Absolutely fascinating account (and Catton's commentary) on a chance conversation William Seward had with Supreme Court Justice John A. Campbell of Alabama. Campbell conducted it as a Socratic dialogue.
Campbell: Slavery will run its course in 25 years.
Seward: "Say fifty years." Campbell accepts.
An extension of slavery into new territories was a non-starter. After a full decade open to slave importation New Mexico had twenty-nine slaves.
Seward: "Only twenty-four, sir." Campbell accepts.
Was there any sense, asked the Justice, in letting the Union be destroyed over the question of slavery in the territories when slavery obviously was not going to establish itself in the territories in any case? Seward agreed that there was not.
...
Catton: ...there is a haunting, tantalizing quality to the report of this conversation, for it is one of the few lights of hope that comes down to us from the fated months that led up to the war. What Seward and Campbell [agreed] was that slavery..., considered rationally, was already dying out and would be gone in 25, or 50, years.
...Here is what many leaders of the North and South should have been saying publicly...for a year and more. No one had done it. ...instead...there had been desperate appeals to pride, to principle, to all of the moral imperatives...
I was surprised to read Seward's answer to Campbell's ultimate question. Fifty more years of slavery! How dare you agree to that! But Abraham Lincoln, soon Seward's boss, didn't see the moral as imperative either. In his famous answer to Horace Greeley Lincoln wrote that he would preserve the union any way he could, by freeing all the slaves, by keeping all the slaves in bondage, by freeing some and keeping others in bondage. I was at least equally surprised to read Bruce Catton--100 years later!-- obviously wrestling with the "haunting, tantalizing" alternative of fifty more years of slavery. After a page of wrestling, Catton concludes,
Perhaps it was not really possible for slavery to die peacefully and quietly, while everyone waited...for the mills of God to finish their grinding. Perhaps the essential fact about slavery was that it could neither be kept alive nor done to death rationally. (Catton's emphasis) Its foundations went far down into the pit, down to the blackest wrong and violence, and when the foundations were torn out, wrong and violence would surely be loosed for a season. ...
That is, so violent an institution must needs die a violent death. That does not necessarily follow "rationally" but I think Catton's "perhaps" speculations are accurate. That is, it is a base moral issue: No moral human beings could countenance fifty more years of millions of Africans in bondage. It is too rational, too cold. How could a moral people treat slave holders rationally? How make a rational calculation with Hitler that Czechoslovakia was "not worth it?" How rationally agree with Putin to the rape and murder of tens of thousands of Ukraine civilians. Yet, we did it. What if Campbell or Seward had proposed the equally "rational" substitution of millions of whites for the Africans for fifty years? Both would have been outraged at the suggestion.
