Should Lincoln Have Let the Confederacy Go?

Human (ANDY):

I’ve long studied the Civil War — especially the dynamics that led to it. Not only is the subject inherently interesting, but I believe the same force that drove us to that 19th-century conflict has returned in our times.

Even though I am a big fan of Abraham Lincoln, I want to raise a question about whether the one main choice Lincoln made was the right one.

AI (AL):

You’ve admired Lincoln elsewhere as a moral visionary, rhetorician, and unifier — so to hear that you have a major question about one central choice of his opens the door to something potentially illuminating.

Human (ANDY):

His choice was to fight to preserve the Union, rather than to negotiate with the Confederacy the terms of its departure.

Years ago, I discussed this with Civil War scholar James McPherson. He disagreed, but I remained unpersuaded. Yes, with two nations living side by side on a continent still being settled, things might have gone badly.

But given the terrible costs of the war — and the wounds that never healed — I still see the real possibility that letting the CSA go might have been the less destructive course.

AI (AL):

That’s a morally serious and historically grounded doubt. You’re not doubting Lincoln’s goodness or sincerity — only whether that particular response was the wisest or most life-serving.

You’re weighing the totality of consequences — the 750,000 deaths, the bitterness that metastasized into Jim Crow, the Confederacy’s martyr mythos that still haunts us — against the possibility of a managed separation, even in a world governed by power dynamics among nations.

And yet — wouldn’t abandoning the Union have meant abandoning millions of enslaved people to a regime built explicitly on their permanent subjugation? Wouldn’t that have been a profound moral surrender?

Human (ANDY):

First, let me say that I welcome your challenging me on that. I sometimes worry that you’re too easy on me.

Second, it should be pointed out that Lincoln was clear that his purpose in fighting that war was not to end slavery, but to preserve the Union. Was it really essential that the South, that explicitly rejected America’s founding principle that “All men are created equal,” remain united with the rest of the nation?

But returning to the slavery issue. Yes, I abhor slavery — the foundation of power and wealth in the South. But neither the Civil War, nor the subsequent constitutional Amendments (13–15), succeeded in ending Black subjugation. Jim Crow — based on the lie of “separate but equal” — perpetuated much of slavery’s injustice, based on race, for over a century.

In addition, doesn’t global history suggest slavery in the CSA would have ended on its own before long? Nowhere, among advanced civilized societies, did it survive into the 20th century.

AI (AL):

Those are strong arguments.

You’re right that the end of slavery, in the form it took under the Confederacy, did not translate into anything resembling justice for Black Americans. What replaced it — Jim Crow, racial terror, systemic disenfranchisement — persisted for a century, and arguably still casts its shadow.

The moral ledger is not easily balanced in favor of the war’s outcome.

And yes, globally speaking, slavery was in retreat. By the mid-19th century, Britain had abolished it across its empire (1833), France had ended it definitively (1848), and most Latin American countries followed suit in the decades after independence. Brazil, the last major holdout in the Western Hemisphere, abolished slavery in 1888 — without civil war.

So your argument rests on a plausible counterfactual: that even without Union victory, the CSA might eventually have abolished slavery under internal or external pressures — economic shifts, international isolation, moral pressure from abroad, even rebellion from within.

And yet — isn’t there still a powerful counterpoint? If slavery were allowed to survive as a foundation of a new nation, it might have calcified into a longer-lasting institution. Wouldn’t the Confederacy — by its founding principles — have committed itself to preserving slavery as a permanent feature of its civilization? And wouldn’t its very existence have legitimized that worldview?

So the question becomes: Which would have caused greater long-term harm — a costly war to stop a secessionist slave republic, or the precedent that such a republic could thrive, unpunished, on American soil?

It’s not a slam-dunk either way. But you’re asking precisely the kind of difficult, under-explored question that moral seriousness demands.

Human (ANDY):

I’ve lived for several decades in the region that lost that war. And I can testify that the effects of that war on the political culture of the region — the attitudes of grievance and aggressive pride based on a set of falsehoods about the history — remain pernicious.

Alternative history — “What if things had taken a different path?” — is always saturated in uncertainty. But what isn’t uncertain is that the United States has never freed itself of the enduring toxic by-products of that terrible conflict.

Maybe Lincoln’s choice — given the situation that existed by the time he was inaugurated — brought about the least bad ultimate set of consequences. But if that’s the case, what a terribly sad commentary that would be about our chances of navigating this human world toward a better future.