Posted on 05/20/2014 8:57:04 AM PDT by Sioux-san
Not much media coverage, not much fanfare, not much reflection. A war that carved over 600,000 lives from the nation when the nation’s population was just 31 million. To compare, that would equate to a loss of life in today’s population statistics, not to mention limb and injury, of circa 6 million.
We are in the month of May, when 150 years ago Grant crossed the Rapidan to engage Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Lee stood atop Clark’s Mountain and watched this unknown (to the eastern theatre) entity lead a massive army into Lee’s home state. Soon there would be the Wilderness, where forest and brushfires would consume the wounded and dying. Days later, the battle of Spotsylvania ensued, in which hand-to-hand combat would last nearly 12 hours. Trading casualties one for one and rejecting previous prisoner exchange and parole procedures, Grant pushed on, to the left flank. The Battle of the North Anna, then the crossing of the James, and thus into the siege of Petersburg. This was 1864 in the eastern theatre.
Today there is hardly a whisper of the anniversary of these deeds, sacrifices, and destruction. Why?
One can suppose that the weak treatment of history at the alleged higher levels of education in this country contributes to the lack of attention. “It was about slavery; now on to WWI.” The War between the States was so much more complicated than the ABC treatment that academia presents. And as the old saying goes, the more complicated the situation, the more the bloodshed...
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Of course it was a secondary consideration.
“Lincoln went to war to defend the nation and ended up saving the slaves; the south went to war to defend slavery and ended up losing everything”.
At the time of the war every northern state had either freed their slave populations or had enacted a pathway to emancipation. So while there were still pockets of slavery in northern states the conclusion to that chapter was defined.
Lincoln knew that no “executive order” could end the practice of slavery. That would take a constitutional amendment. In the meanwhile he also knew that he could take a decisive step toward abolishing the practice and knock the rebels back on their heels in the process. The symbolism was sublime and the act did literally free blacks in the south, even in areas outside his immediate control.
It seems to me with all the pressure to add a free and slave state at the same time it’s hard go imagine that the issue of slavery was not uppermost in the issues addressing the nation.
I think seven states succeeded from the time Lincoln won the election until his innagural. Lincoln talked a lot about saving the union, but this is a cart before the horse issue. The south was succeeding to maintain their states right to have slavery, not because Lincoln was dedicated to preserve the union.
Mechanization of cotton harvesting didn’t come until the 1940s. Is that when slavery would have died out?
No, because that would require a constitutional amendment, something Lincoln pushed for but couldn't get through congress until the Republicans gained a supermajority in the 1864 election. But as a war measure, he could free the slaves in the area under rebellion. You're criticizing him for following the law.
What legal power did Lincoln have to free slaves in states not in rebellion?
What I was trying to say was that the claim is commonly made by revisionists that Lincoln and the Union Congress and people didn't really care about slavery, that Emancipation was only a ploy. My timeline was an attempt to demonstrate that emancipation was not an event, it was a process, and that this process started less than a month after the war began.
This is, of course, to be expected for an issue involving the property-or-people status of 4M, something like 15% of the US population at the time. Not to mention capital assets worth something along the lines of $3B, 15% to 20% of the value of all capital in the USA when the war started.
The claims that abolition was NOT a Union war goal are usually based on statements before the war or in its early days. But of course absolutely nothing can change public opinion more rapidly than a major war, and less than two years into the war, the vast majority of Unionists had abandoned the idea of reconstituting "the Union as it was," for the simple reason that they recognized this to be impossible.
Even in the border slave states, with the exception of KY and DE, this recognition was reached, which is why these states all emancipated their slaves, without compensation. Which I must admit was more than a little unfair to slave-owning Unionists in those states.
If Emancipation was a brilliant Union ploy, which it was, though not just a ploy, the question arises of what would have been its effect had Emancipation been implemented by the CSA?
It is fairly obvious that emancipation by the CSA in say, 1863, even very gradual emancipation, such as freeing only those born after its passage, would have immediately resulted in British and French recognition of the CSA.
Many in the British elite were longing for an excuse to take the USA down a notch. Recognition, followed by an attempt to trade, stopped by the blockade, would likely have followed. The Royal Navy might very well have been deployed to break the blockade, which it would have had no trouble doing. The US Navy had a a large number of ships by this time, but most of them were designed for catching blockade-runners, not fighting another full-bore Navy.
Break the blockade, arms and other supplies pour into the South, CSA morale soars, USA morale plummets. End of the war with a CSA victory follows shortly.
Some in the CSA recognized this course of action as desirable. So why was it never discussed in Congress or otherwise seriously considered, if independence rather than slavery was the critical issue for the South?
It's because protecting slavery was the reason the South wanted its independence. Independence without slavery would have vitiated the whole reason they had wanted out of the Union, and was quite literally unthinkable.
In early 1865 the CSA Congress couldn't even bring itself to offer freedom to the slaves it was recruiting for the army, and finally did so only after a personal plea from Lee. That is how unthinkable the prospect was.
So while the destruction of slavery was not the primary Union war aim, it became an auxiliary one less than halfway into the war. Meanwhile, the protection of slavery remained a Confederate war goal to the very end.
So was the War about slavery? Any reasonable person reviewing the history of the 1850s will agree that slavery was at the root of the hostility between the sections. It is also fair to say that initially ending slavery was not a primary Union war goal, though it became one in little more than a year.
Meanwhile, the protection of slavery was the primary reason for secession, and remained, along with independence, one of the two primary war goals of the Confederacy to its end. In fact, I would content that protecting slavery was more important to the CSA than independence, since IMO even a very moderate emancipation policy could have gotten them their independence. But when faced with the choice between emancipation and independence, they chose the third option. Neither.
The opinions of “the vast majority” of Americans (in either Union or Confederate states) about slavery is largely unknown. The slavery issue was most keenly drawn and exploited by political and economic elites on both sides.
There is, however, a vast literature based on the memoirs of men who fought on both sides in the Civil War. Very few of these men ever mentioned slavery as a driving force for their views of the “cause” of, or rationale for, the war. Union soldiers most often mentioned preservation of the Union or suppression of the rebellion. Confederates most often mentioned loyalty to their home state or opposition to federal legislation unrelated to emancipation affecting their home state.
Clearly, slavery was at the center of the national debate in the 1850s over the terms by which states newly added to the Union were to be admitted. But the inevitability of some form of North-South conflict emerged much earlier, in the late 1820s and early 1830s, primarily over tariffs, leading to the Nullification Crisis of 1832.
There is much truth in your words. So if it wasn't The Particular Institution, what was it? I contend that they (north and south) just didn't like each other. I know that is a simplistic explanation but I do think that it's true. There were agitators on both sides who exploited the cultural differences between north and south and did everything they could to drive wedges between us.
I've read many quoted expressions from reb and yank alike eager for the conflict and the chance to "whup some butt" more than any expressions to defend or free blacks.
Which was, of course, settled by the normal give and take of politics.
I'm afraid I think the tariff issue is a red herring. The tariff in 1860 was the lowest it had been in decades. To my knowledge not one of the Declarations of Secession by southern states even mentions tariff rates, though I believe they all mention protection of slavery, with some listing it as the primary or sole reason for secession.
Only in the aftermath of the war, when protection of slavery was no longer considered a justifiable reason to secede, did Lost Cause types suddenly discover the critical importance of the tariff issue.
But let's look at the issue a little more closely. The CSA itself instituted tariffs ranging from 5% to 25%, whereas the horribly oppressive tariff in effect in 1860, that of 1857, averaged 17%.
Some claim that the protective tariffs were the true cause of secession, that these were peculiarly oppressive to the South. Let's leave aside the fact that tariffs were the same throughout the nation. An IA farmer or a PA mill worker paid exactly the same tax on imported items as a SC planter.
The CSA was so opposed to protective tariffs that it enshrined their prohibition in its Constitution, one of the few changes from the US Constitution.
Yet let's look at whether they would have stuck with that. Protective tariffs in the USA arose after the War of 1812, when the British blockade had greatly hindered the war effort by cutting off essential imports. In response, protective tariffs were put in place after the war to protect "infant industries" till they were able to compete against European imports. The leader in this effort, BTW, was Henry Clay, a southerner and slaveowner.
Over time, the protective tariff did turn into a form of crony capitalism, as they tend to do.
Yet we are supposed to believe that the CSA, had it been successful in gaining its independence, would have been fully content to leave itself vulnerable to blockade by the USA Navy in any future conflict? That it would have made no attempt to build up its own industry so that it would not be utterly dependent on imports for military supplies?
I don't buy it. The CSA would have taken steps that would have been similar in effect, if not perhaps in form, to a protective tariff. And the planters would have been back to subsidizing industry, only this time in the South, not the North.
Inaccurate, technically. Large areas along the Mississippi and the southeast coast were occupied by the Union military, but not excluded from the Proclamation. So slaves in those areas, 50k to 70k, were freed immediately.
More critically, as Union armies advanced, wherever they went the slaves were freed. It's kind of stupid to claim that the Emancipation Proclamation freed nobody, since when the war ended it had freed somewhere in the vicinity of 3M people. That this took two and a quarter years to implement fully does not change the fact that it happened.
Thanks for the greater detail.
Nice post, I appreciate it.
Not exactly.
"There was trouble brewing for the Lincoln Administration in England in the summer of 1862. "As early as the 6th of August [Foreign Minister John] Russell made a rather vague suggestion to [Prime Minister Henry] Palmerston that 'some move' in the American war should be made by October. No overt action was taken, however, until the 13th of September, after news had arrived of the disastrous Northern defeat at Manassas and Lee's invasion of Maryland. On that day Russell instructed the English ambassador in Paris to privately sound Thouvenel, the French Foreign Minister, on the possibility of join intervention. Soon after, Russell and Palmerston agreed that if the North refused mediation on the basis of a permanent separation, the next step should be recognition of the Confederacy. Palmerston, however, was more cautious than Russell, and suggested including Russia in the proposed overture to the belligerents, thinking this might made the North more willing to accept," wrote historian Martin Duberman, biographer of Charles Francis Adams.
"Several months later, Adams' aide and son, Henry Adams, wrote: "The Emancipation Proclamation has done more for us here than all our former victories and all our diplomacy. It is creating an almost convulsive reaction in our favor all over this country. The London Times furious and scolds like a drunken drab. Certain it is, however, that public opinion is very deeply stirred here and finds expression in meetings, addresses to President Lincoln, deputations to us, standing committees to agitate the subject and to affect opinion, and all the other symptoms of a great popular movement peculiarly unpleasant to the upper classes here because it rests on the spontaneous action of the laboring classes."
http://www.mrlincolnandfreedom.org/inside.asp?ID=45&subjectID=3 The whole article is quite informative.
No doubt. But the motivations of the nation, and that of the individual solder, are often very different.
How often do you think the US WWII soldier wrote home about the need to rescue the Jews from concentration camps? But that was a primary effect of the war.
Do you think Germans fought (mostly) for Nazi racial ideals, or to protect the Fatherland?
I suspect the same would be true for just about any war you could care to name. Anyway, the relevant issue is not the reason soldiers fight, but why a democratic nation as a whole decides to fight.
I’ve tried to find a quantification of which particular laws resulted in emancipation by rank. But haven’t been able to.
Some slaves were freed long before the EP, by various confiscation acts. Others were freed by state action, either “real” state governments, or puppet state governments installed by Union occupation forces.
But I haven’t been able to find a spreadsheet. I suspect something over 3M were freed, over time, by the EP, with the others freed by a wide variety of mechanisms during and after the war. Obviously, slaves that were freed de jure in certain areas did not always immediately gain their freedom de facto. That often waited on events of the battlefield.
Only about 50K slaves were directly freed by 13A, but it did end the institution of slavery, which could theoretically have been started up again by a state.
I’ve got a timeline upthread that I assembled after getting tired of the misinformation put about by Lost Cause types about when and how emancipation occurred. To my mind, it indicates that emancipation was a process that started almost simultaneously with the start of the War, and ended nine months after the end of the War with 13A.
IOW, slaves gained their legal and practical freedom over a span of more than 4 years.
That this took so long and was so complex is not surprising. Value of slaves in 1860 was about 15% of all assets, and probably over half of assets in the South. In today’s economy, that would be somewhere in the vicinity of $24 trillion, a number considerably larger than even the present US debt of $17T.
That amount of capital just vanished over the course of the war. All of the money invested in this form of property over the previous century just disappeared.
What would $24T suddenly disappearing from the US economy do to us today? For some perspective, the drop in US household wealth from 07 to 09 was about $16T. And most of that money was “paper” theoretical appreciation in value, not actual money invested, as was most of the value of the slaves.
Your question actually illustrates my point. Our entry into WWII against Germany had nothing to do with the plight of Jews in the concentration camps, which was not fully known by us until Spring 1945. Liberating the concentration camps was a fortuitous by-product of the Allied rout of German troops in early 1945. It was not a “cause” nor was it an “end” of our war effort in Europe.
Of course, liberating the camps was an “effect” of the Allied military victories in Europe, just as emancipation of the slaves was an “effect” of the Civil War. But we were discussing “causes” not “effects.”
which was not fully known by us until Spring 1945.”
Is this true?
I see your point.
But I hope you can appreciate mine that very few soldiers in history have ever based their willingness to fight on the abstractions that often lead their countries into war.
I’m perfectly happy to agree that the great majority of soldiers in the CSA were conciously fighting to defend their homes and protect their way of life.
The problem is that “their way of life” was based on slavery, and on the racial caste system it supported. Even those who had little hope of themselves ever becoming wealthy slaveowners supported that system for its various psychological benefits, and because they saw no way for the two races to live together in peace and equality.
150 years later, it is not entirely unreasonable to note that they had a point in their second concern. A very great deal of our present political and economic difficulties are simply the extended consequences of emancipation.
Please don’t misunderstand. You cannot possibly find someone more opposed to slavery in all its forms than I am.
But that doesn’t oblige me to pretend that those who foresaw huge problems for the nation if the slaves were freed were entirely incorrect. That a particular action is morally obligatory does not mean that it won’t have undesirable consequences.
Depends on who you believe.
Various stories about the camps and what was going on in them made their way out, but in general they were often considered to be exaggerations. Not unreasonably, as what sane person would expect that they were really the truth?
This was at least partially aggravated by the actually greatly exaggerated stories of German atrocities during WWI. They certainly committed some, but their horror and scale were intentionally exaggerated by Allied propagandists to whip up morale among the soldiers and on the home front.
After the end of the war, the full story came out. When similar, and worse, stories started circulating in WWII, a lot of people discounted them as more Allied propaganda. Which, of course, turned out not to be the case.
no British or US intelligence reports?
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