Saturday - January 10, 2004

Category Image How to Avoid a War


Okay, I've been talking about war my past couple of rants, and I've accused nations of acting irrationally by pursuing wars that were avoidable. So the natural question to pose is how could these wars have been avoided? Let's stick with the War of 1861 and engage in the dubious business of speculating what might have been done differently.

To better evaluate how the War of 1861 might have been avoided, we first have to pick a date from which to deviate from history, and we have to understand what was done that caused the war after that date. If you go far enough back in time, you can always find ways to avoid anything, but that's no challenge. So let's go to the date of the election of Abraham Lincoln as President and let's turn him into a reasonable man instead of the bloodthirsty dictator that he was. This is a tall order.

What events happened when he was elected that led to the war? When did the war actually start? First, the deep south states seceded immediately upon his being elected. These first states were South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. The remaining six states, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, and Kentucky didn't secede until after the war started.

When these first seven states seceded, the US military was structured much differently than it is now. The standing army existed, but was quite small. The US had a navy, and it had a small army that was mostly limited to manning shore batteries and forts. The history of how this national military came into existence is interesting in its own right but beyond the scope of this rant. Let's just say that the states did not trust a national military at first, and it took a lot of wrangling to create even this small, and limited military. There were some regular army units but they were also small.

The regular army was so inconspicuous that when John Brown attacked the arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia the nearest army unit was in Fort Monroe, near Norfolk — which is exactly where you would expect to find an army whose primary role was coastal defense. They had to send eighty-seven US Marines from Washington, D.C. under the ad hoc command of Robert E. Lee to deal with him. The US army was designed to man coastal forts and to engage in engineering projects (sounds very Hamiltonian, doesn't it?) and to provide a leadership cadre for the state militias if they were needed. After the war, the army was bigger but the large standing, national army as we know it now did not come into existence until after the First World War. Much of the military in that war were state militias, re-organized into a "rainbow" brigade led by Colonel MacArthur. Most of the rest of the regular army and the Marine Corps was created for that war. But I digress.

When the seven states seceded, all but one of these coastal forts were surrendered to the appropriate state government peacefully. This is because the states considered the land which the forts were on to be their sovereign territory on loan to the United States. The lone exception was Fort Sumter in Charleston's harbor, and Lincoln's refusal to surrender this one fort was the catalyst for starting the war.

Make no mistake about it. Lincoln knew what he was doing. He wanted a war with the seceding states, and he wanted them to fire the first shot. He purposefully chose a fort in South Carolina because the South Carolinians were well known for being hot headed on this issue. Rather than abandon the fort, he sent warships to reprovision it. According to my trusty source, DiLorenzo in his book The Real Lincoln, Bruce Catton explains,

Lincoln had been plainly warned by [his military staffers] that a ship taking provisions to Fort Sumter would be fired on. Now he was sending the ship, with advance notice to the men who had the guns. He was sending warships and soldiers as well . . . If there was going to be a war it would begin over a boat load of salt pork and crackers . . . Not for nothing did Captain Fox remark afterward that it seemed very important to Lincoln that South Carolina "should stand before the civilized world as having fired upon bread."

DiLorenzo further quotes Shelby Foote:

Lincoln had maneuvered [the Confederates] into the position of having either to back down on their threats or else to fire the first shot of the war. What was worse, in the eyes of the world, that first shot would be fired for the immediate purpose of keeping food from hungry men.

So this was the immediate cause of the war. It was only a fort in a sovereign state which no longer wished to be part of a union it voluntarily joined, which was manned by union troops and in need of provisions. As in all tangos and wars, it takes two.

Rather than wait for the resupply ships to arrive, the South Carolinian militia attacked the fort and forcibly took it from the union troops. Virginia, which had already voted against secession, immediately changed course and seceded. Lincoln used this as a pretext for invading Virginia and occupying Maryland and jailing its legislature so that it couldn't vote for secession.

So we have identified the time to go back to, immediately after Lincoln's election, and we have identified what actions started the war. The seceded states, in an irresponsible state of euphoria after having seceded, refused to allow a federal fort in their harbor, and a US president, hell bent for war insisted on further provoking them. How could this have been handled otherwise, and could the entire war have been avoided?

Very clearly, both sides could have backed down from their rhetoric, but that is too much to ask. Either side at this point could have unilaterally avoided the war from starting at this time. On the northern side, Lincoln could have simply surrendered the fort just as all the other forts were surrendered. It had no use to him anymore. It was a static fort and had no offensive capability and resupplying it was difficult and expensive. It could only fire at ships as they passed by and history has shown this to be mostly an inconvenience to shipping traffic. Yes, it could potentially sink ships, but it wasn't very effective in the long run, especially at night. Keeping the fort was a purely symbolic act. It symbolized his desire for war.

On the other hand, South Carolinians were equally thirsty for war. As is natural for a democratic institution that just radically changed its entire government, it had a tendency to act rashly, so perhaps this is the harder change to imagine. But rationally, for the same reason that the fort was mostly useless, South Carolina could have simply blockaded the fort, or even allowed warships to reprovision it. So long as the warships or the fort didn't fire on anyone it really made no difference to them.

If either side had a statesman who wished to avoid a confrontation, the incident at Fort Sumter could have been avoided altogether and it would only be known by historians with arcane lists of forts built by the silly coastal defense construction program.

So, we have shown that there was no real danger to anyone by this fort and it was easily possible to avoid a shoot out over it. We have removed the spark of the war in our imaginative alternate history. But there are three components needed to start a forest fire, heat, fuel, and a spark. This spark is gone, but it's still very hot and dry in the political forest with lots of dead underbrush. Something else has to be done to prevent other sparks from causing a fire.

We now have seven seceded states, Virginia and the other slave states are content to remain in the Union, and Lincoln is perfectly happy to have slave states on his side. Remember, he always said that he didn't care about slavery. But those seven states are quite wealthy, almost exclusively because of agriculture powered by slave labor. In the new industrial world, this was an economy that would be very limited in growth. The cost of maintaining slaves was very expensive because of the fear of slave revolts. In fact, fear of the abolitionist movement inspiring slave revolts was the main reason why these states seceded, according to some historians.

These deep south states had a repulsive institution. The cotton fields had brutal conditions where slaves were treated as subhuman. Slavery is never a good thing, and I am not defending it at all, but these seven states had a slave system that was much worse than anywhere else in the country. Slavery needed to end, and end quickly because it was immoral and inexcusable.

But the war didn't end slavery quickly, and it definitely didn't improve the lives of many former slaves after the war ended. Share cropping was pretty much the same thing, with fewer whippings. The war caused the end of slavery to appear to happen quickly, but it also destroyed 600,000 people and the future of thirteen states.

How could Lincoln have avoided war, freed the slaves, and re-formed the union all at the same time? It would have taken great statesmanship, but if Lincoln had the inspiration or the desire, I think he was talented enough to do it. In some ways, allowing the seven states to remain seceded without provoking South Carolina into attacking Fort Sumter would have worked to everyone's advantage.

How? First, the upper southern states would have stayed in the Union. The lower southern states would become international pariahs. The navy could have concentrated on continuing to chase down slave runners, in cooperation with the British navy. The slavery issue could have been exploited politically to get the British to stop buying cotton from the south, and buy Egyptian cotton instead just as they did when the war started.

With the departure of the extremist slave states, slavery reform could have begun. If they had made it a crime to inflict corporal punishment on slaves without due process in the legal system, slavery would have become too costly to be viable. This would drive the cost of owning slaves up too high to make them worth buying. By removing the seceded states from the Union, the abolitionist movement would have had more strength and would have been able to get these laws enacted throughout the country. By restraining their absolutist zeal, they could have attained their goal almost as fast, with less bloodshed, so long as the seven states were gone.

Many prominent Virginians, for example, often were against slavery (definitely not all) and would have freed their slaves were it legal to do so. Manumission of slaves was illegal because if there were too many free blacks in the population it would have been too hard to detect escaped slaves among them. If all blacks were slaves then identifying slaves is easy. Free slaves in the population makes the cost of keeping slaves higher because of the need to keep better track of them.

I suspect, in my fantasy history, that eventually the seven seceded states would have cooled their tempers, and as their cotton prices dropped from the competition with Egyptian cotton and embargoes against them for their slavery practices, they would have eventually asked to return to the Union. The experiment with secession would have failed.

But what would have been gained, besides not killing so many people? The right to secede would have been maintained. The principle of self-determination, so prominent in the Declaration of Independence, would have stayed with us and all of us would be free. The federal government wouldn't have grown so powerful, for fear of provoking another round of secession. And in the end, secession is the only protection we have from the ever increasing reach of federal power.

Okay, this was really, really long. I doubt anyone reads the whole thing. Here's the conclusion: If either Lincoln or South Carolina had decided to avoid conflict over the useless and meaningless Fort Sumter, and Lincoln had used his political savvy to work with the upper southern states to make slavery less abusive and slowly gave slaves rights under the law, everyone would be much better off, including the slaves who would have been freed in fact, rather than just in name, much sooner.

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