Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire OMG Another Civil War Thread!

With virtual slave labor.

I don't believe the blame lies with either side, but more with a few short sighted people on both sides, and those were the ones with largest financial gains to be made, in the end, the cost to most was monumental, in the loss of both human and property, and so many have never recovered, and continue to perpetuate the hatred that helps no one.
Gettysburg is a wonderful place to visit , and that about the only good thing that came from a senseless war !

Most of the contemporary concern about the outcome of the Civil War doesn't revolve around the fact that the south lost.

It concern about the fact that America lost its second revolution,...and the price that America is paying for that today.

The loom lent itself easily to simple mechanization, HAD already been mechanized where applicable using water power. Machine-made cotton becomes the first product of the Industrial Revolution to take the world by storm, England’s leading export.

More to the point, the insatiable demand for raw cotton makes the Cotton Plantation the fastest way to wealth across the South wherever it could be grown, cotton cultivation grows exponentially, nailing down slavery as the centerpiece of the Southern economy such that most of the capitol wealth in the South consists of enslaved humans.

The cotton gin and improved steam engine designs appear nearly simultaneously in the early 19th Century, cotton takes off, within a generation the collective South is calling itself “The Land of Cotton” and self-identifying as “The Slave States”.

Ermehgerrrrd.

The exponential growth of contton--and slavery--started around 1800. Before that, it was widely assumed that slavery would just wither away within a generation or so. Without cotton growing, it would not be worthwhile to keep slaves, and they would eventually be freed as they were in the North. In the Ordnance of 1787, it was declared that slavery would be illegal in the Northwest Territory. Nobody objected. Cotton hardened the positions on slavery. 75 years later there were shooting wars in Kansas over the question of whether slavery would be legal there. I have an essay written about 1830 in Virginia that discusses freeing the slaves--the government buying them. The essay concluded this was financially impossible because slaves represented more than half the assets of businesses (plantations) in the South.

Some say that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War. But without slavery it never would have occurred.

The irony is that in the decades after the war, machines were invented to pick cotton (as opposed to ginning it) which would have made slavery too expensive to keep.

If the South had hired free whites to pick cotton, it would probably have only raised their cost of labor about 20%, all things consided, and we'd be a lot better off today. And (in my opinion), if air conditioning had not been invented, the South would have never recovered from the war.

Maybe the dumbest thing the South ever did was to try to threaten the economy of England by withholding cotton exports.

First off, Queen Victoria was strongly pro-abolition so they were facing an uphill battle anyway.

But mostly, whatever the Southerner’s own self-perception was, the British Nobility and Upper Classes would view the “Southern Plantation Aristocracy” as one step removed from monkeys (and two steps removed from us Irish, hey, I grew up in England).

To presume to try and grab England by the short hairs via a cotton embargo would sting British pride and GUARANTEE they would develop other sources.

I don’t believe southerners are as bent about the outcome of the war as some want to believe, but many still can’t stand the arrogance of northerners. Just spend some time where there’s an influx of Yanks retiring in the south. Holy schit.

Yea, What he said

We are just truly amazed, at how you twits have turned simple words, like July into a three syllable conversations among yourselves !

William F. Buckley ran him out of National Review after Buckley decided that he would toe the narrative line.

Joseph Sobran died in 2010. Ann Coulter memorialized him here.

https://humanevents.com/2010/10/06/not-your-average-joe/?utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

My friend Joe Sobran died last Thursday, and the world lost its greatest writer.

To my delight, some obituaries noted that he had influenced my writing style. I only wish I had known he was so close to the end so I could have seen him again to let him influence me some more.

The G.K. Chesterton of our time, Joe could deliver a knockout punch with a single line. Many of his aphorisms were so catchy that everyone repeats them now without realizing their provenance.

It was Joe who came up with the apocryphal New York Times headline: “New York Destroyed by Earthquake; Women and Minorities Hit Hardest.”

Joe created the phrase “strange new respect” to describe the sudden warm admiration the media have for any conservative who becomes a liberal.

In the ’80s, Bill Buckley suggested that AIDS sufferers be required to get tattoos on their buttocks to protect other gays. As all hell broke loose over his proposal, Sobran simply suggested that it might borrow from Dante: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

I’ve recently been telling a friend who talked me into agreeing to an interview with the Times that I wouldn’t be mad at him no matter what the Times does to me because “your enemies can never hurt you, only your friends can.” I remember now that it was Sobran who told me that, years ago, in reference to his treatment by Buckley.

Ironically perhaps, I’ve often used a Sobran observation to explain why I have a greater affinity to Israel than to the Muslim world after 9/11: Watching a death-match fight on Animal Planet once, Joe said he found himself instinctively rooting for the mammal over the reptile.

Joe was comically immune to group-think. Every Christian should be, but with Joe it was nearly pathological.

A Shakespeare expert, Joe became convinced that the real author was Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Among his vast trove of evidence were the sonnets, some of which clearly expressed love for another man.

When Joe was writing what became “Alias Shakespeare,” he used to tell me he was going to title the book: “He’s Here, He’s Queer, He’s Edward de Vere!”

Reading through some of his columns after he died and being reminded of what an eloquent writer Joe was, I realized that the best tribute would be to quote him extensively.

As Joe himself said: “I note that my enemies have written a great deal about me, yet they rarely quote me directly. Why not? If I am so disreputable myself, I must at least occasionally say disreputable things. Is it possible that what I say is more cogent than they like to admit?”

Joe’s quotes are much better when you’re reading his columns and a beautifully turned phrase sneaks up on you, but here are a few good ones, even in isolation:

— On our democracy: “Your chances of meeting an IRS agent are far greater than your chances of meeting anyone you voted for.”

— On Clinton: “Once again, his defenders, furiously attacking the prosecution and equating opposition with ‘conspiracy,’ don’t dare mount the best defense: ‘He’s not that sort of man.’ It’s because Clinton is, supremely, ‘that sort of man’ that this whole thing has happened. He’s a lying lecher, a prevaricating pervert, an utterly slimy crook, without a trace of honor or loyalty, desperately trying to save his own skin one last time.”

— On big government: “Freedom has ceased to be a birthright; it has come to mean whatever we are still permitted to do.”

— On Obama: “Nor has he said anything memorable — not even a single aphorism over this long campaign. And the title of his book ‘The Audacity of Hope’ — what on earth does that mean? He is always hinting at a substance that is never disclosed to us. He seems to live by raising vague aspirations he never fulfills.”

— On Buckley’s book “In Search of Anti-Semitism”: “Its real message is not that we should like or respect Jews; only that we should try not to hate them. But this implies that anti-Semitism is the natural reaction to them: If it’s a universal sin, after all, it must be a universal temptation. … When he defends Jews, I sometimes feel like saying: ‘Bill! Bill! It’s all right! They’re not that bad!'”

— On evolution: “If our furry and scaly friends were still evolving, none of them appeared to be gaining on us.”

— On Canada banning Dr. Laura: “Canada has to protect itself against such pernicious, hate-filled American notions as the Law of Moses. If Dr. Laura wants to spew the Ten Commandments, let her do it in her own country.”

After I made some point to Joe once, he paid me a compliment that describes exactly why it was so fun to be around him. He said, “Your mind is always going.”

His body is gone, but I’m sure his mind is still going like gangbusters. And I’m insanely jealous that he’s giving God all the good belly laughs now.

It was the southerners arrogance that caused the war. They should have agreed to let their slaves buy their freedom thru work over 10 years with the expectation that they would become paid farm workers when set free. That would have prevented the war and the destruction of the south at very little cost.

Much as I hate to say it, slavery was the root cause of Southern Secession. Any look at a map of the southern states shows that the cotton belt states all seceded as soon as Lincoln was elected. All the rest waited to see what was going to happen.
The fact that they remained in the union until the government started the war kinda proves that the war was a result of government coercion of the states!
Slavery never entered the equation until after the Emancipation Proclamation was released in the fall of 1862. The war was already a year and a half old, and even then, emancipation was only a carrot and stick approach to ending the war. Slave ownership was still protected in states and sections of the confederacy under federal control.
Freeing the slaves was only a secondary consideration to the government's war policy.
In fact, Lincoln actually relieved 3 Union Commanders for giving orders freeing slaves in their districts! Emancipation only came about as a result of the loophole General Ben Butler discovered by declaring escaped slaves as "Contraband of War". He assumed (rightly) that holding escaped slaves instead of returning them (as was SOP) was actually weakening the Confederate war effort!
7mm

I really enjoy the history threads, especially the War Between the States, as that's where the majority of my knowledge is.
My reason for starting another discussion was merely to get others thoughts regarding
A, was the war necessary? and
B, was Sherman's March necessary?
Funny how these things always turn into a whizzing contest. You'd think I'd know better.
7mm

This one actually seemed to hold together longer than most.

If you want a good, succinct, easy reading, and fair explanation of what caused the Civil War, this is the book.

https://www.amazon.com/Disease-Public-Mind-Understanding-Fought/dp/0306822954

Think of the total irony of it,
Lincoln went total war, throwing off all moral restraint, tossing Augustine to Grotius in the trash to what proposed end? To force the secessionist back into a brotherly union of states, "pinned together with bayonets"???

You will be my kith kin and brother or I will rape plunder burn and enslave you.

That's spot-on. How can people be free when their duly elected representatives aren't free to leave a consortium of states that the majority of their constituency want to leave? How can people be free when they are not free to do with their own body what they wish? (ie put "illegal" drugs in it.)

People aren't free when such basic freedoms are denied. A union of states isn't free unless the states are free to leave what they freely joined.

It was not about slavery-- it was about the North needing the resources the South had!
The North had the industry, the South had the food and cotton--

the South said it was about slavery.