Re: Help design the ideal Presidential candidate

In article <ddfr-689461.16454012052008@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
David Friedman  <ddfr@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>In article <jujmf5xmjk.ln2@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> archmage@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (Nate Edel) wrote:
>
>> I think if the South had attempted to secede in a peaceful and
>> orderly manner, that Lincoln would have had to give in to the
>> inevitable.
>
>It's an interesting idea. 
>
>Has anyone done an alternate history using that version--not the
>South won, or the South fought the North to a standstill, but the
>South seceded in a fashion that made forcible opposition politically
>unviable?

"Let our erring sister go in peace" and all that.

- In late 1860, the South was swept by a great fear, when everyone
  was reporting rumors that slaves had risen a few plantations away,
  raping and killing the white people and burning the houses.  If
  someone investigated, the inhabitants would say that everything was
  fine but that they'd heard that a few plantations down ...
  Newspapers and telegraphs apparently didn't calm the panic, or
  perhaps fueled it (I don't have McPherson handy to check).

- Southerners had been bellicose for years, applauding the savage
  caning in Congress, supporting filibusters in Cuba and Central
  America (c.f. the Ostend Manifesto), and supporting bushwhackers in
  Bloody Kansas.

- The state government of Missouri was pro-Confederate; Kentucky was
  divided.

- The Confederacy laid claim to "Oklahoma" and New Mexico.

Therefore, even if the Federal forts at Charleston and Fort Pickens
were evacuated, other Southern Federal facilities abandoned without
discussion, Union control of most naval ships unquestioned, and the
share of the national debt unresolved, I am inclined to think it more
likely than not that shooting would have started over some issue.
Whether the Union would have then opened the issue of reversing
secession, I'm less certain of.

-- 
Tim McDaniel, tmcd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]