In 2011, the “Science Guy” from the Houston Chronicle, asked me to discuss a remarkable pair of anniversaries on the same day, April 12: the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War and the 50th anniversary of the first human spaceflight. Following a discussion by readers, he asked me to decide which of these two events was more significant in human history.
If you write about the past long enough, people ask you about the future. I try to not speculate about the past, to instead describe it fairly. As for the future, since we can’t describe it we might well speculate!
Eric Berger asks me this question: Two centuries from now, what event will be regarded as the more significant one in the course of human history: the first time a man rocketed into space, or, the beginning of the U.S. Civil War?
It’s an interesting question, a challenge to think about how local events affect global history.
On April 12, 1861, before dawn, the militia of the newly formed Confederate States of America attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, which U.S. soldiers had refused to vacate.
A hundred years later, on the morning of April 12, 1961, the Soviet Union launched Yuri Gagarin into outer space in a Vostok 3KA spacecraft. He traveled around the entire planet Earth in less than two hours. Then finally Gagarin landed by parachute, alive and well, in farmland of the Soviet Saratov region.
My qualifications for answering are mainly that I specialize neither on spaceflight nor on military history, so I have not much bias either way. Still, it’s difficult to deal with contentious interpretations of the Civil War: why did it happen, what was at stake?
The Civil War was mainly about slavery and states’ freedom. The fourth Article of the U.S. Constitution said that no slave could be freed by escaping into another state, yet several abolitionist states disregarded that Article, by releasing incoming slaves from servitude and rejecting slaveholders’ rights to transport slaves as property.
Lincoln ran for President on the platform that he would deter the expansion of slavery; critics claimed that he actually wanted to eliminate slavery. Therefore, once Lincoln was elected, seven slaveholding states declared secession before he even took office. The first, South Carolina, in its 1860 “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession” argued that the northern abolitionist states had violated the 1776 Declaration of Independence (“are and of right, ought to be FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES”) and the U.S. Constitution too by encroaching on South Carolina’s sovereign rights. They and other states tried to exercise their right “to institute a new government.”
Then, Lincoln initially avoided the contentious issues about slaves, and argued instead that the Union was perpetual, that no state had the right to secede.
To determine the war’s effects I won’t speculate about what would’ve happened if the South had won. Instead, consider a simpler matter, suppose that the U.S. government and other countries had recognized the Confederacy as independent, suppose that the military had let the South keep lands and forts without enabling war.
Suppose that the Civil War had not happened, that Lincoln had rigorously obeyed his proclaimed desire to avoid bloodshed. Many countries and states had already eliminated slavery, so it seems likely that, under world pressure, the Confederate States too eventually would.
More than 600,000 soldiers would not have died, nor many civilians. The infrastructure and wealth of the South would not have been devastated. Despite widespread claims that the Confederate States would have more rights, their approved Constitution of 1861 hardly suggests that.
The United States would be a smaller, weaker nation. Some “rebel” states might rejoin, but states with strong economies could continue as sovereign nations, setting a tempting precedent for other strong states.
In hindsight, it is easy to imagine that the Civil War was about the right of a minority, slaves, against oppression from a majority, but documents from the time, such as Lincoln’s speeches, explicitly show instead that the conflict was about the rights of “a majority,” the U.S., over the interests of a minority, the “rebel” states.
The costly space race between Soviets and the U.S. was immensely consequential, because it accelerated the development of many important technologies: computers, aeronautics, satellites, weaponry, etc. Yet manned space flights, in particular, did not entail an extensive restructuring of America or the Soviet Union. But later, spaceflights contributed to international collaborations.
To date, a consequence of the Civil War: the cohesion of the U.S. as the most powerful centralized government in the world, is by itself far greater than the extent to which the first manned spaceflight affected societies.
This is partly because nearby space, unlike the New World encountered by Columbus, does not offer evidently rich environments for human development.
I expect that two hundred years from now, the Civil War will still be considered a more consequential juncture in world history.
Still, I might be wrong, a potential terror can make the space race more significant. If someday we need to deflect an incoming massive asteroid, some factors that previously accelerated space technologies (including the Cold War) will seem awfully important.
A version of this article first appeared in 2011, in The Houston Chronicle’s Chron.com.
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