Posted on 03/10/2013 8:19:44 AM PDT by BroJoeK
You know, I don't know how important of a person you are, or how big of a muckety-muck you are in your community, but I doubt seriously if you speak for the whole South, and you shouldn't be trying to sound like you do, FRiend.
Some of my Southern relatives, inlaws and "outlaws" ancestors served the Confederacy, but others were Unionists, and suffered under the Confederacy.
Regardless, they all want us to come and visit, more often than we do, and they're disappointed when we can't make it.
And I'd love to see them all here...
Yes, I've kidded about it, but where would be a better place and time for a lot of people to get together than...
I agree with what you say, but would like to expand on it a little.
Prior to around 1850 there was no such thing as a North vs. South dichotomy in American politics. Since at least the War of 1812 the country had been politically split into three sections, East (what we now call the Northeast), West (the free states from Ohio to Minnesota and Iowa), and South (the slave states). Some states, like MO and KY sort of vacillated between West and South.
All this time the country had been generally dominated by an alliance between South and West, both of which were heavily agricultural and thus economically aligned in interest against an increasingly industrial and financial East. The notion that in 1850 MS was agricultural and IA was industrial is just ludicrous.
For most of this time slavery was a back issue that most Americans just wanted to go away. Abolitionists were assaulted and sometimes murdered in the West and even in the East. They were (accurately) viewed as disturbers of the national peace.
All this was based on the notion that the expansion of slavery had been settled by the Missouri Compromise in 1820. North of the southern boundary of MO would be free territory.
The southern extremists started pushing for the right to expand slavery into all the territories, with the Dred Scott ruling and the Nebraska Acts.
Men of the West were perfectly happy to have blacks enslaved in the South, but did not want to live next to them, or to free blacks for that matter, so in self-defense they turned against the South’s drive for expansion beyond previously accepted limits.
Meanwhile southerners, accurately or not, felt more and more at risk and they saw as mere self-defense what the East and West saw as aggression.
Which meant throughout the 1850s both sides saw themselves as merely defending themselves against attack by the others. The very natural and human response was to line up with others who felt the same, creating the North vs. South split that finally showed up in the 1860 election.
I see even most of the fire-eaters as thinking of themselves as in self-defense mode, not attack mode. They believed, probably accurately, that the only chance to preserve the institution of slavery in the long run was for the South to be its own country. Hence their maneuvering to create conditions under which the Union would fracture.
Looking back at your original essay, which I think was well-done, BTW, I think you missed one.
This is that Lincoln was the precursor of all subsequent expansions of federal power, and therefore that if Lincoln had not expanded this power, or had failed in his attempt to conquer the South, we would live in a states-rights paradise. IOW, Lincoln is the cause of all our present problems.
This is a classic example of the post hoc, ergo prompter hoc fallacy. The admittedly bad recent and ongoing expansion of federal power occurred after Lincoln, therefore he caused it.
In actual fact, the primary expansion of federal power didn’t get going till the late 1800s, some decades after Lincoln’s presidency, during which the government contracted greatly from its size during the war.
I don’t know of anything at all in Lincoln’s writings, including his letters,which I’ve read several volumes of, that indicate any desire to expand the scope of the government, except insofar as necessary to win the war.
In fact, the CSA did not expand confederate power as much as the Union did federal power, and you can make a good case this was a significant contributor to their eventual defeat.
If you wish to fight a war, you need to recognize that a real existential war, not our present wars of choice, requires centralization of power to win. If you can’t accept that, you should either not get into a war, or you need to recognize that failure to centralize will mean probable defeat, the consequences of which might be considerably than a (hopefully) temporary expansion of central power.
I would also suggest that if temporary expansion of central power is not preferable to defeat, then you probably should not be fighting that particular war, since it doesn’t really matter if you lose.
All of TN was lost long before this once Vicksburg fell— the original mississippi riverine campaign (Donelson etc.) The North started there (ex: Shiloh).
There was no hope to stop the unionists in E. Tenn. So one can argue as many have Hood was high or something-— book is coming out in June this year— he wasn’t. The overall strategy of S from the get go was to politically grind down the N. The effort in TN was a last desperate and foolish effort to disrupt supply lines that were already secure, and Sherman being already more than half the way to Savannah and burning/pillaging up GA along the way. Total war in other words. By this point it was last stand time in Richmond, redoubts, delay and pray— and all logistical.
Will be interested for true facts about Hood’s personal state to come out, esp. as regards his relationships with his command staff. Also would like to know about the “peculiar behaviour of Patrick Cleburne” at Franklin— aside from being a warrior.
Ok, we’ve both exchnged our facts. You still claim my facts are misinformation, and I still believe that your facts are the same. Thus, we’ve come full circle, back to where we started.
Thanks for an interesting but inconclusive discussion. Neither of us were in the Civil War and we both choose which facts we wish to believe. Neither of us changed the other’s mind and all we have done is waste JimRob’s bandwisth.
Your "noble" lost causers (Gen. Early) demanded $500,000 ransom in lieu of the destruction of Chambersburg. They subsequently set the town on fire. In addition, they demanded ransom from individual homeowners, whose homes they torched even after the ransom was paid. In addition, these enlightened officers and men tortured to death an old Negro Freeman [presumably because Southerners weren't racists, and the Civil War was not about slavery.]
/.02 ;-)
Can you cite a couple of examples of your facts which I dispute, and my facts you don’t accept?
An awful lot of Southerners moved North in the 20th century. Maybe they were ill-treated in the North (maybe they came here because they were treated worse in the South). Maybe their migration was the South's revenge for the Civil War and Reconstruction.
But maybe our moving down there is just the next act -- the response to what happened before. Southerners moved where the jobs were. Now Northerners are doing the same (maybe it all has to do with air conditioning, I don't know). By this point, though, I wonder if really unreconstructed Dixiecrats don't feel as out of place in Southern cities as Northern transplants do.
If you're trying to make some point, don't expect other people to guess what it is. Just say it (though however you did it with South Carolina, it didn't work out so well for you, did it?)
Elections like 1860 or 1912 -- or even 1960 for that matter -- were very confusing affairs because it was hard to tell just who electors were going to vote for. Still and all, Lincoln did win a majority of the electoral vote.
His corps took the lead in the invasion of Pennsylvania and almost reached the state capital of Harrisburg before being recalled by Lee to concentrate at Gettysburg. These successes led to favorable comparisons with Jackson.
You need to learn some history, while camped near Harrisburg Confederates went into Harrisburg quite often. There are many letters home describing soldiers going into Harrisburg shopping. Yes, shopping.
BS alert. Most were GTT.
New Jersey had 4 faithless electors who supported Lincoln.
The fact that electors are supposed to vote for the person who won the most votes in their state? Douglas won the state, he should have received all 7.
Hi, Tom
Thank you! I got lucky, too.
No, wait, that didn’t come out right.....
LOL
John Breckenridge received 8 electoral votes from South Carolina and the only citizens that were allowed to vote were the members of the South Carolina legislature. So...should those 8 electoral votes gone to nobody since voters were not allowed to express their preference?
Sherman's men were ordered not to steal from ordinary citizens too. And we all know that soldiers never, ever disobey orders. </sarcasm>
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