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.

[jeffersondem]

“But I always wonder which pronunciation of “data” you are using. UK English or US English?”

Data is the plural of datum.

Pure Latin baby.

[HandyDandy]

So you respond with two useless pieces of information and ignore that the word “data” has two pronunciations, one UK English and one US English. You may as well have not responded.

[jeffersondem]

“. . .the word “data” has two pronunciations, one UK English and one US English.”

It has three pronunciations. And it is the third which should concern your etymological enmities.

How did the Caesars pronounce data?

It is a Latin word. Pure Latin.

[HandyDandy]

More useless drivel. What I'd wondered was how do you pronounce the word. If you don't know how you pronounce it, or if you are too embarrassed to say, that's fine. I don't care anymore.

[BroJoeK]

jeffersondem post #585 to DoodleDawg: "The South allowed itself to get chivvied into a fight by an industrial power...."
"But it is hard to criticize self-defense within the homestall..."

BJK post #599: "Who uses words like that? Not Americans, ever."

jeffersondem post #624"John Wayne. Start with that."

jeffersondem post #691: "And just for the tally book, you do know the movie we’re talking about was for American audiences?"

HandyDandy post #703: "tally book?"

jeffersondem post #705: "Yep. 'McLintock! John Wayne. American."

I'm not a huge John Wayne fan and never heard him or anybody else use words like "chivvied", "homestall" or "tally book".
At best those would be some script-writer's idea of "old American" talk, equivalent to colonial period movies where people use "thee" and "thou".
Nobody but nobody uses such terms today.

Which our FRdiend jeffersondem would know if (presumably) he were American, which obviously he's not.
So I question: is jeffersondem simply a Marxist-educated Britisher still a little peeved over that, ahem, "unpleasantness" in 1776?
Or is he something even more nefarious?

In other words, is he really what he claims to be, a Democrat?

[BroJoeK]

WVMnteer: "Along the lines of Confederate aggressiveness.....there is Buchanan’s Secretary of War, John B. Floyd.
Had he survived the war, he is the one Confederate who truly should have been tried for treason.
He certainly sent an abundance of military supplies south in the months preceding the war."

Right, thanks.
Lost Causers like DiogenesLamp today constantly advance the "poor little South, just wanted to be left alone" meme, when the reality was far different in late 1860 and early 1861.
In those days Confederates were very aggressive in expanding their secessions into states outside the Deep South, seizing Federal properties, threatening & shooting at Union officials and soon enough, killing those they disagreed with.

And during the war Confederates took their fight to the North whenever & wherever they could, by my count to 14 of the 30 remaining Union states & territories.

So "poor little South, just wanted to be left alone" came much later, after their war of aggression turned Lost Cause.

[BroJoeK]

jeffersondem: " If he is attempting to be serious, then I try to make a brief comment using simple, non-British sounding words.
He doesn't like British sounding words."

Nothing wrong with "British sounding words", I use them myself, on occasion.
But who, who is using such words, a native born American, or somebody else?
Pretty clearly, somebody else, so why not just come out & tell us who (or at least what) we're dealing with here?

[central_va]

Show me ONE contemporary newspaper editorial or article that ever discussed the possibly of the South invading, conquering and "winning" the war out right. The CSA did not present the existential threat to the USA you portray. I think the reason you cannot accept that truth is that it ruins your self righteous position in support of naked Northern aggression. It would force you to deal with some pretty heavy issues that you seem incapable of coming to grips with.

You are a sad person.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "I think back upon what Wolfgang Pauli said..."

Pauli, inventor of "spin theory" in physics, applied with a vengeance by DiogenesLamp, jeffersondem & other Lost Causers to their versions of history & politics.

[BroJoeK]

OIFVeteran: "I’ve determined that it is a waste of time to engage with Diogenes Lamp, it’s like talking to a brick wall."
DiogenesLamp: "It should, because I am relating the truth, and the truth is hard as granite."

But DiogenesLamp's "truth" is mushy as manure.
It's only "hard" & smelly to the degree DiogenesLamp refuses to acknowledge, much less answer, any fact or reason contradicting him.

DiogenesLamp: "You want me to be in the same league as 'conspiracy theorists' or other crackpots, and you want my ugly truths about money and power to just 'go away', but the problem with the history is that you can't make the math go away, and that's how we can see what happened.
We follow the money, and the money will tell us the truth even though the people have been lying to us."

All lies & nonsense.
In fact DiogenesLamp refuses to "follow the money" when Deep South slaveholders told us they declared secession to protect their economic investments in slavery.
Instead, Lost Causers insist secession was all about "something else" -- Northern "oppression" or "haughtiness", anything just not slavery.

Of course everyone acknowledges Civil War resulted in part from economic issues, but that's not what DiogenesLamp tells us.
Instead, he tells us that while Confederates were motivated by the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, Republicans were motivated only, strictly & solely by economic calculations, and fears of Charleston, SC, becoming the new New York.

In fact, President Lincoln's primary motivation was to protect the Constitution & Union when Lincoln responded exactly as President Washington responded to the 1792 Whiskey Rebellion, by calling up the militias.
So it was not just the money, stupid, it was first & foremost the Constitution.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp to DoodleDawg: "I don't think you're an idiot, I think you suffer from confirmation bias regarding something you really really want to believe.
You don't want to hear anything that doesn't fit your world view."

No, DoodleDawg's only "problem" is he knows the facts of history far too well to accept any guff & nonsense from Lost Cause propagandists like DiogenesLamp.
That's not "confirmation bias", but simple love of truth in history & elsewhere.

[central_va]

In fact, President Lincoln's primary motivation was to protect the Constitution & Union

The remaining states of the USA still had the Constitution and a Union, a very powerful one. So there was nothing to protect. Also there is nothing in the Constitution concerning secession. Zip, zitch, nada.

When a cell divides into two cells,a natural process, it is not considered a destructive process. Only a state-ist would see it that way.

Cell division

[BroJoeK]

jeffersondem: "Beauregard knew that the orders of those ships were to attack his forces.
His choices were to take out the fort first, and then he could face the attack from the Ships, or he could retreat and be branded a coward, or he could stand there and let his men get killed.”

DiogenesLamp: "Beauregard had limited options and Lincoln exploited his own advantages.
There was simply no way at the time for anyone to foresee Lincoln's clever political and public relations skills."

So much nonsense, where do we even begin?

How about here:

1. The only thing we know for certain, that Beauregard knew, were his orders originating from Jefferson Davis: if no surrender before Lincoln's resupply mission, then attack & reduce Fort Sumter.

2. So Beauregard had no "options", his only "choice" was to determine if Union Major Anderson intended to surrender before Lincoln's resupply mission arrived.
   Anderson said he would surrender in a few days when his supplies ran out, but not before.
   So Beauregard obeyed Davis' orders.

3. As for your Big City slicker Democrat Lincoln... no, you have the wrong man here, that's not Lincoln.
   Rail-splitter Lincoln was chosen by Republicans precisely because he was not one of those.
   Instead, Lincoln represented mid-Western, middle American, small-town constitutionalist values.

4. This is proved in Lincoln's response to Confederate assault on Fort Sumter -- it was identical to President Washington's response to the 1792 Whiskey Rebellion: they called up the militias to suppress it.

[BroJoeK]

DoodleDawg: "“According to you all, every ill that has befallen this country is the fault of Lincoln.
Every government excess.
Every federal overreach.
Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ, none of them had a thing to do about it.
It's sad.”

jeffersondem: "Well, I do hold Lincoln responsible for the synthetic constitution that governs us.
And for the deaths of 600,000, or more, than poisoned the well for generations.
But I don't hold Lincoln responsible for enshrining human bondage into the U.S. constitution.
That was done by the states of New York... etc."

Here again we see the propagandist in jeffersondem.
First, Confederates could have ended the Civil War they started at any time on terms much better than the Unconditional Surrender they fought on & on to accept.
So the blame is all theirs.

Second on the Constitution, contrary to jeffersondem, a truth-teller would admit that Southern slaveholders insisted in 1787 slavery must be "enshrined" in the new US Constitution.
Otherwise there could be no United States of America.
So Northern abolitionists reluctantly agreed.

But in 1788 Congress (at Jefferson's urging) abolished slavery in the Northwest Territories and that's what 1860 Republicans wanted to do with all US territories.
But Southern Democrats would have none of it and in 1860 did what they threatened in 1787, declaring disunion.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp to jeffersondem: "Modern efforts to impose new versions of morality on 'fly over country' (Really, the areas that would have eventually come under Southern influence in a normal progression of time) are simply continuations of what was happening in the 1860s."

But as usual, you have that backwards regarding the "new morality".
In fact, as many Lost Causers now claim: slavery was beginning to die out in Border slave states like Delaware, Maryland, western Virginia & even Missouri.
So in due time those would have become Northern free-states.
Today's strongly Republican western regions like Kansas, Nebraska & Dakotas were never going to be slave-states and therefore were not interested in Slave-Power priorities.

But the Deep South was a very different story.
There cotton made slavery hugely profitable and average white Southerners amazingly prosperous, nearly Gone With the Wind level widespread prosperity.
Their cotton demands brought many slaves from Border & Upper South states, keeping prices high and making slavery unprofitable outside the Deep South.

But as slavery declined further North, Deep South "versions of morality" became less & less those of the vast majority of average Americans, who more & more didn't want what slave-states had to offer politically.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "Well I ignore most of what you write, and I certainly ignore it when it is long."

Which demonstrates again that you are a propagandist rather than truth-teller.
You can't abide & don't respond to any facts or reasons which contradict your half-*ssed historical theories.
You just keep repeating them, over & over & over again...

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp; "Lincoln was well ingratiated to the business interests of the North.
He was a Corporate lawyer who had done a lot of work for the Railroad industry, and he was a 'mercantilist' mentored by Henry Clay.
He was "Big Business" in it's earliest guise."

Curiously, it happens in my travels I'm now near Kentucky Senator Henry Clay's home in Lexington, KY.
Wonderful country, beautiful state...

But young Lincoln was more directly influenced by the former President who Clay had served as Secretary of State, old John Quincy Adams, when Congressman Lincoln served during Adams' last years.
We're told that Lincoln learned from Founder Adams that enemy "contraband of war" could be declared emancipated if Southern states fought a war of rebellion.

That's why 1860 secession over slavery eventually became the Union's war "to make men free".

As for "business interests", no, Kentucky Senator Henry Clay helped form the new "Whig" party in 1834 precisely because Clay was not attached to Northern business interests.
In 1860 Republicans nominated & elected Lincoln precisely because he too was not attached to Northern business interests.

So Clay's Whigs were then, and Republicans later became, westerners and Border State constitutionalists leaving Eastern Big City slicker business interests, long allied with Southern Slave Power planters, to the majority Democrat party.

In short: Big Business (North & South) were Democrats while Republicans were small farms, small business, small towns and traditional constitutional conservatives.

circa 1847: Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, Last Founder President John Quincy Adams, Congressman Abraham Lincoln:

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp to x, post #628: "You want to impress me with a counter argument, tell me how the bulk of European trade with the South disappears short of war?
War is the only way to stop the South from becoming a success story and eventually a serious economic and political threat to the existing Northern interests."

Not to "impress" you, DiogenesLamp, but just to demonstrate how false is yet another of your claims...

In early 1861, even before Fort Sumter, before blockade and Confederate Declaration of War on the United States, King Cotton went to work, declaring a unilateral unprovoked embargo on cotton exports.
In their fevered insanity, Confederates believed their cotton embargo would endear them to their European cotton customers and in deep love those customers would declare their allegiance to the Confederacy and maybe even join in war on the United States!

Instead, anti-slavery Europeans simply found other cotton suppliers.

[jeffersondem]

jeffersondem: “Beauregard knew that the orders of those ships were to attack his forces.
His choices were to take out the fort first, and then he could face the attack from the Ships, or he could retreat and be branded a coward, or he could stand there and let his men get killed.”

DiogenesLamp: “Beauregard had limited options and Lincoln exploited his own advantages.
There was simply no way at the time for anyone to foresee Lincoln's clever political and public relations skills.”

Typical. You got everything backwards.

[BroJoeK]

x to DiogenesLamp post #677: "So why are you so certain that things would have turned out exactly as you say?"

DiogenesLamp: "Because of the money.
Unquestionably the North would have immediately lost between 200-250 million with free trade in the South.
They could see it for themselves.
Just look at the Newspaper quotes I furnished."

Your number of $200 to $250 million in 1861 is somewhat reasonable as a number for total Deep South exports of cotton alone.
But about 20% of that went for Northern customers and half of the rest shipped from New Orleans, not New York, so it's effects on Northern economics were minimal.

More important, those Northerners most effected by Confederate embargoes were their own Big City slicker allied Democrats.
Small farm & town Republicans didn't much care, but slicker Democrats were made desperate economically by Deep South Slave Power insanities.

DiogenesLamp: "It was already a huge commercial boom.
I've read articles from Charleston relating the massive upswing in business they just started receiving after the word of secession had gotten out..."

In 1790 Charleston, SC was the 4th largest US city (after Philadelphia, New York & Boston) with a population of 16,000.
By 1860 Charleston's population grew to 41,000 but it fell to the 22nd largest US city.
So by 1860 Charleston's growth rate was around 600 people per year.
If several hundred new people arrived in Charleston in a few months that would be a big deal in Charleston newspapers, right?

But by 1860 the growth rate of New York City alone averaged about 700 new people per week, and yes it did fall to about half that during the war, and that difference doubtless represents the loss of Deep South cotton.
But the scale & resources of the two cities was so disparate Confederate optimism in early 1861 should be kept in perspective.

Notice here that 1860 Charleston is fed by three rail lines, none standard US gauge and none to major cities, while New York had at least eight standard lines, including connections to every major Northern & Midwestern city, from Boston & Baltimore to Chicago & St. Louis.

DiogonesLamp: "I didn't say it would bring Utopia, but I did say it would bring wealth and industry to them.
There is still the problem of slavery and it wasn't going to go away.
Efforts to abolish it would increase as the South grew more prosperous, and eventually the very wealthy would feel social pressure to get rid of it."

But here's your problem with that idea: any push for abolition in the Confederacy must begin in Border & Upper South states where slavery was less influential to begin with.
But abolition would be unbreakably opposed by the Deep South slave power and the Confederate Constitution which allowed no flexibility on the subject.

So, instead of abolition, what they would have seen is what had already started by the 1850s: slave gangs used not only in agriculture, but also in the new factories now competing to replace Northern free-labor manufacturing.

That's why any suggestion slavery might somehow disappear quietly or quickly in the slavocratic Confederacy is just pure fantasy.
Neither economics nor morality would ever force it and the Confederate Constitution would never allow it.