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 ...
Do you not realize how ridiculous is this idea? They didn't need to "preserve" something that had already existed within the Union for "four score and seven years."
It was legal at that time and place in history. Lincoln offered them assurances that he would do nothing to endanger slavery, and he even went so far as to support the Corwin Amendment which would have made it permanent and impossible to destroy.
The Civil War was about the control of that money produced by those slaves. About 73% of all hard foreign currency earned by the US came from those Southern slave states, and this represented a huge amount of money for the United States at that time.
Lincoln made it clear they could have slavery, but what they could not have was financial independence from Washington D.C.
Even the London Spectator noted at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation that:
The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.
1863? Wasn't that two years after the war had already started?
Hard to have a war to end slavery when you haven't even ended it in your own territory. It makes people think you aren't serious about what you claim.
Don’t get mad bro - just because your daddy and your granddaddy voted for dhimmicrats - that don’t make me liberal.
If Custer had actually won the Battle of the Little Big Horn (thought it would be a killing and capture of old men, women, and children like the snowy massacre he conducted at the Washita River) he was slated to return east by train to be nominated by acclamation for president at the about to begin Democrat convention. The party bigwigs in New York had things lined up for him.
Despite the limited terms of the Emancipation Proclamation, it marked a decisive shift in the North's war aims, from simple preservation of the union to preservation plus the end of slavery.
If the South had instead remained in the union, they could have stymied abolition while undertaking gradual reforms that ameliorated the conditions of slavery. Doing so would have preserved the South's prosperity and political power.
As a boy, George Patton met Mosby and heard Mosby’s war stories.
Mosby mastered the 3:00AM raid on the Yanks with very few Yanks being killed and about 1,700 were taken as prisoners including a young General to be used in the prisoner exchange program . Grant halted the prisoner exchange program after the Fort Pillow incident and that’s when the prisons on both sides became vastly over crowed .
Mosby and his partisans never surrendered but were simply allowed to disband instead . My Great ,great , great grandfather Charles Price served in his command and is mentioned in Mosby’s Memoirs .
Mosby was known as a very humane man but had a bad habit of falling out of the saddle .
So you're saying Mosby had no idea what he was actually fighting about? Poor guy.
Had the North not stopped the South, the South would have become an economic powerhouse and wrecked countless Northern industries.
So you would have us believe.
Well he owned slaves so I suspect not.
The Southern states reasons for leaving have nothing to do with the Northern States reasons for forcing them back in. Since the Northern States had control of the war, it was *THEIR* reasons that mattered in the conflict, not the Southern States reasons for wanting out of the Union.
The Northern states had no interest in stopping slavery when the war began. They only wanted to get those Southern states back under their control.
Despite the limited terms of the Emancipation Proclamation, it marked a decisive shift in the North's war aims, from simple preservation of the union to preservation plus the end of slavery.
Well see, there you go. Yes it did mark a decisive shift. It moved the goal posts to something other than what actually started the war. If the point of the North going to war wasn't to end slavery, then why do people keep repeating that it was?
If the South had instead remained in the union, they could have stymied abolition while undertaking gradual reforms that ameliorated the conditions of slavery. Doing so would have preserved the South's prosperity and political power.
On the other hand, had they simply been allowed to remain independent, they could have been even more prosperous anyways without having to listen to their Moral superiors in the North East telling them what horrible human beings they were.
Producing 3/4ths of all US Exports without New York taking a 40% cut out of their profits would have given them plenty of capital to build industries to rival the North. This I think was the real reason why the US went to war with them. There were plenty of Robber Barons with power and influence who would have lost both had the South remained independent of their control.
Poor attempt by you to put words in my mouth that I didn't say. All that Mosby needed to know is that his homeland was invaded. That is all that is necessary to understand when it comes to a man's need to fight.
So you would have us believe.
So do the economic records indicate. So too do the Newspaper editorials of the time predict. (On both sides.)
The South produced 3/4ths of all European trade. They had 1/4th the citizenry of the Northern States. Much money, low population, they would have been prosperous.
Eli Whitney's cotton gin revived the fading institution of slavery by making cotton farming practical. The fact is that the demand for and price of slaves boomed because of the cotton gin.
And John Deere's self-cleaning steel plow had much more effect in breaking up prairie sod in the upper midwest than it did in the slave belt.
If you're speaking of mechanization in general, cotton farming wasn't mechanized until the 1940s, when the first practical cotton harvester was developed. That combined with advances in herbicides, which reduced the amount of hand "chopping" of cotton fields, to reduce the amount of manual labor cotton production required. Not coincidentally, this is when sharecropping, the southern agricultural labor system that replaced slavery with debt peonage, died off.
It wasn’t unusual for people who owned slaves to be neutral or even a bit abolitionist.
Thomas Jefferson would have fit into that category.
Except that's not what the Corwin Amendment said. What it said was that any amendment to the Constitution ending slavery had to originate in a slave state and needed unanimous support of all states. Read it for yourself. It did not prevent any state from ending slavery on its own, as many had already done. (Or do you think that it was only a matter for the federal government to determine?) It also did not permit the expansion of slavery into the territories, which is why the south refused to consider it.
Lincoln's belief was that slavery should be held to where it already existed, and that in time those states would end it on their own without federal interference. The south realized that slavery was doomed unless it could expand, if for no other reason than to get rid of the booming slave population.
I've read the accounts of how some southerners dreamed of creating a great slave empire around the Caribbean: but I am dubious of the possibility of doing so and even more so of how important a factor that was in the actual decision to secede.
The proximate cause was Lincoln's election, where you had the election of a President whose party was dedicated to abolition.
What do you think the reaction of some states today would be if a Democrat candidate were elected with an openly declared platform of gun confiscation?
The other issue I see that is often terribly confused is that of the rights of freedmen after the Civil War. The Radical Republicans passed amendments using rather dubious methods to enfranchise blacks. Those amendments remained a dead letter for almost a hundred years as soon as Union troops were withdrawn from the South. Why? Because there was only a passion in the North to preserve the Union (and eventually, to end slavery, which was seen as the principal cause of disunion).
But there was no large constituency in either the North or South to enfranchise blacks: they were to be treated more or less as resident aliens.
What we called "slavery" in America was a common form of labor control & usage, that at long periods of time, has affected virtually every human tribe or race on earth. (It is an interesting footnote, that George III, when he first ascended to the throne, freed the last White British slaves, in the British mines. The terms employed may vary--the actual term "slavery" of course is derived from the Slavic people, where serfdom--at least in Russia, I believe was finally abolished, during our tragic war of the 1860s; but of course feudal serfdom was not limited to the slavic part of Europe. Of course the bondsmen in the Near East in Biblical times, were basically held in the same labor system--a situation that was not denounced by either Jesus or the Patriarchs of the Old Testament, except where other factors were involved.
Had the South not been increasingly insulted by obsessed fanatics, who wanted to abolish the system, but without making any arrangements to provide for an acceptable transition for either master or servant, it is not likely that secession would have carried the day, politically. But the display of the same sort of fanaticism that is displayed today in purging American history, makes it very clear why self-respecting Southerners, regardless of their view of the labor system, felt obliged to chart a new destiny.
The great Negro educator, Booker T. Washington, who was born a slave, but rose to be the outstanding educator of his people, also offers a more benign view of his times:
Booker T. Washington Testimony.
One can certainly recognize the benefits of a free labor force, and still refrain from denouncing those in every land & every era, when other systems prevailed. My only point here is to call attention to the apparent need of some to embrace a fanatic obsession over social interaction that ended in America over 5 generations ago; where that obsession seems to lead those afflicted to embrace an all out effort to divide this generation of Americans.
I have read through all the comments on this board (about 40), and am amazed at the utter historical ignorance being shared. When we talk about slavery “causing” the Civil War, that is like saying Comey’s letter caused Hillary’s defeat. A kernel of truth in a much more complicated set of occurrences. First, the NORTH sure as hell was NOT fighting over slavery. In fact, Congress passed a constitutional amendment in early 1861 that would have guaranteed that slavery would be legal in the South forever. The Republican Party was not an anti-slavery party; it was, in fact, an anti-EXPANSION of slavery party. Most people in the North could have cared less about slavery—like 98%. Republican politicians despised slavery b/c the 3/5th Compromise gave rural Southerners a numbers advantage in Congress over the more heavily (white) populated North. This pissed them off, bigly. Also, many in New England saw slavery as a black mark on America—not b/c slavery was evil, but b/c New Englanders saw mixing black blood with white blood the same way Hitler did. If the North was NOT fighting to free the slaves—and they most assuredly were not—then how could slavery be THE cause of the Civil War. I could go on and on....
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