could the civil war have been avoided? why or why not?
any opinions?
There was only one way and that was if the North let the South go. The South wasn’t going to go along with the North peacefully. They were in the midst of a huge inferiority complex, because the North was expanding by leaps and bounds.
Consider this – The make up of Congress is such that the greater the population of a state, the more representation in the House. But small states have the same representation in the Senate as do the large ones. There was an uneasy co-existence with North and South because no matter how big the North got and therefore had way more men in the House, the South was equal in the Senate.
But there was trouble on the horizon. Checking the 1860 map, you can see that there were to be more Northern states than Southern coming up. There was just more room. So the North would also be leading in the Senate as well. This would mean the South would be outnumbered in the Senate as well. And since the Senate has important roles like affirming Supreme Court nominees, all that power would be in the North.
The South decided to get out of the Union before all power was lost. The North could have let them go. But Lincoln was strong willed and was not going to let it happen. Had Douglas won the Presidency, there might have been a peaceful split. But Lincoln’s goal was to protect the Union at all costs. And he had the guts to see it through.
So, it could have been avaoided, but not by keeping the Union together. The only way to have avoided the Civil War was to let the South go.
