Was 'Preserving the Union' an Error?

Sometimes it's better for people if nations dissolve

“The Union must be preserved” (source)

“[Lincoln’s] presidential oath bound him to ‘preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,’ and each step in the process of emancipation was in the interest of preserving the nation, and thus preserving the Constitution.”
—U.S. Library of Congress, here

Years ago, when I first started this Substack, almost the first piece I wrote was about America’s second original sin — accommodating the South and its lust for slave-driven labor. (The original original sin was, of course, importing enslaved Africans in the first place.)

Was 'Preserving the Union' Our Other Original Sin?

In that piece I wrote:

We often look back at the American Civil War as a turning point in our history. That war, in essence, was a violent attempt to also "keep the slave-holding states on board," and it succeeded. Yet though the Confederacy lost and its citizens were stripped of their enslaved people, they were not stripped of their race-based animus, their anger, their history of exploitation, and their constant fear of racial retribution and revolt.

Was all of that effort worth it? What if that war had never needed to be fought? What if America's second sin was this — the attempt, even at the start, to keep the slave states “on board"?

There followed a discussion of those two turning points — the writing of a slave state–friendly Constitution in the 1780’s, and later, the desire by Lincoln and the North to continue to keep slave states in what was then called “the Union.”

The idea of “preserving the Union” at every cost is now, I have to say, a tainted one if viewed with the ideas expressed here in mind:

Rethinking Collapse

Collapse and its Benefits

Yes, rethinking collapse. Is the aggrandizement of large nation states necessarily good? Was it good for the “Union” in the 1860s for the states, all of them, to remain together?

There was indeed concern for the horrid lives of the enslaved Africans in much of the North, and that was one reason offered to keep all states bound to each other. But the Emancipation Proclamation came late in the game, in the midst of the Civil War, not at the start, and Lincoln tried hard, before armed conflict began, to reach accommodations with the recalcitrant South.

We think of that now as “politics,” trying to compromise. But what drove the fervent desire to “preserve the Union”? What about Manifest Destiny? Does that ring a bell?

The concept that it was the English colonizers’ “destiny” to rule over all the land from ocean to ocean first raised its head in the 1844 election that produced President James Polk — a decade and a half before the War of 1861. Was that part of what drove the desire to “preserve” the U.S.?

Rethinking the Civil War from the Standpoint of Collapse

Recall from our recent piece that many social collapses aren’t tragic at all. Some aren’t complete destructions, but fragmentations that lead to reconfiguration. And they often produce smaller governed bodies and thus more local control.

Quoting James C. Scott, who’s cited in the piece:

The state and early civilizations were often seen as attractive magnets, drawing people in by virtue of their luxury, culture, and opportunities. In fact, the early states had to capture and hold much of their population by forms of bondage[.]

This gives us two kinds of bondage — the bondage of slavery and the bondage of the state. Surely the South saw itself “enslaved” by the Union of states.

And what of the North, the states willing at great cost of lives, to “preserve the Union”? Were they making what they thought was the best choice for Africans? If so, why all the attempts at compromise? Or were they making the choice that preserved, in their minds at least, our “national greatness,” our Manifest Destiny, by keeping the Southern states bound to the Northern majority?

Today, that choice — should we “preserve the Union” — is not obviously yes.

What if Lincoln had not been so hell-bent on "preserving the Union," and instead had just announced, "Let the slave states go, and good riddance to them all"?

By then the slave-induced wounds on the republic had festered — for example, the compromises leading up to the war left a mess in the west — but the massive national bloodletting that started in 1861 would have been avoided, and the new non-slave nation of the North would not have been continuously roiled by the slave-holding South from the day of Emancipation till now.

But What of the Africans?

My earlier piece dealt with this, a truly serious concern:

The greatest obstacle to this way of thinking involves the enslaved Africans themselves. The benefit to them that came from the Civil War should not be understated or underestimated. Freedom is worth a lot.

The history of Africans on the American continent would have been vastly worse had they not been freed in 1862. Men like Frederick Douglass would still have achieved their greatness — he escaped slavery to Pennsylvania well before the war ­— but those who failed to escape would have remained in the wretched condition they were born to. So we cannot consider this new thought casually. …

Yet we should consider it, at least in an alternative-history sense. What may have happened if the Founders had not bent the Constitution to include the slave states’ demands? What may have happened if Lincoln had placed peace before union?

It’s far from certain that enslaved Africans’ lives would have continued as they did in the ante bellum South.

[A] look at the history of Haiti is instructive. The Haitian Revolution started in the 1790s and concluded with liberation in 1804. Would a weakened [post-separation] South have been subject to similar revolts? And if revolts had occurred, would the Northern Union have found it in its interest to stand aside [and not defend Southern slave-owners]? I certainly hope so. After all, abolitionist voices were strong, and the issue would have been hotly debated at least.

A war may still have emerged between North and South, the latter united or not, caused by skirmishes launched by the southern states or by battles in the West. But would it have gone the same way as the actual war? It may well have ended earlier, even with the same result.

In addition, if the North had not tried to force the defeated South into the Northern Union, the terms of victory could have been much more simple — the winners could have declared all enslaved people free, given them citizenship and right of passage to the non-slave North, then left.

Thus no Reconstruction, and no myth of the "war of Northern aggression" with its constant theme of Yankee imposition. Would the post-war outcomes of that have been better for us? Food for thought.

It’s hard to say for certain what would have happened if … if this had occurred and not that, if the South had been isolated from Northern wealth, if the South’s revenge against its African population in the wake of Reconstruction had not occurred. We can only say what did occur thanks to the War — a very mixed future at best.

What Would You Have Done Then? What Would You Do Today?

With all this in mind, I urge you to ask yourself:

• Would the North have been better off then without the South?

• Would the nation be better off now, the northern portion, if the South were not part of it?

• Would the lives of African-Americans have been better on balance than what they endured from 1865 to the Civil Rights era?

Sometimes it’s better for people if nations dissolve. Why ask this? We may be making that choice again, and in not many years.