Former President Donald Trump just involved himself in the historiography of the Civil War during a speech in Iowa today. It was not an event on the history of the Civil War, but, from out of nowhere, Trump said that the war could have been avoided through “negotiation.” Here is the report from Forbes Magazine put up at 5:00 PM Today. Here is the report:
Former President Donald Trump said that negotiations could have prevented the Civil War while speaking at a campaign event in Iowa on Saturday, as the more than 150-year-old conflict remains an unexpected talking point along the Republican primary campaign trail.
CRUCIAL QUOTE
“I know it very well, I know the whole process that they went through and they just couldn’t get along,” Trump said. “That would have been something that could have been negotiated and they wouldn’t have had that problem. But it was a hell of a time.”
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Ah, but “only he” could have solved that problem.
He would have flown between the capitals from his AmRev era airfields.
That this man is as delusional as he is corrupt is not the issue. That so manyAmericans—and an entire political party — choose to worship the delusion and ignore the core is the problem.
Mr Duke – I’m not quite sure that I understand your response to Trump’s comment. I’m also not sure if that’s Trump’s quote in its entirety. But the issue is whether or not the Civil War could have been avoided by negotiation….. or once started, could it have ended through some type of negotiated settlement. The answer is obviously yes to both questions and the Peace Democrats in the North favored that possibility.
However, it’s impossible to say what the details of such a settlement would have been. In theory, it’s possible that the phasing out of slavery would have occurred and /or some form of compensation to slave owners might have been included (which Lincoln had supported at one time) as part of some type of a settlement.
Clearly the bottom line and the intriguing question is whether or not the loss of 600,000 lives (including my great, great grandfather ‘s life) and the resultant monumental suffering, could have been avoided, via a non violent solution. We’ll never know but trying to answer that question may help us in the future to deal with what appear to be unresolvable conflicts. In the meantime, I’m not sure that attacking Trump for making a relatively benign comment helps further our understanding of what occurred 150+ years ago.
I’m with Kevin Duke. And I don’t consider Trump’s comment to be “relatively benign” as you do.
I don’t have it in front of me at the moment, but I recall that in 1862, Lincoln looked at the daily cost of the war and compared it to the cost of compensating enslavers for the people they held in bondage. If this compensation was proposed to the Confederacy, I’m not sure. But obviously, they never agreed to it. The rebels against the United States never compromised on the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln; or on secession; or emancipation, or the men who served in the United States Colored Troops. Rather than take these men prisoner and exchange them for captured Confederates, they instead murdered Black soldiers who tried to surrender.
I don’t trust Trump with the reckless and foolish things he says, either. He showed already that he doesn’t know or care anything about history with the remarks he made about Frederick Douglass in 2017; and for refusing to visit an American Cemetery in France because he apparently didn’t want to get his hair wet in the rain.
I don’t believe Trump has any substantial knowledge of the Civil War at all- what caused it, why it continued to be fought, and who benefited from it. When he says he thinks the war could have been avoided through negotiation, I don’t think he has any idea of what he’s talking about.
The point I was trying to make – which you obviously missed – was not a defense of Trump but the possibility that a negotiated settlement might have been reached. For example, if Gettysburg had ended with a Confederate victory, the pressure on Lincoln to negotiate an end to the war would have been enormous. Would it have been possible to save the Union and eliminate slavery immediately – probably not. The South would only agree to rejoin the Union if slavery was protected.
So, if slavery had continued, that would have been a deplorable situation. But how much longer would slavery have continued – 10 years, 20 or more……and would world opinion have demanded an end to it, well before the beginning of the 20th century? Who knows?
But when one looks at the hundreds of thousands of lives lost during the war and the millions more that were devastated, would it have been better for slavery to have continued for a few years more……or for slavery to have been ended immediately, as it was?
That’s a difficult question for me to answer but maybe not for you and others. If so, then I guess, in your opinion, slavery was so morally reprehensible – as it was elsewhere in the world at the time and throughout history – then there is no question that the lives lost and devastated, was the price that had to be paid. However, maybe if you were transported back in time and you were a soldier killed or crippled…..or a wife who lost a husband or a parent who lost a son, you might feel differently.
A polisci professor once stated that if you want to understand countries, think of them as companies. OF course was “negotiations” during the war. The South expressed thier discontent with the Compromise of 1850, Corporate policy by a hostile takeover of the southern market. During the war, violent negotiations took place on the numerous battlefields. And not to diminish their horrible livelihood- Southern labor voted with thier feet to join the Northern Corporate structure. We read the history of the war as though African American had no agency – if the war was not about slavery, why did they leave and seek education to better themselves??
Good point.