Writer's Block: A few good men

[browngirl]

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Abraham Lincoln. If he hadn't signed the Emancipation Proclamation, either slavery would never have ended (and among many, many other effects, I wouldn't be living in the US) or it would have ended a generation or two in a far, far bloodier manner. (What could be bloodier than the Civil War? Try a genocide. I've read facsimiles of historical documents suggesting that as the solution to the 'problem'.)

(Yes, I know he would rather have not have done so, and that 'freeing the slaves' was a much more complicated process, etc. I could write a ten page paper about this if I had time.)

Having answered this question, I find myself wondering if we're going to be asked who the Soviet Premier with the most positive impact was (Gorbachov, imo, but I'm a child of the '80s) and so on for other countries. LJ is international and this is rather a US-centric question.

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

What was the possible genocide?

[ailbhe]

I can guess and I don't like the answer.

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

Harry Turtledove's "Southern Victory" alternative history series goes into this ... essentially the Holocaust, but in the CSA, directed toward African-Americans. With few people in the USA giving a crap.

[koshmom.livejournal.com]

You asked what could be bloodier than the Civil War? I'd say the essential genocide of the Native American tribes. Which happened in earnest after the
Civil War was over. Civil War had soldiers mainly being killed, but with Native Americans they had whole tribes either wiped out or at least moved to locales where they could starve or be unable to support themselves (then be told they were useless because they were not allowed to support themselves).

But then, you can't really compare the Native American plight to that of the slaves/black people. Both were bad, just in different ways.

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

I had a class in Western History (which in that case meant history of the West in the US, not the larger meaning) where the professor made a pretty good (and excessively detailed) argument that the Civil War made it impossible for the US Army to continue to enforce the treaty agreements with the tribes that had them. (He also found us documentary proof of US Army efforts to inoculate tribes against smallpox, which was a nice counter to the incidents of infected blankets in the trade goods.) But after the Civil War, it all went to Habakkuk.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

The articles I've seen on the subject suggest that 90% of the original Native population was killed by introduced diseases long before the Europeans made contact with the bulk of the Native population. So you can estimate that directly or indirectly, Europeans killed over 90% of the Natives. (Though of course, there are a lot of ethnicities that were exterminated completely. The Trojans and the Carthaginians come to mind.)

[(Anonymous)]

If you're interested in pre-Columbus America, you should read 1491 by Charles Mann. (Or if you don't have that much energy, read the kid's version Before Columbus: the Americas of 1491. It's really fascinating because the recent research upends almost everything I learned in school.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

As a tangent based off of the 90% mortality rate of the Indians, I find it remarkable that the Pilgrims managed to die off in such record numbers when they had, at their disposal, an entirely depopulated village with houses already built, fields already plowed, and grain already stored.

I mean, there is LITERALLY no better situation they could have landed in, and they STILL managed a fifty percent casualty rate.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

I've read that they intended to go for Virginia, and so got much worse weather than they bargained for.

I've also read:

It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to
a life in the wilderness. They packed as if they had misunderstood
the purpose of the trip. They found room for sundials and
candle-snuffers, a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey.
One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and thirteen pairs of
boots. Yet they failed to bring a single cow or horse, plow or
fishing line. [ ... ] They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for
the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence in the most
dramatic way possible: by dying in droves.
-- from "Made in America: an informal history of the English Language in the
United States", by Bill Bryson, on the Pilgrims

And certainly the fields weren't already plowed, as the Natives didn't use plows. But the fields probably were largely cleared, and even the schoolbook story says that they had a source of a considerable amount of seed corn.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

On the Soviet Premier question, it would have to be Gorbachev. Nobody else comes close.

[sethg]

If slavery were “resolved” by genocide, who would work the fields in the southern plantations?

Off the top of my head, the most likely alternative to the Civil War would have been a Haiti-like situation, where the slaves were freed but the post-emancipation economy had a massive debt burden in order to pay off the former slavemasters. From that point of view, I suppose the South did abolitionists a favor by rebelling, since even before the Proclamation, the Union could comply with the letter of the Fugitive Slave Act by declaring escaped slaves “contraband of war”.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

Given the hideous expense, destruction, and loss of life of the Civil War (or War between the States, if you prefer), it would have been cheaper to pay off the slaveowners. And emancipation by eminent domain would have been unquestionably constitutional. It might have even led to a better history of race relations. (If we'd gone directly from slavery to the depths of Jim Crow, we'd have been about 40 years ahead of how it actually happened.)

The really sad thing is that if Eli Whitney's cotton gin had been invented after 1840 (when the importation of slaves was/could be banned), the growth of the cotton plantations would not have caused a huge growth in the slave population, and a lot of trouble would have been averted.