Civil War Thread

You need to read less Howard Zinn. If Samuel Southernlover looks across the border and sees Ned Northernman raking it in, eventually Samuel's gonna clue in.

Southerners back then were an exceptionally stupid lot. But they were greedy, too.

 

Oh, there's no doubt the South would not have given up de facto slavery willingly, but they might have under duress from their trading partners overseas with whom they needed to stay on the good side of to have any hope whatsoever of surviving economically. Then, they'd have done the bare minimum necessary in terms of "freeing" the slaves to get back in the good graces of the European powers.

 

This was a strong point in Foote's trilogy. I did read it, all. It's the best read of my life.

The Union won, but was never really threatened, militarily. The Union was expanding to the West at the same time, building a railroad, fighting Indians and getting into early industrialization. It was mobilized, but not like the South. The South was nothing but involved into the war. The entire CSA was devoted to a single cause, the Union otoh was a fully functioning nation.

And make no mistake, the fine gentlemen and ladies of the status quo ante bellum were the some of the most selfish, greedy and arrogant human beings since the fall of Rome. Using human bondage to enjoy a privileged life. Approx 32% of whites owned slaves in the slave states in 1860. Mississsipi and South Carolina it was nearly 50%. Confederates opposed states’ rights — that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery.

 

Oh, sure, it would probably happen eventually, but my point was that Kantor's premise that the CSA would have gotten rid of slavery voluntarily in the 1880s is crazy. My guess would be some time around WWII.

It's also not to be dismissed that a stunning victory by the CSA in the Civil
War would have been a huge leap backwards for emancipation worldwide.

Given a Confederate win in the CW, Euro powers might well have felt far less urgency in getting rid of slavery in their colonial holdings in Africa, Asia and South America. Not to mention the CSA itself might well have tried to establish slave territories in the Caribbean and Central America.

 

Racism against blacks was nearly universal in the white South then, but support for slavery much less so. Poor Southerners deeply resented the aristocracy that could afford multiple slaves and had virtually no way to move up the economic ladder because how do you compete against free labor? (This same resentment and economic desperation is what eventually got convict leasing abolished in the region years after the war.)

 

I always find the story of Salmon Chase and his daughter Kate to be quite interesting. Salmon wanted to be president, lost to Lincoln, joined the cabinet, kept disagreeing with Lincoln, kept offering his resignation because he kept wanting Lincoln to beg him to stay, then Lincoln called him out on it and accepted the resignation. And then eventually put him on the Supreme Court.

Kate, meanwhile was the Ivanka of her time, and played a major role in her father's politics, which, as a woman back then, was a major thing in itself. Yet, Lincoln pretty much was able to resist her influence.

 

Kate Chase.

 

6.

I should have more to contribute to this thread later, but wanted to get that out there.

 

If, at some point, the slave labor (like any other technology) becomes prohibitively expensive to procure and maintain.
Slaves were not, pardon the expression, free. You had to buy them, feed them, house them. Even if it was a hundred times below poverty level, there were still costs associated with it. The slave traders also would have had rising costs as other nations and changing attitudes made it more and more difficult to procure slaves. Those costs eventually get passed along, and there should come a point where it's simply more profitable to free the slaves, pay them a pittance to keep doing the jobs they know, and let them pay for their basic needs themselves.
Man, that's a disturbing paragraph to put that into stark terms like that. But I digress...

If you look at it, though, it is sort of what happened after the war. How long that would have taken without the war is a good question. Maybe post-WWI, when worldwide colonialism started to collapse?

 

For a one volume book, James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom is tough to beat.

And for different aspect of the war, I'll plug my friend Greg Downs, a Civil War historian whose most recent book was After Appomattox.

 

The history of Reconstruction was indelibly stamped by the shadow of Lincoln and everyone's hopes/fears/beliefs/delusions over what he would have done had he lived.

I know all about "malice toward none" and all that crap, but somehow I suspect Abraham Lincoln, long about, oh, let's say June 1866, getting reports of the Ku Klux Klan running amuck in the south, terrorizing and killing former slaves,would have said, "what the hell did we fight this war for anyway," and ordered Sherman to storm back South and finish the job with mass roundups of former rebels.

 

I think you over-estimate the goodliness of your Northern forebears.