For a Two-State Solution in the U.S., 1861-65

At the warmongering American Enterprise Institute Monday, Frederick Kagan pushed for continuing the war in Iraq by saying that things looked lousy in the Civil War here in 1862 or so, but Lincoln stuck with it notwithstanding widespread grumbling over the cause. If he hadn’t, Kagan said, Washington would be dealing with Atlanta to this day…

I don’t like the analogy. That war was closer to home: We (the North) had a dog in that fight; we were implicated in southern slavery in a way that we were not implicated in Saddam’s crimes and abuses. Lincoln had an end game, victory over the southern army. Tell me what victory looks like in Iraq.

But I take Kagan’s point–and Iraq has made me think I’d have been against the Civil War too. Why? The Civil War was a bloody horror; wikipedia says it cost nearly 8 percent of the able white male population their lives. Undoubtedly it ended an immoral and disgraceful institution, slavery. But if the North had let the South secede, and then imposed sanctions and blockades and underground railroads, how long would slavery have lasted? (A long time, says my friend Dan Swanson; but wasn’t slavery falling all around the northern hemisphere?) And doesn’t war entail forms of glorified slavery–soldiering.

As it is, conditions for blacks in the south remained desperate for another 100
years, and desegregation required another war between the states, a far
less bloody one.  Anyone who’s visited the south notices that the bitterness caused by defeat imparted a nobility to the antebellum south that still lingers in many places.  Kagan says that the Confederacy would have remained a separate country. I wonder. How long before the seceders would have reunited? And if they didn’t, so what. Washington deals with Ottawa, and Jim Carrey comes here to make movies.

A couple of commenters, irritated by my isolationism, have said that Vietnam was a worthy fight. Well, I don’t like any war in which the public turns against it, especially if
it does so after years of official promotion of the cause. I don’t think you can force people to die for something they don’t believe in. My friend Dan, objecting to my argument here, says that the Civil War was unavoidable. I suppose that’s the bottom line. Vietnam and Iraq were wars of choice.

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