Thread by @akoz33

I somehow feel compelled to state my view of the American Civil War (although it totally should be completely obvious ...).
I think the Confederacy was a bad cause for one reason only - slavery. That was the true cause of the secession & its original sin from which there is n

no escape. And in fact, the inevitability of what happened and why it had to happen (slavery) was already pointed out a long time earlier by Tocqueville.
But as for secession itself - calling it “treason” is no different that calling any secession treason, including the more

recent breaks up of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The first was a federation that was entered into by consent & disolved peacefully, the second had a mote complicated origin & was dissolved by civil war. Is secession never justified unless it’s purely consensual? History of much

of the world does not suggest any clear answers. I myself strongly supported the failed secession of Biafra from Nigeria but there are also cases when I was not sympathetic to the secessionists. One thing has always clear however:

“Treason doth never prosper: what ’s the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

If the Confederacy succeeded (in my opinion it could only have done so with the help of a European intervention - Napoleon III wanted to intervene but the British would not allow it) that Jefferson Davies and Lee would be national heroes and everyone would be congratulating the

Confederate States of America on each anniversary of its birth, and there would also be a Confederate Ambassador in Washington (or perhaps another city that would have become the Capital of the United States). I think such an outcome would have been unfortunate for the world

but historians and social scientists would have proved (by “scientific consensus”) that it was “inevitable”.