It is intriguing how widespread this false idea is. The USA was _not_ the only country where there was a war over slavery–in Cuba, the Ten Years’ War (1868-78), about as destructive on a per capita basis as the US civil war, played a critical role in ending slavery on the island.

Also, it is not at all clear that slavery in the USA (or in an independent CSA) would follow the same course as in other slaveholding areas of the Americas. The seceding states, compared to places like Cuba or Brazil, had a much higher percentage of the free population in slaveholding families and a much lower free black population.

I am not in general a fan of economic determinism, and this is a particularly unconvincing example of it.

However, JP, when you say

“Too many centripetal forces. The war overcame this. This is why Lincoln risked everything on the war.”

you’re going seriously overboard, and inserting your retrospective interpretation of the stakes (which could be correct) into Lincoln’s 1860 brain. A.) ANY evidence that this concern motivated Lincoln’s decision for war? B.) Worse, the way you put it (i.e., “THIS is why”) you’d have to show that this was the ONLY motivation.

Finally, with regard to this whole “could the North have been viable with so-many states stuff,” you sound a lot more like S. Douglas than like Lincoln in your elevation of geographic and cultural factors over political principle. That is, you show fairly little concern about the necessary implications of accepting (or de facto accepting) the principle of secesionism. On the basis of a geo-socio-cultural theory of what would have held the Union amputated of the South together or not (a bit like Douglas’ geo-socio-cultural theory of why slavery would not spread into the colder territories under popular sovereignty, against Lincoln’s worry that even South Dakotan settlers might turn out to like to have some slaves if the political path to doing so was made easier) you wave aside the atomistic dynamic inherent to secessionist logic(as well as the unifying dynamic inherent to anti-secessionist thought and rhetoric). With Lincoln, and as a political theorist, I say respect the logical dynamics embedded in principles, and err on the side of caution against the operation of bad dynamics. Such a position does not, I trust, necessarily wed me to the one Deneen seems to espouse in places, which is to basically start America over in an communitarian groove by ripping all the Lockeanism out. (Of course, Deneen at times sounds pretty sympathetic to secession for his own reasons–since he won’t admit that the primary polis in our day must be the nation, that peculiar part of the Lockean logic he likes!)

But all my theoretical musings aside, the bottom line JP is you haven’t the evidence for your statement.

Yes. Acceptance of a practice of slavery, the idea that a human can “own” another human as property, was the flaw at the heart of the original U.S. society. Africans were not considered human beings at the time that the Constitution was formed.

The divided-sovereignty argument for why we had a war (pace Peter Lawler) doesn’t give enough credit to the understanding of states’ rights up to the Civil War; it was the overwhelming orthodoxy. And to the extent that federal sovereignty was in play, it was based on the principle of subsidiarity, and so there was not–at least in any clear way–an inherent conflict between state sovereignty and federal sovereignty, one that could only be decided by war. Subsidiarity is the neglected subtext of the belief in confederation as opposed to Lincolnian consolidation.

Was Lincoln a tyrant? As Wittgenstein said, “Don’t think, just look and see.”

And Peter, your comment that “…the South was largely left to itself for almost a century,” indicates an attitude that seems to say that it’s the federal gummint’s obligation to correct/modify the thinking of the various regions, states, or individual Americans?
And, the reason why the ‘po’ white Southerner volunteered was because your people had invaded his country. No one forced him, no one had to bribe him…it was about defending his people, about Southern honor.

On the Radical Republicans: We might be talking about two different groups (or two partly overlapping groups at different times), but my understanding of the Radical Republicans , is that initially they pursued (perhaps with too little charity towards defeated Southern whites) political racial equality. I’m not sure how much less firm (disqualifications from voting aside) Lincoln would have been in the face of violent attempts to subjugate the freedmen (and women.) The sacred message included the hope for “firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right” and for a “just” peace after all. It didn’t last of course, and the Radical Republican commitment to racial political equality became a kind of gestural politics in the latter part of the 1800s.

About later developments you are right and there might have been seeds of those qualities you describe even in many of the Radical Republicans, especially after they tasted political defeat in the second civil war and they cast about for a new basis for political action, but I remember an old prof of mine describing the agenda and ideological change of the Republicans in the first half of the 1880s in directions very similar to those you describe. There is also Republicans trying to rationalize the tacit agreement between Northern and Southern whites that they would each live with (though some on both sides might still complain) about the outcomes of the first Civil War (no secession and the end of slavery) and the second civil war (the federal nonenforcement of the rights of African Americans in the South.)