What If the South Had Been Allowed to Go in Peace?

What If the South Had Been Allowed to Go in Peace

Did the world end when America became a separate country from England?  No, and not only have America and England long been staunch allies and close trading partners, but their peoples continue to share many friendships and family relationships.  Norway seceded from Sweden, without a war, and the two countries still enjoy friendly relations.  Although I don’t advocate modern secession, and although I’m proud of the many good things that America has done, I don’t think it would have been the end of the world if the South had been allowed to go in peace.

I think both the U.S.A. and the C.S.A. would have flourished.  Interchange between the states of the two nations would have continued almost exactly as before.  If anything, the presence of a prosperous low-tax, limited-government Southern confederacy would have been a powerful incentive for the federal government to limit taxes and to adhere more closely to the limitations imposed on it by the Constitution.

Some critics have suggested that if the Confederacy had survived, World War II may have had a different outcome.  But the fact that England and America separated didn’t prevent them from later joining forces to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II.  The U.S. and the Confederacy certainly would have teamed up to do the same thing.

If the South had been permitted to go in peace, slavery would have died a natural death in a matter of a few decades, if not sooner.  Before the war, even some Northern politicians, such as William Seward, said slavery was a dying institution.  The percentage of Southern whites that belonged to slaveholding families dropped by 5 percent from 1850-1860 (Divine et al, editor, America Past and Present, p. 389).  Historian Allan Nevins noted that by the 1850s "slavery was dying all around the edges of its domain" (The Emergence of Lincoln, Volume 2, p. 469).  Although slavery was still economically profitable, its days were numbered.  Interestingly, some of the most vocal Northern abolitionists, including Wendell Phillips, welcomed the South’s secession because they believed Southern slavery would die out more quickly if the South were no longer part of the Union.

If the South had been allowed to leave in peace, over 600,000 soldiers (over half of them from the North) would have been spared death.  Over 50,000 Southern civilians likewise would have been spared death.  Hundreds of thousands of soldiers would not have been wounded for life.  Millions of families would have been spared sorrow and anguish over their dead and wounded loved ones.  Billions of dollars in property damage would have been avoided.  And, race relations would not have suffered the poisoning that they experienced during and after the war.

“But,” some will ask, “wouldn’t the Union have been destroyed if the Confederacy had survived?”  This was one of Lincoln’s erroneous arguments.  The Union would not have been “destroyed” if the South had been allowed to leave in peace.  The Union still would have had 23 states, compared to the Confederacy’s 11 states, and it would have retained control over the vast western territories.  The Union’s population was more than twice the size of the Confederacy’s.  In addition, the Union had nine times more factories than the Confederacy, twenty times more pig iron, seventeen times more textiles, two and a half times more railroad tracks, thirty-two times more firearms, and nine times more production value.  The Union still would have been one of the largest and most powerful countries on the earth even without the eleven states of the Confederacy.  So the Union would have been just fine if the Republicans had allowed the South to go in peace.  (Of course, if the two nations had lived in peace, the Union would have needed to lower its tariff in order to compete with the low Confederate tariff, but that could have been done in a matter of days by the U.S. Congress.)

What would the South be like today if the Confederacy had survived?  No one can say with certainty, but it’s  likely that taxes of all kinds would be much lower.  Citizens would have much less government interference in their lives.  Parents would have more control over their children’s education and over their local schools.  Southern schools would most likely allow voluntary prayer, moral instruction, nativity plays at Christmas time, and formal Bible reading (as our schools used to do until the 1960s when the Supreme Court suddenly decided these things were somehow “unconstitutional”).  There would be tough anti-pornography laws.  The lives of unborn children would be protected by law.  There would be no question that marriage should be reserved for a man and a woman.  And a state government could place a Ten Commandments monument in front of a state judicial building without having to worry about a federal judge wrongfully ordering its removal.

However, all this being said, I think that if the South had been allowed to go in peace, it would have eventually rejoined the Union.  But, if not, I don’t think it would have been the end of the world if the South had remained independent.  England and America have managed to do very well as separate nations.  So have Norway and Sweden.  I think the Confederacy and the United States could have done the same thing.