Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Story Of Jacob Miller... Hard Headed Yankee Takes One Between The Eyes.

No, but horses would have been pulling McCormick reapers by that time.

Maybe but it takes time for new things to go mainstream....in any era much less back then. The concept of the computer was invented in the 1950's.......I didn't have one until the late 1980's and that was because I worked in the industry.......every swinging Richard didn't have one at home until around Y2k. I once paid $4000 for a PC.....I think it was 1987ish.....with the idea of using it to make money. It had much less capability than a modern day disposable phone. Can you imagine what one of those reapers probably cost in the 1850's or 60's?

I also have no idea how that machine would have been applied to picking and seeding cotton. Don't know much about farming. I can tell you that my Grandaddy was still plowing with a mule as a teenager......he was born in 1903. That was likely in part due to lingering after effects of reconstruction. Old folks here used to say everyone was poor in those days......just didn't know it.

I have said before that if the north and south could have waited about 25-30 years and just continued to bitch at each other, technology would have solved the problem. I really believe that.

Obviously my comment about most Yankees getting shot in azz while running away was meant as a wisecrack, art least to a certain extent, however it sure did rile the Northern aggressors on here up..........lol. With that being said, and not to keep rehashing it, we all know that the victors write the history, so that's that. But, what is true, and indisputably true, is that the Southern soldier was a better fighting man than his Northern counterpart. Time and time again, numerically smaller Southern armies defeated numerically superior Northern ones. Stonewall Jackson and Nathan Bedford Forrest were two of the best examples of that.

But, being a better soldier does always translate into winning, as that soldier must be equipped to fight as well, or better, than those he comes up against. As an example, the average German soldier was better trained and in most cases, a better fighting man than his Allied counterparts were. That held true pretty much throughout the war, and ended when the huge number of Allied soldiers and material was too much to overcome. The same thing happened to the South, as the North had the advantage of much more in the way of men and materials. It is somewhat surprising that the War Between the States lasted as long as it did, and had it not been for the Southern solider being as good as he was, it wouldn't have.

IMO, the senior officer corps of the CSA was generally better than the USA, with a few exceptions like Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan. The enlisted soldiers and company grade officers were, as a whole, equal. This USA military had superior logistics and numbers, so they could better stand a war of attrition. They could afford to lose more men and material than the CSA and that is what finally led to victory and defeat.

In WW2 the Germans had been preparing for war since the mid-1930's, while the elected governments of France, UK, and USA didn't embark on military upgrades until it appeared that war was inevitable, so the Germans were more successful at first. The USSR didn't prepare for a war with Germany because they had signed a non-aggression pact and only entered WW2 against Germany when they were invaded in 1941. I don't believe that the individual German soldier was better, on average, than their American and British counterparts.

Some things that the U.S. didn't do has surprised me, such as:

Why didn't we copy the MG-34 in inch specs, chamber it in 30-06, and issue it at the squad and platoon level in place of the much heavier Browning 1917/1919 machine guns?

Why didn't we upgrade the Sherman M4 main gun to be comparable to the Panzer V's high velocity 75mm gun? It was probably due to the physical size restrictions necessary for shipping them from US manufacturing site via ship to Europe, but perhaps they could have been upgraded at in-theatre depots.

Why didn't we produce more tungsten core kinetic energy anti-tank rounds and produce them earlier in the war, as we had access to a much greater supply of tungsten than the Germans did?


Yet another exercise in 20/20 hindsight.

The MG 34 was over engineered and difficult to manufacture. We did try to copy the MG 42 but had problems getting it to work with the slightly more powerful 30-06. Those problems could have been solved, but by then we were winning with the equipment we already had...so it was shelved.

We did modify the Sherman.

I learned something as a result of this conversation. Both North and South allowed paid substitutes, and both sides stopped this practice in 1864 due to the negative perception of “poor men fighting a rich man’s war”. Also both sides found paid substitutes as a group to be the worst and most unreliable of their soldiers but the financial incentive was substantial, essentially a year’s salary for a laborer.

But here’s the really interesting part; the proportion of paid substitutes on either side was about the same, around one in ten of their soldiers See.....

https://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/conscription.html

and

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/72737875.pdf


Fascinating info 😎



Given the fact that the Confederacy initiated conscription a whole year ahead of the Union when the supply of volunteers dried up and continued to expand the age range of conscription all the way up to age fifty by the end of the war, it’s a no-brainer they woulda used immigrants in droves if they had ‘em, but they didn’t.

Nobody immigrated to the South because thanks to forty years of short-sighted Planter Aristocracy leadership and the fact that cotton was 80% of their economy, they had no industry and more than anything an immigrant woulda had to compete with slave labor.

There were immigrants wearing grey though, I have recently learned that the Louisiana Tigers, conscripted from the New Orleans docks, mostly consisted of Irish immigrants.

On the topic of the Irish in general, was it you who said the Confederacy woulda won if they had more?

In that light, the History of Ireland itself is generally written in terms of to what degree they were or were not getting their a$$es kIcked by the English in any given year

WHAT!!!!! The 100+ free Black Teamsters in that Union supply train carried off by JEB Stuart’s cavalry in the Gettysburg campaign became PRISONERS OF WAR??? 😮 Sir, if you keep this up I’m gonna start thinking you’re just making schidt up

OK, trying for brevity here, “returned” Black folks were valuable contraband and held in confinement until “recognized” by their owners, proof of said ownership being a fungible commodity. Follow the money.

Only one third of Southern families owned even one slave, and yet slaves comprised one quarter of the whole Southern population and slaves OUTNUMBERED free folk in the states of South Carolina and Mississippi.

IIRC slaves comprised like 80% of the entire capital wealth of the collective South. The fact that a small minority of Southerners owned even one slave merely points out the enormous economic disparity between the wealthy ruling Planter Class who set policy and your average Southern small farmer.

How important was the slavery issue in precipitating secession? Refer to the Compromises of 1820 and 1850, and then read the Statement of Causes put out by the self-identified “Slave States” in there own words...

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states

...and then there’s that pesky “Cornerstone Speech” given by CSA Veep Alexander Stephens, bane of Lost Causers everywhere...

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech

So, did some Black folks fight for the Confederacy? Ya some snuck by in contravention of official policy. Patrick Cleburne TRIED to make it official but was met with an awkward silence, after all if your whole economic system was based on a presumption that Black folk were unworthy of freedom then giving them a gun and having them fight for BOTH yours and their freedom weren’t kosher.

But did some Black folk fight for the Confederacy? Consider this, an enslaved woman owned neither the rights to her own body nor to any children she bore, a LOT of slave women got knocked up by their owner or his family to a degree such that almost no Black Americans today do not have White blood.

For many slaves, their owner’s family was also their immediate blood kin. Would you fight for your family?

Sir, you are missing the point entirely. The 13th Amendment, freeing ALL slaves everywhere in America, was a politically risky gambit on Lincoln’s part, laying the groundwork for which was initiated early in his first term.

Total abolition was an unpopular and divisive issue, with widespread resentment that “the niqqer” had landed us in this bloody mess in the first place. Even outside the South there was widespread apprehension about what the economic and social impact of a million plus suddenly freed slaves was gonna look like.

Lincoln’s stated goal from first to last, was preserving the Union. His conviction that so long as slavery persisted anywhere in the US it could still destroy the Union was strong enough that even in the crisis and election year of 1864, when he fully expected to lose and to lose the Union when McClellan was elected, he continued on with this divisive issue.

Final triumph, he lived to see it pass into law.

Two months later he was shot in the back of the head by that guy you appear to admire. The irony being that if Lincoln had served out a second term, Reconstruction would have probably looked different.

The Shermans with 76mm HV guns didn't see combat until after D-Day, more than 31 months after the U.S. entered WW2. The funny thing is that the Ordinance Corp wanted to put a HV gun into production so that the Sherman would have a better chance for success in tank on tank battles, but U.S. tactics didn't focus on tank on tank battles like the Germans and Russians were engaged in on the Eastern Front, rather on punching through the front lines and rolling up logistics and support units in the rear. The short 75mm gun worked OK until the Allies broke out of the hedge rows during Operation Cobra. I wonder how many U.S. tankers would have opted for a U.S. rework of the Panzer V or VI in lieu of any of the pre-M4A3HVSS Shermans?

This

Really? Explain Appomattox. Who surrendered to whom?

The problems of 160 years ago and many of our problems today boil down to this: Southerners were too damn lazy to pick their own cotton and tobacco. Listening to my nephew who moved from NY to South Carolina and who manages a large electrical contractor business, they are still lazy.

So, why don't you tell your damn nephew to move back to NY is it's so much better there..............but that's the catch isn't it......Southerners don't move North, but Yankees sure as heck like to move South.

I'll add to that by saying that I've worked with some Yankees in my day, and their idea of hard work was running to the union and complaining about something.

I-95 has at least two northbound lanes and Delta is ready when he is.

Thank goodness you won. They may well be lazy, but the aren't set on destroy the nation like you cuckolds. What a disgrace you are.

How's you tranny Surgeon General and liberal ass governor doing?

I'm pretty sure a LOT of Yankee mom's were sucking on that black root after the war ended. You best check your woodpile.

How ya doing there ol' Steelhead?

It seems ol' Cooper must've taken one between the eyes hisself, judgin' by some of what he's asayin'. Wash yo mouth out wit soap, suh. Nevuh thought Ah'd see the day when a Yank would bad mouth a Prez'dent from his own neck o' de woods, and us poor ol' Rebels would be left to defend said Prez'dent.