THE CAUSES OF THE CIVIL WAR
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Congress of December 1, 1862, he set forth a detailed plan by which
States, on an agreement to abolish slavery by 1900, would receive
government bonds in proportion to the number of slaves emancipated.
Yet, even though Lincoln's proposals represented a solution of the
problem conceivably gratifying to the slaveholder's purse as well as
to his pride, they got nowhere. Two-thirds of the border representa–
tives rejected the scheme, even when personally presented to them by
Lincoln himself. And, of course, only the pressure of war brought
compensated emancipation its limited hearing of 1862.
Still, granted these difficulties, does it not remain true that other ·
countries abolished slavery without internal convulsion?
If
emotional–
ism had not aggravated the situation beyond hope, Craven has writ–
ten, then slavery "might have been faced as a national question and
dealt with as successfully as the South American countries dealt with
the same problem."
If
Brazil could free its slaves and Russia its serfs
in the middle of the nineteenth century without civil war, why could
not the United States have done as well?
The analogies are appealing but not, I think, really persuasive.
There are essential differences between the slavery question in the
United States and the problems in Brazil or in Russia. In the first
place, Brazil and Russia were able to face servitude "as a national
question" because it was, in fact, a national question. Neither country
had the American problem of the identification of compact sectional
interests with the survival of the slavery system. In the second place,
there was no race problem at all in Russia; and, though there was a
race problem
in
Brazil, the more civilized folkways of that country
relieved racial differences of the extreme tension which they breed in
the South of the United States. In the third place, neither in Russia
nor in Brazil did the abolition of servitude involve constitutional is–
sues; and the existence of these issues played a great part in determin–
ing the form of the American struggle.
It is hard to draw much comfort, therefore, from the fact that
other nations abolished servitude peaceably. The problem in America
was peculiarly recalcitrant. The schemes for gradual emancipation
got nowhere. Neither internal reform nor economic exhaustion con–
tained much promise for a peaceful solution. The hard fact, indeed,
is that the revisionists have not tried seriously to describe the policies
by which the slavery problem could have been peacefully resolved.
