American Nationalism with no Civil War

Suppose slavery ends peacefully state-by-state, causing the civil war never to occur.

Would American nationalism still develop? Or would people continue to identify with their own state? Could a loose-USA still exist in 2013 or would the federal government still get bigger regardless?
 

Meerkat92

Banned
Governments as a rule tend to centralize and increase in size, typically with a roughly corresponding loss in efficiency and civil, economic, and political liberties. While not having a civil war might slow this trend down, I doubt that it would halt it entirely.
 
Governments as a rule tend to centralize and increase in size, typically with a roughly corresponding loss in efficiency and civil, economic, and political liberties. While not having a civil war might slow this trend down, I doubt that it would halt it entirely.

Strong gov can result in MORE liberty actually, specially for a group like afro-americans as civil rights moves start well to move. There is no liberty for the masses and 'casteless' in the visions of original 'democracies' of modern days - only rich white men by example may vote.
 
And loyalty to the government over the state was there - even for southerners (who seem to have felt it more than the "North") - in the 1860s, so I don't see that dissolving.

North Carolina raised John Gibbon, for example, was a Unionist. David Farragut (living in Virginia before the war, can't recall where he was born and raised before going to sea) was a unionist. George Thomas the Virginian was a unionist.

So were tens of thousands of common soldiers.
 

Meerkat92

Banned
The more interesting question, IMO, would be, how would you get the South to gradually give up slavery without a war?
 
The more interesting question, IMO, would be, how would you get the South to gradually give up slavery without a war?

Not compensated emancipation, because even the border states - less ideologically and economically committed - rejected it.
 

Meerkat92

Banned
I suppose you could butterfly away the cotton gin, but with a PoD that far back, who knows what could happen.
 

scholar

Banned
Strong gov can result in MORE liberty actually, specially for a group like afro-americans as civil rights moves start well to move. There is no liberty for the masses and 'casteless' in the visions of original 'democracies' of modern days - only rich white men by example may vote.
That's mildly curious. Some states actually allowed women to vote before a centralized government put into place federal voting laws.

That, and voting allowed united states citizens who were free men who owned some property. Not necessarily rich or white. Most free blacks could vote regardless, until restrictions were put into place, long before the civil war.

"When the federal constitution was ratified in 1789, free blacks held the same legal right to vote as whites in every state except Virginia and Georgia. As of 1792, free blacks could vote in twelve of fifteen states, and not until 1803 did a northern state restrict the franchise to whites."

The real tragedy is that Africans lost their liberties in a slow drawn out process and the country was more progressive, in some ways, at its founding than it was after the civil war.
 

katchen

Banned
If the cotton boll weevil spread in the 1840s, it would literally eat away the economic foundation for Southern slavery. The value of slaves would drop and compensated emancipation would become affordable, (particularly after the Gold Rush made it possible to pay slave owners in inflated, newly minted gold currency). Since slaves would be freed gradually, the question of what to do with freedmen (allow them to move to cities, repatriate to Liberia, drive away to Mexico, ) would be worked out. Probably the last states to give up slavery would be states like Virginia and North Carolina that grow a great deal of tobacco that would be unaffected by the boll weevil but might be affected around the turn of the 20th Century by boycotts on slave grown cigarettes in European nations. Slavery could conceivably wind up never actually becoming actually illegal, but becoming rarer and rarer, limited to things like penal servitude and possibly the sex trade.

The basis for expansive federal power would not exist. Big business would also be more inhibited, since big business depended and still does, on federal supremacy to preempt state and local regulation and create national markets and policies. It would be harder to suppress populism. The US might wind up a lot more democratic socialist, though without a 14th Amendment, enforcement of the Bill of Rights would vary widely from state to state and states would still be free to censor news media and criminalize slander or libel or limit procedural safeguards on the rights of the accused, Battles for civil liberties would have to be fought out state by state, as would union organizing. Populist grassroots politics would probably be more common, though and there would be nothing like our big banks today.

There would be no federal lands per se, as public lands would devolve to states as soon as a territory becomes a state, as is the case in Canada and Australia. Interestingly, we might have national health care on the Canadian model, since Canada's system is the result of provinces taking the initiative of establishing provincial Medicare in the 1960s. Again, major variation between North and South and much more live and let live.

And probably fewer wars since wars without a congressional declaration of war would be far more difficult. We might see recall of Congresspeople and Senators by initiative, brought in during the early 1900s as part of progressivism. :)
 
Compensated emancipation being affordable only matters if slave owners are willing to end slavery, as opposed to their slaves being sold to pay their debts and the new owners putting them to use on something other than cotton.

Big business was most effectively inhibited by Federal regulation to the extent they've heeded any government regulation.
 
Getting back to the original question, if it did somehow happen I rather suspect that American nationalism would be, if anything stronger. IMO the Mexican war suggests that the impulse that created nationalism in the form we are thinking of pre dated the war, and was if anything slowed by it. Remember that the Civil War was not, for most purposes, a total war in the industrial sense of it in the 20th century; it did not create massive economic growth as such. Without the war, in my view you would have an American culture quite similar to what emerged, but one with much less trauma, economic loss and division than OTL.
 
Getting back to the original question, if it did somehow happen I rather suspect that American nationalism would be, if anything stronger. IMO the Mexican war suggests that the impulse that created nationalism in the form we are thinking of pre dated the war, and was if anything slowed by it. Remember that the Civil War was not, for most purposes, a total war in the industrial sense of it in the 20th century; it did not create massive economic growth as such. Without the war, in my view you would have an American culture quite similar to what emerged, but one with much less trauma, economic loss and division than OTL.

The US experienced enormous economic growth after the ACW - it may have hurt the South specifically and certain states especially, but OTL sees the US go from (for just manufacturing production) #3 in 1860 to #2 in 1880 (7.2% to 14.7% of the world's total - to put this in perspective, Britain, still #1, went from 19.9% to 22.9%, and even the difference between the German states in 1860 - not counting Austria - to Germany in 1880 is merely 4.9% to 8.5%)

"Between the ending of the Civil War in 1865 and the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, for example, American wheat production increased by 256 percent, corn by 222 percent, refined sugar by 460 percent, coal by 800 percent, steel rails by 523 percent, and the miles of track in operation by over 567 percent." (The figures are all from The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers).

I suppose you could say that without the ACW it would be even faster, but the point is that it was so fast that in terms of "the United States", the production figures for 1860 are a fraction of what it produced a little more than a generation later - making the losses scarcely measurable on the national level.


Can't address the issue of trauma and division, of course. But economically, the US in 1865 was a society able to catapult itself upward. Saying that the ACW was a hindrance to that is simply not valid nationally.
 
Can't address the issue of trauma and division, of course. But economically, the US in 1865 was a society able to catapult itself upward. Saying that the ACW was a hindrance to that is simply not valid nationally.

I would argue with that. No it wasn't a particular hindrance in terms of physical destruction or reallocation of resources, but the war had a definite and long lasting impact on the dollar. On the one hand a low dollar may have helped exports somewhat, but I generally get the feeling that the economy was for the most part significantly slower in the late 1860s and early 70s than it would have been without a war.
 
Also economically consider the impact of the Homestead Act and Transcontinental Railway. Without a civil war these would not have occurred nearly so soon as the they were seen to pave the way for more free states and with Senate allocation to 2 senators per state Souther senators would be reluctant to allow there passage.

Homestead Act encourage settlement beyond the Midwest while the railway made crossing the country much, much less time consuming and much more affordable.
 
I would argue with that. No it wasn't a particular hindrance in terms of physical destruction or reallocation of resources, but the war had a definite and long lasting impact on the dollar. On the one hand a low dollar may have helped exports somewhat, but I generally get the feeling that the economy was for the most part significantly slower in the late 1860s and early 70s than it would have been without a war.

And you get this feeling based on what, intuition?

That the US sees its percentage of world manufacturing just slightly more than double between 1860 and 1880 (it tripled between 1830 and 1860, but I don't have any figures for 1840 here) does not sound like the result of "significantly slowed" economic growth.
 
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