That's just your overwrought and ahistorical take

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David Blight: Could the war have been prevented?

By David Blight

Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery and Abolition at Yale University

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/house-divide...r_hav.html

None of these proposals gained any real traction against the rising Lincoln administration's (and Lincoln's own) steadfastness to draw the line about any future expansion of slavery.

The only measure that did emerge from Congress was an original Thirteenth Amendment, that would have explicitly barred Congress from ever ending slavery in the existing slave states.

THAT is an historical fact that directly refutes your opinion .

This idea even gained Lincoln's guarded support, although it never made it to the states for ratification, nor did it stop the wave of secession in the Deep South.

The only way war on some scale might have been avoided in the spring of 1861 is for Lincoln and the Republicans to give up the very cause for which their party and their coalition across the North had rallied -- to cordon off and restrict the future of slavery in defense of free labor ideology and a more egalitarian society - and for Southern secessionists to give up their conviction that their slave society and their racial order were under desperate threat from that new Republican persuasion and simply wait for another four-year cycle of elections.

Some anti-secessionists in some Southern states argued for just such an approach. But neither side's dominant leaders in 1861 were willing to do this.

It must be remembered, however, that virtually none of the leaders of either side had any clear idea of the kind of revolutionary scale the impending war would take on. Many people in 1860-61 were trying to avoid war; that much is clear.

But tragically and for some gleefully, they were overwhelmed by the power of their own convictions, and driven by forces they only partly controlled which had put an expanding slave society and a burgeoning free labor society on a terrible collision course for at least two generations.

In the early to mid-20th century a generation or two of American historians argued that the Civil War was avoidable, indeed a "needless war" wrought by mere "politics" and the "unctuous fury" of power-hungry politicians.

But that was before, in the wake of World War II, that a new generation of scholars came to see just how fundamental slavery and race were in the story of the 1850s and in the decisions that led to the firing on Fort Sumter in April, 1861. In the abstract we might never stop wondering about how the war could have been avoided, as we also must explain why it was not .

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