Topics this page:
• Was the war necessary to end slavery?
• Patrick Cleburne confederate emancipation advocate
• U. S. Grant quote
• Harry Flashman - fictional character but interesting quote

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  WAS THE WAR NECESSARY TO END SLAVERY?

  Jeffrey Rogers Hummel -- from "Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men - A History of the American Civil War" Open Court Publishing Company 1996

  "When Lincoln took the presidential oath in 1861, letting the lower South secede in Peace was a viable antislavery option. At the moment of Lincoln's inauguration the Union still retained more slave states than had left. Radical abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, had traditionally advocated northern secession from the South. They felt that this best hastened the destruction of slavery by allowing the free states to get out from under the Constitution's fugitive slave provision. Passionately opposing slavery and simultaneously favoring secession are therefore quite consistent. Yet hardly any modern account of the Union's fiery conflagration even acknowledges this untried alternative.

  "Slavery was doomed even if Lincoln had permitted the small Gulf Coast Confederacy to depart in peace. The Republican-controlled Congress would have been able to work toward emancipation within the border states, where slavery was already declining. In due course the Radicals could have repealed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. With chattels fleeing across the border and raising slavery's enforcement costs, the peculiar institution's final destruction within an independent cotton South was inevitable.

  "Slavery could not last if the slaves had freedom within arm's length," recalled American abolitionist Moncure Conway. Slavery in the Cape Colony of southern Africa, for instance, depended upon the transportation of blacks from Mozambique and Madagascar and of east Indians. The so-called Hottentots, indigenous to the area, were nearly impossible to keep enslaved because they could escape too easily. Civil War runaways so weakened the peculiar institution that the Confederacy itself turned toward emancipating and arming blacks. Slavery thus neither explains nor justifies Northern suppres- sion of secession. The Union war effort reduces, in the words of Conway, to "mere manslaughter."

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  FROM CHAPTER XIV OF U. S. GRANTS MEMOIRS

  There was no time during the rebellion when I did not think, and often say, that the South was more to be benefited by its defeat than the North. The latter had the people, the institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation. The former was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class. With the outside world at war with this institution, they could not have extended their territory. The labor of the country was not skilled, nor allowed to become so. The whites could not toil without becoming degraded, and those who did were denominated "poor white trash." The system of labor would have soon exhausted the soil and left the people poor. The non-slaveholders would have left the country, and the small slave- holder must have sold out to his more fortunate neighbor. Soon the slaves would have outnumbered the masters, and, not being in sympathy with them, would have risen in their might and exterminated them. The war was expensive to the South as well as to the North, both in blood and treasure, but it was worth all it cost.

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  General Patrick R. Cleburne

  
  Confederate Emancipation Advocate
  "He was a man of equally quick perception and strong character, and was, especially in one respect, in advance of many of our people. He possessed the boldness and wisdom to earnestly advocate at an early period of the war the freedom of the negro and enrollment of the young and able-bodied men of that race. This stroke of policy and additional source of strength to our armies would, in my opinion, have given us our independence."
  General John Bell Hood, Texan

Well, he was right, and I, in my excusable ignorance, was wrong; the storm was gathering in �59 - but what astonishes me today is that all the wiseacres who discuss its origins and inevitability, never give a thought to where it really began, back in 1776, with their idiotic Declaration of Independence. If they�d had the wit to stay in the Empire then, instead of getting drunk on humbug about �freedom� and letting a pack of firebrands (who had a fine eye to their own advantage) drag �em into pointless rebellion, there would never have been an American Civil War, and that�s as sure as any �if� can be. How so? Well, Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, and slavery in 1833, and the South would have been bound to go along with that, grumbling, to be sure, but helpless against the will of Britain and her northern American colonies. It would all have happened quietly, no doubt with compensation, and there�d have been nothing for North and South to fight about. Q.E.D.

But try telling that to a smart New Yorker, or an Arkansas chawbacon, or a pot-bellied Virginia Senator; point out that Canada and Australia managed their way to peaceful independence without any tomfool Declarations or Bunker Hills or Shilohs or Gettysburgs, and are every bit as much �the land of the free� as Kentucky or Oregon, and all you�ll get is a great harangue about �liberty and the pursuit of happiness�, damn your Limey impudence, from the first; a derisive haw-haw and a stream of tobacco juice across your boots from the second; and a deal of pious fustian about a new nation forged in blood emerging into the sunlight under Freedom�s flag, from the third. You might as well be listening to an intoxicated Frog.

It�s understandable, to be sure: they have to live with their ancestors� folly and pretend that it was all for the best, and that the monstrous collection of platitudes which they call a Constitution, which is worse than useless because it can be twisted to mean anything you please by crooked lawyers and grafting politicos, is the ultimate human wisdom. Well, it ain�t, and it wasn�t worth one life, American or British, in the War of Independence, let alone the vile slaughter of the Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Celtic race in the Civil War. But perhaps you had to stand on Cemetery Ridge after Pickett�s charge to understand that.

I put these thoughts to Lincoln, you know, after the war, and he sat back, cracking his knuckles and eyeing me slantendicular.

�Flashman the non-Founding Father is a wondrous thought,� says he. �Come, now, do I detect a mite of imperial resentment? You know, paternal jealousy because the mutinous son didn�t turn out prodigal after all?�

�You can�t get much more prodigal than Gettysburg, Mr President,� says I. �And I ain�t jealous one little bit. I just wish our ancestors had been wiser. I�d be happy to see Queen reigning in Washington, with yourself as Prime Minister of the British-American Empire.� Toady, if you like, but true.

�Lord Lincoln . . . of Kaintuck�?� laughs he. �Doesn�t sound half bad. D�you suppose they�d make me a Duke? No, better not - the boys would never let me in the store at New Salem again!�

He was the only American, by the way, who ever gave me a straight answer to a question I�ve asked occasionally, out of pure mischief: why was it right for the thirteen colonies to secede from the British Empire, but wrong for the Southern States to secede from the Union?

�Setting aside the Constitution, of which you think so poorly - and which I�d abandon gladly in order to preserve the Union, if you�ll pardon the paradox - I�m astonished that a man of your worldly experience can even ask such a question, � says he. �What has �right� got to do with it? The Revolution of �76 succeeded, the recent rebellion did not, and there, as the darkie said when he�d et the melon, is an end of it.�

And a few hours after that he was dead, the last but not the least casualty of that rotten war.