Edward:

I am on my first cup of coffee so may have missed something, but it seems to me that you answered your initial question quite effectively with your last post. To summarize my interpretation of your post: No, the CSA could not be left to its own, because the understanding that Unionists placed on the essence of the American revolution was perpetual union. In the northern mindset, states could not pick up their marbles because they disagreed with the outcome of a legitimate election. Therefore, the act of secession made war inevitable. The only question left was to decide whether that secession was irreversible and I believe it was.

Since Lincoln's ill-conceived "Any people anywhere . . . have the right to rise up" speech during the 1848 presidential campaign, perpetual union was Lincoln's constant and unaltered message to the country. Instead of hearing the message, however, the southern leaders chose to concentrate on Lincoln's rather weak and vague stand on slavery.

IMO the South was well aware of Lincoln's perpetual union position and seceded after the 1860 election knowing that Lincoln would not and could not let them go in peace. While arguments continue to this day as to whether the Founding Fathers designed the Union as "perpetual," the fact remains that Lincoln believed it and designed both his actions and public utterings to express this belief. In essence the timing of secession was a deliberate thumbing to the north, a kind of "We dare you." Naturally, we know today that the south grossly underestimated the obscure and ungainly man they considered a rube and a rude westerner who would take office in March of 1861.

In 1858 William Seward described the two prevalent views in America of the developing sectional conflict. He reported that some, &#34;think it is accidental. unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators and therefore ephemeral . . .&#34; <u>Ephemeral: </u>short-lived, fleeting, transitory, momentary. In other words, many had a bad case of tunnel vision and chose to believe the trouble would go away with the passage of time.

Those who viewed it this way were simply avoiding the reality that Seward and many like-minded men &#40;remember in the prewar Senate Davis and Seward were close friends&#41; saw more clearly, &#34;It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces. . .&#34;

Seward himself was not advocating war. He felt war was unnecessary and to be avoided at all costs. It was Seward after all who proposed the ludicrous device of declaring war on Spain to reunite the states. Nonetheless, Seward recognized the growing chasm and was simply saying that the ideas and institutions, which divided North and South, were both intense and extensive resulting in a natural debate and conflict.

Seward defined the irrepressible conflict as arising from &#34;two radically different political systems; the one resting on the basis of servile labor, the other on the basis of voluntary labor of free men.&#34; Seward believed that collisions were bound to occur as the country grew and addressed evolving issues such as westward expansion, railroad building, urban growth, international trade treaties, and of course the ubiquitous slavery question.

Lincoln agreed with Seward and saw the widening breach as irrepressible requiring a resolution. In what many believe was Lincoln&#39;s greatest speech, the second inaugural, Lincoln announced, &#34;All knew that this [slave] interest was somehow the cause of war. . . To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war.&#34; While Lincoln was speaking in hindsight, it is certain that his words reflected what he believed in early 1861.

In the 20th Century Edward Channing argued that slavery created two &#34;irreconcilable sections&#34; in the antebellum years resulting in the South becoming a nation within a nation, &#34;War for Southern Independence&#34; Channing said resulted from the two sides being unable, &#34;to live side by side within the walls of one government.&#34;

Allan Nevin&#39;s agreed and took it further, &#34;the main root of the conflict . . . was the problem of slavery,&#34; along with a related problem of &#34;race adjustment,&#34; concluding that &#34;South and North . . . were rapidly becoming separate peoples. . . With every passing year, the fundamental assumptions, tastes, and cultural aims of the two sections became more divergent.&#34; These differences created a climate, &#34;in which emotions grew feverish; in which every episode became a crisis, every jar a shock.&#34;

David Potter another 20th C historian, however, took a variant view, believing that a compromise allowing slavery to expand and therefore survive would have been &#34;better than war.&#34; He agreed that emancipation was a &#34;good thing,&#34; but pondered, &#34;A person is entitled to wonder whether the slaves could not have been freed at a smaller per capita cost.&#34; Potter felt that the Crittenden Compromise guaranteeing slavery where it existed was the best alternative to war and that slavery had reached its natural limits anyway and would eventually disappear. Therefore to Potter the war was a waste and completely unnecessary as a solution to a strictly political question.

Now if you assume that time created by a stalemate would have allowed peaceful men to come to a resolution, you must also assume that during the standoff, abolitionists would have expanded their work up North and that leaders below the M-D Line would have continued to pursue independence. Therefore how could the work of peace bear fruit in such an unstable and volatile climate? I don&#39;t believe that it could. To effect a compromise there has to be a middle ground where there is agreement. IMO by 1860, the national soil connecting the two sides had been richly plowed for several decades with the combustible nutrients of conflicting goals, societal disagreements, rampant fanaticism and tenacious determinism, which eroded the middle ground, dropping it into the chasm. Stated another way, there was not ground for compromise. The USA would not and could not abandon perpetual union. The CSA would not and could not abandon their bid for independence.

Finally when the Ft. Sumter crisis began heating up, Davis tried to compromise with the Union by compensating the USA for the forts and sent a peace mission to DC. This attempt at peaceful secession ignored Lincoln’s stand on perpetual union . Lincoln could not receive the commission without recognizing the legitimacy of the Confederacy. Thus the Davis peace commission resulted in another impasse, but all the while the pot kept boiling.

Unwilling to accept the standoff, and totally ignoring Lincoln&#39;s determination for perpetual union, Davis acted. In his first erroneous misreading of the North, Davis listened to reports that the Republicans were coming apart and based his actions on this wrong conclusion. He therefore forced the issue by demanding that Sumter be evacuated. He agreed with radical South Carolinians that the CSA could not lose, by reasoning that if the “We dare you” worked, the CSA would exist in peace and if the North took the dare, the Upper South would tumble into the CSA and reinforce its existence with its numbers and resources. Firing on Sumter, of course, worked in the short term. &#34;The thrill of action and triumph rushed through the Confederacy. In the Upper South where secession had been stymied, reconsideration proceeded promptly.&#34; [Cooper pg 366]

In his book <u>The Imperiled Union</u>, Kenneth Stampp says: &#34;There still remains the question of the evitability or inevitability of the Civil War itself - a question that will probably continue to be, as it is now &#40;1980&#41;, unanswerable. It may well be that the country reached a point sometime in the 1850s when it would have been almost impossible to avoid a violent resolution of the sectional crisis. . .&#34; Stampp suggests that during that decade both sides hardened their resolve and set their goals and at some point, &#34;the point of no return&#34; was reached and passed.

I believe that Stampp adequately answers your question in the only way possible: <font color="ff0000">&#34;The irrepressible conflict of antebellum years made the war, if not inevitable, at least an understandable response to its stresses by men and women no more or less wise than we.&#34;</font> [pgs 225 &amp; 245]

&#40;Message edited by tulip on December 15, 2002&#41;