historical question

[flea]

I've been reading about the Civil War lately, and yesterday was Confederate Memorial Day, on which the Confederate Constitution, the only copy of which my employer owns, is displayed.

One thing I haven't yet read about or figured out is why Lincoln was so intent on preserving the Union. Why not let the South secede? Was there debate about it at the time? So far all I have seen is that Lincoln considered secession to be rebellion, and the Confederacy started hostilites. Did Lincoln just not expect things to go on s long and so damagingly?

(Be gentle; remember, my historical period starts in 5000 BCE.)

Comments

[veejane.livejournal.com]

Well, for one thing, cotton was ridiculously profitable, and moreso when the growing and the processing and the spinning and the weaving all happened within a single country, pre-tariff. If the Merrimack (MA) mills had had to compete on raw materials prices with Britain, post-tariff, the north wouldn't have done so well.

For another, if one state can secede, all of them can, and the country falls apart. Or the southern bloc becomes a (possibly tenuous) country, starts a series of land-grabs in the territories, and becomes its own continental and trade superpower that just happens to exclude the nothern states. Arizona became its own territory in 1862, instead of being part of New Mexico territory, because of all the southern planters who had claimed its farmland and wanted to secede. A couple of lesser-known but still important Civil War battles were fought in upper New Mexico, where the Union defeated Texan and Arizonan forces who wanted contiguous southern/CSA land from the Atlantic to (almost) the Pacific. If the southern forces had won those battles, they probably would have invaded southern California and tried to split the state in two.

Charleston and New Orleans and Galveston were all ports in the seceding territory, and pretty damned important for trade. New Orleans controls access to the whole Mississippi River complex, which automatically messes up trade and people-movement all over the midwest as far north as the Dakotas.

The federal government had invested a lot of money in the lands seceding (purchase from foreign governments/Indians; the cost of Indian wars; forts and all the stuff that lives in forts; tariff and tax infrastructure) and owned a fair amount of it too. That's a big investment to write off.

And, after all, the US had been a country for 80 years by then, and had only ever grown: all of its wars had basically been land-grabs, from Britain or Indians or Mexico. To allow land to leave its control unfought-for would break a couple of serious underlying assumptions in the American character of that time. (Probably, I would posit, even in the southern American character; they just had a cognitive dissonance thing for a while.) How can you be the enactor of manifest destiny if you can't keep your own feet in their orderly little socks? It kind of stops being destiny at that point, and becomes mud-wrestling.

[serrana.livejournal.com]

I think MD post-dates the war a bit, but yes, basically (like much of U.S. history) it boils down to capitalism and real estate.

Also, the Confederacy would have made a real grab for the West, and that was just Not On.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

Term first used in the 1840s by Jacksonian democrats. The painting with the lady with the telegraph under her arm isn't till 1872, but the concept was firmly in place by the time Kit Carson was getting lost guiding the US Army into California.

[aimeejmc.livejournal.com]

Everything Jane said, plus, the secession had it's roots at the first Continental Congress. Half of the Constitution were things that the South wanted, that the North didn't. But the North had a lower bottom line than the South. The North just wanted to keep the states unified, and would do anything, and subsequently did almost everything the South wanted, to keep the states together.

[jarsy.livejournal.com]

This is weirdly timeful for me, becuase I just found out about this!

DH has been reading a lot of Civil War history lately, so I've been getting bits and pieces. As a foreigner I've only ever had movies and tv to go on, really. And I had no idea that the South wanted to secede! That completely changes every idea I've ever had about the civil war. I'd never thought of the South as the good guys before...

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

Well, the South wanted to secede because they were afraid that their right to enslave millions of people would be removed. So, depends on your definition of "good guys."

[veejane.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and the whole "war of northern aggression" thing always got me. Like, dudes, what event actually constitutes the first armed conflict of the war? Would that be, I don't know, Ft. Sumter? And... who assaulted Ft. Sumter, pray? It's the war of whose aggression?

Actually, I just finished a book about the US/Mexican war of 1848, and it has a lot in common with the Civil War in terms of the characterizations by the losing side. Looking at it in people and materiel terms, it is obvious who was going to win from before the first shot was fired. And yet the going-to-lose side persistently chose a belligerent path, for reasons totally unrelated to chances-of-winning. (Mostly: pride, desperation, force of compromise among warring factions, etc.) In both cases, the losing side might have shot the moon -- basically, acquired foreign recognition and allies, providing materiel and trained military assistance -- but it was totally a moonshot and they basically knew it going in, and then over the course of the war and its immediate aftermath you can see an amnestic radicalization, where they literally forget that the bellicose stance was never realistic (although they'd known it previously), and argue that it could have been viable if-only.

Amnesia in politics as in most matters of consistent goal-seeking is a very big and frustrating problem. The moreso, when the amnesia appears to be magical thinking to rescue oneself (where "self" may be as large as nation) from understanding one's role in one's own misfortunes.

[gingerk.livejournal.com]

The North's original name for the conflict was the War of the Great Rebellion, while the South called it the War Between the States. As others have said, it goes back to the essential question that started with the Articles of Confederation: is the United States one nation, indivisible, or a collection of independent states? The Southern colonies were generally on the states' rights side of the question. When Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase, he threw a continent-sized wrench into the machinery, since any new states were not sovereign colonies in the sense of the original 13 states. Slavery became the fracture point because of the question of whether the new states would allow slavery, banned in the North. The question was fought in Congress; in the courts; and in bloody Missouri and Kansas. It probably would have been fought state by state to California without the Civil War.

Lincoln would probably have tried to continue to compromise, if the Confederacy hadn't fired on Fort Sumter.

I don't think anyone imagined it would last so long or be so ugly, although I suspect Lincoln and Lee had some sense of it. At the beginning, Northern volunteers poured it saying it would be a "breakfast spell" -- they'd whip those Southerners and be home by dinner.