If Lincoln had let the secessionists go

Roads not taken

History has been likened to a river, with a flow generally determined by the landscape it traverses. Rocks in the river can divert the flow modestly. A landslide can create a larger diversion. But gravity always wins and the river flows downhill regardless.

A single human can influence the course of history, but rarely for long. Napoleon marched all about Europe, but a generation after he died, the continent wasn't much different than it would have been had he never lived. William of Normandy forcibly introduced the French language into England, but if he hadn't done so, someone else probably would have. Mao Zedong led the People's Liberation Army to victory in China's civil war. Half a century after his death, the Communist party carries on in China quite well without him. Isaac Newton saw farther than others of his generation, but the giants whose shoulders he admitted to have stood on would have supported someone else who figured out gravity.

Counterfactual history has fascinated people for a long time. What would have happened if Pickett's charge had succeeded? If Oswald's bullets had missed Kennedy?

These questions can be entertaining. Unusually in the study of history, they give license to the imagination.

Their limits should be kept in mind. Many people are familiar with the projections of hurricane paths supplied by meteorologists. These start narrow, at the point where the hurricane is now, and they increasingly broaden the farther they project into the future. Counterfactual history should be handled similarly. We know where the world was on November 22, 1963. We can guess with some confidence where it would have been on November 23, had Kennedy not been shot. But the farther out we project, the less confidence we should have. Would Kennedy have pulled out of Vietnam after the 1964 election? Who knows?

The greatest value of counterfactual history lies in encouraging close analysis of what actually did happen. It's one thing to say Lincoln freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Does this mean that if Lincoln had been assassinated in the summer of 1862 the Emancipation Proclamation would not have been issued? We can't answer this question definitively, but in grappling with it we can illuminate the extent to which this moment in history depended on Lincoln and the extent to which there were other forces at work.

In this and subsequent essays I propose to ask a series of counterfactual questions. What would have happened if something that did take place had not?

Since I mentioned Lincoln, the initial question will be: What would have happened if Lincoln had not resisted secession?

Lincoln gets credit for saving the Union and freeing the slaves. And well he should. But might the Union have been saved without him? And the slaves freed?

The answer to the first question is, certainly not, in the short term. The seven states that seceded by the time Lincoln was inaugurated, and formed the Confederate States of America, declared themselves an independent nation. And so they would have become if Lincoln hadn’t contested their independence.

But eight slave states had not seceded by then, and they might never had seceded if Lincoln hadn't made war upon the seceders. Unionist sentiment was strong and openly proclaimed in Virginia, which had strong commercial ties to the North. Unionism remained viable in Virginia until Lincoln called for volunteers to suppress secession after the fall of Fort Sumter. Lincoln proposed to march a Union army through Virginia to get to South Carolina. This was more than a majority of Virginians could bear. Yet even after Virginia seceded, Unionist feeling persisted in the western part of the state, which broke off to become West Virginia.

If secession had been confined to the seven states of the Deep South, the Confederacy would have had a tough slog in the world of nations. It might very well have gravitated back toward the United States once slavery ended.

And slavery almost certainly would have ended within in a generation even absent the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. Clear-eyed Southerners recognized that slavery handicapped the region in the race for economic development, which required a more flexible workforce than slavery allowed. To be sure, slavery enriched many slaveholders—although not all of them, for it encouraged bad business practices, which kept many planters in chronic debt. In the debate over secession in Virginia, critics contended that secession would serve only the interests only of the small class of large planters, and that it was high time the commonwealth broke their stranglehold on politics. Lincoln's declaration of war allowed the planters to play the patriot card. Without that, they might well have lost the debate.

People in other slave states were making similar arguments. These would have gotten louder as time passed, with or without a war. And one by one, the southern states would have ended slavery for the same reason the northern states had already ended slavery: because it no longer made economic sense.

Furthermore, if slavery had ended by the uncoerced choice of the southern states, its aftermath would have been less troubled than it was in actual event, in which it was wrapped in the resentment consequent to the defeat of the South in the war. No small part of that resentment resulted from the knowledge that hundreds of thousands of slaves had turned traitor to their states, in the eyes of the white residents of those states, by joining the Union army. When the Ku Klux Klan and its like emerged, their first targets were the black veterans of the Union army. Many of those black veterans, knowing they could expect harsh treatment, left their states for the West, constituting the group called “exodusters.”

Here I will call a halt. I don't want to try to prove that which can't be proven. The purpose of this exercise is chiefly to caution against falling into the inevitability trap. Because something happened a certain way, it's tempting to think it had to happen that way. Historians are particularly susceptible. We know how things turned out, and we devote most of our energy to explaining how and why they turned out as they did.

The river of history in the 19th century was flowing toward an end to slavery. At the beginning of the century slavery was legal and hardly questioned in most countries on earth. At the end of the century it was illegal nearly everywhere and almost universally condemned. The southern states in America stood as a rock in this stream for the first two-thirds of the century. But the current was too strong. It washed slavery away even in Brazil. It would have done so in the American South.

The river of history was also flowing in the direction of combinative nationalism. Italians were unifying to create Italy, Germans to create Germany. Economic, cultural and political forces like the ones that produced those unifications would have drawn the Confederacy back toward the Union. Full amalgamation might or might not have occurred. Perhaps one or more constitutional amendments would have made clearer how the states stood with respect to the federal government. The United States might have come to resemble Canada or the modern European Union.

Anyway, it's worth thinking about.