Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 10: Were alternatives to civil war possible by 1860?

“Lincoln allegedly teaches lessons about ‘the politics of the possible’,” writes Mark Graber, “but the precise nature of those lessons and possibilities are obscured by scholarly failures to acknowledge the proslavery compromises necessary in 1861 to preserve the Union peacefully or the justification of the violence actually responsible for the abolition of slavery.” (“John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Dred Scott, and the Problem of Constitutional Evil” in The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law, 2010)

What did he mean by that? In retrospect, the US Civil War – like almost any other historical event – can look inevitable. But the politicians looked for ways to avoid that outcome. And in a general sense, that’s very understandable. Solving a problem without civil war is obviously better in the abstract that solving it with one.

On the other hand, what if civil war is inevitable? That was a big part of the context of the debate over slavery prior to 1860. Many slaves certainly thought slavery was intolerable enough to undertake the very risky flight to free states, where they could legally be hunted down by slavecatchers as runaway slaves.

There was also the example of Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, which showed that there was a way to end slavery with rebellion and war. It certainly scared the bejeesus out of American slaveowners. Independence for Haiti also came with a huge downside: France coerced them into paying France compensation for the emancipated slaves. It took Haiti 122 years to pay that debt down, acting as a huge drag on their economic development. (See: Greg Rosalsky, 'The Greatest Heist In History': How Haiti Was Forced To Pay Reparations For Freedom NPR/Planet Money 10/05/2021) Ending slavery by compensated emancipation – state governments buying the slaves from their owners, in effect – was used by Northeastern states to end slavery there. So emancipated compensation was considered a realistic option prior to the Civil War. Though even by the early 19th century with the growing investment in slavery and cotton production in the South, it wasn’t actually a realistic solution.

It would have been a horribly unjust way to end slavery, as well – unjust to the slaves themselves and to non-slaveowning whites - but a bonanza to the owners that had been ruthlessly exploiting their labor for their whole lifetimes. We could argue in the abstract whether it would have been a lesser evil than the Civil War was. But it was simply not a realistic option.

There was also the fact that “the people” who made up those able to vote was made up of white men. And as I’ve discussed in these posts in earlier years (particularly with reference to the work of historian William Freehling), it was a fact that whites could be both intensely opposed to slavery and intensely racist against Black people. The popularity even among serious white Abolitionists of the thoroughly impractical “colonization” movement which looked to relocate all African-Americans literally to Africa is one manifestation of that. Virtually no Black Abolitionists embraced the colonization scheme.

Graber writess:

The central question Americans faced during the late 1850s was how much slavery they were willing to accept to maintain national union. Taney and Douglas insisted that the price for Northerners was high, that a good deal of accommodation was necessary to preserve the Constitution of 1789. [The antislavery guerilla fighter] John Brown forthrightly insisted that all mainstream politicians proposed too dear a bargain for national union, that violence was the only means by which substantial numbers of slaves would be freed in the foreseeable future. By pretending that Lincoln’s proposal to place slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction” over the course of a century or more might have both preserved union and justified the constitutional order, contemporary Americans fail to acknowledge just how much constitutional evil must be tolerated to maintain constitutions in divided societies and the necessity of violence as the only alternative for possibly advancing the good.

John Brown participated on the proslavery in the guerilla war between pro- and antislavery fighters in what became known as “Bleeding Kansas,” which in itself was a mini-civil war. The proslavery forces were determined to establish slavery in Kansas Territory by force and violence as well as by legal political means. The Presidency was controlled by pro-slavery Democrats who were not going to oppose the pro-slavery guerrillas.

It's sometimes said that Brown intended to incite a civil war by the action he unsuccessfully undertook at Harper’s Ferry. But that was not the case. His plan was to establish groups of antislavery guerillas in the Appalachians to encourage and assist slaves to escape to increase the crisis of the slave system.