US Civil War

Besides a larger population to draw from, the North could offer deals to fresh immigrants to speed their path to citizenship, through military service. Late in the war, the South was so desperate for troops as to offer freedom deals to slaves in some locations. There were few takers, a small percentage of the total. By then, most slaves were thinking they were about to get their freedom anyway, without risking death.

A gross miscalculation by Jefferson Davis, who made a lot of mistakes.

Before the war, the Southern agricultural economy was bigger and stronger than the North's industrial economy. Not so after 1861. 150 years later, the South still hasn't caught up. Some rural (former plantation) areas have been in an economic depression for the whole 150 years.

Longstreet was the only one who wanted to invest a lot of time in digging trenches, earning him the nickname, King of Spades.

Another error they discovered in the textbooks was, it's always better to hold the high ground. At Chattanooga, Lookout Mountain was too high and too steep. When the Union charged up the slope, the CSA's cannonballs rolled out of the cannons before they could be fired! They had never needed to point the barrels downward before. :rofl: I'm sure it didn't seem so funny at the time.

I need to learn more about that.

Another key point in the scenario: Woodrow Wilson could have only been a CSA president (unlikely), not USA, being from Virginia.

Excellent point! While many Southerners still cling to a form of fascism, believing in the importance of one culture, one ethnicity, one race, one religion, and one political philosophy, we don't talk about killing everyone who is different. We just want them politically powerless. That's better than the Hitler approach.

 

:cheers2: Good for them!

With any political decision, including this one, you'll never go far astray if you follow the money trail. Trace out any of the legal gyrations that took place before the war, and they all lead back to cotton plantation dollars, one way or another. All that free labor was simply worth too much to give up. They looked for any loophole they could find to hang onto it with out a war, including playing around with the concept of nullification (being revisited now), the theory that a state could pass a law saying that a specific federal law did not apply in that state.

No matter how eloquently someone can speak or write on the theoretical concepts behind states rights (including secession), the bottom line is, if the slavery issue had been settled somehow, the Southern states didn't have any other big issues that were on their minds at the time. In other words, they didn't need enhanced rights for any other purpose, no matter how legitimate or illegitimate those expanded rights might have been, legally.

Besides the ungodly amount of cash at stake, fear of the unknown can be a powerful motivator. What would a post-slavery South look like? What would the transition be like? Nobody knew. What they got was pretty close to a worst-case scenario.

These things always end up touching on some "what if" questions at some point. I've never done that with WWI, but...

 

Theres no end to "what if" scenarios from history. But it can amusing, stimulating even, to speculate.

WWI was a major nail in the coffin of the British Empire as a world dominating power, and the start of a new era of American ascendency. Had the USA not become involved, things would surely have been different.

 

That's the real value of studying history. As we learn to create those scenarios, we can apply that same kind of thinking to the present, and analyze the possible consequences of things we might do in the near future.

Maybe WWI should be my next historical study. I only live about three hours from the Woodrow Wilson presidential library and museum. Unfortunately, that's the only significant WWI-related site I can get to without an expensive plane ride.

North Carolina doesn't have an abundance of plantation homes, and never did, but I have been to areas where many remain. I have mixed feelings about them. They symbolize slavery and should have never been built, but many are architectural masterpieces that can now be enjoyed by visitors of all races, and tearing them down wouldn't make anything better for the slaves who labored to pay for them.

Natchez, Mississippi is the motherload:

https://www.google.com/search?q=nat...4TSrQHekYD4CA&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=933&bih=620

"Rosalie" is the house where General Grant stayed during his occupation of Natchez:

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Oak Alley Plantation is west of New Orleans:

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Also, when we talked about fascism yesterday, it reminded me of modern fascist groups, who use the Confederate flag almost as often as they use the Swastika. The rectangular flag they are using was actually the CSA Navy jack, not used for any other purpose. The battle flag was perfectly square:

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There were three official CSA national flags, created in this order:

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The problem with the second version was that when there was no wind, it looked like a white flag of surrender.

 

WWI is an interesting if somewhat grim subject. At some time I might start a thread about some aspects of it. Ill have to give it some thought.

I can understand your mixed feelings about the plantation houses. But I think the same is true of many old buildings and structures. Many have some kind of dark history in the background. For instance in the UK are great houses which were built on the wealth gained through slavery in the West Indies on sugar plantations. Medieval castles where torture and cruel executions were carried out. Even sites associated with the industrial revolution can make me shudder at times when I think of the conditions the workers lived and worked under.

As regards learning from history, I hope so. But too often the same mistakes are just repeated.

 

Did you follow the link to the Google image search? It's amazing how many architectural masterpieces can be found in that one small area! Six of them are truly world-class, and there are over 100 considered to be of significant historical value.

Melrose is the only one of the group owned by the National Park Service. It's the only one in town that still has its slave quarters. Public tours include a very honest description of living and working conditions for slaves.

Some have become bed and breakfast inns, such as Monmouth, especially popular for weddings and honeymoons.

I often wonder how the majority of black Americans feel about these places. I never hear or read anything from them on this subject. Trying to put myself in their place, I can see two ways they could go, emotionally. The first and most obvious would be anger. That requires no explanation. The second would be vindication; staying at Monmouth as a successful black professional, being waited on by a paid, mostly white staff. That could feel like a victory celebration for having helped change a country to make it much more fair than it used to be.

I also wonder how black Americans feel about harsh Reconstruction period policies, which were intended to punish white Southern leaders and plantation owners, but also greatly reduced job creation for decades in areas where former slaves were desperate for paid employment. It's like the North forgot the former slaves were still down there. It was the direct opposite of a well thought out post-slavery jobs program.

At least there seems to be no reasonable chance of slavery making a comeback in any halfway civilized country. That's one issue that the world has apparently laid to rest forever. Even the modern Nazi fringe groups don't talk about it.

It does bother me somewhat that America's current political divisions seem to correlate so well with the borders of the old Confederacy. After all these years, we're still out of sync, but the issues of division are not as deep this time. The end result isn't likely to be similar.

Racists and fascists around the world today like to use the Navy version of the old flag:

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I rarely see those anymore, anywhere close to where I live. They were fairly common 30 years ago, in rural areas.

In recent years, I've seen members of our Tea Party flying this formerly rare variation of the CSA first national flag:

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I believe to their way of thinking, the larger circle of stars reminds them of the old Betsy Ross American flag (below), which has 13 stars. They want to combine the revolutionary spirit of that period with some Confederate principles.

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During the CW, the US flag was not altered to remove any stars, since they rejected the right of states to leave:

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One little story I heard somewhere, cant recall where, was that as Shermans men tore up the railroads, they would build a fire of the sleepers and heat the rails until they were pliable. The rails were then wrapped around trees. This was known as a "Sherman bowtie".

The idea of course, was to put the rails beyond future re use.

 

There are indeed some incredible houses on that link. And really it makes it obvious what those plantation owners were so keen to hold onto.
I think that it also shows the absolute contradiction intrinsic in their grand lifestyle. On one hand a high culture and beautiful and gracious mansions, on the other the sordid details of slavery.
But I would also say that it isnt much different from the situation in the UK during the 18th and 19th centuries. There was money from slave produced commodities, but also the working conditions of workers during the industrial revolution were little better than those of slaves in the South. In some respects it may have been even worse, as often the work itself was dangerous and the social conditions were absolutely appalling.
Its not beyond possibility that some slave owning Southerners actually looked after their slaves better then many of the "muck and brass" British industrialists. Who likewise built themselves mansions on the proceeds.

For me as a Brit its hard to know or to gauge the status of Blacks in the US nowadays. I assume that a lot of what is projected in the media is biased one way or another.
Racism as you have it is very different from British racism.

Seems to me that the war is still an emotive issue for Americans. But I wonder if thats across the nation, or is it more so in the States that took part.

 

On the inside, they were loaded with everything money could buy at that time, and some of them still have most of their stuff, including chess sets made of every expensive material you can imagine, plus paintings and tapestries from all over the world, and rare books. Natchez had the highest average income and highest net worth of any city or town in North America.

There is something else unique about Natchez. They invented the modern concept of sprawling surburban neighborhoods. Before that, almost everybody either lived in a city, with townhouses packed tightly together, or in a farmhouse in the middle of a tract of farmland. A town might have two or three city blocks of houses for the wealthy with large grassy yards. The original plantation houses were just extreme farmhouses. Then some of the richest landowners, who owned multiple plantations, decided to build mansions in Natchez, away from their farmland. The neighborhoods became large enough that walking to town became impractical. They wouldn't have wanted to walk anyway. Everyone was dependent on horses and buggies, usually driven by a slave. The men traveled to their plantations during the week, and socialized in Natchez on the weekends, competing with each other to see who could throw the most extravigant parties, and display the most impressive recent novelty purchases from Europe.

Of course, large suburban neighborhoods are everywhere now, but the idea didn't catch on until streetcars and automobiles were invented.

Natchez is the oldest European settlement on the Mississippi River, built on the highest ground, immune to flooding. Baton Rouge was settled next, then New Orleans.

It's not just the UK that had issues. The North was getting a lot of working class immigrants from all over Europe.

The poorest of the Southern whites probably had the worst conditions of all. Every drought meant another round of malnutrition. At least the slaves had a guaranteed food supply. An unhealthy slave was an unproductive business asset.

You never know who might post in the thread someday.

Definitely more in the South, more among older people, and more in rural areas than big cities.

There are many more Americans who don't like some of the differences they see between the Northeast and Southeast, and have limited understanding of how these differences came to be.

There was very little post-war economic recovery in the South until the post-WWII economic boom that lifted all of America. The South still lagged behind until the 1970's, when companies started shifting manufacturing jobs south, chasing lower wages. The '70's and '80's were the decades when we made up a lot of ground. We built office towers and shopping malls that were just as nice as anything in the Northeast. Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, and Dallas absolutely exploded into major metro areas.

With the 1990's came the big shift in manufacturing from the American South to China, again chasing lower wages. And once again, we are now lagging behind the Northeast economically. Atlanta was hit harder by the panic of 2008 and real estate collapse than any other US city.

 

A status is as much perceived and imagined as it is based in reality. I know a couple black people (I wouldn't call them friends of mine though) who believe in their hearts that racism affects them everyday, and that many of their problems stem from that racism. They ignore the fact that their current status is, most of the time, brought about by decisions made by them and them alone.

Racism here certainly has a different history informing it than it does in Britain, I'll grant that.

So often it can extend beyond simply the states involved. I have found that ones views of the war will depend sometimes depend on one's political leanings, regardless of whether they are from a state involved in the war or not.

 

In the UK if you are a young black male, you are something like five times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than if you are white.
I was wondering if you get that kind of thing much still in the US.
On paper, we have equality laws etc, but still there is racism and even institutionalized racism.

 

Definitely.

 

We certainly do; some places get it more than others. Still, there are statistics that make stuff like this sort of understandable.

 

I think there are contradictions and complexities in these issues both sides of the Atlantic.
You have Obama, and yet theres still racism.

We have very few blacks in positions of authority. And actually, the target of the extreme right these days is more often Muslims of whatever race rather than Afro Carribeans.

 

And there always will be.

 

You are probably right.

 

To get back to the civil war theme.

I just checked it out, and if you adjust the figures to account for inflation "Gone With The Wind" is still the biggest grossing movie of all time.

I havent seen it for years, and I assume it would now seem very dated. But I recall that the early part of the film gave a reasonably good picture of the lavish lifestyle enjoyed in the old south. Hollywoods version anyway.

 

I think it still does a great job depicting the aristocratic culture of typical plantations. It wasn't intended to be anything more.

When I was growing up, every little white girl fantasized about going to one of those parties at Tara, in a big hoop skirt. Most of us eventually read some romance novels set in the Civil War period, and some of us moved on to historical novels that were intended to be more serious and accurate. A small number got into the pure history books, which were more popular with the guys.

This plantation is the best of a very small number remaining in North Carolina:

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