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Comment by brightstep | Hacker News Reader

One nuance this summary misses is that there was a serious hesitancy among Northern politicians to seriously address the slavery issue. While many believed it was abominable, they didn't step up to stop it because it would shake up the status quo which by and large benefited them.

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True, the status quo benefited them. But also, when the status quo did get shaken up, it resulted in half a million dead. A leader with any foresight would hesitate to open that particular Pandora's Box.

That's true, and there may have been fewer casualties if such a leader had stepped up sooner

Correct, and don't discount the generations of men and women born into bondage because of the inability of northern leaders to step up sooner. It's a little insulting to suggest the half million soldiers dead are the cost of the Civil War, when it's also the millions who suffered from the existence of the institution of slavery.

Or the USA would cease to exist.

The fact that this issue needed to be settled by a brutal war puts into perspective just how difficult of a problem this was to solve.

If this issue was tackled earlier, it's very possible that the country would have split into two factions, which would then compete with one another during westward expansion, triggering a conflict that would turn out to be much more devastating.

The most interesting case to compare with in this regard is Britain, which freed its slaves with essentially zero cost in lives--by paying off the slave owners. I'm not sure that could ever have been on the table in the US given the position abolitionists took, but it's interesting to wonder how things might have gone if it had been.

Brazil freed its slaves with no compensation at all (in either direction).

I disagree here. What could the North have done differently (post 1792) to seriously address the slavery issue? The Southern states had enough political power to put off any major reform; e.g. they had enough clout to engineer the dreadful Dred Scott decision.

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