Posted on 05/01/2017 7:54:06 AM PDT by C19fan
John S. Mosby, known as the “Gray Ghost,” was a Virginian who became legendary for his leadership of Mosby’s Rangers—a band of Confederate guerrilla fighters that harassed the Union Army and went toe-to-toe with George Armstrong Custer in the Shenandoah Valley.
Mosby is still highly regarded as a strategist and tactician and is studied to this day by practitioners of unconventional warfare. He lived a long life, dying early in the 20th century, and was also a lawyer, a diplomat and author who wrote about his experiences during the war.
(Excerpt) Read more at warisboring.com ...
If I wanted to be liked I would tell people what they want to hear instead of what I see as the objective truth.
You just can't resist a cheap shot.
The entire claim that the War was fought to free slaves is itself a cheap shot. Trying to force any discussion of the war to focus on slavery and nothing but slavery, is also a "cheap shot." Pointing out the truth that the Union hated slaves and wanted them deported is an effort to jar loose that cognitive dissonance with which so many people are afflicted. Lincoln was an officer in a society dedicated to deporting black people before he ever ran for any office.
Lincoln was willing to give the vote to some African-Americans when he died.
At one time I would have said that was admirable and indicative of a high moral character, but as i've gotten older and can see further, my acquired cynicism kicks in and I note that this would of course heavily benefit his party. A despicable man who lusted after power would welcome millions of new voters who were virtually guaranteed to always support his party's efforts to gain and maintain power.
Pray tell, when did this conversion of Lincoln to supporting this idea occur? Before it could possibly do him any good, or after he had total control of his conquered enemies who he knew would never vote for him or his party again?
That was far more than most white Americans of the day would allow.
It didn't benefit them in any way they could see, unless of course they were running for some sort of office on the Republican ticket.
He might have continued to support voluntary colonization efforts.
My recollection is that he was really looking at various plans to send blacks to either Africa or Brazil, and this was after the war was over.
But he wasn't trying to deport anybody.
He was certainly urging them to leave. He was working on incentives to help with that goal.
I understand you now, though.
All the cynicism about other people is just an effort to normalize and justify your own nihilism.
Throughout my life I have sometimes wondered if I was being too cynical, and then something would happen that would make me realize I wasn't being cynical enough.
Nowadays I find it nearly impossible to be too cynical because often times you will find the blackest hearts in the nicest seeming people. Look at the Clintons for example.
I've come to the conclusion that it wouldn't make any difference to you one way or the other. You have your religion, and I am unlikely to ever shake your faith in it.
I don't think it is the "weeds" at all. I think it is clearly supportable by the financial evidence available. I think it is the primary cause of the war, and I think most people would rather believe a glorious lie than the very ugly truth.
Yet secession was not peaceful because Jefferson Davis had P.T. Beauregard fire on Fort Sumter.
You sorta completely missed that last message I posted to you. Perhaps you should take another look at it, but this time try to see it objectively.
As that unnecessary attack suggests, the Confederacy was born not to trade peacefully, but to fight for the preservation and extension of slavery.
Nearly a thousand men involved, Six ships of War, and explicit orders to force an entrance to Ft. Sumter, and because the South was so foolish as to believe the Union Navy would attempt to carry out their order, it is the South that chose violence? Even the Buffalo Daily Courier thought Lincoln had provoked it.
On April 16, 1861, The Buffalo Daily Courier published the following:
" The affair at Fort Sumter, it seems to us, has been planned as a means by which the war feeling at the North should be intensified, and the administration thus receive popular support for its policy…. If the armament which lay outside the harbor, while the fort was being battered to pieces, had been designed for the relief of Major Anderson, it certainly would have made a show of fulfilling its mission. But it seems plain to us that no such design was had. The administration, virtually, to use a homely illustration, stood at Sumter like a boy with a chip on his shoulder, daring his antagonist to knock it off. The Carolinians have knocked off the chip. War is inaugurated, and the design of the administration accomplished.
Again, the Spanish Armada sailed (Much like the Fox Expedition to Sumter) with the Defenders in the full knowledge that the invader's intentions was to stage an attack, and you blame the defenders for starting it?
The British Fired first on the Spanish. The fact that the Spanish were there with a fighting force was itself a provocation.
I actually played that game. Thanks for the blast from the past.
Davis ought to have waited for those Union Warships to open up with cannon fire on them first, but that's a hard thing to ask a man to do.
"Stand there and let them fire their cannon at you! You may be killed or mangled, but your death would be for a worthy cause! "
Of course, as we now know, those Ships were never going to attack, despite their clear orders to do so. Since the Powhatan was never going to arrive to lead them, they would just be floating out there off of Charleston until new orders were ferried out to them.
Pray tell, how were those provisions ever going to get unloaded when the ships wouldn't move without the Powhatan?
It seems as if the goal was to provision the fort, it was never going to get accomplished because the Powhatan was not going to show up.
How do you explain an intention to provision the fort and then deliberately creating a condition in which that order would never be carried out?
What's going on, was Lincoln some sort of imbecile that somehow catch-22d his provisioning expedition?
Did Lincoln absent mindedly send his command ship to Pensacola and leave all his other ships in "orders" purgatory?
How were those ships ever going to get those provisions to the men in Sumter? He had no plan to accomplish it! The necessary component to accomplishing his plan was steaming off to Florida when it should have been rendezvousing with the other ships of the task force 10 miles off the coast of Charleston.
Lincoln was either an imbecile or a genius, but the orders given the Powhatan and the other ships are not what a man of ordinary rationality would have done.
Let me ask you something. Speaking of imbeciles, why on earth did the city of Charleston not take the initiative to man Fort Sumter themselves before Major Anderson decided to move into it? Major Anderson, on his own initiative vacated Fort Moultrie and positioned his men in Fort Sumter. Then, it seems, the newly formed Confederate Government was outraged and had a “situation” on its hands. I’ll betcha the genius Davis was kicking himself for years after. It hadn’t occurred to him to just “occupy” it, before Anderson moved in and raised the Stars and Stripes?
The entire crisis could have been averted by permitting the garrison to buy food locally, or, after a parley, getting an agreement with the Union force that only provisions would be landed from the supply vessels. Davis, a West Point graduate with combat experience and a former Secretary of War, knew how to arrange that.
Besides, the fort was supposed to be abandoned, not reinforced. Strengthen I g fort when a host nation asks you to leave is an act of war.
Well I would assume they saw no need because they were assured by Seward that the Union Troops would be withdrawn at some point in the future.
Yes, trusting the Lincoln administration officials to be forthright and honest in their dealings was clearly imbecilic.
You are dodging my point because it clearly unsettles you if you have grasped it.
The orders to supply the fortress depended upon the arrival of the Powhatan. If the Powhatan does not show up, the supply mission is paralyzed.
The Powhatan is clearly not going to show up because Lincoln gave secret orders to Captain David Porter (shortly after this incident he was promoted to Admiral Porter) to sail the Powhatan to Florida.
The Supply Mission was either just an intentional feint, or it was shot in the foot by Lincoln through a mistake.
Lincoln was certainly a Merchantilist (Crony Capitalist) lawyer in bed with big business. He was all in favor of government policy that supported the interests of what then would have been regarded as "Large Corporations" today.
It is no accident that the Robber Barons came along after the Civil War. The Climate was right for it.
Yes, they could have kept all the slavery they wanted had they merely given up Independence sooner.
Independence was the unforgivable sin, it cut into the money stream feeding New York/Washington.
And where you are dishonest is your refusal to acknowledge that the Union was just fine with this so long as they remained in economic control of this "slaveocracy."
You are a hypocrite who will not acknowledge the Union's support of Slavery and the intent to continue tolerating it indefinitely.
You keep trying to put the Slavery shoe on the South, and you simply ignore the fact that the Union government of the North was also wearing it as it had continued to do for "Four Score and Seven Years."
Sure, but the founders were not such people and neither was Abraham Lincoln and the Union.
The problem with your understanding of history is that you want to believe that they were.
Did Davis issue orders to Beauregard? No he did not. Walker issued the order.
End of Story. Period. Full Stop. Stop trying to salvage your mistake in saying Davis issued the order to Beauregard.
Davis did not issue the order to Beauregard.
No it wasn't. It was still under construction.
Strengthen I g fort when a host nation asks you to leave is an act of war.
The "host nation" was the United States and you're right, the hostile alien invaders from South Carolina should have left it alone.
DiogenesLamp: ** “Well Abraham Lincoln’s plan was to ship them off to Africa or Brazil.” **
In 1776 Thomas Jefferson condemned British imposed slavery in the Declaration of Independence.
In 1777 the first Northern state, Vermont, began abolition, soon followed by others.
In 1780 Jefferson first proposed abolition in the then Northwest Territories.
In 1807 President Jefferson signed abolition of international slave imports.
In 1817 the American Colonization Society was founded to return freedmen to Africa.
In 1819 the U.S. Slave Trade Act authorized funding to settle freed blacks in what would become Liberia, in Africa.
In 1820 the first American freedmen arrived in what would become Liberia, Africa.
*** In 1824 Thomas Jefferson became the first to propose a Federal buyout of slaves and colonizing freedmen in Santo Domingo.***
From that period on, proposals to abolish slavery and return freedmen to Africa or elsewhere were part of US political discourse.
The change from Jefferson to, say, a young Lincoln was that what Jefferson considered mandatory, Lincoln would offer as voluntary.
Indeed, when Lincoln learned by talking with them that most freedmen did not wish to settle outside the USA, he abandoned it.
So as usual, DiogenesLamp has it backwards when saying that Lincoln wanted to deport ex-slaves.
No, Lincoln offered them voluntary emigration, which they refused, so he dropped it.
Thomas Jefferson condemned it in the draft. The others removed that language deliberately.
No, Lincoln offered them voluntary emigration, which they refused, so he dropped it.
He didn't drop it, he got killed, and so he could no longer further those plans he had worked on.
You, sir, are either a fool or an imbecile in not being able to acknowledge the wide moral gap between a people(s) that believe it is the natural order for one group of men to own another group of men and Abraham Lincoln who consistently over the course of his political career argued that all men should be free.
And they weren't driving policy for the first 18 months of the war. The intent always was to continue slavery as before.
You, sir, are either a fool or an imbecile in not being able to acknowledge the wide moral gap between a people(s) that believe it is the natural order for one group of men to own another group of men and Abraham Lincoln who consistently over the course of his political career argued that all men should be free.
I am not going to acknowledge a wide moral gap because none such existed. Lincoln had every intention of restoring slavery in the South. (He never stopped it in the Union) Therefore he does not get any credit for Abolishing slavery when it was never his intention to do so when he launched his invasion.
Even his Emancipation Proclamation continued slavery in areas that had been taken by Union troops.
The *MORAL* issue for which Lincoln claims to have fought the war was to "Preserve the Union" which he often characterized as "Ending the Rebellion" as if 4 million people could be called "Rebellious" when invoking their right to independence.
This "bait and switch" tactic that your side always employs of converting the reason the Union fought the war from "Preserving the Union" to "abolishing slavery" is morally reprehensible. It is an effort to subsequently color with moral legitimacy acts which were not moral at all.
Everything Lincoln did had the effect of protecting Northern Wealth and Political Power. That it may have also advanced a moral cause at horrible and immoral expense to others, was a side effect.
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