The South gave the North two options after the Civil War: draconian rule by the North enforced by hundreds of thousands of soldiers that would be resisted by guerrilla warfare, or they could allow the South to re-join the Union on an equal basis as long as they pretended to no longer have slavery and pretended to be part of the United States. Given that one option meant generations of Union soldiers in the South and the other option meant peace, it’s no wonder that in the compromise of 1876, the North accepted the South’s offer of the second option.
Still, during the ten years that the North attempted to enforce democracy in the South, they should have taken the opportunity to hang the whole lot of traitors who were the top military and civilian leadership of the Confederacy by the neck for treason. Instead they let those people go free and create the legend of the “Lost Cause” where it wasn’t about slavery, it was about a way of life, and the North won not because they had better generals and better political leadership (which, at the end of the war, was 100% true — Lincoln had weeded out the weak leadership ruthlessly and arrived at a team that was ludicrously effective), but because of sheer industrial might.
The reality is that the South had better guns and powder for most of the war, and if everybody who had been drafted had shown up to fight, would have been able to match the North man-for-man. The South lost because of failures of its political and military leadership, not because of lack of manpower or lack of weapons — but by allowing the traitors to live, the North allowed the traitors to re-write history to where they were the valiant victims of Northern industrial might, rather than incompetents who lost the war through their own stupidity and arrogance. By allowing the traitors to live, the North gave credence to their arguments that treason was an ordinary and respectable thing. Thus the North, eventually, lost the Civil War, if not in 1876, then most certainly when a tool in the pay of the Russians became President with Russian help because treason — accepting the aid of a foreign power in expectation of quid pro quo — has been rendered an ordinary and respectable thing.
— Badtux the Geopolitical History Penguin
Please don’t confuse the Confederacy with the South.
Are you familiar with William H. Freehling’s The South vs. the South? He points out that one out of every three southerners who fought in the Civil War did so on the side of the Union. There’s no way to overcome that handicap without the aid of foreign powers.
It’s worth noting that the Confederacy was never in a position to focus its military against the Union. In order to preserve slavery, the CSA had to leave many potential soldiers stationed in the interior – otherwise, it would have collapsed from internal slave uprisings.
Personally, I would have preferred to give the traitors life sentences. The 13th Amendment provides a single loophole for permitting “involuntary servitude”: punishment for a crime. If they liked slavery so much, it would only be fair to give them the experience of being slaves.
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Don’t confuse “the South” as defined by Freehling, and the Deep South as defined by the borders of the Confederacy. Freehling played fast and loose with his statistics in order to “prove” his case. He includes states that did not secede as part of “the South” in order to pretend that the Deep South was not as anti-Union as it was.
When I was in college I worked with researcher who put together the history of a very small area of the Deep South. What he found, looking at actual source documentation (family letters and such), was that there was a fairly large number of people who did not show up to fight for the Confederacy, perhaps the majority of those who were drafted — but it wasn’t because of any pro-Union sentiments. Like most in the Deep South, they hated the Union. But they hated their family starving more, and in the richest soil on the continent the planters were still planting cotton, not food, meaning that the world’s largest agricultural workforce on some of the world’s richest land — the slave population of the South — wasn’t being used to feed the Confederacy. Instead, it was being used to pile up cotton at railheads and river docks that couldn’t haul it anywhere because of the Yankee blockade.
This matches things I’ve seen from other researchers. So yeah, they fought against the Confederate authorities when said authorities came into their area to enforce the draft, and if found and turned over to the armies, deserted as soon as they could. But it wasn’t about being pro-Union. It was about being anti-Starving.
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“the world’s largest agricultural workforce on some of the world’s richest land — the slave population of the South — wasn’t being used to feed the Confederacy. Instead, it was being used to pile up cotton at railheads and river docks that couldn’t haul it anywhere because of the Yankee blockade.”
Fark! I didn’t realise that. Sounds like what the British did to the Irish during the Potato Famine about 20 years earlier, raising cattle for export on the Auld Sod while the Micks died. Never underestimate the willingness of rich fcukers to starve the 99% in order to pad their bankmaggot accounts.
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And the neoSouth will lose the neocivilwar that’s coming, a war where there won’t be sides of blue and grey or North and South, but anarchic violence of bullets flying every whichaway for all sorts of individualized reasons. Shit’s gonna break down and stop working. Preznit Incompetrump and his band of griftalooters are every bit the modern equivalent to the jackalopes of Jeff Davis and the Southern Congress. They’re going to throw spanners in the gears of all sorts of things, to the point where important systems will sputter and lurch, while life gets worse for everyone except the upper crustys. The neoRebs will suffer, but it’ll be worth it to them because the people they hate — furriners, non-KKKhristians, modern people — will be suffering too. Nihilism at large. A civil war where EVERYBODY loses. It’ll be like Yugoslavia 1991-1994, except the Serbs and Croats didn’t have nukes to toss around. doG help civilization.
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I’m more of a “The Machine Stops” fatalist. tRump and his merry men will pour in a little sand and things will get a little bumpier, but the inertia of the machine will keep it lurching on for quite some time.
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My mother taught school in Virginia in the Fifties. She remembers that the “social studies” curriculum for her grade (forth or fifth, I think) covered the “war Between the States” beginning with a justification for secession and then spending the better part of the school year on Southern victories and Southern generals. The dreadful truth of Southern defeat was skimmed through in the final week of June.
A transplanted Yankee, she was appalled, but it helped her understand why “The South” is like it is…
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Partly, right. But, and, soforth? Also wrong. Never heard of the carpetbaggers? And what they tried to do in the south? You see the end product, but, not what they did to create the end product. The south had better weapons, they also had better schools, and and more public republic. Up north it was less gentile, more autocratic, and people dying daily, trying to get west. The establishment of guilds, and rise of states rights, again, punishment of the working classes by the baron’s aided by the states, with their malitias, really formulated a wild era. But, it’s because of Americans forced their way into Africa and created slavery? Whatever happened to the white slave classes, shipped here for stealing a potatoes to survive another day? Australia, NZ also.
If I remember my earliest history book, printed in 1896, we found slavers in Africa, and bought slaves from them. It wasn’t American, but all nationalities, and shipping them all over the world. If they were lucky, they came to the Americas, they lived to old age generally. Elsewhere they lived to the thirties if they were lucky.
Luckily, my grandparent came as family groups granted land, and seven years to clear it and start selling to the markets.
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Jim, Jim, Jim. Keep telling yourself that stuff and you’ll keep feeling all warm and fuzzy. The death rate on the march to the coast and the middle passage was over 40%. Better schools, for whom? The planters kept the kids home to be educated. A more public republic…for the white landowner. White slave classes…hum, nevermind, best head out for the white homeland they want to create in Idaho, Jim.
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Bukko, sorry, but it’s a consequence of my job. I’m a social media ghost because of the insane restrictions that are placed upon employees of my employer. Many ignore these rules, at their own risk, but I’ve elected to avoid the issue completely till I’m free of the shackles.
FYI, I’d consider myself a barely moderate Conservative if the moderate Democrats hadn’t moved onto my turf over the past 30 years+.
As for the delusional or insane commentators, the folks here are positively rational versus places like The Field Negro, where the blogger allows all comments, just to let the rational reader see just how deep the damage is at the shallow end of the gene pool.
Mr. Tux, my apologies if the mention of another Blog was a violation.
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Jim, methinks you’re smoking from the Daughters of the Confederacy crack pipe.
a) Education *sucked* in the Deep South even then. I worked with an actual historian on this. We were investigating the accounting books of pre-war plantations to see how profitable they were (or were not). These people who ran the plantations couldn’t add, they couldn’t spell, they couldn’t reconcile their accounts, they were, to put it blunt, ill-educated by any standard. Half the plantations we investigated had gone bankrupt at some point in time and gone to new ownership. The usual cause of bankruptcy was that the owners completely lost track of their accounts, they lost track of their payables, they lost track of their receivables, they added things wrong all over the place, and eventually they lost the farm. The little people in the countryside were even worse-off. I have family histories and census records that show that a 4th grade education was the maximum that most males achieved in the Deep South, because then they were pulled out of school to work the farm. Which, given a 10 month growing season in the Deep South, meant no time for school, unlike in the North that had a short growing season. Girls got more education, most made it to 6th and it was not uncommon for girls to make it to the 8th grade, girls were often the keepers of the family bible and the keeper of the family’s books, but high school simply didn’t exist in the Deep South. Wealthy planters sent their high-school-age children off to boarding schools, but that obviously was not an option for the poor whites, and of course education was forbidden altogether for slaves.
b) The source of the Africans enslaved on the plantations is irrelevant. The slave trade hadn’t been a thing for decades by the time of the Civil War, the South’s slaves were primarily the product of breeding. One reason why so many American blacks are so muscular is because plantation owners actually bred for that trait, because muscular slaves could do more work. They were bred like livestock. One of my great-great-grandfathers was in that line of work, he had a dozen sturdy breeding-age female slaves and one big black stud to impregnate them, and kept them popping out babies to sell on the slave market until the women died in childbirth, generally before age 40 (the sturdiest of their female offspring took their place as breeders). If your goal was to say that being bred like livestock was preferential to being a free human being, you failed.
c) If you look at the historical graves in my family’s family cemetery, which dates back to the late 1860’s, until around 1930 or so the predominant graves are tiny little infant graves. If you survived infancy, you were likely to live to a fairly old age. *Unless* you were female. A *lot* of females died in their late 30’s / early 40’s, probably due to childbirth and just being worn out trying to pop out enough babies so that a few could survive to adulthood. Sulfa drugs, better sanitation practices, birth control, and the first vaccinations caused that death toll to drop drastically. But if your goal is to say that people coming to America from elsewhere lived longer than elsewhere, the historical record does not support your statement. Until after public sanitation became common after the turn of the 20th century and caused a drastic decline in the death rate in cities, the death rate in the USA was similar to the death rate anywhere else on the planet.
d) There was never any white slave class in the United States. The indenture system had already dissolved by the time the United States was formed, due to religious and practical reasons. The Constitution explicitly enshrined the practice of *Negro* chattel slavery, not slavery of any other race. It was prohibited to own Christian slaves by most Christian religions, but Negros were presumed to “bear the mark of Caan” and thus not be Christian even if they adopted the forms of Christianity. The same is not true of, say, the Irish, who indeed worked in very nasty poorly paid jobs when they came to America but even upright Anglicans had to admit the Irish were Christians and thus could not be legally enslaved and bred as livestock under both canon law and secular law.
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Tux, there you go again using facts to refute someone who thinks slavery was a good thing. Good onya for trying, but I reckon “why bother?”
I think “Jim” has commented here before with his romanticized view of how life was for human slaves in the AmeriKKKan South. It’s hard to tell when people have generic sceenyms with no profile or even a quirky handle such as “Centerpuke.” IIRC, “Jim’s” argument boils down to “those human cattle had three hots and a cot, and other countries had slaves too, so what the SSouth did was jes’ fine and dandy!”
To the mind of reich-wingers, “facts” do not matter, because they do not believe them. “Facts” are no different to opinions to someone who rejects their reality. All that stuff that happened in the past is impossible to prove to them because all the people who lived in the past are dead now so who’s to say what’s right? A bunch of books? The reich-winger did not write those books. The reich-winger did not personally experience the events described in those books, so he can’t say whether they were true or not. Perhaps there were OTHER things that happened that were left out of the books full of “facts” because the authors were prejudiced against the SSouth and wanted to be politically correct about the blacks. Or about Jews and the Holocaust. Turks and Armenians. Hulagu and the sacking of Baghdad, if you’re part of his fan club in Kyrgyzstan…
I’ve given up trying to reason with anyone who chooses to cling to fiction. If you think about it, it takes a stronger mental motivation to things that the rest of the world disbelieves than it does to accept the truth. Agreeing with commonly accepted reality is easy. Just go along with everyone else. If you’re going to sign on 100% with something wack, you’ve gotta be COMMITTED to it. No point reasoning with a True Believer. Just causes them to dig in harder. When I meet someone like that — which I do all the time in psych wards in Australia, but not so much in everyday society there — I don’t waste my breath. Not worth the calories it takes to move my tongue to talk to them. I just smile and say “That’s an interesting way of looking at it” and move on. Nut jobs don’t deserve any more of a rational person’s time.
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Bukko: it is good to witness for the truth, even to the deliberately ignorant, for your own sake and for those who see you.
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An interesting one, on filmsforaction.org there is an item, called the invention of capitalism. It is a mostly true rendition by pearlman. An interesting read. Showing how the robber barons got greedy. And how they planned their conquest of the serfs. Yes it started that far back. Serf, was the slave of the church, the church chose everything down to who you could marry, to the food you ate and potable you drank. But, every liberal blame the white American for slavery. Don’t blame the white American, blame those who captured the slave and sold them to others. Generally, it was one fuedal state versus another state, one warlord vs another, one family vs another…..you want to blame, some ideal, for wrongdoings against others, , blame greed, blame Creed, blame capitalism that is ill regulated.
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Gobble Gobble Gobble!
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[…] In a related story, Badtux muses on how the South never stopped rising again. […]
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Always appreciate your history lessons. Been following the blog for several years. My local paper, The Roanoke Times, had a nice op-ed today about our Sons of Confederate Veterans who are greatly aggrieved, concluding with this:
“Wherever the SCV parades, beseech them to explain why blacks today do not march shoulder-to-shoulder with whites to celebrate their shared Southern heritage.” Halford Ryan, professor emeritus of public speaking at Washington and Lee Univ. (old dude)
http://www.roanoke.com/opinion/commentary/ryan-confederate-warts-and-all/article_99c4a01c-3c66-5b0b-bb5b-ea28cb223853.html
Also, you probably know of Doug Muder, whose post from 2014 received a fair amount of attention.
excerpt:
Doug Muder: “Who really won the Civil War? The first hint at how deep the second mystery ran came from the biography, [Jefferson Davis: American] by William J. Cooper. In 1865, not only was Davis not agonizing over how to end the destruction, he wanted to keep it going longer. He disapproved of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and when U. S. troops finally captured him, he was on his way to Texas, where an intact army might continue the war.
That sounded crazy until I read about Reconstruction. In my high school history class, Reconstruction was a mysterious blank period between Lincoln’s assassination and Edison’s light bulb. Congress impeached Andrew Johnson for some reason, the transcontinental railroad got built, corruption scandals engulfed the Grant administration, and Custer lost at Little Big Horn. But none of it seemed to have much to do with present-day events.
And oh, those blacks Lincoln emancipated? Except for Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, they vanished like the Lost Tribes of Israel. They wouldn’t re-enter history until the 1950s, when for some reason they still weren’t free.
Here’s what my teachers’ should have told me: “Reconstruction was the second phase of the Civil War. It lasted until 1877, when the Confederates won.” I think that would have gotten my attention.
It wasn’t just that Confederates wanted to continue the war. They did continue it, and they ultimately prevailed. They weren’t crazy, they were just stubborn.”
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I’d disagree with you on a couple of points. The South did not have better guns or powder & what they did have was never enough because they lacked the industrial might to create it. As for man power, yes they had more people trained in military tactics (largely because of the bullshit militia movement the slave holders built out of fear of their property raising up to kill them) but they could never have matched the North man for man. Shelby Foote, probably the preeminent Southern historian on the ACW described it as “The North fought with one arm tied behind its back” because they did not fully enforce the draft and provided many easy outs.
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The Confederate Powder Works, operated by the Confederate government, produced mass amounts of powder of better quality than anything the Union quartermasters purchased from the lowest bidder. It made less smoke, fouled the rifles less, and otherwise was higher quality. No Confederate army ever lacked for powder and shot. The whole reason for putting the Confederate capital in Richmond was to protect the vital Tredegar Ironworks, the only facility in the entire South capable of building railroad locomotives or casting cannon. And cast cannon it did. I repeat: No battle was ever lost by the Confederacy because they lacked for guns or powder.
Much is made of the lack of Southern industry, but it did not take much industry to make shoes, which were hand-made on lasts and required only leather, which was of plentiful supply because Texas was full of cattle, yet Confederate armies were often short of shoes. Same deal with cloth, the Carolinas had plenty of spinning mills to make cotton cloth, but hiring women to sew it into uniforms didn’t happen. This is again part and parcel of the many bad decisions made by the Confederacy. They had the resources, they simply didn’t put them to use to fight effectively due to stupendous incompetence on the part of the Confederate leadership, starting with President Jefferson Davis on downwards to the state level leadership, none of which functioned as a coherent whole. The result was that military leaders often had to spend more time looking for food and clothing for their armies than actually fighting. And that lack of food and clothing extended Confederacy-wide. The plantations grew enough food and made enough clothing for their own purposes, but the ordinary whites who made up most of the Confederate armies, and their families, didn’t get any share of that food and clothing.
In the end, what killed the Confederacy was spectacular incompetence both at the economic level — when they failed to provide sufficient food and clothing both for their armies and for their civilian population despite clearly having the capability to do so given their access to the best soil and agricultural workforce on the continent and plenty of cotton to spin and weave and create clothing out of — and at the diplomatic level, when they failed to gain the support of any European power due to a continual stream of diplomatic miscues, support that was the absolute minimum needed to be viable given that they had no hope of building a navy capable of breaking the Union blockade. Meanwhile the Union had William H. Seward as Secretary of State, one of the most brilliant diplomats that this nation has ever produced, who with a combination of cajoling and threats of war combined with the utter failure of the Confederacy to successfully argue its case, successfully convinced both the British and French to not enter the war on the side of the Confederacy.
In the end, it was Confederate incompetence, not Northern industrial might, that ended the Confederacy. To win their independence they had to do everything right, because there was no margin for error given the size differential between the two. They did almost nothing right — the only things they really did right was powder and guns.
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