The Convenient Lie: The Decade That Did Not Have To End This Way, 1850-1860
The third installment of this great series by Mindy Esposito.
The third installment of this great series by Mindy Esposito.
(Mindy Esposito) - People say the War Between the States was inevitable. That once slavery existed and the country expanded, the collision was only a matter of time.
That is a tidy explanation. It is also a way of absolving everyone involved of the decisions they actually made. Inevitable means nobody chose it. Nobody failed. Nobody could have done otherwise. History just happened.
History does not just happen. People make decisions. Legislators pass laws. Presidents act or refuse to act. Compromises get offered and rejected. Every one of those choices in the decade between 1850 and 1860 made the next crisis harder to solve than the last. That is not inevitability. That is a sequence of failures.
And here is what the standard narrative will never tell you plainly. Slavery was already dying. Not because of Northern moral pressure. Because the world was moving away from it. Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself throughout its empire in 1833. France abolished it in 1848. Every Western nation was on the same trajectory. The South knew it. The argument was never whether slavery would end. The argument was on whose terms, at what pace, and who would bear the…