Smyslov_Fan wrote on 11/11/08 at 05:20:53:
I really love history. I really don't like this discussion, in which both sides have misrepresented what happened in the Civil War. I agree that Lincoln one of our greatest presidents, but his stance on slavery was problematic.
Lincoln was great in three special ways. Lincoln fought for the UNION of the United States. Shelby Foote accurately stated that before the Civil War, we had these United States, and after the Civil War we had the United States.
Lincoln was a great orator who used the power of his speech and office to great effect, even when his own commander in chief ran against him in the middle of the war!
Lincoln was strong enough to admit when he was wrong. The Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation were tentative but necessary steps towards the great amendments of Reconstruction.
To argue that the South was going to give up its slaves is simply anti-historical. The South fought for its slaves all the way through the 1960s. The letters of plantation owners to their former slaves show this. Calhoun's famous defense of slavery shows this. Dredd Scott shows this. Any sensible reading of the historical record shows this.
Yes, soldiers of the Confederacy complained that they were fighting for lazy slaves, but they still fought. The Union troops knew what they were fighting for, and after the New York Draft Riots and Sherman's March, volunteerism started to climb. This was the real deathknell of the Confederacy.
But all this talk of Lincoln and the Confederacy is a red herring. The real argument is over whether the Constitution is about States' Rights or about a nation. The Civil War and the 14th Amendment concluded that argument, but it is still being fought by some who think 19th Century capitalism and jurisprudence was in some way superior to today's society. We are much better off today than any but the very richest white folk of the 19th Century.
Oh, and while I'm at it... if a political theory is only good for one nation and doesn't work in Europe, it's not much good as a political theory in this age of globalization. The US is part of the international society that it helped to create. (This criticism is equally valid for pure Marxism as it is for pure Liberalism.)
Well expressed, and all quite true. Still I must say that it's rather disturbing to encounter here (of all places) advocacy of the Confederate cause, which on a modern moral dimension ranks rather close to that of Adolph Hitler.
Like many Americans, I have read extensively of the history of the Civil War. However empty the question may be of modern significance, it's interesting to speculate how the war might have turned out differently, a point that has been debated here. In this connection, it is widely recognized that the war was won in the West (west of the Appalachians, that is), a vast region where the federal navy dominated the waterways and transported large bodies of troops pretty much wherever it wished, and where the South went from defeat to defeat. For all the mighty and storied battles fought in the East, not one was decisive.
I read somewhere that given the limited powers of movement of the armies of the day, and given the preponderance of strength that rifled musketry and light artillery gave to the defense, the destruction of one large army by another of similar size was more or less impossible. Indeed there is just one example of this having happened east of the Mississippi, when George Thomas annihilated the Confederate "Army of the Tennessee" at Nashville. But this was a special case, where the Southerners were badly demoralized, well beyond their sources of supply, moderately outnumbered, and foolishly lauched a do-or-die attack against well-prepared positions. Otherwise, the larger engagements of the Civil War were toe-to-toe pugilism on a vast scale, preceded and followed by mutually ineffective and poorly informed stumbling around. In that context, it was often possible to claim "victory" on the basis of a nice tactic, a lower casualty count or eventual possession of the field, but actual victory stood well out of reach. There were some general officers of the day who understood this, but Lee, who always pursued the dream of utterly destroying the enemy host, did not.
Not even Gettysburg, for all of its fabled significance, was remotely decisive; it merely became necessary for the Confederate army to retreat. Had the Confederates somehow "won" a dime-a-dozen tactical victory -- the usual scenario being their timely seizure of Culp's Hill -- this would merely have necessitated a federal withdrawal, the next plausible line of defense being Rock Creek. And the Confederate supply system almost certainly was not up to supporting another major battle north of the Potomac in any case.
The story of the Civil War is the story of a major mid-19th-Century industrial power grinding a late-18th-century agrarian society into submission. I read somewhere that the Union army built more railways in the South than existed there before the war. During the course of the war, the north built a larger sea navy than Britain's, and a major riverine navy in the West, besides. The South "built" a few ships by refurbishing salvaged bottoms, and armored them, for want of anything better, with the torn-up tracks of its own railroads. I do recall Shelby Foote remarking that for all the scale of its military operations, northern society was not really on a war footing at any time, pointing to continuation right through the war not only of classes at the Ivy League colleges, but of the intercollegiate boat races! He said that if the South had ever actually threatened to win the war, the North would simply have taken its other hand out from behind its back, and used it to beat the South with.
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