Britain abolished slavery when slavery lost cost-effectiveness in the global slave trade. As a result of the Revolution, which isolated the cotton-producing colonies from Britain legally (though not really in any economic sense), and as a result of diversification of sugar production (from cane, produced in plantations, to beets, manufactured on the continent), Britain didn't rely on slavery - their own practice of slavery, anyway - anymore.
Without implying that the Civil War was fought over anything other than slavery, the trigger was the moment when the North united in political opposition to the South and won. Once it was clear that the North could elect a President who received not a single vote (and very nearly did, since Lincoln wasn't on the ballot in most southern states), the Southern power-holders could only choose between eventual capitulation on the issue of slavery, which would mean forfeiting their livelihoods, and outright resistance to the government.
The idea that anything could have been done on the part of anyone else to prevent the power-brokers from choosing the latter is belied by the fifty years prior, in which everything from threats to compromise to placation to concession was tried, without success. The idea that one could expect the southern power-holders to act in a way so totally divergent from their own interests - ones which would end the comfortable lives they and their families had grown accustomed to - seems... well, without merit. Maybe they should have, but even the Founders who regarded slavery as a great evil, as their descendants did not, chose not to manumit their slaves even on their deaths for fear of ruining their families.
That is to say, I think that a political solution was always impossible.
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Why don't we have a holiday to celebrate re-union? Because it was (and remains) legally and politically difficult to suggest that the union was ever actually divided. Officially, there was a rebellion led by the political leaders of the southern states, but there was no secession of the states, because the states can't secede. If they could secede, the war would be the Union's fault.
no subject
Date: 28 Apr 2011 05:24 am (UTC)Without implying that the Civil War was fought over anything other than slavery, the trigger was the moment when the North united in political opposition to the South and won. Once it was clear that the North could elect a President who received not a single vote (and very nearly did, since Lincoln wasn't on the ballot in most southern states), the Southern power-holders could only choose between eventual capitulation on the issue of slavery, which would mean forfeiting their livelihoods, and outright resistance to the government.
The idea that anything could have been done on the part of anyone else to prevent the power-brokers from choosing the latter is belied by the fifty years prior, in which everything from threats to compromise to placation to concession was tried, without success. The idea that one could expect the southern power-holders to act in a way so totally divergent from their own interests - ones which would end the comfortable lives they and their families had grown accustomed to - seems... well, without merit. Maybe they should have, but even the Founders who regarded slavery as a great evil, as their descendants did not, chose not to manumit their slaves even on their deaths for fear of ruining their families.
That is to say, I think that a political solution was always impossible.
---
Why don't we have a holiday to celebrate re-union? Because it was (and remains) legally and politically difficult to suggest that the union was ever actually divided. Officially, there was a rebellion led by the political leaders of the southern states, but there was no secession of the states, because the states can't secede. If they could secede, the war would be the Union's fault.