Old Hickory's Weblog

Billmon has been on a roll posting provocative stuff lately.  I want to mention this one The Totalitarian Temptation 07/02/06 as well worth reading and I plan to comment on it more later.

But first I want to mention his response to a New York Times column by John Tierney, where he speculates whether it might not have worked out better if the Confederacy had succeeded in making a separate nation:  A House Divided 07/04/06.  Billmon and Steve Gilliard go into several of the things  wrong with Tierney's column (Idiocy in action 07/04/06).

But neither of them points out clearly that this is one variety of neo-Confederate fantasy.  And if we're going to talk counterfactual history, let's at least rely on what the real situation tells us so far as we can.

There was no way the Confederacy and a United States of the Union states were going to coexist.  On the military and economic front, the CSA would have controlled the Mississippi River, which was the main source for trade in the (then-)western states.  They would have been pressured to join the CSA or face economic strangulation.

And it was the slavery issue (in any honest account) that tore the country apart.  Or, more precisely, that led the Southern "Fire-Eaters" to push for secession.  If they were that upset about having free states being potential avenues of escape for their slaves, what would they have done if the free states became a separate country?  At a minimum, they would have insisted on a treaty as strict as the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 if not more so, and just as intrusive of the internal affairs of the United States and its individual states.

Unless the remaining United States was willing to live on their knees to the slaveholding Confederacy, it never would have worked.  The CSA would have absorbed all or most of the Union states and made them into slave states.  Or tried.

|  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this