war." We are discussing, per your original post to which I responded, "why was the war fought?" These are all separate issues.

The war was fought because the Federal Government refused to allow the Southern States to secede peacefully. Even if I completely grant that the only reason the South seceded was to preserve slavery (which I do not grant), the reasons why the South seceded are immaterial to the question of why the war was fought. The South could have seceded over any issue and the Federal Government, under Abraham Lincoln, would have not allowed it to secede peacefully. So the war was not fought over slavery. It was fought over the issue of national self-determination for the South.

Given the effectiveness at Southerners at disestablishing blacks after the end of the occupation, it seems to me to be going too far to say that any action the Confederacy took to defend itself in the way of conscripting Blacks was irreversable or would lead to a quick end of slavery.

Most mainstream historians would disagree with you. For just one example, see James McPherson in BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM.

You are also committing the same fallacy Derek Jackson has committed...assuming that what happened in OTL would provide an example of what would happen in the ATL, without considering why the OTL conditions existed and whether they would still apply in the ATL.

The reason why blacks were treated as they were in the postwar South in OTL has everything to do with the South having lost the war, and especially with what went on during Reconstruction. The Republican Party played a game of "divide and conquer" in the South after the War. They organized black voters into so-called "Union Leagues" which excluded Southern whites from participating. Indeed, many of these Union Leagues became so anti-white that they became virtually a pro-Republican version of the Ku Klux Klan, targeting white voters instead of black voters. They used black voting blocks, along with disenfranchisement of most Southern whites, to gain a strangle-hold on most of the Southern State legislatures. Is it any wonder that white Southerners, when they finally got power back into their own hands, reacted by moving to disenfranchise the blacks who had supported this Republican takeover (BTW, this is not to say that the South was right in reacting in this way. What happened in the aftermath of reconstruction is, in my opinion, a terrible tragedy and totally unnecessary)?

None of that would have happened in an independent Confederacy, so assuming that conditions for blacks in an independent Confederacy would be like those for blacks in the post-bellum OTL South is simply not supportable.

 

[The Mists Of Time]

Me got a question. Exactly what issue-when it came to the" political issue of states rights"-did the Confederacy decide to form and fight over ? Also some contemporary quotes detailing what "states rights" issue they were fighting for would be helpful.

In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected President and he and The Republican Party were very much opposed to slavery. The Republicans also I believe had control of Congress. The South feared the anti-slavery Republicans would abolish slavery. The question was who had the power to control or abolish slavery? The North said the federal government alone had that power. The South said it was left to the individual states, it was the right of the individual states to decide (state's rights). How far does the power of the states go within their own borders, at what point can the federal government step in? Who has authority or the right to regulate or control slavery, the individual states (state's rights), or the federal government?

There were also issues about taxes, tarriffs like The Merrile Tarriff (excuse spelling), and regulation of business and protectionism. Who has the authority and the right to decide these things? The individual states (state's rights) or the federal government. At what point can the federal government step in? At what point does the power of the individual states give way to the power of the federal government? The North said it was primarily a power reserved to and held by the federal government. The South said it was a power and a right reserved to the individual states (state's rights).

Slavery and also issues such as tarriffs and protectionist laws were issues that brought all this to a head, and slavery was an extremely emotionally charged issue. It involved issues of humanity of whether Black people were human and treating them as human. It also involved issues of property and when the federal government can make you give up property (slaves were property).

The South said that if The North refused to recognise their rights (state's rights) they would secceed. Note, they didn't secceed as a group but as individual states. The North said the Union couldn't be broken and thus The South couldn't secceed or be allowed to secceed. The result was The Civil War.

 

[Dave Howery]

Lincoln's election was indeed the immediate cause of the South's secession... but not because they feared he would free the slaves. It was because the South saw itself as increasingly bereft of political and economic power compared to the north. The Congress was dominated by the much more populous north. The South had little investment capital (New York State had more than the entire south). The Presidency was the one place in the Federal government where the South had influence, because most of the Presidents up to that point came from Virginia or the south. After long and bitter wrangling over tarriffs and slavery and the free/slave status of various territories, the election of Lincoln was basically the last straw for the south, now bereft of any political power in Washington.
Ironically, slavery was the reason the south was so poor off. Immigrants flooded into the north to work in factories or to go west to farm on the frontier... most avoided the south and competing with slave labor. There was little investment capital in the south partly because the major financial institutions were controlled by the rather small plantation owner class, who were often not willing to invest in industry. And the loss of political power in Congress was only heightened by the fact that blacks (a large minority group in the region) weren't even counted as full citizens, only 3/5 or so.
So, slavery was both an issue in the war, and was woven into most of the other reasons behind it. So, you could make a case that it was indeed the most important issue of the war... although nobody at the time really realized it...

 

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

That is only true if you confuse the reasons for secession with the reasons why the war was fought. The two are not one and the same. The fact is that the South could have been allowed to secede peacefully. The war came because of the decision of the Federal Government not to allow a peaceful secession. Therefore, national independence was in fact the PRIMARY war aim of the Confederacy from the outset...a fact that it later clearly demonstrated by abandoning the preservation of slavery as a war aim entirely by the end of the war.]

I'm not confusing anything. National independence was only an aim in order to protect the institution of slavery. They ARE one and the same. You're just splitting hairs. Even if the CSA abandoned the preservation of slavery years later, that doesn't change the fact that that was THE reason for seceding in the first place. And it was the South that fired upon a Federal fort to begin the war... and I'm not sure why the Federal Government should have tolerated a demonstrably militant rebellion in the first place - most governments don't just sit around and watch their countries dissolve.

 

[Kidblast]

Yet it's pretty much what they did until the latter part of the 20th century. Keeping practically half of their workforce uneducated, disenfranchised and marginalized in the name of institutionalized racism sounds a lot like cutting one's nose to spite one's face.

Not only did they have to do this in the South but also in South Africa.

 

[Kidblast]

I didn't say that it would be abolished, I said that it would disappear on its own.

I'm guessing that in a Confederacy where slavery is largely gone, blacks will be treated better than in OTL due to the lack of coercion, but that it will be extremely patronizing.

Considering that in OTL, most Southern states forbid free blacks the right to reside in said states, I don't think Southern attitudes towards free blacks would be very benevolent.

 

[Nytram01]

The southern states kept the tariffs low and thus profited from this for a long time, not caring whether what was good for them was good for everyone. Almost the minute when this changed, they seceded. Sorry, but that's how it looks to me.

In the past there was the tariff crisis of 1828 when the government passed a protectionist tariff that the south opposed, the Tariff of Abominations. The difference between the 1820's and the 1860's was that in the 1820's the southern states had the power to nullify the tariff and seek a more perferable outcome for them, in the 1860's they didn't have that.

When Lincoln got into power he brought with him the Morrill Protectionist tariff. The South had been debating against and protesting protectionism for many years and continued to do so when Lincoln got into power. Lincoln however took away the Southern States right to nullify such a tariff when he promised to invade any states that refused to pay the Morrill Tariff and occupy it until such a time as the tariff was paid.

While the south may have been wrong about low tariiffs ((or they may have been right, I don't know)) Lincoln was wrong to force the high tariff on them without leaving room for negotiotiation about it.

Also the issue of the Morrill Tariff was one that caused a sort of secessionist crisis in New York City whose mayor, Fernando Wood, suggested that they should seceed from both state and country to be able to continue trading without having to pay the Morrill Tariff. Paying the Morrill Tariff would have meant, as it did in the OTL, that the majority of the money that they made would be sent to fund the government and their war instead of being used to benefit New York itself.

 

[robertp6165]

Considering that in OTL, most Southern states forbid free blacks the right to reside in said states, I don't think Southern attitudes towards free blacks would be very benevolent.

Odd that there were many more free blacks in the South than there were in the North, then.

 

[Michael E Johnson]

Considering that in OTL, most Southern states forbid free blacks the right to reside in said states, I don't think Southern attitudes towards free blacks would be very benevolent.

An understatement.