I am not sure the country should be unified. There are some significant differences between the North and the South regarding the major issues.
Yes there would be benefits as well as costs from a peaceful splitup.
One factor to consider is it might not have been the last splitup. If it was decided that states had the right to leave, than maybe New England would have left, or maybe some other group would have broken up in the future. The more country breaks up the more the costs grow compared to the benefits IMO, at least in the context of a non peaceful world.
Up until WW II, the North was the strongest part of the Union......economically speaking. In addition most of the defense plants were in the North. Since WW II, the South has grown dramatically but still the North has more wealth.
Yes, if the US broke up, and WWI and/or WWII still happened on schedule, the North would probably be more powerful than the South when those wars came around. But at least post WWII, and I think even earlier than that a disproportionate share of our soldiers came from the South. (Not a majority, but more than the old South's share of our population)
Also "more powerful than the South", doesn't equal "as powerful as the country actually was without the breakup". If either the North or the South gets involved on the side of the allies but not the other, than the American forces in the world wars would be weaker. If either one allies with the Axis things get even worse. Or you might get a country that was more focused on North America, and get neither half involved in the wars overseas. That would spare us our share of the destruction of the wars at least at first, but could lead to strongly negative consequences.
I haven't given much thought to what a Germany victory in WWI would have produced, but I don't think it would be positive.
An Axis victory in WWII would have been a major disaster. Alternatively if the US doesn't get involved, or gets involved later or with less force, but the Axis loses anyway, it might be through a Soviet takeover of all of the parts of Europe formerly controlled by the Nazis.
That's hard to say. Its hard to know exactly what would have transpired had the North let the South secede.
Yes. Such questions are always difficult to answer, and impossible to answer definitively.
One possibility you did not discuss.......the South coming back into the Union of their own volition.
I did mention it, but I didn't go in to it in any depth.
If they came back and could dictate the terms you might still have slavery, unless perhaps they came back much later and had since outlawed slavery.
Best case IMO would be if they came back after outlawing slavery (or accepted no slavery as part of the terms of coming back), but where able to keep the government from having quite as strong of centralization trend as the one that started with the Civil War, and was accelerated by FDR.
But even then there is downsides. One being that some of that centralization has been beneficial, a larger one being that the institution of slavery would have continued for a longer time in the US. How much longer is an important question when your trying to speculate about how good or bad the results from letting the south go would have been. |
