Idiocy in action

Yeah, this could have lasted

Disunited States of America

By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: July 4, 2006

On Independence Day, would we all be happier with even more independence? What if government of the people meant that the Red people in the South and the Blue people in the North had a border between them?

This question used to be of interest mainly to Southerners mourning their Lost Cause, but nowadays Northerners have their own reason to lament. The South is gaining seats in Congress at their expense, and four of the last five presidents have come from the South.

If the South were a separate country, Northern liberals wouldn't be ranting at George W. Bush and Pat Robertson. They wouldn't be frantically trying to find a candidate who appealed to the Bible Belt and pretended to enjoy Nascar races. They might never hear a Garth Brooks song or have to stop at a Cracker Barrel Old Country Store.

Southern conservatives wouldn't have to fight for moral values against godless Yankees. They wouldn't have to watch John Kerry go hunting. Michael Moore would be an obscure foreign filmmaker. Talk-show hosts wouldn't be rallying their audiences against Hillary Clinton because she'd never have been elected to their Senate. Politics in both countries might be less partisan, even civil.
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Ransom's pessimism is shared by another historian, John Majewski of the University of California at Santa Barbara. He imagines blacks suffering for decades, first under slavery and then under an apartheid system. He speculates that people in both countries would have ended up poorer, especially in the South, because of trade barriers between the countries and the lack of a single large market.

But there's also the optimistic scenario of Jeff Hummel, an economic historian at San Jose State University, the author of "Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men." He believes slavery would have collapsed quickly if the South had been allowed to peacefully secede and the North had simply stopped returning runaway slaves.

Unable to stop slaves from escaping, Hummel argues, the South would have been forced to abandon the system, and freed

First, the South would be broke.

The North had an overwhelming military advantage over the South, and even if the combat had stopped, the guerrilla war against the Confederacy rarely discussed by Southern historians would have continued with help from the north.

Then, there would have been a second war maybe 20 years later, with a poor South and a technically advanced north and it would have ended the same.