All pile on the dead guy! Fyodor has a What If? moment or two.

So, Pennsylvania's only president made a gaffe and caused our nation's bloodiest war? Oy vey!

Exactly how many "presidential historians" (Doris Kearns Goodwin, call your lawyer's office.) does it take to screw in a lightbulb or screw up history?

Now, I'm no historian, but I have been known to play one here in Bloggerdom. The only way anyone elected as the fifteenth president could have avoided war was to let the southern states go their own way.

Which might not have been such a bad idea after all...

Let's play a little What If? , shall we ?

IF the US lost the southern states and avoided a war, what then?

1) Quicker westward expansion, for one thing. The fertile midwest would be needed to feed the cities of the east.
2) More rapid industrialization. Do more of what you do best.
3) The door would have been left open for the secessionist states to return to the Union. I have no doubt a few would come back once the economic backwardness of slavery began to starve their citizens to death. (An economic embargo might have helped hasten this inevitability.)

What about long term consequences?

IF everything else stayed the same (a big if, of course) would the US have been able to make the difference in WWI?

Probably not. That would give us a German-dominated continental Europe before 1920. That means no Hitler exploiting hatred of the Treaty of Versailles to gain power.

That means no WWII, right?

Maybe. The Germans still would have sent Lenin back to Russia to end WWI in the east and the Bolsheviks would probably still have grabbed power.

Would the Kaiser (or his heir) attacked the Soviet Union once all was quiet on his western front?

A good possibility, though it probably would not have been a World War if the Germans struck quickly before the commies gained strength.

But then again, the German people would not have had the stomach for another war. WWI devasted their nation, and there is no reason to believe my What If? WWI would have been different in that regard. (Plus the Kaiser and the rest of Europe would soon be facing commie insurrections of their own, courtesy of Moscow.)

So, by 1945 we have a monarchial Germany dominating Western Europe and commie Russia holding the East. The US is a strong nation in its own hemisphere, but it's not a factor in Europe. The secessionist states might have split into two or more small countries.

Then there is Imperial Japan dominating the Pacific. The US can't check her and Britain has never recovered from The Great War. Its colonies are either German or independent.

So, who gets atomic weapons first? Not us, kiddies. I would not bet on Wilhemine Germany either. The Japanese? I doubt it. That leaves the arch-murderer Stalin with the ultimate tool of international blackmail.

Assuming, of course, that ol' Red Joe would be rational enough to only use The Bomb as a threat...


Sorry, kiddies. Here is the James Buchanan story:

The Salt Lake Tribune: Buchanan's Civil War blunder tops list of presidential miscues

From engaging in sexual relations with an intern to letting the Vietnam War escalate, U.S. presidents have been blamed for some egregious errors. So who had the worst blunder? President James Buchanan, for failing to avert the Civil War, according to a survey of presidential historians organized by the University of Louisville's McConnell Center.