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Was John Brown a good emissary of Abolitionist thought? If your arguments are correct, they should apply to Brown as well, no? There's a pretty clear split happening here of "effective at advancing values" versus "persuasive in a polite conversation about abstractions". Not all people rate these two traits equally, and they tend to trade off against each other.
Would it be fair to say that your core assumption here is that the Civil War was a standard-deviation or three out from the optimal solution-space?
You describe Brown's results in negative terms: he sidelined other forms of resistance, exacerbated existing tensions, didn't resolve anything, divided rather than unified. Only, it seems to me that what he actually did was polarize the situation: he made it abundantly clear that the existing conditions could not last, and that something had to be done one way or the other. That unified each side within itself, even if it grew less united across the aisle.
Five years from his execution, Slavery in America was done. Not winding down, not slowly declining, not coming to a middle, not hotly contested, but ended decisively and permanently for so long as the society he operated within might survive. The cost was high, but it could be and in fact was paid. It seems hard to imagine that he himself would not see this as a near-optimal outcome, and many of his contemporaries seemed to see it likewise.
But in every other state in the world where slavery used to be practiced, it was dismantled without civil war. I'd say that puts Brown's legacy into question rather strongly.
Yes- sometimes that state would be dismantled by the indigenous population (Haiti being the best example), and sometimes the colonizing government would just up and leave like the modern US does leaving the country to collapse on its own.
The US, uniquely among slavingholding nations/empires in the 19th century, was not in a position to do either and had a large portion of its own country where slavery was still economically viable (it's way easier to mechanize sugarcane harvest than it is for cotton and tree fruits, which still aren't mechanized even today- yes, the cotton gin helped, but it didn't solve the problem like farming combines do).
You left out the word "it" from the quote. I didn't say the state in question was dismantled, I said that slavery as an institution was dismantled/ended throughout peaceful steps everywhere in the world but the US. Whether that involved decolonization or not isn't relevant to that main point.
There were other exceptions, including brief but serious backsliding time and again, but for the most part it took no major wars.
But how much of the war in the US was because abolitionists were more violent, and how much was because slavers were more powerful? In many parts of the world, the first peaceful step toward abolition was that the British Navy asked you how many pieces you would like to be in. Then, where slavery survived on ongoing trade (slavery in most of the Americas had become dependent on an order of magnitude higher imports; mass slavery in most of Africa was being funded by the exports), ending the trade left the institution unviable. But in the US slave states they were "producing" (forgive that I can't think of a word that's ugly enough here) their own new slaves, and slavery was still going strong for generations after international slave trading had been prohibited. The Union turned out to have military superiority over the Confederacy, but not so obviously as e.g. the Royal Navy vs Dahomey, so "just confront the slavers and await the inevitable negotiated victory" wasn't an option in the US. Less capacity for hypothetical violence means having to use more of that capacity for actual violence.
Even in parts of the US where slavery was ended via peaceful steps, look at the cost. Compensated emancipation was used in many countries, but only for DC in the USA; Lincoln couldn't even convince Delaware to do the same. If it had been used for the whole country, the price would have been a majority of a year's GDP. Gradual emancipation worked in most of the Northern States, but with that mechanism the awful price was paid by the slaves; e.g. Pennsylvania freed future children of slaves in 1780, but the last slaves there weren't freed until the legislature "rushed" the process to its end in 1847.
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It's actually kind of central to the entire point. It's easy to "ban slavery" when that comes in the form of an edict and a couple of gunboats to some far-off land where you don't have to deal with the economic and political fallout either way, since the landed gentry halfway around the world are much less of a threat to the government and people at home trying to ban it (the worst they could do is declare independence and they usually wouldn't have the manpower to do it, hence the slaves in the first place), couldn't meaningfully co-ordinate a response, and would usually be dealt with things like separate end dates for the phase-out depending on which colony it was to make sure a response would not be co-ordinated.
The US, by contrast, had to deal with half of its contiguous colonized landmass able to co-ordinate a response since they weren't that far away from each other, the end of slavery was all-or-nothing for all colonies at once, and instead of having an ocean between [north] and [each individual state in the south], the north was on a land border making a concentrated response by the south logistically, financially, and strategically viable (enough).
Which, of course, is what ended up happening. A federal/imperial government (same thing, really) being able to dictate policy to its provinces individually and one at a time is a much easier thing to pull off than having every single one waiting and just as able to reinforce each other as the government.
But there are numerous historical examples of sovereign states abolishing slavery as well. Brazil too, for example.
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