'Slavery would have persisted, grown' were Trump president during Civil War: historian

Former President Donald Trump raised hackles from historians recently when he insisted that he could have negotiated a solution that would have prevented the American Civil War.

This led historian Joshua Zeitz to conduct a thought experiment: What if Trump or someone like him had been president instead of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War?

In an essay in Politico, Zeitz posited that "in all likelihood, chattel slavery in North America would have persisted, even grown, well into the 20th century" had Trump been president in the 1860s.

According to Zeitz, the notion that slavery would have died out on its own was likely wishful thinking given how much Southern states were dedicated to expanding it out into new territories.

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Additionally, Zeitz points out, Lincoln did try to negotiate a more gradual end to slavery, only to be slapped away by Southern plantation owners.

"The only plausible program for gradual abolition was compensated emancipation, a scheme by which the government would pay slaveowners to emancipate their enslaved workers," he argues. "White Southerners bitterly resisted that option."

On top of all that, writes Zeitz, the aftermath of the American Civil War resulted in policies that led to industrialization that turned America into an economic powerhouse.

"The world Donald Trump envisioned is both easy and awful to imagine: a world in which Lincoln and his cabinet agreed to the Crittenden compromise, slavery persisted into the 20th century — ending, perhaps, in violent revolution, or under global pressure — and the nation’s economic and political trajectory took a markedly different course," he contends. "The U.S. would have remained an economic powerhouse, most likely, but much of the nation’s industrial development and urbanization would have been delayed by decades."

Read the whole essay here.