at least as likely to have been CS as US fire; it was a pretty confused scene. Yes, I’ve been there and stomped around all the cemeteries in the August heat in ’07; you don’t appreciate August in Virginia unless you come there from 60 degree Alaska! None of my research can locate a marked grave for him so he must be buried in the mass grave of Georgia troops at Blanchford Church.

I’m working from memory and don’t have my maps but if you stand on the works at The Crater, or what’s left of them and face the mine entrance and the main body of union troops, the 48th and the rest of Wright’s Brigade would have been behind you too the left and counterattacked from there. He was killed somewhere between their trenches and the Crater itself; there’s not a lot of records.

I’m going to let that one go.

I truly hope you have no one in your family who is in the military at present because I have a hunch that you wouldn’t be proud of them either.

I’ve been doing some recent reading, and I’ve come to the conclusion that (1) slavery would have ended without the civil war and (2) the war would have happened anyway.

As to the first point, slavery isn’t really cost-effective in any economic situation that requires skilled labor. If you have to start investing significant training into a slave, the financial benefits drop off significantly, and no slave is going to exhibit any level of skill if it’s going to be applied to someone else’s bennefit. Despite the battles that were fought over “bloody Kansas”, slavery wouldn’t have been effective there because the simple farming techniques of the deep south couldn’t be applied. Eventually, slaveholders even in the deep south wouldn’t have been able to compete effectively with the next generation of farming machinery. Within another decade, slaveholders in the south would probably have welcomed a government buy-out.

As to the second, the South was unhappy about the loss of political power that the industrial revolution had brought about; the southern states had been the dominant political and economic force in America since before the Revolution, but by the 1850′s they’d seen that equation reversed. With the industrialization of the North and the huge immigrant workforce that served the factories, the South was no longer able to dominate national politics. When Lincoln was elected without a single Southern electoral vote, there was a widespread feeling among Southerners that they’d become vassals of the North. The fact that Lincoln was aligned with the Abolitionists (who, even with one of the greatest causes in human history, STILL managed to give “self-righteous jerks” a bad name), was really just adding insult to injury. By the way, Lincoln was personally anti-slavery, but he WASN’T an Abolitionist.

There’s a good case to be made that the situation as of 1860 wasn’t “what they’d signed up for”, particularly since the Abolitionists seemed to feel that the constution shouldn’t be considered an impediment to thier Great Cause, and the SCOTUS seemed to be in agreement.

Had the war been only about slavery, the confederates wouldn’t have gotten more than a few thousand people behind them; most southern farmers couldn’t afford slaves, didn’t have operationd big enough for slaves to make economic sense, and resented the unfair advantage that the big slaveholding plantations had.

So, to summarize, the idea that the Civil War was about slavery is about as truthful as the notion that the “Problems” in Northern Ireland are about religion; it’s a convenient sound byte that helps to support a beloved narrative, but it’s a gross oversimplification and fundamentally false.

try again.

liberal who looks down his nose at those of us who live in flyover country and have rural accents, believe in God Almighty, love this country and believe that it’s worth shedding our blood for if freedom is threatened.

And by the way, there’s a link on Gateway Pundit today that will show you whose family DID own slaves–and that would be good ole Barack Hussein Obama.

If you wanted to be respectful you wouldn’t have allowed the inference to occur.

A gutless troll whose sole purpose in life is to take inflammatory potshots on a website.
Guess we wouldn’t have found you on that hill – on either side.

He answered here.

Like I said, they were on the side of evil.

They were right on one thing; slavery was a bad thing that should end, just as the envirowhackos are right that we should not abuse the Earth. After that, it all breaks down for both abolitionists and enviromentalists.

Northern derision towards The South was just as virulent then as today and rich Yankees touring The South and coming back to write their travelogue about life among the degenerates were a stock in trade, see, e.g., Frederick Law Olmstead inter alia. Frederick Douglass, a skilled shipwright, freely admitted that work was easier to get and his material standard of living higher in slaveholding Baltimore than in free Boston. Stowe and Garrison grossly mischaracterized life in the South and grossly overstated the role and effectiveness of the Underground Railway. If every Yankee who claimed to have helped on the Underground Railway actually had, there would have been no Civil War because the slaves would all have been in the North. For a good, modern scholarly look see, Gara’s “The Liberty Line. When Stowe was introduced to Lincoln, he said, “So you’re the little lady who brought on this great war.

The Yankees won and the Yankees wrote the history. There is no doubt that slavery was the proximate cause of secession in the Lower South. It was not the cause of war. War came over the trade and tariffs of the US, most of which came from The South. Before Ft. Sumpter, Greeley was writing, “let our wayward sisters go,” but then he came under pressure from the NY business community over the effects of a free trade South with the Port of New Orleans being the principal trading center for the Y trade of the western rivers and the Mississippi. That portended a bleak future for New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.

Lincoln’s move to replenish Ft. Sumpter and, the Southerns believed, re-arm it was deliberately provocative. Lincoln knew his adversaries and the prideful Carolinians, too small to be a republic and too large to be a lunatic asylum, opened fire on the fort. Even secessionist firebrands like Georgia’s Robert Toombs knew that the CSA had made a mortal error.

Lincoln called on the governors of the several remaining states to provide 75K men to “suppress the rebellion.” The upper South states refused and seceded. Mr. Lincoln and the Eastern business community had their war. There’s a reason the Union Army’s first target was New Orleans. One might wonder what would have happened if rather than withholding cotton from the market, The South had declared New Orleans an open, free trade port just bursting at the seams with cheap, high quality cotton. I suspect the British and French might not have been so respectful of the US blockade.

In any event, only one of the four lineal sides of my family owned slaves and they only a single family, the scion of which, Walter, stayed on with the family until the day my gg/grandmother died in the ’90s. He left that night never to be seen or heard from again. I happen to think that the current government of the United States is evil incarnate but so far I remain loyal to it. So long as I remain loyal to it, I would defend it against any enemy foreign or domestic no matter how distasteful I find its present government. I’ve read thousands of soldier letters, Union and Confederate, yes, Confederates could write, the literacy rates of the two armies were about the same, around 80%. They fought for home and hearth and most of all for honor. Honor defined mostly as the respect of their friends and families. In the Ken Burns WBTS series, Burns asked Shelby Foote about the so-called Pickett’s Charge in an exchange something like this: Burns – Lee’s Army was the most successful and experienced army in the World, they had to know the odds. What made them go? Foote- Because it would have taken more courage not to go.

For instance, Grant owned slaves. Forgetting such tidbits of historical trivia tends to oversimplify the whole of it.

It doesn’t surprise me, and I am not trying to paint the picture that everyone in the North was an abolitionist going to war purely for those reasons, or that those in the South were all slaveholders going to war to keep people enslaved. But, I think you have to consider the outcome, vs the outcome of a Southern victory. I am not trying to assign blame or anything like that. But that doesn’t change the fact that if I had to pick a side today, I’d pick the Union side.

The Civil War ended slavery earlier than it would have ended, for sure, but the mechanization that came shortly after the last shot was fired would also have done so.

Such counterfactuals are always troublesome…many of the Founders thought that slavery was on the way out, quickly, as a result of how they structured things. We can guess this about slavery, but we can never be sure. For all we know it would have lasted another 75 years. Even if it had lasted, say, 20, that is a lot of people, spending a lot of time enslaved. And something like slavery is hard to kill completely, without some event like a war – it would have lived on for a long time even in reduced form.

that pretty much covers it.

but if he were to say he’d like to put on that uniform on again and have another crack at the American army, I would lose my admiration fast.

About fighting for the Union, and being an abolitionist – I am not saying that this is what I would have done had I been alive in the 19th century. I like to think I would, but who knows, right? I am saying what I would do if, starting from now, I went back in time. In which case I would have the benefit of 21st century ideals and all. And, hopefully, technology. And I would be an abolitionist, Union soldier, and radical Republican.

This might seem like nitpicking but it’s important to my central point. I don’t expect anyone with Confederate, or Nazi, relatives / ancestors to live in shame or anything close to it. But there is a big difference between that and saying that you yourself would go back and fight on that side. As to your Dad’s friend, I don’t think we should condemn him – but we also shouldn’t say that we would go back and fight alongside him if we had the chance. That is what some people here are saying wrt the Confederacy.

Slavery is abolished, the South wins, and most people who are living in the South now or intend to come here would need a passport and a hell of an immigration lawyer.

Yep. THAT I would consider.

My family has only been here since the early 1900s so I don’t have a dog in this fight, but what most people don’t realize is that the biggest loss of this war was the original American Republic, a voluntary Republic of sovereign states. Remember that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves in Union controlled territory. With the end of that republic came a much larger, more centralized, more “empire building” country with states turning into mostly administrative areas. We continue to be a house divided against itself even to the present day.

than I realized.

:>)

BTW, has there been a Steve Sighting lately?