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Comment by nineplay | Hacker News Reader

The majority probably didn't want to secede prior to the civil war. Fortunately for those who did want to secede, a massive proportion of the population didn't have the right to vote.

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>South Carolina became the first state to formally secede in December 1860

>At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina's Charleston Harbor. Less than 34 hours later, Union forces surrendered. Traditionally, this event has been used to mark the beginning of the Civil War.

I mean, the whole reason for the secession was the fear that at some indefinite point in the future they might be prevented from keeping a large portion (~30%) of the population in chattel slavery, so, yeah, there was a substantial disenfranchised portion of the population who probably wouldn’t have been on board with the cause of secession were they consulted on the matter.

This sort of revisionist history helps nobody. It wasn't a "might" it was an "all but certainly". The election of Lincoln was kind of the nail in the coffin for slavery because it meant that the anti slavery interests would at least be able to do something that ended slavery if not immediately then at some point in the future via the votes from the new free states being incorporated from the territories.

Now, it would've been a lot nicer if they didn't start a war over it, but slavery was done for one way or another and everyone knew it.

> The election of Lincoln was kind of the nail in the coffin for slavery because it meant that the anti slavery interests would at least be able to do something that ended slavery if not immediately then at some point in the future via the votes from the new free states being incorporated from the territories.

I mean, in an alternate universe where the modern cloture rule existed and somehow at least one extra free state was admitted while the South was not paying attention to block it, sure, that’s almost plausible, but...

You mean the alternate universe of <checks notes> Brazil?

They progressively outlawed slavery over the course of 1870 through 1890 without a civil war. The US probably could've done just about the same over a shorter period (because the US was richer and could have paid its way through a lot of the opposition faced in Brazil).

Lincoln favored projects of emancipation with compensation to the slaveholders. In a letter of March 14, 1862, he writes that the paying off all claims in Delaware, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri, at $400 per head (his term, not mine) would cost less than the expense incurred in eighty-seven days of war. The project went forward only in the District of Columbia.

> You mean the alternate universe of <checks notes> Brazil?

Brazil had the same Constitution, Senate Rules, and balance of power between slave and free states as the pre-Civil War USA?

A case of secession more directly attributed to choice by slaves was that of Haiti.

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