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Originally Posted by August
a. Lincoln could not avoid a war because by the time he was elected war was pretty much an inevitability. It had been building for over a decade.
b. Had the south won I firmly believe the nation would have continued to fragment eventually leading to 48 independent countries most likely constantly at war with each other and at least unable to unite against 20th century enemies.
c. Had the south won Seward would never have purchased Alaska which would have put Soviet tank divisions on the North American continent. Not a pretty thought.
d. All the post civil war achievements of the United States, landing man on the moon for example, do not happen because at 1/50th of the budget no single state would be able to afford it.
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a) Good point but inevitability of the war is debatable, what exactly made it inevitable?
b) If peace were established and we were to form again as a union of states, what would make us unlikely to unite? 20th century enemies? Which ones? WW1 posed no threat to the U.S. just as WW2 did not. The Japanese never would have attacked us had it not been for the oil sanctions we imposed on them, and look what victory got us, Communist China.
The Germans certainly could not have invaded England. Everyone talks about the Battle of Britain as being the linchpin of invasion but many forget there was a substantial Royal Navy at the time. Add to this the lack of seaworthy German landing craft.
Furthermore, with such difficulty in invading England (even if Hitler HAD really wanted that) how would the Germans ever make a Trans-Atlantic invasion force?
WW2 was won on the Eastern front by the Soviets facing 98% of the Wehrmacht by the time D-Day rolled around (
Armageddon, Clive Ponting) and what did that get us? A communist superpower and a nuclear weapon crisis.
c. The U.S. bought Alaska from the Soviet Union. We didn't preclude an imminent invasion by doing so. That's like saying that if Canada bought France the Germans wouldn't have invaded.
d. Landing a man on the moon was economically worthless. The "repute" gained from such an undertaking is dubiously valuable even from a government point of view. Did the Soviets concede superiority to us after the moon landing?
e. Actually, it didn't. The US industrialization process was made by the smuggling of the Bessemer steel refining process and the fact that just because Britain had outlawed exports of industrial processes did not make them unavailable. Research Germany, 1860.
f. The U.S economic boom was made possible largely by the inventiveness of U.S. inventors and the stagnation of British industry in developing new products/industries in an attempt to maintain the status quo (
The Red Queen, Matt Ridley) This was also a function of war debt from the Napoleonic Wars. This same problem led to the downfall of the British Empire from WW1-WW2.
g. Slavery did not require a war to end. Look at the civil rights movement in America in the 50's-70's. There was already a strong anti-slavery movement in the North just as the was a strong civil rights movement in the North during the aforementioned period. Mechanization would have made slavery obsolete anyway. Consider the lot of the sharecropper, who was virtually worthless, compared to a slave who was very expensive. If a slave dies or is sick one must purchase another whereas a sharecropper can be replaced for almost no cost by a multitude of willing laborers.
Slavery was merely an excuse to get the citizenry to pursue a cause that their leaders felt they would not understand. Just as communism taking over the world was the motivation for Korea and Vietnam, just as the Germans taking over the world and murdering babies and all that garbage was an excuse to get people to fight the world wars.
I agree that Gettysburg was a great battle and the men who served on both sides deserve their place in history as did all who fought. Like many wars however, it is a tragedy that they fought and died for something much different than what they believed they fought for.
edit: this is, of course my personal opinion. While controversial, I submit it for consideration.