![]() It must be remembered, however, that virtually none of the leaders of either side had any clear idea of the kind of revolutionary scale the impending war would take on. But neither side's dominant leaders in 1861 were willing to do this. Some anti-secessionists in some Southern states argued for just such an approach. David blight free#The only way war on some scale might have been avoided in the spring of 1861 is for Lincoln and the Republicans to give up the very cause for which their party and their coalition across the North had rallied - to cordon off and restrict the future of slavery in defense of free labor ideology and a more egalitarian society - and for Southern secessionists to give up their conviction that their slave society and their racial order were under desperate threat from that new Republican persuasion and simply wait for another four-year cycle of elections. ![]() This idea even gained Lincoln's guarded support, although it never made it to the states for ratification, nor did it stop the wave of secession in the Deep South. The only measure that did emerge from Congress was an original Thirteenth Amendment, that would have explicitly barred Congress from ever ending slavery in the existing slave states. None of these proposals gained any real traction against the rising Lincoln administration's (and Lincoln's own) steadfastness to draw the line about any future expansion of slavery. Stephen Douglass even proposed a new "Sedition" bill to criminalize speeches and publications against slavery. Ideas also floated in the air for removal and colonization of free blacks outside America's borders. Crittenden, offered various ideas for Constitutional amendments that would prevent the federal government from ever abolishing slavery in any government jurisdiction, prevent any interference in the domestic slave trade, or extend the Missouri Compromise Line to the Pacific Ocean. The "Crittenden Compromise" plan in Washington, named for Kentuckian, John J. As early as December, 1860, after South Carolina had seceded, all manner of ideas were floated publicly to save the Union: replacing the presidency with an executive council representing regions of the country a new national police to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and a new kind of "gag rule" barring any form of legislation about slavery whatsoever. In the midst of the secession crisis of the winter of 1860-61, many compromise proposals emerged in Congress and the press. Genuine, reasonable compromises on the pivotal question of slavery expansion - whether America would indeed pursue a future based on slave labor or free labor - were now all but impossible. That decision, theoretically opening the entire West to the possible expansion of slavery and declaring that African Americans were not and never could be citizens of the United States, in effect, ruined the last vestiges of moderation. From a broad point of view, the marker at which I would make at least a qualified case for the inevitability of intractable conflict, if not war, is the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court in the spring of 1857. Whether the Civil War could have been avoided is of course a matter of when in the chronology of the road to disunion we choose to ask this question. David blight series#This virtual talk was the first of a three-part series sponsored by Witness to History: Slavery in Guilford.Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery and Abolition at Yale University He is the author of many books including Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History, and Race and Reunion, which received the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize, among other awards. Blight is Sterling Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. ![]() Blight’s 2001 book “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory” explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America’s national reunion.ĭavid W. In the war’s aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America’s collective memory as the Civil War. ![]() Blight, the Pulitzer-Prize winning historian and Yale Professor, spoke about “ How the Aftermath of the Civil War Helps Us Understand Trumpism” in the first talk of a three-part Series sponsored by Witness to History: Slavery in Guilford. ![]()
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