Was the Civil war unavoidable and if it could have been avoided what would race relations be like in the 21st Century?

http://www.textbookx.com/product_detail.ph...isbn=0847697223

Working from the premise that "wars have seldom been justified, " distinguished scholar Charles Adams argues that not only was the Civil War avoidable, but it was a humanitarian disaster that nearly destroyed American democracy. According to Adams, the Civil War was not fought to free the slaves, and it was not a conflict over differing ways of life. The South seceded because of their economic interests, and Lincoln purposefully lured Confederate firebrands into war because secession threatened to cripple the North's economy. This bold and thought provoking book is a must read for anyone interested in a fresh perspective on the causes of the American Civil War.

True. I think that if the Civil war had not happened, the US would not be a federally based nation, but rather a collection of states loosely knitted together.

That's exactly the punchline, locbuds. Interesting piece here:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/miller1.html



In spite of our schoolbook teachings, the common understandings were very different way back when:



Now, that's American.

An interesting start, bart. Thanks. This will require a bit of homework. As a kid I was always interested in history, and for some reason never could relate to the South in any way, shape or form. Couldn't even root for the south in a football game from my earliest rememberances. I'm sure my feelings must be mostly civil war related(though I've always had an interest in reincarnation, so who knows).

But after stepping back away from my own prejudice I have to say that the South had it's own reasons for their actions outside of just slavery. They can't be seen as wholly unrelated to the North and it's political actions.

I just wonder if there is any scenario that would have taken the country from half slave to all free outside of such a costly war. Will have to look around and see what the experts think.

My own interest began in contemplating the relentless, relentless, relentless legacy of racism and ill-will from the Civil War, and contemplating that slavery had survived nowhere (or nearly) and clearly would not have. It doesn't take a lot of historical study to realize the war was not fought for (or against) slavery.

I also became interested via my own contemplations of democracy vs. large states, and in developing this mini-thesis that the Civil War was a key turning point.

I don't think there's any question that slavery would have ended. Those more knowledgable can paint more realistic scenarios of how, and with what consequences.

If history and lessons from it mean anything, then even backwards speculation shouldn't be considered solely idle.

I keep seeing that the civil war was "not fought for slavery." As a reality check, however, I'd like to point out that it did indeed end that wretched practice.

That folks, is something to keep in mind.

http://www.floridareenactorsonline.com/confedright.htm

An interesting article that points to a few reasons why the south's political postion was more in line with what many people envisioned for the US. Adherence to the Constitution, the Bill Of Rights, and limits to the power of the Federal government. It alos points out that at no time did the South try to overthrow the federal government, they merely withdrew from it and set up their own Constitution. Something the US did in relation the the British empire and surely was arguably their right.

The tariff issue is also important because it was obviously a source of friction that had little to do with slavery. Taxes paid by a minority and used by the majority for no benefit to the minority. Taxation without representation? Maybe not quite, but I can imagine southerners drew many parallels.

It's pretty common knowledge that there were several causes for the war, slavery among them.

It's also pretty common knowledge that the wretched practice has not ended.

Here's sort of a bad, but interesting, analogy. At what cost? Our recent war in Iraq ended the tyranny of Saddam Hussein's reign. But at what cost? Will it in the end be a net plus for Iraqis & the wider Middle East and even us?

It is a similar question regarding the Civil War. It is argued that the War and the reconstruction and all that followed -- and does still, even, extracted costs and entrenched brutality and hatreds that comprised an exceedingly expensive way to end slavery for blacks as well as whites.

As pointed out elsewhere, slavery ended <<<nearly>>> everywhere, and in only two places -- the US & Haiti -- via war.

It was the very wretchedness (and endlessness) of the legacy that led, as I said, to my first personal questions about the story I'd been told.

Interesting observations about costs...on one hand it depends upon who does the measuring...the mother of an American killed in battle or the wife of a husband killed, maimed, or tortured by Saddam.

The cost/benefit of the Civil War is, in my view, very obvious. The abrubt departure from dependence upon slave labor has had nearly immeasurable contributions to economic and technological progress world wide. The relative short-term costs paid in that day cannot compare to the incredible expansion of fruits we enjoy today.

Exactly my point -- in reverse. The costs were not short-term. They still wend on. Was there an alternative? Most every other country subject to slavery found one.

An argument about the Civil War is not an argument for slavery, in any way, shape or form. (As the war itself was not fought to end it.)

My point was that the costs were "short-term" in the sense that, had slavery endured a decade or two longer, the costs would have been much greater.

Very complex variables at play, I prefer to think that there are many reasons for the war as an "end" to slavery. Had slaves been simply replaced by "natural progress" over the next 50 or so years...very interesting social constructs emerge.

I think it's hard to imagine an end to slavery with greater or longer-lasting or more pervasive costs than the US has paid (and is still paying.)

I hope you aren't saying that ending slavery caused the industiral revolution.

Didn't mean for this to become so difficult. My point was, it is analogous to ripping-off a bandaid quickly as opposed to removing it slowly.

As the industrial revolution was underway in a normal fashion, slavery was slated for economic trash heap...at some point two or three decades later, the country would be faced with the disposing of the non-productive elements. It is one thing to discard typewriters during the computer revolution but quite another to rid ourselves of unnecessary human beings...Or is it?

How America might wash her hands would have produced a very different society than what we have today. How would we value human life, racial equality, ourselves? Humane assimilation evolving over perhaps a few centuries or simple economic disposal creating the immergence of a very dark side of humanity.

I think the war spared us that choice. As bad as it was, even considering the problems of its aftermath, it was, for want of a better phrase, a short-term cost.

Hell of a lot of killed and maimed people in that war. At the time and for some time later there was still plenty market for agrarian and semi-skille labor. People in the South both black and wihte grew up picking cotton by hand even well into the 20th century. And how is it that all those blacks ended up working in the steel mills and factories up north? I really believe your cost/benefit thing is way off here.

The country was rapidly expanding, railroads and towns being built. The labor market was great. Even a slight decrease in immigration would have left pleny of jobs for both black and white citizens.

What is this horrible choice you speak of anyway?

I would use a different analogy. Rather than remove a bandaid quickly or slowly, the Civil War can be thought to have poured a variety of bacteria, some deadly, into an open sore. I would change your last sentence, too. As bad as it was, even considering the problems of its aftermath, it was, for want of a better phrase, a long-term cost which it seems we will never have to stop paying.

That is the animosity, the divide, and the wretched level of racism left and arguably made worse by that war & its aftermath.

You can disagree, but not merely by asserting it isn't so -- because all evidence is that it is so.

I have speculated aloud whether the only end will come by the diminishment, now well underway, of black Americans into America's second-largest majority and a withering away of their priority thusly.

This is the point I was making when I contemplated starting this thread from the discussion of race on another board. I understand RepBubs point that at least we got it over with quickly, but many sources I've seen say slavery probably would have been ended pretty quickly even without a war.

The unfounded blame southerners put on blacks for the war seems to me to be a major reason racism against blacks lasted so long. Maybe if we'd have avoided an all out war the races would have come together a lot sooner. A permanent poor underclass based on race is bad for the country in ways that probably make the civil war a minor problem in the long run.(outside of the horrible carnage)

Was it legal for a slave owner to kill slaves who were his "property"?

Yes. And we grow up and "find out" the war was not fought to end slavery, and the carnage measured even on war's terms particularly horrid. It was in a history class where we were asked to define the deepest problem in America (and given no hints) that I realized the answer was clear even if the reasons or solutions were not so. But that is where my points of wonder (specifically about that war) began.

I'm simply suggesting that our society could have gone down a very strange moral road...If we disposed of slaves in the same manner we discard the utility values of worthless economic items, like typewriters, then how we rationalize our decisions is key...

A good analogy is Nazi Germany...assume that Germany had been victorious and that the treatment of Jews had become widely accetpable among the Germans. Growing up in a society where a complete race of people is expendible with no regard of any kind would certainly produce a different moral outlook than we have today. The results of something like that on a world wide level is far worse than the price paid for the Civil War.


The choce we didn't have to make was how to dispose of them...it was made for us by the war.

Guess I'm lucky you ain't me.

Ten-four. Guess we ain't having a discussion after all.

When I read responses like "You can disagree, but not merely by asserting it isn't so -- because all evidence is that it is so. " I tend to consider a "discussion" over.

Civil War? Which one?

The one that will probably happen in I®aq? The first American Civil War or the next impending one?

American Civil War?

A war over slavery?

How many industries in the North relied on slave labor?

We don't dispose of typewriters. We don't dispose of workers either. I believe it's really far out to even consider the "what if" that you propose. You have left out so many other factors it isn't even funny. I have considered them now that you brought them up, and now that I've done that, I don't plan to consider again.

Can you type a letter in a secret language on a typrewriter?

Do typewriters speak money grubbin Mason?

Well....alrighty then...

It was only an opinion and it is impossible to list all the "factors" in a few sentences. Seems that you are taking this in an unusually personal way that I didn't mean to imply.

You are certainly free to consider whatever you wish...and I can dispose of a typewriter.

I can't remember where I saw it (the Huntington Hartford, maybe) but I once saw a travelling exhibit of newspapers, posters, ads and pamphlets from the 1850-1860 era. (Got to handle 'em, too, with white gloves.)

Anyway, what surprised me the most was the selling prices of slaves in that decade, after the African import trade had fizzled. Prices were running as high as $1800 each--in 1850 dollars.

Seems to me that that would have been fast becoming economically unsustainable over the long run.

Countries were one by one ending the practice of slavery. The US would have followed shortly. There was no other way. There were other ways to end it, but no choice but to, eventually, and eventually would have been soon.

The Civil War was not fought to end slavery, and the upshot of that end to it (war and "reconstruction") was to drag out racial disharmony and hatred for the next 150 years.

It's interesting to ponder, though, how the Continental US would be divided now, had the South been allowed to secede in peace.

Would the Confederate States of America, with its weaker constitution (similar to the earlier Articles of Confederation) have held together, or would it have succumbed to the same disorganization?

Would Texas have remained with the Confederacy, or seceded in turn and returned to its status as an independent Republic? And absent the Mexican-American War, would Oregon and Washington have been viable Yankee, holdings, located so distantly and with a Spanish/Mexican held California?

Makes for interesting speculation, but most likely comes down to neither the USA nor the CSA being a superpower in the 20th century.

Exactly, Jude. No superpowers in the 20th Century. So ..... does that mean the US would not have been there to jump into and help win the World Wars, or does that mean at least the second might never have taken place or a much smaller one?

I'd love to go to a freewheeling, idly or in high-gear speculating forum on it all.

bds, I really suspect that, even had the South been allowed to secede peacefully, conflict between the two entities would have been inevitable. The North's growing economic power still would have been resented by the economically declining South, and I can envision no practical accomodation that could have been reached over shipping via the Mississippi.

It's a shame Cleburne isn't around. His thoughts on the subject would have been interesting.

Yeah, it is a shame Cleburne isn't around. I'd like him around at the elections regardless. He is a good and sometimes surprising contributor.

If the Civil War had been fought to end slavery (of which there is no doubt that it was not), it is a spectacular lesson in Arturo's favorite topic: unintended consequences.

Really it was another in a long line of economic and power struggles, and the age-old way with those is war.

There's a chilling quote in the beginning of the book Black Hawk Down about war. I keep forgetting to write it down so I can cite it.

Grig had a great interest in the civil war too. Sadly my own interests tend to almost everything but the civil war(and Vietnam as well) I do find it interesting that the American civil war was maybe the worlds first modern war. Sadly the Europeans didn't learn anything from it and lost a generation of young men in hopeless bayonet style charges across open ground, having not learned the secret of defense and maneuver over trying to break static lines of defense with waves of naked human flesh.

Are we playing along with that pathetic lie? I thought this sort of doodoo was only worthy of textbooks in Balkan countries in the early and mid-20th century. "return to its status as an independent Republic" . . . oh yeah, a viable, long-lived independent Republic that Texas . . .

I disagree. I suspect that, had the Civil War NOT been fought, black flight from south to north of Negro "refugees" (the situation the Fugitive Slave Act was, from the Southern viewpoint, supposed to ameliorate) would have escalated to a situation much like our present Mexican wetbacks, resulting in an inflow of cheap unskilled labor in the North, and a backlash movement.

As it was, most blacks remained in place, in the Southern states, and didn't migrate north until the early-1900s labor demands drew them from their settled (but second class) security in the South.

With what?

And, how does the 1880-1920 wave of "New Immigration" figure into all of these counterfactual scenarios? Would it have happened had a much larger number of blacks become fugitives in the "free" States? Would all the New Immigrants have gone to the South, instead? Would the dearth of "tied" agricultural labor led to the rationalization of Southern agriculture much earlier? Would the South have made its transition to proper capitalism that much earlier? Would the entire nation have become richer and more productive and FREER even faster?

Personally, I think the immigrants would have migrated to Canada.
The carpetbaggers were more responsible for the hatred that was targeted against a common enemy, as much as what any hatred monger could inflict upon another man.
Nevertheless, the Irish displaced quite a number of freed men when they were allowed and encouraged to compete for jobs.
Possible a similar scenario with the influx of men and women coming from Mexico and crowding the cities and displacing workers while competing for similar jobs.

The civil war in the US could not have been avoided. I think there is an argument that civil wars might be a necessity for the growth of “new nations”.

Off topic??
Just wanted to put this somewhere...

Yakama identity is born of the land. The Yakama believe the land takes care of them, and in turn they must take care of it.

Traditionally, Yakama men were the providers and protectors of their families and villages. They passed on these traditions to their sons -- traditions that formed their identities.

But 200 years ago, a brief encounter with Capt. William Clark at the mouth of the Yakima River signaled the start of the changes that would slowly, but profoundly, alter nearly all that had been. Adapting to a different world has not been easy. As vast territory and a way of life have eroded, so have the lives of many tribal members.

The Treaty of 1855 -- whose 150-year anniversary is commemorated this year -- has helped. It preserved a portion of the Yakamas' original land and traditions.

Without those two inseparable elements -- land and tradition -- tribal leaders say they would lose their identity entirely, and in doing so would lose their way in the world.


http://yakimaherald.com/nativesons/index

Hmmm .... just noticed you're from Yakima, junky. Do you think there is any validity left to this demarcation of "Indian" lands common in Washington State?

(I guess I should check the board more often...)

I do not know.

1800's

I know the general bullet points of the history of the " Indians ", and it looks to me, that everytime they agreed to treaties they were kicked off the land because of some overlooked resource ( gold, fur, oil, land for white settlements--New Ulm, even if they only spoke German, they were white to the Indians...)

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"The Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation are descendents of 14 tribes and bands that were federally recognized under the Yakama Treaty of 1855. The 1,377,034-acre reservation is located in southcentral Washington, along the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountain Range."


To accommodate an insatiable white demand for land and resources, Washington territorial governor and Indian agent Isaac Stevens concluded the Yakama Treaty with the Yakama and 13 other tribes and bands on June 9, 1855. In signing the treaty, the Indians ceded 11.5 million acres to the United States. Although the Yakama themselves ceded 10,828,800 acres to the U.S. government, they reserved their right to fish, hunt and gather within the ceded area. The tribes and bands also agreed to move to a new reservation and receive federal benefits.

The treaty stipulated two years to allow the tribes and bands to relocate on the new reservation, but Governor Stevens threw open Indian lands for white settlers less than two weeks after the treaty was signed. A Yakama chief, Kamiakin, called upon the tribes to oppose the declaration. Some of the tribes joined forces under Kamiakin. The Indians managed to fight off U.S. soldiers for about three years in the uprising called the Yakima War (1855-1858). Other Indians in the territory rose up as well. In September 1858, at the Battle of Four Lakes near Spokane, the Indians were decisively defeated. Kamiakan escaped to Canada, but two dozen other leaders were apprehended and executed.

Most of the Yakama and other tribes then moved onto the reservation where numerous Sahaptin dialects, Chinookan, Salish and English languages converged. They led a harrowing existence. White agents ran the reservation intending to assimilate the internees into American society. A boarding school was established at Fort Simcoe on the reservation to educate and indoctrinate Indian children. Confinement on the reservation contributed to a social breakdown, ill health, alcoholism, and such other problems as high infant mortality.

Agents also compelled Indians to grow crops on the reservation, but they farmed without enthusiasm. Many struggled to fish, hunt, and gather, but the old ways had been disrupted. The Yakama gradually lost access to fishing and hunting lands, as well as to areas with roots and berries; non-Indians had started farms and ranches on ceded Yakama land. Whites let their livestock feed on roots and berries. Irrigation projects destroyed Yakima River salmon runs and plowing ruined plant and animal habitat.

In accordance with a new federal policy in the late 1800s, government agents began to break up the reservation into 80-acre allotments for individual Indians, to encourage tillage. By 1914, 4,506 tribal members held 440,000 allotted acres, leaving 780,000 acres owned by the tribe as a whole.

Later in the 1900s, however, nearly all tillable acreage was purchased out of Indian hands. Such towns as Toppenish and Wapato were established on lands purchased from Indian allotments. Various entities threatened to confiscate Indian water. County, state and federal governments promoted development, including road and railroad construction, as well as the massive Wapato Irrigation Project. Whites sought through official channels to restrict the movement of Yakama people on the Columbia Plateau.
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a couple of things that went the Indian's way

1) Alaska Native Land Claims

****"Natives unite in new movement
The two protests were part of the growing political activism of Alaska's Natives. In 1966 Charlie Edwardson, Jr., who was chairman of a community education program in Barrow, called a meeting to discuss Eskimo land rights. The conference led to the formation of the Arctic Slope Native Association whose goal was to receive title to 58 million acres of land north of the Brooks Range. Members of the Arctic Slope group, the Northwest Alaska Native Association (NANA), and the recently organized Seward Peninsula Native Association filed protests against state land selections in Northwest and Arctic Alaska. U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall halted all federal land transactions in Alaska until Congress settled the issue of Alaska Native land claims. Oil at Prudhoe Bay Lands already acquired by the State of Alaska were not affected by Udall's freeze. Several oil companies had leased state land in Northwest and Arctic Alaska to explore for oil. In 1968 oil gushed from a wildcat well drilled by the Atlantic Richfield Company at Prudhoe Bay."

2) The Boldt decision

*****"The Yakama have focused on self-sufficiency and economic independence since World War II. The federal government had acknowledged Yakama fishing rights in the treaty of 1855, but later, county and state officials opposed native fishing rights. As a result of legal battles culminating in the historic Boldt decision of 1974, the federal government reaffirmed Yakama fishing rights and made the tribe a co-manager of fishery resources with the state of Washington."

http://www.u-s-history.com/index.html

I miss seeing you around, though I usually check in a bit later than you do.

Ta.

I miss you, too junky, how goes it?

i hope all is well

http://www.myspace.com/sieve_fisted_find_prod