By the beginning of April 1861, seven states had seceded from the Union, and Confederate and Union soldiers had been pointing their guns at each other across Charleston Harbor for several months. But not everyone was convinced that a violent showdown was the only way to resolve the slavery question.
The 25-year-old Harvard graduate Charles Francis Adams Jr. (grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams) suggested in The Atlantic that natural economic forces could prove more effective than military ones in eradicating slavery. If the “peaceful laws of trade” were left to follow their natural course, he argued, the South’s cotton monopoly would crumble and the role of slavery in American life would fall away.
His theory was never put to the test: the month his article appeared, Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard’s men fired on Fort Sumter, and war broke out. Adams would go on to fight for the Union at Gettysburg, and would later become an authority on the railroad industry, assuming the presidency of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1884.
Read Full Article »
