Civil War Thread

[YankeeFan]

The Civil War is one of those topics that some folks seem to do the really deep dive, and learn a ton about. I imagine we have some of those people here.

I personally just don't know very much about the specifics: the major battles, the generals, etc.

I recently went to Grant's Tomb with a couple of my brothers, and they knew so much more about the War than I did.

So, tell us what you know about the War. What should we know? What books are worth reading?

 

[Starman]

We won, get over it.

Actually, I shouldn't say "we," because none of my ancestors fought (too old or too young) and there's some circumstantial evidence that my GG-GF may have fudged his age in the 1860 Census to stay out of the draft.

But if he'd told the truth and got drafted, then got killed in 1862, my G-GF would never have been born, and so neither would I.

So good work, Great Great Grandpa. Give peace a chance, power to the people, right on!

Other than that my whole family -- all branches -- lived in hardcore Union states in the 1860s, so yay us.

 

[TigerVols]

I grew up on a battlefield and went to school on a battlefield, and yet @YankeeFan's name sums up my support of the winning side better than the actual name holder's apparently does.

 

[TheSportsPredictor]

I thought it was great when Spider-Man announced to the world he was really Peter Parker. Kinda disappointed how they retconned it all.

Civil War 2 last year didn't even approach the original.

 

[albert777]

As I posited in the "I Changed My Mind" thread, I've done a 180 on the Civil War since my younger days. I have a few ancestors who fought for the Confederacy. Honestly don't know if they were slave-owners. They were hardscrabble farmers in east Mississippi/west Alabama and if they did own slaves, it more than likely wasn't more than a housekeeper and/or maybe a cook.

Like most white kids with a Southern background, I was indoctrinated in the "Lost Cause" myth, but once I got into college and began to really study the war, it was obvious that the right side won. One thing that has always fascinated me that Confederate apologists seem unable to address is what would have happened in 1914 if the South had won. Would the two American nations have gotten drawn into the entangling alliances that pulled Europe into war in August, 1914? Would the resulting war have been considered a second Civil War, with the North seeing a chance to reunify the country, or would it have become part of the greater conflict? If the USA and CSA had avoided those alliances, how long could they have stayed out of the war? And once they were dragged into the war, would they have been enemies or allies?

And, earlier, would there have been a Spanish-American War (which resulted in the United States gaining possession of an overseas empire) if there were two American states? That I sincerely doubt.

I've read some counterfactuals that poke around at the results of a Confederate victory (victory being defined as the Union suing for peace and the South gaining its independence), but none that have pondered how a divided America would have handled the crisis in 1914.

 

[dixiehack]

They were hardscrabble farmers in east Mississippi/west Alabama and if they did own slaves, it more than likely wasn't more than a housekeeper and/or maybe a cook.

If they were on the margins, chances are any slave they had would have been a field hand. Making a crop each year was priority one, with easing domestic burdens for the women folk seen as a luxury. (Usual caveats about all of it being evil and disgusting apply.)

 

[outofplace]

That brings up another side topic. Does it change how people feel if their families weren't in this country yet at the time of the Civil War? None of my ancestors arrived until the early 1900s and my family all remained in the North until the I was a kid.

My father's second wife was fascinated with the Civil War. They bought and remodeled a home in downtown Charleston, S.C. which had a picture of Robert E. Lee on the wall as you walked in the front door. She insisted they leave it there. I thought it was odd, but nobody down there ever seemed to agree with me.

To answer the question about what is good to read, I'm a big fan of The Killer Angels. It is historical fiction, but the author used documents such as letters written by the participants in the Battle of Gettysburg in his research. Though it focuses on Gettysburg, it explores the causes of the war and the motivations of some of the participants, especially Lee.

 

[CD Boogie]

"Team of Rivals," which was sort of the basis for "Lincoln" with Daniel Day Lewis, was a terrific read. I've always heard Shelby Foote's Civil War series is a must-read, but I haven't gotten around to it. Also just finished the new novel "American War," which posits a second Civil War centered around the South's unwillingness to give up its reliance on fossil fuels. Was thought provoking, but with further remove I'm seeing that some of the suppositions don't hang together so well.

I grew up in the north but went to school in Richmond and Nashville, so I heard a lot of different opinions about the war. Almost every educated person I encountered acknowledged that the basis for the war was slavery, not northern aggression. And the people who didn't were racists, in my experience.

In no scenario were the South in the right. One of my co-workers the other day idiotically said states have a right to secede. Uh, no, they don't. That's why they were called rebels. A state legislature can vote to secede, but there is nothing in the Constitution that provides a path for secession. You're breaking the law by breaking away.

Is Secession Legal?

 

[Starman]

MacKinlay Kantor's 1960 book, "If The South Had Won The Civil War" was one of the first major alternate history books and covers most of those topics, although very superficially IMO.

Essentially his conclusion was that everything would have worked out mostly fine and the three nations (he assumed Texas would have broken off from the CSA) would have been pals and allies.

His first premise is that the Confederates would have decided all on their own to eliminate slavery in the 1880s, a proposition I find preposterous under the circumstances.

In 1860, any white man in the South publicly urging the abolition of slavery would have pretty much have been dragged out in the street and shot on the spot.

The idea that 15-20 years later, public sentiment would swing to the point of general agreement that slavery should be eliminated, IMO is flat-out absurd.

 

[QYFW]

It feeds the rich while it buries the poor.

 

[Captain_Kirk]

What I came to appreciate/learn, the more I studied the Civil War, was how close the south was to actually winning it. They really held the upper hand, at least battle-wise well into 1864, and only the superior numbers of soldiers, supplies and materials for the Union and the slow attrition over time for the Rebels allowed for a Union victory in the end.

Recommend the Ken Burns documentary highly. It's 9 hours, but easily broken up into 1 hour segments.

A couple nuggets from that show that I can recall right off the top:

The guy whose farmland served as the first battlefield of the war, left thereafter to avoid the war and ended up settling at a place called Appomattox, and they signed the peace accord in his sitting room.

At that first battle of Bull Run/Manassas, apparently townsfolk from DC came out to watch the action, not unlike a sporting event. The spectators left more than a little bit shaken and shocked at witnessing mortal warfare in person.

 

[Evil ... Thy name is Orville Redenbacher!!]

"Team of Rivals," which was sort of the basis for "Lincoln" with Daniel Day Lewis, was a terrific read. I've always heard Shelby Foote's Civil War series is a must-read, but I haven't gotten around to it. Also just finished the new novel "American War," which posits a second Civil War centered around the South's unwillingness to give up its reliance on fossil fuels. Was thought provoking, but with further remove I'm seeing that some of the suppositions don't hang together so well.

I grew up in the north but went to school in Richmond and Nashville, so I heard a lot of different opinions about the war. Almost every educated person I encountered acknowledged that the basis for the war was slavery, not northern aggression. And the people who didn't were racists, in my experience.

In no scenario were the South in the right. One of my co-workers the other day idiotically said states have a right to secede. Uh, no, they don't. That's why they were called rebels. A state legislature can vote to secede, but there is nothing in the Constitution that provides a path for secession. You're breaking the law by breaking away.

Is Secession Legal?

I have Team of Rivals (Xmas present from mom a few years ago) sitting on a shelf at home and haven't cracked it. Not a big CW buff. In spite of the fact the CW gave birth to the great state of West By God Virginia and A1 steak sauce.

 

[Starman]

What I came to appreciate/learn, the more I studied the Civil War, was how close the south was to actually winning it. They really held the upper hand, at least battle-wise well into 1864, and only the superior numbers of soldiers, supplies and materials for the Union and the slow attrition over time for the Rebels allowed for a Union victory in the end.

Kantor's book posited that a couple major reversals shifted the tone of several key battles, mainly allowing the South to take Gettysburg, cut off Washington, make a run in the direction of Philadelphia, which then throws the entire Union into panic, resulting in the flipping of the border states Maryland and Kentucky which had previously remained in the fold, and things go to hell rapidly after that.

He also has Grant getting killed in a horse riding accident in 1862 IIRC, never rising to command, and the Union Army being commanded by dithering indecisive defeatists looking for a way out.

 

[CD Boogie]

I have Team of Rivals (Xmas present from mom a few years ago) sitting on a shelf at home and haven't cracked it. Not a big CW buff. In spite of the fact the CW gave birth to the great state of West By God Virginia and A1 steak sauce.

I'm not a buff by any means, but the rotating narrative -- focusing on this group of guys who all vied to be president, lost to Lincoln and then agreed to serve in his cabinet -- is pretty fascinating. Highly recommend it.

 

[dixiehack]

Kantor's book posited that a couple major reversals shifted the tone of several key battles, mainly allowing the South to take Gettysburg, cut off Washington, make a run in the direction of Philadelphia, which then throws the entire Union into panic, resulting in the flipping of the border states Maryland and Kentucky which had previously remained in the fold, and things go to hell rapidly after that.

Hard to say. Even if Gettysburg had been a Southern win, Vicksburg fell at the same time, giving the Union control of the Mississippi River and free access to the heart of Confederate territory.

 

[albert777]

MacKinlay Kantor's 1960 book, "If The South Had Won The Civil War" was one of the first major alternate history books and covers most of those topics, although very superficially IMO.

Essentially his conclusion was that everything would have worked out mostly fine and the three nations (he assumed Texas would have broken off from the CSA) would have been pals and allies.

His first premise is that the Confederates would have decided all on their own to eliminate slavery in the 1880s, a proposition I find preposterous under the circumstances.

In 1860, any white man in the South publicly urging the abolition of slavery would have pretty much have been dragged out in the street and shot on the spot.

The idea that 15-20 years later, public sentiment would swing to the point of general agreement that slavery should be eliminated, IMO is flat-out absurd.

I could see it happening in that time frame IF (big if) the Confederacy's supporting powers (Great Britain & France) were to put enough pressure on the South that slavery became an economic liability. It also would depend on how much industrial development progressed in an independent Confederacy. Could slavery have made a transition from a largely agrarian institution to one that would have been able to man industrial jobs? Interesting questions. Even if the South had acted to end slavery in that 15-20 year time frame, though, any "freeing" of the slaves in the South would have been a token gesture at best.

 

[Starman]

Yeah, I think Kantor's book also had CSA recognition by the European powers coming quickly after the fall of Gettysburg, which contributes to the snowball effect.

Kantor has Grant dying in the riding accident long before Vicksburg, so no big Union victory there.

 

[dixiehack]

Then as now, white Southerners were fiercely opposed to taxation and big government projects (internal improvements in the vernacular of the day). With no Merrill Act to provide for broad-based agricultural education, soil exhaustion and the boll weevil eventually would have combined to leave the economy utterly ruined.

 

[Starman]

I find the idea that industrial/ manufacturing economies were somehow fundamentally incompatible with slavery laughable.

As the industrial revolution and the rise of sweatshops demonstrated, factory owners were always willing to pay workers dirt dog cheap wages. How much of a jump would it have been to go from 10 cents an hour to nothing?

Ridiculous. Factory owners and big industrialists would have been thrilled for the workforce to work for nothing beyond bare subsistence. A dream come true even today.


Also, the Nazis/Soviets certainly showed in the 20th century that involuntary workers could be put to work in factories. Sure, maybe productivity and quality control might not be up to snuff, but effective labor costs of close to zero makes up for that.

 

[User 11148]

Also, the Nazis/Soviets certainly showed in the 20th century that involuntary workers could be put to work in factories.

Yeah, and a fat lot of good it did 'em, too.