Actually he discusses a couple of books on what might have followed if the Confederate States of America had been allowed to secede .
The pessimists include Roger Ransom, who lays out a detailed scenario in his recent book, "The Confederate States of America." Ransom, an economic historian at the University of California at Riverside, imagines the Confederate armies in the West and at Gettysburg making a few different moves that stymie the Union, leaving the war stalemated in 1864.
As a result, Lincoln loses the election, and his successor signs a peace treaty allowing the South to secede. The Confederacy stretches from Virginia down to Florida and out to the western edge of Arizona (with the international border running along the upper edges of Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico).
Slavery remains legal, in Ransom's alternate history, but when world demand for cotton declines in the 1870's, slavery becomes a political and economic liability. The Confederate government, struggling to diversify its economy, emancipates the slaves and compensates their owners (who would have been lobbying for such a buyout).
On balance, Ransom figures, Southern whites would have fared a little better economically in a separate nation. But blacks would have done much worse, and not only because slavery would have lasted longer. Once freed, they wouldn't have been given equal political or economic rights in the Confederacy, and Northerners might have tried to stop them from immigrating — maybe with the seal-the-border fervor of today's Minutemen.
Other than Lincoln losing the election, that's pretty much what happened. And his assasination serves as an adequate causal substitute for the electoral loss.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Newsvine
Furl
Google
Yahoo
Tierney, however, goes on to
Tierney, however, goes on to argue through his support of the views of a professor of economic history at the California State University at San Jose that had the South been allowed to come around to seeing that slavery was not economically sustainable it would have over time adopted a more benign and concilatory posture toward blacks. This is, of course, pure bullshit.
I couldn't help but remember
I couldn't help but remember the book Erin Aubry Kaplan recommended last week, Race and Reunion : The Civil War in American Memory.
Even the depressing books Mr. Tierney mentioned plays into this game.
Rain or not, I think I want to get a copy of this one. None of Mr. Tierney's suggestions appeal to me as other than science fiction.Â
The North/South dichotomy is
The North/South dichotomy is over-hyped. The North was as much a center of slavery and the slave trade as the South. The whole country was complicit in slavery, that's why it was embedded in the Constitution. The whole goddamn place might as well have been called "The Confederate States of America," given the virulent antiblack racism that permeated the culture.