---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Harold S. Forsythe" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 07 Feb 2002 12:38:11 -0500
Subject: Re: Fw: Re: eventual phasing out of slavery
Great, David, let me jump back in.
The mores of the North would have changed, because of changed
circumstances. There would have been internal conflict, to be
sure, but just as Canada changed because it became a haven for
escaped slaves re: the US, the North would have shifted gears as
it become to new nearer Canada, vis-a-vis the Confederacy.
I have never bought the radical abolitionists' demands for disunion.
Save for the purest of the lot, I have always thought it a confession
that they could not imagine the industrial and financial might of the
North wielded to destroy slavery. They accepted Civil War soon
enough when it came.
The question of asylum is fascinating. First, the Dred Scott
decision would not necessarily have remained precendent in the
Confederacy, but would have in the Union. Thus, citizenship was
almost out of the question, without a constitutional amendment.
(Even in victory, the radical Republicans were so unsure of the
effect of the citizenship clause in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, they
reenacted the clause in the 14th Amendment.) Ultimately, Ben
Butler declared slaves contraband of war; but it is not clear that a
parallel policy--contrabands of peace?--is imaginable.
David is quite right to doubt that an incoming Republican
administration would or could have accepted Confederate
independence. Lincoln's steadfast policy was holding the Union
together, by any means necessary. Jefferson Davis would have
been wise to distrust any promise from Lincoln to the contrary;
perhaps by having international guarantors of the Confederacy's
nation status. Would Lincoln have been so foolish as to promise
England and France that he would not invade the new neighbor to
the south, and then do so anyway? I doubt it.
Richard Hofstadter maintained (in his Lincoln essay, in the
American Political Tradition), that Lincoln tricked the Confederates
into firing on the flag at Ft. Sumter. Abraham Lincoln was one of
the shrewdest politicians ever produced by a wily nation. He was
as full of tricks and he was of jokes and I suspect he would found
another way to make the Confederates attack first.
Harold
Date sent: Thu, 07 Feb 2002 11:11:16 -0400
From: David Kiracofe <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Fw: Re: eventual phasing out of slavery
To: [log in to unmask]
Send reply to: David Kiracofe <[log in to unmask]>
Organization: College of Charleston
> > OK -- I always enjoy reading Harold Forsythe's posts because they are so
> > thoughtful and enlightening. I'll grant Harold the point on the
> > Underground Railroad, but I'm still not convinced on the matter of the
> > United States becoming a refuge for escapees from the
> > successfully-seceded southern Confederacy -- why would the mores of the
> > north in regards to race (and its not just about race, but free labor
> > and competition for jobs, and control of the growing immigrant
> > populations, etc. etc.)change to make them more in line with the
> > activists of the Underground RR? Would the US grant asylum? (that's a
> > nifty question -- anybody know about such matters?)or naturalize them?
> > Wouldn't former-fugitives concentrate in border regions exacerbating
> > social tensions there?
> >
> > The question though also raises the point of successful secession --
> > could a Republican administration really let them go? I know there were
> > radical abolitionists who hoped to save the American experiment by
> > severing itself from the corrupting influences of slave power, but
> > surely that view did not dominate. So letting the south go would have
> > undermined the administration in that quarter -- what then? I hesitate
> > to entertain counterfactuals, but I can imagine some...
> >
> > Good cheer.
> >
> > David
> >
> >
> >
>
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Harold S. Forsythe
Assistant Professor History
Director: Black Studies
Fairfield University
Fairfield, CT 06430-5195
(203) 254-4000 x2379
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