I’m currently reading Break It Up, by Richard Kreitner. I’m sure that I’ll write more about it later, but his thesis is that the Civil War wasn’t some weird historical anomaly. In fact, there have been many, many secessionist movements in US history. So far, I’ve found this book to be quite fascinating.
What inspired this post is a question that Kreitner posed in his book. What if Abraham Lincoln had lost the Presidential election in 1860? For presidential geeks, the idea seems kind of silly. After all, the Democratic party had become hopelessly split over the question of slavery. In 1860, they fielded two candidates, Stephen Douglas representing the Northern Democrats and John Breckinridge representing the Southern Democrats. To make matters even worse, there was a fourth candidate running representing the Constitutional Union party. This was John Bell and his entire platform was based upon saving the union, regardless of cost or compromises.
Given all of that, the Republican party was the only unified party in the field. Sure, Lincoln wasn’t going to win too many states in the South, but as long as he held the North, given its much larger population, it seemed inevitable that he would win the Presidency.
However, Kreitner mentioned a historical tidbit that I’d never heard. Desperate to keep Lincoln from winning a majority in the electoral college, in New York the three other presidential candidates formed a fusion party. If this fusion party had won in New York, then Lincoln would have been denied a majority in the electoral college. In fact, Lincoln only won New York by a couple thousand votes.
What would have happened if the fusion party won New York?. Well, with no majority winner in the electoral college, the election would have been thrown to the House of Representatives. For those of you not up on your election arcana, the representatives of each state get together and decide which candidate their state will cast their vote for. Yep, each state gets one vote.
If that’d happened, the Republicans would have gotten a plurality of states but would have been short of a majority. Given the deep schism between the Republican party and the other parties, there would have been no path for the Republicans to get a majority of states.
So what happens then? Here it gets weird. It would fall to the Senate to elect a Vice President. The Vice President would then serve as the acting President until the House chose a President (again, an unlikely prospect). The Vice President could have served as acting President for potentially a significant period of time.
Because of the makeup of the Senate at that time, the Southern states were dominant. Senators could only choose from the two top vote-getters in the Vice Presidential electoral college. They would have not chosen Hannibal Hamlin, the Republican candidate, and would have elected the Democratic Joseph Lane, a notorious pro-slavery sympathizer.
So, what would have happened? Northerners would have felt that the election had been stolen from them from a pro-slavery federal government. Kreitner goes into detail about this, but ever since the founding of our country, there was sporadic and significant Northern secessionist activities. In many ways, the federal government was controlled by the Southern states and many times Northerners had been forced to make compromises to mitigate the Southern secessionist threats. This could have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.
In that case, there would have been a secession crisis, but it would have been the Northern states that would have seceded.
How would the Southern states have responded?
On the one hand, you might think that they would just say good riddance. After all, they’d been talking secession for decades, convinced that, with King Cotton, that they’d be a significant world power on their own.
However, if the Northern states seceded, they would be sharing a long border with a country adamantly anti-slavery. Thanks to the Fugitive Slave Act, Northern states were compelled to return escaped enslaved persons back to the South. Sure, some Northern states actively nullified this law, but the federal government did step in and enforce this law when the local government refused to.
If separate countries, the Fugitive Slave Act would no longer apply. The Southern states would share a several hundred mile border with a country that would actively and aggressively encourage enslaved people to escape their slaver and come live in freedom. There was no effective way, especially in 1860, to keep enslaved people from voting with their feet and crossing over what would have been a very porous border. Southern leaders actively feared this scenario. This was one of the reasons why, as much as they threatened secession over a period of decades, they didn’t act on it until Lincoln’s election.
Given that, would the Southern states have felt compelled to engage in a Civil War to keep the Northern states from seceding?
Maybe, but if they did, they would have faced the same problems that they faced in the actual Civil War. The Northern states had significant more population than the South. The North had significant more manufacturing capacity than the South. Unlike during the actual Civil War, Southern soldiers would have done most of their fighting on Northern soil. As horrible as it was, fighting on Southern soil gave the Confederate soldiers special incentive to fight. That would have been lost. Instead, the Southern soldiers, most of them not slaveholders themselves, might have seen the war as an explicit fight to preserve slavery. That would have discouraged their fighting motivation even more.
So, in an alternate reality, Lincoln loses and a Southern President is chosen despite the Republicans clearly winning the popular vote. That, in turn, infuriates the Northern states and they decide, no more compromise and they secede. The Southern states, knowing that they probably can’t conquer the Northern states, allow them to create a new republic. This republic, adamantly anti-slavery, actively encourages enslaved people to escape to their country. The Southern states, unable to prevent the deluge of their escaping enslaved population, eventually understand that their peculiar institution can no longer stand. They voluntarily end the practice of slavery. They come up with some mechanism to compensate slave owners for their ‘property’ (after all, in this scenario, cotton is still king and the Southern states are getting fat off this export, so coming up with such a compensation is doable). Slavery ends without 600,000 soldiers dying.
Who’s to say what would have actually happened, but I find this counterfactual fascinating to contemplate.
dorkenstein 