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danieldwilliam) wrote2015-04-06 12:28 pm
danieldwilliam) wrote2015-04-06 12:28 pm
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On the US Civil War
Item one on my year of self-improvement was the US Civil War. This post is going to be a short review of the literature and some longer thoughts on the US Civil War.
The US Civil War was the United States bloodiest conflict. Over 625,000 soldiers were killed, along with some 50,000 civilians. Some 3% of the population were casualties of the conflict. Not counting those civilians who died of hunger or disease. In World War Two the US lost 420,000 service personnel, about 0.32% of its population. Whole states were devastated as an act of policy in 1865. In 1945 more US civilians died in their own internment camps than by enemy action.
The conflict continues to shape US politics and culture today. The myth of the Lost Cause, the romance of the brave Southern boys fighting like tigers for their wily, genius generals, for freedom from Northern Aggression and a genteel way of life full of magnolia blossom and condensation running down the sides of a mint julep like a single bead of perspiration down a Southern Belle’s décolletage and the reality of a million peasants dying to keep an anti-democratic aristocracy lording over the bonded servitude of multitudes, fighting so a few rich men could continue to work, murder and rape millions of people, affect the way America is today.
I read three books, three one volume popular histories. The American Civil War by John Keegan. Battle Cry of Freedom by James M McPherson and This Hallowed Ground by Bruce Catton
I started with John Keegan’s The American Civil War. It is a pretty straight forward military history of the war. It’s the least good of the three good histories and the least good Keegan book I’ve read. It’s not bad, it’s just not great. It’s a little disorganised and I think it fails to make a persuasive case for its fundamental premise; that the South was never going to win this war and they were bloody idiots for starting it. He doesn’t gather enough evidence or present it in the right structure to make me think he’d made his case.
However, I did gain a good understanding of the structure of the fighting and some inkling of how the economics and politics contributed to the shape of the war.
The second book, by far the fattest, was Battle Cry of Freedom by James M McPherson. When the Captain saw me start this book he was incredulous that anyone could read such a large book. “That will take you for ever and for ever to read it. If you read that, daddy, you will have died.” At 944 pages it is a whopper.
A meticulous presentation of the historical evidence. What on the surface looks like a chronological presentation of the context of the war, the build up to it and the actual conflict itself takes on a thematic structure. Issues of politics and economics are covered in some depth. Important themes when reached in the chronology are explored, forwards and backwards before the story continues. I found this a very helpful structure. The book is dry but thorough.
Last was Bruce Catton’s This Hallowed Ground. The warmest book of the three Catton takes a chronological approach to the war years, focusing on the fighting but explores the politics and personalities with humour and with a knack for presenting the human qualities and the humanity of the main actors and the two populations. Catton is the one who made it real for me that although Grant wasn’t drinking, fear that he would be thought to have made himself ineffective through drink affected his decision making and that Lincoln would forgive him just about anything because “he fights.”
So, three books, three slightly different examinations of the same period. I feel that I’ve got a good basic handle on the causes of the war and its conduct. Readers can decide for themselves which of the three might suit them best.
So what do I think about the US Civil War. I was mulling over the following questions. Could the South have won? Why did the North start the war? Could the aftermath of the War been different and would that have led to a different America today?
The South was never going to win this war and they were bloody idiots for starting it.
That’s the answer to the first two questions.
In more detail, the South could never have won the war assuming any average level of incompetence in the Federal military and civil administration short of outright treason. The Federals mustered two million soldiers to the Confederacies one million and at the same time keep the North’s uncountable factories, farms and banks full of workers. In the period between 1860 and 1870 some 1.5 million people immigrated to the US, mostly to the North. At the beginning of the war the South had no means of producing gunpowder and by the end of the war no means of purchasing it from abroad or moving it internally.
It was only the timidity, lack of imagination and failure of intelligence gathering that kept the South in the conflict for four years. Well, that and the repercussions of the popular political nature of the war. The North scored a massive own goal in the early months of the war, allowing the headstrong popular war fever to bounce the Eastern theatre command in to an unwise and ill-prepared series of offensives. These ended badly and scared and scarred the Eastern high command and persuaded them that the South was garrisoned with devils and generalled by Napoleon, Hannibal and Alexander the Great.
I’m going to swing through the second question about the North starting the war to explain the eagerness with which the Federals attacked Richmond in 1861.
The popular conception of the US Civil war is that the North started it. They provoked the South in to leaving the Union to protect slavery and then started a war to stop them leaving. I think the biggest and clearest new knowledge I have gained is that this is utterly untrue. It’s a pernicious untruth that lies like a cancer in the core of the American psyche.
The South started the war in the same way and with the same mind-set that Hitler started the Second World War. The South correctly grasped that slavery and free labour modern capitalism could not exist on the same continent let alone in the same nation and then set out to expand slavery to the North and West using legal legerdemain, the corruption of the Constitution and para-military violence. Southern congressmen banned Congress from debating slavery. They stuffed the Supreme Court with pro-slavery Southerners who judged that a Southerner could take a slave to a free state, that an escaped slave must be returned by the North to the South at the expense of Northern tax payers and that prohibitions on slave holding in Northern states were unconstitutional because they interfered with the right of property. They refused to admit new States to the Union unless an equal number of new Slave States were admitted so as to maintain the “balance” between Slave and Free states, up to an including a serious suggestion that the US invade Cuba so that it, and all its slaves, could be admitted as a Slave State to balance the ticket when admitting Kansas. When Northern settlers in Missouri and Kansas desired to live in a State without slavery Southern thugs left their homes in other States, travelled North and West and shot, lynched and burned free settlers culminating in a military coup. John Brown was retaliating for Southern lynch mobs.
Far from the North interfering in the South, the South went out of its way to interfere in the North. What earthly business a Southern plantation owner thought he had pulling an escaped slave out of a house in Boston I don’t know but they turned the whole apparatus of the United States state towards enforcing that “right” of recovery, at gun point. Using Northerners’ own guns.
But then, these are people who think it okay to own another human being. Very specifically, they thought African Americans were human being but that it was okay to own them. I’ve had a couple of goes at this and failed, but try and imagine yourself thinking it is okay to own another human being. Imagine yourself sitting down, watching other people work, thinking it right and proper that you own them.
So, I have come, firmly to the opinion that the South started the US Civil war and they started in about 1850, or maybe 1840. The US Civil War could be renamed the War of Southern Aggression, or the Great Slave Holders Revolt Part Two but I prefer the War of Southern Dickwaddery.
This is why, I think, that the Federals allowed themselves to bounce in to precipitous invasions of the South in the first year of the war. After ten or twenty years of listening to lectures from the South about States’ Rights whilst the South sent militia to Kansas and marshals to Massachusetts the North had had about as much as it was going to take and it was mad as hell. When war broke out Lincoln called for a volunteer militia. Northern States provided twice as many soldiers as requested in half the time and were still turning away volunteers. There were riots when the Federal army had to send some volunteers home as they didn’t have enough rifles for them. The North rioted because some of them weren’t going to be allowed to go and fight soon enough.
This popular enthusiasm bounced the North in to some costly mistakes and then fear of the South made them timid, in the East.
This new found timidity met three other factors. The Federal intelligence services were woeful. Basic desk based intelligence, of the sort I would be useful at, like counting how many factories the South had making guns or reading Southern newspapers for reports of troop movements or counting the number of men appointed colonel of a regiment and therefore the number of regiments in the South just didn’t happen. Actual espionage was even worse. McClellan, the senior Eastern Federal general during the early war, constantly thought he was facing a Confederate army about twice the size of his own. Fanciful given the population of the North was about 21 million to the Confederacy’s 9 but very real in his mind.
The second factor was a failure of imagination. Eastern generals thought they needed to capture Confederate cities because that is what the manual said. They allowed the South to define the war as a large series of pistol duels between gentlemen, rather than the exercise in total war that it was to become. It didn’t occur to them that they could destroy the Confederacy’s armies just by killing them wherever they were and ruin the Confederacy’s economy by blockading it and burning their crops in the fields. They rather stumbled on this strategy after Grant and Sherman and Farragut had put them in the way of it.
The third factor was that they allowed themselves to be seduced by the genius of Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Damn me those are names to conjure with. Two genius generals of the first rank, Lee who launched an invasion of the North with no idea where he was going and no supplies and Jackson who managed to get himself shot by his own soldiers. That’s harsh. Deliberately so. Lee and Jackson were pretty handy tactical generals, handling limited resources with flair and attention to detail but neither could articulate a way the Confederacy could win the war.
That is the crux of the first question. There was no way the Confederacy could win the war. They could not launch a successful invasion of the North and destroy its economy or its political will. They had too few soldiers, too few munitions, too few horses and carts, too few railroads. They could hold off the Federals, this year. Maybe next year, perhaps the year after that but every year the Federal army got bigger and better armed, the Northern population got bigger and richer and the South had no way to replace the men or money it was losing or to break the blockade.
Once Grant and Sherman and Farragut had captured the Mississippi and worked out that the way to beat the Confederacy was simply to starve, burn and kill it there was nothing the Confederacy could do to stop them.
The South was doomed and they should never had started the war but they believed their own racist propaganda about a Southerner being worth ten Yankies and the slaves loving their masters. When it came to it escaped slaves with rifles and shoes and full stomachs turned out to be better soldiers than half-starved, ragged flintlock wielding Confederates.
This was a most political war and you can’t divorce the political environment, the causes and the effects of the conflict from the actual fighting. It was also an economic war. Fought with whole economies and between two irreconcilable economic theories. The combination of the politics and the economics was against the South. Massively and profoundly against the South. The North had but to hold its will sufficiently to summon its great reserves of fighting men and armaments and then to crush the South.
The South started a war it could never win in pursuit of an unjustifiable policy of expanding slavery and they got what they deserved.
Some other points by the way.
Although slavery was at the heart of the war and many Northerners fought to get rid of slavery not many Northerners saw slavery as a great evil. Some did. Many were more concerned about the economic effects on their own portions of the population. Most were just fed up of the South pushing them around. There were no shortage of racists in the North.
Why didn’t the North just let the South go? Well partly nationalism and wounded pride but also the genuine irreconcilability of slavery and industrial capitalism and, frankly, the South were a bunch of raving racist madmen who thought they were invincible. They would never have been content to sit quietly in the South drinking cocktails and flogging slaves until the mills in England New and Old found alternative sources of cotton and sugar. They’d have invaded California in about 1863 or burnt Washington whilst attempting to recover escaped slaves.
This was a fundamentally political war. Lincoln had to fight and win an election in the middle of the war and he relied on popular support to provide the soldiers and funds for fighting the war. The North could have voted in 1864 to end the war, but they didn’t. Similarly, the South expressed its popular enthusiasm for the war very clearly in vote after vote at the beginning and at the end its failure of political will by desertion after desertion.
Lincoln, Grant and Sherman stumbled on an articulation of total war. The whole might of the North’s economy and population would be brought to bear on the South, bludgeoning and crushing it and draining it of blood and treasure in every way possible. I respect Grant. I admire Lincoln. I think I’d have liked Sherman. They were all hard men in a righteous cause.
I came to admire Lincoln for his ability to see the bigger picture. I came to respect Grant for his determination to win and his originality in command. I came to like Sherman for his humour and his ironical, reflective and detached view of his own war-making. The instrument and guiding light of the despoliation of the South his most famous remark is markedly pacifist, “I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting — its glory is all moonshine.” Though he burned South Carolina he did not burn North Carolina.
So the South started a war it could not win, but what of the peace? For me the saddest moment of the Civil War is the assassination of Lincoln. After winning the war Lincoln, Grant and Sherman had a solid plan to win the peace by re-admitting the South to the Union and seeing that everyone could have an easy, prosperous peace so long as they were willing to be loyal to the Union and forsake slavery. His assassination within a week of the Confederate surrender robbed the civil administration of his wisdom and political skill, incensed Northern vengance and discredited Sherman, whose easy occupation of the South was tarred as facilitating the continuation of Southern resistance. Lincoln thought in decades, his rivals and successors thought in weeks. We will never know but I think a Lincoln Reconstitution that required the South to confront the great wrong on which it was founded but also allowed it to turn away from both slavery and the civil war would have made the hundred years after the Civil War an easier and more prosperous time for the South and led to a better more unified United States today. It worked for Germany in 1948.
I’ll close with a final word from Sherman, from Christmas of 1860, the first year of the war
You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it … Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.
The US Civil War was the United States bloodiest conflict. Over 625,000 soldiers were killed, along with some 50,000 civilians. Some 3% of the population were casualties of the conflict. Not counting those civilians who died of hunger or disease. In World War Two the US lost 420,000 service personnel, about 0.32% of its population. Whole states were devastated as an act of policy in 1865. In 1945 more US civilians died in their own internment camps than by enemy action.
The conflict continues to shape US politics and culture today. The myth of the Lost Cause, the romance of the brave Southern boys fighting like tigers for their wily, genius generals, for freedom from Northern Aggression and a genteel way of life full of magnolia blossom and condensation running down the sides of a mint julep like a single bead of perspiration down a Southern Belle’s décolletage and the reality of a million peasants dying to keep an anti-democratic aristocracy lording over the bonded servitude of multitudes, fighting so a few rich men could continue to work, murder and rape millions of people, affect the way America is today.
I read three books, three one volume popular histories. The American Civil War by John Keegan. Battle Cry of Freedom by James M McPherson and This Hallowed Ground by Bruce Catton
I started with John Keegan’s The American Civil War. It is a pretty straight forward military history of the war. It’s the least good of the three good histories and the least good Keegan book I’ve read. It’s not bad, it’s just not great. It’s a little disorganised and I think it fails to make a persuasive case for its fundamental premise; that the South was never going to win this war and they were bloody idiots for starting it. He doesn’t gather enough evidence or present it in the right structure to make me think he’d made his case.
However, I did gain a good understanding of the structure of the fighting and some inkling of how the economics and politics contributed to the shape of the war.
The second book, by far the fattest, was Battle Cry of Freedom by James M McPherson. When the Captain saw me start this book he was incredulous that anyone could read such a large book. “That will take you for ever and for ever to read it. If you read that, daddy, you will have died.” At 944 pages it is a whopper.
A meticulous presentation of the historical evidence. What on the surface looks like a chronological presentation of the context of the war, the build up to it and the actual conflict itself takes on a thematic structure. Issues of politics and economics are covered in some depth. Important themes when reached in the chronology are explored, forwards and backwards before the story continues. I found this a very helpful structure. The book is dry but thorough.
Last was Bruce Catton’s This Hallowed Ground. The warmest book of the three Catton takes a chronological approach to the war years, focusing on the fighting but explores the politics and personalities with humour and with a knack for presenting the human qualities and the humanity of the main actors and the two populations. Catton is the one who made it real for me that although Grant wasn’t drinking, fear that he would be thought to have made himself ineffective through drink affected his decision making and that Lincoln would forgive him just about anything because “he fights.”
So, three books, three slightly different examinations of the same period. I feel that I’ve got a good basic handle on the causes of the war and its conduct. Readers can decide for themselves which of the three might suit them best.
So what do I think about the US Civil War. I was mulling over the following questions. Could the South have won? Why did the North start the war? Could the aftermath of the War been different and would that have led to a different America today?
The South was never going to win this war and they were bloody idiots for starting it.
That’s the answer to the first two questions.
In more detail, the South could never have won the war assuming any average level of incompetence in the Federal military and civil administration short of outright treason. The Federals mustered two million soldiers to the Confederacies one million and at the same time keep the North’s uncountable factories, farms and banks full of workers. In the period between 1860 and 1870 some 1.5 million people immigrated to the US, mostly to the North. At the beginning of the war the South had no means of producing gunpowder and by the end of the war no means of purchasing it from abroad or moving it internally.
It was only the timidity, lack of imagination and failure of intelligence gathering that kept the South in the conflict for four years. Well, that and the repercussions of the popular political nature of the war. The North scored a massive own goal in the early months of the war, allowing the headstrong popular war fever to bounce the Eastern theatre command in to an unwise and ill-prepared series of offensives. These ended badly and scared and scarred the Eastern high command and persuaded them that the South was garrisoned with devils and generalled by Napoleon, Hannibal and Alexander the Great.
I’m going to swing through the second question about the North starting the war to explain the eagerness with which the Federals attacked Richmond in 1861.
The popular conception of the US Civil war is that the North started it. They provoked the South in to leaving the Union to protect slavery and then started a war to stop them leaving. I think the biggest and clearest new knowledge I have gained is that this is utterly untrue. It’s a pernicious untruth that lies like a cancer in the core of the American psyche.
The South started the war in the same way and with the same mind-set that Hitler started the Second World War. The South correctly grasped that slavery and free labour modern capitalism could not exist on the same continent let alone in the same nation and then set out to expand slavery to the North and West using legal legerdemain, the corruption of the Constitution and para-military violence. Southern congressmen banned Congress from debating slavery. They stuffed the Supreme Court with pro-slavery Southerners who judged that a Southerner could take a slave to a free state, that an escaped slave must be returned by the North to the South at the expense of Northern tax payers and that prohibitions on slave holding in Northern states were unconstitutional because they interfered with the right of property. They refused to admit new States to the Union unless an equal number of new Slave States were admitted so as to maintain the “balance” between Slave and Free states, up to an including a serious suggestion that the US invade Cuba so that it, and all its slaves, could be admitted as a Slave State to balance the ticket when admitting Kansas. When Northern settlers in Missouri and Kansas desired to live in a State without slavery Southern thugs left their homes in other States, travelled North and West and shot, lynched and burned free settlers culminating in a military coup. John Brown was retaliating for Southern lynch mobs.
Far from the North interfering in the South, the South went out of its way to interfere in the North. What earthly business a Southern plantation owner thought he had pulling an escaped slave out of a house in Boston I don’t know but they turned the whole apparatus of the United States state towards enforcing that “right” of recovery, at gun point. Using Northerners’ own guns.
But then, these are people who think it okay to own another human being. Very specifically, they thought African Americans were human being but that it was okay to own them. I’ve had a couple of goes at this and failed, but try and imagine yourself thinking it is okay to own another human being. Imagine yourself sitting down, watching other people work, thinking it right and proper that you own them.
So, I have come, firmly to the opinion that the South started the US Civil war and they started in about 1850, or maybe 1840. The US Civil War could be renamed the War of Southern Aggression, or the Great Slave Holders Revolt Part Two but I prefer the War of Southern Dickwaddery.
This is why, I think, that the Federals allowed themselves to bounce in to precipitous invasions of the South in the first year of the war. After ten or twenty years of listening to lectures from the South about States’ Rights whilst the South sent militia to Kansas and marshals to Massachusetts the North had had about as much as it was going to take and it was mad as hell. When war broke out Lincoln called for a volunteer militia. Northern States provided twice as many soldiers as requested in half the time and were still turning away volunteers. There were riots when the Federal army had to send some volunteers home as they didn’t have enough rifles for them. The North rioted because some of them weren’t going to be allowed to go and fight soon enough.
This popular enthusiasm bounced the North in to some costly mistakes and then fear of the South made them timid, in the East.
This new found timidity met three other factors. The Federal intelligence services were woeful. Basic desk based intelligence, of the sort I would be useful at, like counting how many factories the South had making guns or reading Southern newspapers for reports of troop movements or counting the number of men appointed colonel of a regiment and therefore the number of regiments in the South just didn’t happen. Actual espionage was even worse. McClellan, the senior Eastern Federal general during the early war, constantly thought he was facing a Confederate army about twice the size of his own. Fanciful given the population of the North was about 21 million to the Confederacy’s 9 but very real in his mind.
The second factor was a failure of imagination. Eastern generals thought they needed to capture Confederate cities because that is what the manual said. They allowed the South to define the war as a large series of pistol duels between gentlemen, rather than the exercise in total war that it was to become. It didn’t occur to them that they could destroy the Confederacy’s armies just by killing them wherever they were and ruin the Confederacy’s economy by blockading it and burning their crops in the fields. They rather stumbled on this strategy after Grant and Sherman and Farragut had put them in the way of it.
The third factor was that they allowed themselves to be seduced by the genius of Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Damn me those are names to conjure with. Two genius generals of the first rank, Lee who launched an invasion of the North with no idea where he was going and no supplies and Jackson who managed to get himself shot by his own soldiers. That’s harsh. Deliberately so. Lee and Jackson were pretty handy tactical generals, handling limited resources with flair and attention to detail but neither could articulate a way the Confederacy could win the war.
That is the crux of the first question. There was no way the Confederacy could win the war. They could not launch a successful invasion of the North and destroy its economy or its political will. They had too few soldiers, too few munitions, too few horses and carts, too few railroads. They could hold off the Federals, this year. Maybe next year, perhaps the year after that but every year the Federal army got bigger and better armed, the Northern population got bigger and richer and the South had no way to replace the men or money it was losing or to break the blockade.
Once Grant and Sherman and Farragut had captured the Mississippi and worked out that the way to beat the Confederacy was simply to starve, burn and kill it there was nothing the Confederacy could do to stop them.
The South was doomed and they should never had started the war but they believed their own racist propaganda about a Southerner being worth ten Yankies and the slaves loving their masters. When it came to it escaped slaves with rifles and shoes and full stomachs turned out to be better soldiers than half-starved, ragged flintlock wielding Confederates.
This was a most political war and you can’t divorce the political environment, the causes and the effects of the conflict from the actual fighting. It was also an economic war. Fought with whole economies and between two irreconcilable economic theories. The combination of the politics and the economics was against the South. Massively and profoundly against the South. The North had but to hold its will sufficiently to summon its great reserves of fighting men and armaments and then to crush the South.
The South started a war it could never win in pursuit of an unjustifiable policy of expanding slavery and they got what they deserved.
Some other points by the way.
Although slavery was at the heart of the war and many Northerners fought to get rid of slavery not many Northerners saw slavery as a great evil. Some did. Many were more concerned about the economic effects on their own portions of the population. Most were just fed up of the South pushing them around. There were no shortage of racists in the North.
Why didn’t the North just let the South go? Well partly nationalism and wounded pride but also the genuine irreconcilability of slavery and industrial capitalism and, frankly, the South were a bunch of raving racist madmen who thought they were invincible. They would never have been content to sit quietly in the South drinking cocktails and flogging slaves until the mills in England New and Old found alternative sources of cotton and sugar. They’d have invaded California in about 1863 or burnt Washington whilst attempting to recover escaped slaves.
This was a fundamentally political war. Lincoln had to fight and win an election in the middle of the war and he relied on popular support to provide the soldiers and funds for fighting the war. The North could have voted in 1864 to end the war, but they didn’t. Similarly, the South expressed its popular enthusiasm for the war very clearly in vote after vote at the beginning and at the end its failure of political will by desertion after desertion.
Lincoln, Grant and Sherman stumbled on an articulation of total war. The whole might of the North’s economy and population would be brought to bear on the South, bludgeoning and crushing it and draining it of blood and treasure in every way possible. I respect Grant. I admire Lincoln. I think I’d have liked Sherman. They were all hard men in a righteous cause.
I came to admire Lincoln for his ability to see the bigger picture. I came to respect Grant for his determination to win and his originality in command. I came to like Sherman for his humour and his ironical, reflective and detached view of his own war-making. The instrument and guiding light of the despoliation of the South his most famous remark is markedly pacifist, “I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting — its glory is all moonshine.” Though he burned South Carolina he did not burn North Carolina.
So the South started a war it could not win, but what of the peace? For me the saddest moment of the Civil War is the assassination of Lincoln. After winning the war Lincoln, Grant and Sherman had a solid plan to win the peace by re-admitting the South to the Union and seeing that everyone could have an easy, prosperous peace so long as they were willing to be loyal to the Union and forsake slavery. His assassination within a week of the Confederate surrender robbed the civil administration of his wisdom and political skill, incensed Northern vengance and discredited Sherman, whose easy occupation of the South was tarred as facilitating the continuation of Southern resistance. Lincoln thought in decades, his rivals and successors thought in weeks. We will never know but I think a Lincoln Reconstitution that required the South to confront the great wrong on which it was founded but also allowed it to turn away from both slavery and the civil war would have made the hundred years after the Civil War an easier and more prosperous time for the South and led to a better more unified United States today. It worked for Germany in 1948.
I’ll close with a final word from Sherman, from Christmas of 1860, the first year of the war
You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it … Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.
no subject
no subject
Generally.
We should not be too sanguine about democracies avoiding war with each other.
Nor about the limitiations that democracy places on the flaws in the way we individually and collectively assess situations. Democracies can and do and, I fear, well make bad errors of judgement that lead to war and those wars will, as a result of the popular support for their inniatation, be large and total and existential. Similarly, as we are seeing in the UK about economics and immigration.
Justice denied anywhere imperils justice and peace everywhere.
We will only be freed from the scourge of war once we have truly embraced the truth that we are all fully human.
Well functioning democracies, however, remain the best hope of achieving justice and full humanity
Politics is as much a consequence of war as war is a consequence of politcs.
I fear a similar conflict lies in our future along much the same fault lines as the US Civil War, free or bonded labour. I think over the next 20-50 years more and more work will be done by machine intelligence driving robotic machines. Some polities will appropriate most of this labour and wealth to only a few people. Some will share or collectivise the wealth more widely. The implications for the mass of the citizery are obvious. The two systems can not long endure in the same economy. The former must encroach on the liberties of the latter by policy or it will be eroded by the anarchic enthusiasm of the latter.
If you found your political institutions on injustice or even just on entrenched positions and vested interests, no matter how rational, clever, emotionally intelligent and fair they are eventually you will end up in a conflict where the substance of the argument becomes wrapped up in the fairness of the system.
No one listens to Sherman until he is the commander of the last standing army.
Don't bring a knife to a gun fight.
no subject
To coordinate collective activity.
To avoid inefficient Nash equilibria.
To provide a framework for spontaneous conflict resolution.
To provide a common framework for private interaction.
To bind our drunk future selves to the resolutions of our wiser soberer selves.
The US Civil War is an example of it failing at all five simultaneously.
How that came about and how it can be avoided in the near future are worth thinking about.