Confederate Veteran John Mosby Knew the Lost Cause Was Bull

War is Boring ^ | May 1, 2017 | Kevin Knodell

[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.

[DiogenesLamp]

Fine, if you or I had been white Americans in 1860 we most likely wouldn't have cared much about the slaves. You certainly wouldn't.

I don't know if that's true or not. I suppose it would depend upon where I was raised, even so, i've always been an old softie, especially when it comes to making other people work instead of doing my own work. I can't stand doing that now.

But they you act as though Lincoln were somehow uniquely racist in his day and contemplating deporting freed slaves against their will.

If he would act completely against the will of White Southerners, I don't see why he would concern himself greatly with the will of Black Southerners. I have little doubt that he contemplated deporting them against their will, but being the political animal that he was, he probably modified his intentions to fit the then current politics of the time.

Looking at the historical Lincoln, and comparing him to most people of the day -- including the hypothetical nineteenth century you and I -- the conclusion one draws would have to be that he was less prejudiced and less stuck in his ways than most of his contemporaries -- including the hypothetical you and I.

That's probably a fair assessment. Yes, he was very Liberal for his time period.

So why not simply admit that and give the man his due?

I admit he was more enlightened than most of his time period, but are we now parsing degrees of racist? A certain amount gets a pass, but beyond some ill defined threshold that would consist of too much?

They were all racist back in those days. The Northern People were as much if not more racist than were the Southern People, and it is a false claim that the bloodshed was motivated by a concern for black people.

If you really thought the Clintons were "nice" that's another problem you have.

I thought they were greasy scum just a few months after he started running for office, but the same parts of the nation that voted for Lincoln thought Bill Clinton was just a "nice" wonderful man.

But that doesn't mean that they are completely materialistic and self-interested and without beliefs.

And sometimes they are. Clinton had no core beliefs. He would change his position and his supporters would just applaud. A lot of Republican politicians seem to have no core beliefs.

Sometimes it's those very beliefs that make them dangerous.

Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama. Jimmy Carter. Yes, very.

[DiogenesLamp]

I don't see any serious analyses of coastal shipping rates in the 19th century online or in book form. I do see references to rants by slaveowning politicians and secessionist propagandists about how Yankee shippers were charging all the traffic would bear, but there's nothing objective or unprejudiced or serious about such complaints.

I will see if I can find you some of this material. I recall reading some of it on another Civil War thread, and BroJoeK actually provided some interesting links on the subject.

[HandyDandy]

The point in bringing it up at all is to demonstrate that Lincoln didn't believe the "all men are created equal" anymore than did the founders four score and seven years earlier.

How did Lincoln feel about the enslavement of the black man by the white man?

[x]

This article also proves he was in Washington at the time he said he was

Actually, no. Butler didn't meet Lincoln when he said he did. Magness (a.k.a. gopcapitalist) says the Butler met Lincoln on another day.

What gets downplayed in the article are Butler's unreliability and the possibility that colonization was something Butler brought up, not Lincoln.

[x]

I don't know if that's true or not. I suppose it would depend upon where I was raised, even so, i've always been an old softie, especially when it comes to making other people work instead of doing my own work. I can't stand doing that now.

Yeah, everybody in the world is self-interested and mercenary, but, you and only you are an old softie. And it's everybody else who's a hypocrite!

Know thyself. If you are forever thinking up excuses and justifications for slaveowners in 2017, your hypothetical self would have been doing the same thing in 1860.

[OIFVeteran]

I think your assessment is spot on. I have concluded that even if you could transport DiogenesLamp back to South Carolina in 1860 when they seceded he would argue with them that their not really seceding because of slavery.

[BroJoeK]

WVMnteer: "As I pointed out, Lincoln did seem genuinely interested in a voluntary colonization scheme.
He and everyone associated with the idea had long given up on Africa as a destination.
But Central America was seen as a real possibility."

Congress had authorized money for colonization of freedmen in Africa as early as 1819 and over decades a total around 13,000 African-Americans emigrated there, eventually founding Liberia in 1847.
Today their descendants number about 200,000 or 5% of Liberia's population.

Here is a summary on Lincoln & abolition.

Lincoln on Abolition

Note that it lists several potential Lincoln colonization sites and in one case over 13,000 freedmen volunteered to go -- sites in Panama, Haiti and British West Indies.
However, none proved significant or successful and it's reported Lincoln "sloughed off" on colonization by mid 1864.

General Butler's story is also mentioned & put in context.

[HandyDandy]

According to you, This article also proves he was in Washington at the time he said he was, Which pretty much knocks down the argument of critics to the contrary.

If you'd read the article in its entirety you would know that while it puts Butler in a meeting with Lincoln just shortly before the Fords Theater incident, it claims that nobody knows what they conferred about. It also puts a lot of doubt on Butlers account. Next time find a better source. (I'm just trying to be objective, like you)

[HandyDandy]

So far as sending them to the colonies, he had proposed that they be hired by the Federal Government to build a Canal across Panama, and once they were settled in Panama, they could send for their wives and families. That was his Panama plan. He was trying for inducement at this point in time. (1863 I think)

Here, again, Sir, you are mixing your mythos or outright lying. Lincoln had his own "Central America plan" which he personally laid before a delegation of leading blacks. It had nothing to do with building a canal, but had more to do with coal. Herein, you are referring to the very dubious Panama Plan of Gen Butler (the canal plan, that Butler claims to have introduced to Lincoln in April, 1865). Only Butler is the source for this Panama plan. Two entirely separate plans which you have just mashed together. Just trying to be objective.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp on the Union Anaconda Plan blockade: "It was effective in convincing their normal traffic not to attempt it.
The Numbers i've seen were that a thousand ships or so got past it, but the normal traffic was around twenty thousand ships. "

Certainly blockade was effective by war's end when one in three blockade runners was captured or sunk, a total of 1,500 during the war.
But 1861 & 1862 were a different story.
In those years nine of ten blockade runners made it and even Northerners considered blockade a joke:

1862 cartoon mocking Union blockade:

That's why I argue the Confederacy could have, in 1861 & 1862 continued to ship its cotton, which in 1860 was worth around $200 million total.
Such revenues would have gone a long way towards relieving the Confederacy's financial strain and supplied it with more modern weapons.

DiogenesLamp: "That's all the extent of your message that I feel like reading."

It's your usual modus operandi: hit & run poster, put out lengthy bovine excrement full of nonsense, then run for the hills when answers are posted.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "Skipping this one. To respond to your claims is to lend credence to your false premises."

Total rubbish.
You just can't face the truth and that's why you head for the hills whenever you see it.

Hit & run poster.

[BroJoeK]

OIFVeteran: ** “if one of the other Republican candidates had won the nomination, and the election, the response from the south would have been to same. “ **

The most likely alternative, iirc, was Senator & former NY Governor William Seward, who Lincoln made Secretary of State.
Seward was a different kind of man from Lincoln and doubtless would have played events differently.
Probably would have sought & compromised for peace, not to the degree of, say, a Democrat like 1864 candidate McClellan, but more than Lincoln.
But Seward was also more radical in abolitionism than Lincoln, so no telling...

In 1861 Seward called Lincoln, “the best among us” and there’s no suggestion he ever wavered in that view.

In 1860 Deep South Fire Eaters announced that if Lincoln won they would secede.
I think they expected the election would get thrown into the House of Representatives where deals could be cut to protect slavery.

What they may not have expected was how strongly 1860 Northern voters rejected Democrat-Compromise-Unity politics.
The silent majority of Northerners in 1860 wanted to drain the swamp in Washington and make America great again.

But Democrats then as now just can’t accept elections that go against them.

[BroJoeK]

HandyDandy: ** “Mea culpa.
You are correct.
I was just trying to be polite.
What I really meant to say about your post #395 was that it was a bunch of bullsh*t.” **

DiogenesLamp: ** “I had little doubt you would consider it that before I even wrote it.
You are hardly a paragon of objectivity.” **

In fact, HandyDandy is one of our better informed & clearer writing posters.
But you can always tell when DiogenesLamp has lost his argument because he falls back on ludicrous accusations, in this instance “objectivity”.

If HandyDandy responds by citing more historical facts DiogenesLamp will pay him the ultimate complement, by refusing to even read HandyDandy’s posts.

Hit & run poster, it’s all DiogenesLamp has.

[HandyDandy]

Thanks for the compliment, BroJoeK. I am just trying to hold my own as an amateur buff. I am amazed at some of the very informed posters I find in these threads. This thread especially has turned up some new and very knowledgeable posters. I always learn things from your posts.

[OIFVeteran]

I would agree with your assessment that Seward would have done things somewhat differently. However, the south had already stated in the 1856 election that they would secede if the Republican, Fremont, was elected. I really don’t think it would have mattered who was the candidate for the republicans, the south would have still seceded, forcing Seward (or Chase, etc) to respond with force. It was the election, even the very existence, of a mildly abolitionist party that was intolerable to the south.

[DiogenesLamp]

I don't see any serious analyses of coastal shipping rates in the 19th century online or in book form. I do see references to rants by slaveowning politicians and secessionist propagandists about how Yankee shippers were charging all the traffic would bear, but there's nothing objective or unprejudiced or serious about such complaints.

I found what I believe is the BroJoeK source I mentioned. The Link to it is contained in this message.

Since this "triangle trade" involved a domestic leg, foreign vessels were excluded from it (under the 1817 law), except a few English ones that could substitute a Canadian port for a Northern U.S. one. And since it was subsidized by the U.S. government, it was going to continue to be the only game in town.

Robert Greenhalgh Albion, in his laudatory history of the Port of New York, openly boasts of this selfish monopoly. "By creating a three-cornered trade in the 'cotton triangle,' New York dragged the commerce between the southern ports and Europe out of its normal course some two hundred miles to collect a heavy toll upon it. This trade might perfectly well have taken the form of direct shuttles between Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, or New Orleans on the one hand and Liverpool or Havre on the other, leaving New York far to one side had it not interfered in this way. To clinch this abnormal arrangement, moreover, New York developed the coastal packet lines without which it would have been extremely difficult to make the east-bound trips of the ocean packets profitable."[2]

Even when the Southern cotton bound for Europe didn't put in at the wharves of Sandy Hook or the East River, unloading and reloading, the combined income from interests, commissions, freight, insurance, and other profits took perhaps 40 cents into New York of every dollar paid for southern cotton.

[DiogenesLamp]

How did Lincoln feel about the enslavement of the black man by the white man?

He felt that it was absolutely acceptable so long as the white man kept paying into his Treasury and to his Crony Industrialist friends in the North East.

[DiogenesLamp]

Actually, no. Butler didn't meet Lincoln when he said he did. Magness (a.k.a. gopcapitalist) says the Butler met Lincoln on another day.

My recollection from reading the article is that Butler might have been a little fuzzy on the exact date, but it was more or less shortly before Lincoln's assassination. Spring of 1865.

What gets downplayed in the article are Butler's unreliability and the possibility that colonization was something Butler brought up, not Lincoln.

That has been asserted by modern day critics who adamantly do not wish to believe that Lincoln continued to discuss ideas that he had articulated for most of his adult life.

They insinuate that Butler was simply fueling his own aggrandizement and significance by making this assertion.

I am of the opinion that a Major General of the Union would be a man of high character and not given to lying. (Military men of this period valued honor. ) I am of the opinion that if that is what the man said he heard, then that is what he heard.

Now you can chose to believe one of two things. You can believe that Major General Butler was a liar, or you can believe that he heard Lincoln say what he claims; Sentiments Lincoln expressed for most of his adult life.

I chose to apply Occam's razor and believe that which most simply explains the event.

[DiogenesLamp]

Yeah, everybody in the world is self-interested and mercenary, but, you and only you are an old softie. And it's everybody else who's a hypocrite!

We need to make this about me? I'm sure there were plenty of old softies back in those days as well, they just weren't a majority, or even close to a majority. (Till Later.)

Know thyself. If you are forever thinking up excuses and justifications for slaveowners in 2017, your hypothetical self would have been doing the same thing in 1860.

Well see there, you have a completely different view of what I am doing than do I. I can't recall having made a single justification for slaveowners, I merely point out that it was legal at the time and protected by the then US Constitution. I also point out that under the Principles articulated in the Nation's founding document, these slaverowners had the same right to leave as did the original slaveowner founders. You see, unlike you, I am not caught up in the slavery issue to the exclusion of all other factors.

I simply acknowledge how things were at that time. I don't have to agree with it to speak the truth about it.

If being slaveowners was no impediment to the Founders obtaining independence, the same standard should also apply "four score and seven years" later.

[DiogenesLamp]

I think your assessment is spot on. I have concluded that even if you could transport DiogenesLamp back to South Carolina in 1860 when they seceded he would argue with them that their not really seceding because of slavery.

Didn't they already have it? Wasn't it already part of the Union for "four score and seven years?"

Even so, it is irrelevant why they left. The principle articulated in the Declaration of Independence assured them of the right to leave whenever they believed the existing Government no longer represented their best interests.