Posted on 08/01/2016 5:21:21 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Strong’s analysis was surprisingly close the mark. Missouri would wrench itself apart before and during the war. After an initial conventional phase which culminated at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, Missouri had their own mostly irregular and very nasty civil war inside the larger national struggle.
Virginia split in two, but unlike Strong’s opinion the “poor trash” poor, white, non-slave owners ended up breaking for the Union in what is now West Virginia.
The key point is that four years out, there is an increasing number of political leaders implying that violence is acceptable. In this case Wise implying a threat to Fremont.
Reading it now. I think it’s pretty good.
There was always resistance to the lowland planters among the non-slave owning farmers, who often lived on higher ground. West Virginia is the best example, but Southern Missouri had a lot of them too. That pattern persisted throughout the era of the Solid South. What Republicans there were tended to live in the Appalachians, Ozarks or foothills.
They will have possession of the Federal executive with its vast power, patronage, prestige of legality, its army, its navy, and its revenue on the fourth of March next. Hitherto it has been on the side of the Constitution and the right; after the fourth of March it will be in the hands of your enemy. Will you let him have it? (Cries of "No, no. Never.") Then strike while it is yet today. * * * Nothing but ruin will follow delay. The enemy on the fourth of March will intrench himself behind a quintuple wall of defence. Executive power, judiciary, (Mr. Seward has already proclaimed its reformation,) army, navy, and treasury. Twenty years of labor, and toil, and taxes all expended upon preparation, would not make up for the advantage your enemies would gain if the rising sun on the fifth of March should find you in the Union. Then strike while it is yet time.
Any doubt he would have struck Lincoln down had he been able to do so?
And yet for all the bravado that the earlier quote invoked it was Toombs, and Toombs alone who objected to the attack on the federal Fort Sumter. From the book Robert Toombs: The Civil Wars of a United States Senator and Confederate General
Davis's decision was made with the concurrence of his cabinet. Only secretary of state, Robert Toombs of Georgia, vocally dissented. Toombs is alleged to have exclaimed that an attack on Sumter would be "suicide, murder," and would stir a "hornet's nest" of hostility to the South. "It is unnecessary; it puts us in the wrong; it is fatal," Toombs pleaded. But the cabinet ordered the attack on Sumter.Was he prescient or just timid?
Many in the North were willing to let the South go if it meant a war. What we don't think about much is the Southern perspective. Slaveowners like Toombs were all for war if that's what it took, but could they count on the non-slaveowning majority to fight for them?
The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, Abridged by Thomas J. Pressly
Trying to square the circle on the issue of slavery.
It’s amazing how fast the thinking of people like Strong will change during the events of the next few years.
What interesting comments!
I’m going to enjoy following Mr. Strong’s diary.
Just think if he had a blog or a Facebook page!
Continued from July 28 (reply #62)
Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era
There was some discussion a while ago about pro-Union sentiment in the South. In Missouri it was mostly in the south, in the hill country of the Ozarks.
The introduction to this diary entry mentions Ellie, who is Ellen Ruggles Strong, wife of the diarist. Mr. Ruggles is Samuel B. Ruggles, Strong’s father-in-law and a prominent New Yorker. I don’t know who Miss Rosalie is yet. G.T. Strong was born in 1820, so he is now 36. The couple had a child that died in 1849, when Ellie Strong nearly died herself from some illness. A son was born in 1851 and another boy came along just last May, so the Strongs had a 5-year-old and a 4-month-old baby on their vacation in Vermont - HJS.
Continued from August 5 (reply #27).
The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, Abridged by Thomas J. Pressly
henkster: "Like Curtis LeMay and Arthur Harris. I wanted Sherman in command in Afghanistan."
Iraq, Afrhanistan & Vietnam?
Those are wars we lost, right?
So how about wars we won, let's say, WWII.
Sherman's men were ordered to take or destroy civilian property.
They were not authorized to harm unresisting civilians, and there are no legitimate reports of massacres.
In WWII, by contrast, allied bombings killed hundreds of thousands of German civilians, and on D-Day in France alone, as many of our allied French civilians died as allied troops combined.
According to this source, 15,000 to 20,000 French civilians died in the battle for Normandy.
This source says 2,000 French civilians died in Caen alone.
So, despite our Lost Causers' best efforts to exaggerate Sherman's brutality up to Hitlerian or Stalinistic levels, in fact, by comparison, WT Sherman was a Sunday-school teacher, out for an afternoon's picnic.
Your argument would be valid if there is no moral difference between “collateral” damage and intentional wanton destruction and seizure of property. Nobody has a problem with battle damage but intentional pillaging is beneath human dignity.
So what do you call allied bombings of axis cities, and the resulting civilian deaths?
How is that "morally superior" to Sherman's destruction of Confederate property, without significant civilian deaths?
I don’t wish to enter the lists of this tournament, but I would point out Bomber Harris knew perfectly well that his night area bombing program, often in bad weather, would hit targets of military or industrial value pretty much by chance. He didn’t care - he wanted to destroy Germany’s great cities, and that he did.
More importantly, the allies hoped to destroy Germans' will to fight, and in that they famously failed, just as German bombings in England failed to bring Brits to heal.
But they did help accomplish the one essential goal of the Second World War, at which Allies completely failed in the First, and that was to convince Germans that war was far, far too terrible to consider starting yet a Third.
So peace is the lasting legacy of commanders like Lemay and Harris, and on a vastly smaller scale, also of Sunday-school teacher WT Sherman.
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