150th Anniversary of the Civil War

Other Civil War re-enactments I'd like to see. Andersonville. Gettysburg, July 4, with 50,000 dead and wounded men lying around. The Fort Pillow massacre. Oh, the list of glorious moments is endless.

 

Either he doesn't know what he's talking about (quickly becoming a common thread in this thread) or he typed Richmond and meant something else.

 

That's just silly. The average soldier in Vietnam didn't give a flying fuck about Ho Chi Minh, and the average soldier in Iraq right now doesn't own a refinery. Doesn't mean those wars weren't about communism or oil, respectively. I mean, come the fuck on.

 

Yeah sorry. That's on me.
I was thinking Richmond.

 

You know that most average soldiers in Vietnam were drafted and sent there, right? Most didn't volunteer to go help South Vietnam just because they liked them.

I'm sure in 1861 there were hundreds of conversations around Indiana and Minnesota dinner tables: "Honey, I know your and our seven children's survival depends on us maintaining our 10-acre farm, but I hear there are some folks being treated poorly in Georgia so I think I'll go off and charge down some cannons to see if I can't do right by them. Now if I'm lucky, I'll be cut down by grape shot rather than die of lingering disease or of starvation in some prison camp. I'm also sorry to say, that the Army said if I want to be in a cavalry unit, I have to provide my own horse. I'll have to take the only one we have. Maybe the kids can pitch in and pull the plow while I'm away."

or better yet, some Irish Catholic immigrants - well known for their progressive views on race - getting off the boat in New York: "Seamus, I know we just got forcibly removed from our own country by the plundering British, survived a great famine and a treacherous sea journey, but I hear there are some slaves in the South that are in a bad way. Let's join the Army to go set them free. We'll have to march to where the fighting is. Where is this Louisissippi?"

 

I don't often agree with MM, but I do on this one.

 

That was an entertaining response, but there's nothing remotely factual in it.

 

Ehhhh Forrest was best as a raider .... as far as a cavalry commander attached to an army, protecting its flanks and serving as its eyes, he didn't really distinguish himself.

Yes - Stuart failed during the Gettysburg campaign, but he served Lee much better than Forrest ever served any of the AoT commanders. Stuart also performed adequetly as a fill-in infantry corp commander at times.

You can't credit Longstreet for being great, and at the same time knock Jackson for his ocassaional let-downs.

Longstreet - who was very good - could pout, too. And his performance at Gettysburg was a self-fulfilling prediction - his pout-induced slow movement around to the right and towards Little Round Top gave the Union plenty of time to shift folks around and refuse its own flank. If Longstreet moves quickly on the second day, his attack had a much better chance of sucess.

Longstreet was also so-so when he spent the fall of '63 in Tennessee.

 

You did have soldiers, especially at the beginning of the war, rallying around the flag to fight. In the North, they saw it as this big adventure far away from home that was going to end in 90 days. And in the South, they saw it as defending their homes from the Yankee aggressors.

But as the war dragged on, and the body count rose, by 1863, support for the war had shrank, which was why Lincoln instituted the draft. Stupidly, he allowed people to buy their way out of the draft for $300 (bascially, a year's pay back then), which basically told the people that this was a rich man's war. And the Southern soldiers got worn down by fighting and starvation.

 

Joe, poor people always fight rich people's wars. Your point, such as it is, is so broad as to have no meaning. Apply it to any other war and see how dumb it looks. The average German soldier had no personal interest in Hitler ruling the world or the extermination of the Jewish population. Does that mean WWII wasn't "about" those things?

And, sure, it was about the "economy," Evil. It was about the south preserving their economy that was based on slave labor.

Both arguments are non sequiturs.

 

I think I said earlier, yes, slavery was one of the things it was "about" but the average solider wasn't fighting "for or against" it as if on some moral crusade. For some on each side it was a crusade for/against. For 90 percent of the rest, it wasn't. You made my point. Many (poor) fight for the few (rich), not some cause. That should be clear enough to understand.

 

And the fact that poor people fight rich people's wars doesn't change the fact that Confederate poor people were fighting for the right of Confederate rich people to own other poor people. And they knew it. At the time. It's sad, but it's true.

All the rest is so much ahistorical backfill.