1860 Constitutional Convention

From the Archdruid report Aug 8, 2012:


Had the leaders of the southern states in 1860 been less proud and more pragmatic, it’s entirely possible that they could have won their independence and spared themselves the catastrophe of the Civil War by some such measure as this. It’s eerily plausible to imagine Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi rising in the Senate that year to propose an amendment to provide for the peaceful dissolution of the Union, denouncing the radicals on both sides of the slavery issue who were pushing the nation toward civil war, and offering a peaceful separation of the states as the only workable solution to the problem that had dogged the nation for so long—and it’s by no means hard, at a time when most Americans still wanted to avoid war, to imagine such a proposal getting the votes it would need from Congress and the states to take effect.

Plausible? ASB?
 
ASB in my opinion. While slavery was the cause, the North fought the war to preserve the Union. No way they let the country fall apart and the southern states leave just because they asked nicely. I think this scenario plays out the same. Davis proposes a constitutional amendment allowing for states to leave the Union, it gets shot down hard and the war happens anyway. It's possible I suppose but you'd need an earlier POD.
 
ASB in my opinion. While slavery was the cause, the North fought the war to preserve the Union.

More specifically Lincoln fought the war to do so, while there were of course those in the North who supported it, it was not the largescale you see today, which itself is the result of the war, the aftermath of the Civil War in many ways basically changed the country into a unified state as opposed to a collection of federated states.
 
I always heard people back then were more loyal to their states, with Lincoln being an exception for some reason.

What needs to change for him to consider himself Illinoisan first American second?
 

Sabot Cat

Banned
I always heard people back then were more loyal to their states, with Lincoln being an exception for some reason.

What needs to change for him to consider himself Illinoisan first American second?

It'd probably help if he didn't move so much in his childhood.
 
ASB in my opinion. While slavery was the cause, the North fought the war to preserve the Union. No way they let the country fall apart and the southern states leave just because they asked nicely. I think this scenario plays out the same. Davis proposes a constitutional amendment allowing for states to leave the Union, it gets shot down hard and the war happens anyway. It's possible I suppose but you'd need an earlier POD.

Lincoln is never going to let the South get away with it on his watch. While a bloodless secession would be preferable, the extremists on both sides were too loud to be ignored.
 
I think a more tactical South could have easily gotten the Crittenden amendments passed and probably could have even gotten a Constitutional Convention called as long it wasn't being sold as solely about secession. At such a convention, who knows what could have happened.
 
1860 is much too late for such an amendment to have the slightest chance of passing. The beating of Senator Sumner, the execution of John Brown, Bloody Kansas: The Republicans won every state in the North precisely because the idea that the South must be made to pay for its crimes was so widespread by that point. You'd probably have to hold such an thing in the early 1850s...for which you need an event that genuinely spooks the South but no the North. All the land gained from the Mexican conquest declared permanently and unequivocally free through some shenanigans?
 
This is simply not possible for so many reasons. First of all, it would be a concession by the southerners that secession was not legal under the existing constitution. Second, few northerners were willing to accept disunion except for some extreme pro-southern Democrats and some extreme antislavery Republicans. And as I once noted at
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/9GdLp2-QxyQ/8alnFwKmVfUJ
***
It may in fact be questioned how sincere some people in this last
group were about accepting peaceful secession, anyway. There is a good
discussion of this in Kenneth M. Stampp, *And the War Came: The North and
the Secession Crisis 1860-61* (Phoenix Books edition 1964), pp. 248-9:
"Charles Sumner advocated disunion--but only in private and largely as a
kind of intellectual excursion into political theory. In practice he
encouraged the movement to prepare the Massachusetts militia to defend
Washington and enforce the laws. On November 27 Henry Ward Beecher boldly
proclaimed that he cared little whether the South seceded. Two days later
he preached a Thanksgiving Day sermon which raised the banners for a war
against the Slave Power...For a proponent of peaceful disunion Garrison's
Boston *Liberator* became surprisingly agitated about southern 'treason.'
It charged that secessionists were determined to provoke a civil war and
castigated the Democrats who allegedly opposed the punishment of
'traitors.'" Stampp also shows (pp. 22-25) how Horace Greeley's alleged
support of peaceful disunion was so qualified as to be meaningless. Most
talk of voluntary disunion among anti-slavery men was really just meant to
oppose the idea of saving the Union through yet another cowardly
compromise with the Slave Power.)

***

Third, any constitutional convention would mean *delay* which was the last thing the secessionists wanted. Seward did propose a constitutional convention to deal with the regional issues once passions had cooled--and southerners, not just immediate secessionists, rejected this as just a delaying tactic.
 
Who is this Archdruid, and why are people citing him as a source? There are already two threads based on his ideas, and in both cases pretty much everyone agrees that they are ASB.

As for the specific scenario at hand: There is no way such an amendment could be passed. Even assuming all of the Democrats in both chambers vote for it (something that is unlikely), because of Republican opposition to such a blatantly pro-slavery anti-union idea, there would be two-thirds majority in the Senate, but the amendment would die in the House. You also probably could not get two-thirds of the states to support it. At the time there were 33 states. Of these 15 were slave states, but only 11 seceded IOTL. That is far below the two-thirds majority needed.
 
Napoleon IV:

The Archdruid is literally an Archdruid. He is the head of a Druid Church. This is no more pertinent to his AH speculations than the fact that I am a Roman Catholic are pertinent to mine.

His Archdruid Report is a weekly blog on, not Druidism (in which case I would not be reading it), but on Peak Oil (and Peak resources in general) and their affects over the next few centuries. Again, his religion is no more pertinent to his speculations on this than is mine on mine.

I am reading his blog posts in chronological order. Recently I came across a couple AH speculations in them that I wanted to present to the AH forum. This gave me basically three choices:

1) Copy and Paste the speculations and attribute them to him
This is what I did

2) Copy and paste them, but not attribute them.
I am not a plagiarist.

3) Extensively rewrite them, with comments of my own included.
I am lazy and short on time.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Napoleon IV:

The Archdruid is literally an Archdruid. He is the head of a Druid Church. This is no more pertinent to his AH speculations than the fact that I am a Roman Catholic are pertinent to mine.

His Archdruid Report is a weekly blog on, not Druidism (in which case I would not be reading it), but on Peak Oil (and Peak resources in general) and their affects over the next few centuries. Again, his religion is no more pertinent to his speculations on this than is mine on mine.

I am reading his blog posts in chronological order. Recently I came across a couple AH speculations in them that I wanted to present to the AH forum. This gave me basically three choices:

1) Copy and Paste the speculations and attribute them to him
This is what I did

2) Copy and paste them, but not attribute them.
I am not a plagiarist.

3) Extensively rewrite them, with comments of my own included.
I am lazy and short on time.

Fair enough, but a link back would help to make it clear this is blog-speculation rather than some kind of official report (as the name "report" can imply, to someone skimming the preamble.)
 
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