Civil War analogy has a major flaw

[randr]

I have read that many Civil War historians believe that Lincoln made a terrible mistake by going to war. Had he let the south secede countless lives would have been saved and, sooner or later, economic and geopolitical pressures would have brought the southern states back into the Union. It has also been speculated that the south would have ended slavery sooner on their own, saving the nation from the subsequent 100 years of bigotry we have experienced.
Anyone else know more of this?

[mikehiggins]

1. Yeah, and if we'd kicked Rosa Parks off that bus

we would have avoided all that pesky civil rights stuff.

Hopefully I will die soon enough to avoid hearing all this revisionist bullshit become canon.

What happened, happened. What might have happened can never be known. This sort of thing is little more than a waste of time, and perhaps the basis for some doctoral thesis somewhere down the road.

[GrumpyGreg]

2. Theories abound. n/t

[aquart]

3. Heard that drivel. There is, however, another likely scenario.

That we continued dividing and fighting each other like Europe, until the hatreds and enmities were so great, and so grounded in history, that we fell prey to whatever foreign power chose to invade and use our hatreds against each other. Thereby losing our independence, our nation, and our hope.

Instead, we had ONE devastating civil war. ONE.

When you listen to airy fairy dingaling historians, try also to think of Illyria, Yugoslavia, Croatia, Albania, Serbia...oh wait...that's actually the same place, depending on the current war's border alignment.

[Historic NY]

4. I have doubts on that.........

in order to dampen the souths economic interests he would have had to blockade the CSA's entire coast. They had established business interests in Europe who paid for cotton & other southern exports. The CSA did establish sources to purchase weapons and other goods that normally came from the north. The mere act of the blockade would have touched off the war. Then again most people then never thought the war would go on for years. They were looking for a quick victory.

[Yupster]

5. Here's an interesting and true story

At the Battle of Chikamagua General Longstreet made the key breakthrough that won the battle for the Confederates. During a lull in the fighting, Longstreet and his staff sat in a field to have a lunch of fried chicken.

At that point a Yankee shell exploded overhead sending fragments all around. Longstreet's chief of ordinace was seen rolling around the floor in horrible pain.

Turns out he was just choking on a chicken bone and he survived the war wounded but alive.

The Confederate Chief of Ordinance for the First Corps name?

Payton Manning.

That story makes me wonder how many other Payton Mannings are not alive today because their great great grandfather was among the 600,000 killed in that war. How many inventions weren't invented, best sellers weren't written, educational theories weren't described and masterpieces weren't painted.

That war did such an amazing amount of damage to the human potential of America. In the Confederate states fully one quarter of the adult white men were killed by the war and another one quarter injured.

We'll never know just how much we lost.

[Yupster]

6. My guesses

and face it, we're all just guessing is that the world wouldn't look a whole lot different today had the south been let to peacefully secede.

I think the two most likely eventualities are that either the two sides would eventually rejoin or their would be three English-speaking friendly democracies in North America today instead of two.

Either way, not a big change from today's world.

I think slavery would have been ended gradually about the same time as Brazil ended it.

[FVZA_Colonel]

7. That seems similar to the themes Harry Turtledove explored in his book

"How Few Remain," the "Great War" Series, and the "Return to Engagement Series." In all liklihood, the south would have been forced to end slavery, as happened in "How Few Remain" (in which the Confederacy manumitted their slaves in order to enjoy the continued support of Britain and France, without which they would likely have been conquered by the US). However, by no means do I think that we would have been spared the bigotry that we suffered up untilt the Civil Rights movement; in fact, as Turtledove argued in his novels, I believe it might have been worse.

[Yupster]

8. I love Trutledove, but

I think the Civil War series is his weakest.

I must admit that I haven't read his wizard stuff though so it's not fair to say the weakest.

[FVZA_Colonel]

10. It isn't perfect, but

by and large I have enjoyed it. And I am serious when I say that I find one of the ideas he advanced, that conditions would be far worse for blacks in the Confederacy, entirely logical and plausible; of course, the idea seems pretty obvious, but I still felt he did an ok job in exploring how it would unfold.


On Edit: If I sounded snotty with the statement after the semicolon, I apologize.

[Yupster]

11. I keep reading them because

they're Turtledove, but I just thought the last one was just absolutely awful.

It was so laughably predictable itn my opinion it didn't even qualify as writing anymore.

As soon as he said Pittsburgh I said, oh okay, that's Stalingrad and they're going to get surrounded in there and surrender. That was just awful story development.

I really have enjoyed the last few books of the World War II series though. He hasn't run out of ideas in that series yet.

And the new Pearl Harbor series has been wonderful so far in my opinion. I'm reading Book Two right now.

[FVZA_Colonel]

12. Sounds like I ought to look for them in the library rather than the book

store then.

[AllegroRondo]

18. His "Darkness" series is amazing

its basically a re-casting of WW2 into a fantasy universe, with magic, dragons, etc. He does an amazing job of juggling about 20 major characters to give a narrative of the entire war, and show how every story in the war in interconnected in some way.

[FreedomAngel82]

9. Oh yes

I'm sure they would've been in a hurry to end slavery. :eyes: Oh please. The south would've suceded and we wouldn't even be apart of the United States. I doubt that. From what I've read the Confederates and the people who were for slavery were very stubborn. Look at the freeper types today.

[Lexingtonian]

13. doubtful

The South chose war. It never had any intentions of peaceably coexisting with the North, hoping all along to foment secession in susceptible states and ultimately to squelch the North as a competitor.

There's a fixed idea that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. It's probably more fair to say that slavery was the most problematic and intolerable element of the Southern social caste system to Northerners. But the whole system was offensive- the planters were very much at work establishing themselves as an aristocracy, cutting themselves out privilege after privilege, and intensification and expansion of slavery was a very effective means of de-democratizing the white working class of the South and driving it into an extreme classism and instituting severe social hierarchy and conformity to caste. Prior to the Civil War the South was devolving backwards to medieval monarchy and rural feudalism on a roughly British model, the North was evolving toward Industrial Age democracy and federalism and caste breakdown.

The South had to behave increasingly like an industrial society as it strained ever harder to win the Civil War, and toward the very end it found it had to make black slaves feel invested in it and be willing workers and soldiers for it.

Bigotry accompanies rigid caste, class, and gender divisions. It's an element of the private- nongovernmental- social enforcement mechanism. The primary generator of these divisions is immigration of novel groups that are impermissible/undesirable for any other group present in the country to intermarry. Large scale immigration ended in the Twenties. During the Fifties the second generation of these last large white immigrant groups began to marry and was partially assimilated, and that's when the legal barriers (i.e. to intermarriage and 'miscegenation') and bigotry began to break down in a way that was more than symbolic. In 1953 the Supreme Court decided times were finally changing and peacetime, so it let attacks on segregation laws succeed, i.e. Brown v. Board, that seemed unaffordable before and in 1960 or '61 the Civil Rights Act was the decisive turn.

It takes about three generations for bigotries and fascisms to (quite literally) die out in a society. It took about that long for the U.S. to recover from the Civil War, 1865 to ~1941, or (more accurately) for all the parties to that conflict and their oldest children- who carry on the grudges of their parents in seriousness- to die out. The time was spent not dealing with race, that being too bitter and full of wounds, but with sufferage and to a minor extent basic Indian rights. If you look closely, U.S. history consists of social conflict periods of about 75 years in length and turnarounds in the relative power balance to the winning side about 10 years before their end. The present one ends in 2015 to 2020, and it's been an awful lot of arguments and conflict all ultimately rooted in issues of social equality and full citizenship, about interpretation and implementation of the 14th Amendment.

So I don't buy the hypothetical claim. The South prepared for a war of secession since the wars with Mexico for control of Texas. Grant says in his memoirs that that's where the Southern secessionists got the grandiose idea of armed rebellion and became convinced of inalterable federal feebleness and ineptitude and Northern inability and lack of desire to wage war. And if you want to know what kind of a country the C.S.A. was going to be (and was), I strongly recommend a good read of the Confederate Constitution and the reports of the various Commissioners to their states about the merits of secession and the C.S.A. You might want to know that the C.S.A. considered secession from itself illegal and reason for war- the people who tried to found a Northwest Confederacy were rather surprised when they found out that Richmond refused to let the Missouri state government in exile sign on to that scheme.

[newswolf56]

14. Yes and no. First, the war itself was inevitable:

Then as now, the Republican Party was the party of Big Business, and the biggest Big Business in the mid-19th Century was timber -- in terms of its absolute control of government, approximately equal to Big Oil today. The timber barons had clearcut all the accessible northern forests and desperately wanted access to the Southern forests, which were typically harvested by selective logging rather than clear-cutting and were otherwise carefully managed as well. Meanwhile the great forests of the Old Northwest -- Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota -- were beyond reach in 1860 because the northern rail lines did not extend far enough (and indeed building those rail lines was one of the projects to be financed by the profits reaped by logging the South).

To achieve these purely economic ends, the timber barons applied a time-honored capitalist tactic: co-opt a worthy cause and turn it into an excuse for imperialist aggression. Thus Big Timber not only began covertly financing the Abolitionist Movement to inflame pro-war sentiment but brazenly bought Lincoln's nomination in 1860.

These are not "revisions" of history but rather facts that at the time were common knowledge and were hotly debated in some newspapers both North and South -- most of them rediscovered within the last 20 years by environmentalists investigating the unprecedented destruction (literally the methodical ruin of the entire regional ecology) -- inflicted on the South by the northern timber companies after the war: many times worse than the environmental damage inflicted on the Old Northwest, which was cleaned up relatively quickly simply because the Timber Barons did not want to permanently befoul their own back yards.

One example suffices to illustrate the magnitude of the damage. In 1865 the Tennessee River was steamboat-navigable from its mouth, where it enters the Ohio at Paducah, to its source at Knoxville in the confluence of the Holston and French Broad rivers, which were themselves steamboat navigable a mile or two upstream -- in each instance to the first rapids. Only 35 years later and due entirely to clearcutting -- the Timber Barons cut the whole South bald as a baby's bottom -- the Tennessee River was so impossibly silted it was not navigable at all: with the loss of this great waterway -- in its day the equivalent of an entire interstate highway system -- the whole of Southern Appalachia and much of the cotton belt as well was thus effectively isolated from the rest of America. Indeed the regional ruination was so great, it could only be remedied by the massive application of socialist economic and political principles: thus Franklin Delano Roosevelt's creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the primary purpose of which was desperately needed re-forestation, itself the key to the other main TVA purposes of flood control and restoration of the Tennessee as a navigable River -- in other words, repair of the almost inconceivable damage done by the timber imperialism of northern (American) Big Business.

As to the Abolitionist Movement, there was indeed some very strong pre-war abolitionist sentiment in the South, but it was primarily limited to the Southern women's movement, about which very little is known today -- and that only because of diligent research by present-day feminists. Once the war began, the Confederate government harshly suppressed any pro-abolitionist sentiment as part of a broader campaign against anything it regarded as subversive or treasonous. Nevertheless before the war there had been enough abolitionists -- both whites and free blacks -- scattered throughout the South to "follow the drinking gourd," keeping the underground railroad functioning, delivering runaway slaves to freedom north of the Ohio River. This tradition was continued in modern times by the substantial (and mostly unreported) numbers of Southern whites who risked life and limb in the Civil Rights Movement.

Whether the Confederacy would have abolished slavery on its own is doubtful. Though the slave-holding aristocracy was in fact relatively small -- the agricultural equivalent of the North's industrial oligarchy -- virtually all the non-slaveholding white working-class opposed the abolition of slavery simply because it would have meant more people competing for jobs that were already chronically scarce, and therefore lower wages. Thus the economic basis of bigotry: class warfare in the classically Marxist sense, with the already profound Caucasian racist contempt for blacks (which in the South was further reinforced by Christianity) inflamed to murderous hatred by economic factors. Thus too the South (whether then or now) as a truly ultimate demonstration of the historical truth of class warfare: a tiny obscenely powerful oligarchy ensuring its omnipotence by manipulating the workers to battle one another, with proletarian factionalism inflamed to the Nth power by race hatred.


Edit: typos.

[Thom Little]

15. If the South was going to nix slavery so soon there would've been no war

I've heard this drivel before and it holds no water. Had they been allowed to secede, slavery would've persisted for a very long time. The Confederate constitution guaranteed the "right" to own slaves. Large numbers of people were obviously willing to fight and die for that "right." Revisionists and racists would have you believe hundreds of thousands of Southerners died en masse to preserve the institution of slavery for the sole reason of setting the stage for a newly independent Confederacy to abolish it shortly thereafter. The very idea is absolutely ridiculus.

[yellowcanine]

16. What Civil War historians think Lincoln made a mistake by going to war?

First of all, no serious historian makes judgements based on "should have, could have, would have" because they know that such scenarios are impossible to predict and ultimately pointless. The South would have ended slavery "sooner on their own"????? Sooner than 1863 or 1865? Surely you can't be serious. I agree that the South would have eventually have ended slavery but it is hard to envision a scenario of it happening until well into the 20th century unless there had been a slave revolt - which in my opinion is exactly what would have happened and it would have made the Civil War look like a picnic because civilians, white and black, would have borne most of the casualties, as in the case of all true revolutions/insurgencies.

[alcibiades_mystery]

17. A million "What ifs," light as a feather

The speculation you're describing is not "history." It is a quaint and silly parlor game.