If Abe Lincoln Had Let the South Secede

Sometimes I like to imagine what would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had let the Southern states secede from the Union, instead of making war on those Southern states who declared themselves the Confederacy, to stop the secession. Or if the Confederacy had won, which I imagine would have had much the same effect (except that letting the secession proceed would have spared the enormous loss of life and mutilation that the war caused).

For one thing, we would not have had the conservative Southern states doing their best to stop social progress, such as equality for African-Americans, for these 150 years. [Note added 1/10/2011: My regular readers know my ideas on the proliferation of guns. I recently read that much of the support for the NRA, the leading obstacle to gun control, comes from the South.]

I still would like to see the U.S. rid of at least a few of those states. Let them be another country, and then I don't have to care very much what they do. Let them have school prayer. Let them post the Ten Commandments outside their courthouses. Let them teach creationism. (They probably do.) Let them be mocked by most Western countries. (They are.) Let them continue to imprison and execute a ridiculous percentage of their populations. Let them all have their guns and shoot one another. Of course it would still be deplorable, but at least I could look at all that with more distance, like we think about what goes on in Africa. They would be "they" and not "we"--at least not we in the eyes of the world.

(A couple years ago there even was some talk, presumably not very serious, about splitting the U.S. between the "Red" and "Blue" states. Unfortunately one difficulty--a serious one--with this idea is that the Red states are not contiguous. Splitting them off would create a country like the original Pakistan, with two separated areas. Pakistan could not survive that way, with two separated parts, and what was East Pakistan became the country of Bangladesh.)

Here are my candidates for the states I'd be perfectly willing to see gone from the United States, though I might diddle with this priority a little bit:

1. (tie) Texas and Mississippi
2. (tie) Arkansas and Alabama
3. Arizona, especially to be rid of its Senator, John McCain (and to think that, during the last presidential campaign, he almost had us convinced he was a moderate)
4. (tie) Kentucky (to be rid of Mitch McConnell) and Louisiana

Although I have had these thoughts for quite a while, my posting them now coincides with the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War and hence a renewed focus on the issues behind the Civil War (which the South views as having happened yesterday). Southerners want to view the war as over issues of states' sovereignty and not slavery.

Mark Simpson, the commander of South Carolina's division of Sons of Confederate Veterans, says, "Look at the way the elections have just gone. There were two dozen states that passed sovereignty resolutions. South Carolina passed it, and it stems from an unconstitutional mandate from Congress over the health care bill."

You know what I say, Let 'em secede. Now if not then. I'm not sure I'd be sorry to see most of them gone.

But back to what would have been if they'd seceded in 1861: The main question one would wonder is, How or when (if ever) would slavery have ended? Well, certainly it would have lasted longer. But to look at the example of some other countries, it probably would have ended in a few more decades. There would have been international pressures and perhaps even pressures from within.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein