Civil War 150th

[warspite1]

ORIGINAL: rhondabrwn

Was just thinking... this thread needs to be preserved for easy and continued access... perhaps in a new forum specifically set up to honor distinguished threads of high value...

At the very least, "stickied" somewhere and not allowed to drift away into the darkness once people stop posting to it.

Just a thought...

warspite1

That is a really good idea Rhonda. Any idea if that is possible Capt Harlock?

[shunwick]

Capt. Harlock,

This account has kept me enthralled and you have my heartfelt thanks for creating this work.

I too would like to see this thread preserved so that it does not sink into obscurity.

Best wishes,
Steve

[vonRocko]

Many thanks Capt. Harlock. The best thread I ever read!

[reg113]

+1

[Josh]

ORIGINAL: rhondabrwn

Was just thinking... this thread needs to be preserved for easy and continued access... perhaps in a new forum specifically set up to honor distinguished threads of high value...

At the very least, "stickied" somewhere and not allowed to drift away into the darkness once people stop posting to it.

Just a thought...

I totally agree with you there Rhonda. Have you emailed Erik about it? This thread needs to be preserved if possible.

[rhondabrwn]

ORIGINAL: Josh

ORIGINAL: rhondabrwn

Was just thinking... this thread needs to be preserved for easy and continued access... perhaps in a new forum specifically set up to honor distinguished threads of high value...

At the very least, "stickied" somewhere and not allowed to drift away into the darkness once people stop posting to it.

Just a thought...

I totally agree with you there Rhonda. Have you emailed Erik about it? This thread needs to be preserved if possible.

Hadn't thought of writing Erik, I assumed he would be viewing. I'll have to do that.

[t001001001]

I don't know if you can publish this, Captain. If you can I'll buy a few copies, I know a few ppl who would thoroughly enjoy this.

Great thread, what a project. Thanks, man

[AbwehrX]

Great topic. However the war didnt end the Confederacy. It still lives on! [:'(]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederados
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_colonies

[Capt. Harlock]

I don't know if you can publish this, Captain. If you can I'll buy a few copies, I know a few ppl who would thoroughly enjoy this.

I am indeed planning to turn this into an e-book. It's going to take a while, because while I have files of the text I used, I don't have the insertion points for all the image files. And I confess that I do not have a central storage place for those image files -- over the course of the thread I posted from Los Angeles, Chicago, Puget Sound, Atlanta, New Jersey, and London.

[Capt. Harlock]

Charles M. Blow has a disappointing column in today's New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/opini ... l-day.html

He quotes losses of various wars that America has fought, but his figures of Confederate war dead total only 133,821. This is clearly in error: for a century the most widely accepted estimates were 94,000 battle dead and 164,00 non-combat dead, giving a total of 258,000. More recent research by Professor J. David Hacker strongly suggests that even this number should be increased by a further 20% or more.

I will state that I am a Northerner, born in Minnesota, and having attended college in the Boston area (which was Abolition Central before and during the Civil War). But the holiday that we now call Memorial Day evolved from a remembrance of all those who fell in the Civil War. It has now justly been expanded to cover all American soldiers who have lost their lives in service, but it still encompasses those who fought in the Southern side. We do a disservice to the spirit of Memorial Day if we count only half of them.

[charlie0311]

Hi,

NYT up to it's normal stuff, ie, world domination, in clever disguise.

That they would use Memorial Day only shows what they, the ubermensch, think of us goyem, cannon fodder, untermensch.

Put this in the wrong place, should be following Capt Harlock's thread, with first remark on NYT

[AbwehrX]

Charles M. Blow has a disappointing column in today's New York Times:

No big deal. The NYT has even less credibility than the National Enquirer. Had you not brought it up here I wouldve never noticed since I wouldnt waste time reading such a pathetic, polemic rag. [:D]

[AbwehrX]

Florida's last Civil War veteran, Bill Lundy, poses with a jet fighter, 1955-

[AbwehrX]

I found this as an afterthought. Funny that the actual CW history is somewhat different from the way its taught.

[shunwick]

Jay Ungar And Molly Mason with Fiddle Fever - Ashokan Farewell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZXIn-s3K54

Best wishes,
Steve

[shunwick]

Another Civil War song...

David Kincaid - We'll Fight for Uncle Sam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQL_EQi ... 4DB8F42470

Best wishes,
Steve

[AbwehrX]

Thanks for those beautiful links Mr Shunwick. [:D]

In other news, I did not know this before. Capt Harlock is this true?? [:@]

http://chuckbaldwinlive.com/Articles/ta ... wered.aspx

Folks, please understand that the only people in 1861 who believed that states did NOT have the right to secede were Abraham Lincoln and his radical Republicans. To say that southern states did not have the right to secede from the United States is to say that the thirteen colonies did not have the right to secede from Great Britain. One cannot be right and the other wrong. If one is right, both are right. How can we celebrate our Declaration of Independence in 1776 and then turn around and condemn the Declaration of Independence of the Confederacy in 1861? Talk about hypocrisy!

In fact, southern states were not the only states that talked about secession. After the southern states seceded, the State of Maryland fully intended to join them. In September of 1861, Lincoln sent federal troops to the State capital and seized the legislature by force in order to prevent them from voting. Federal provost marshals stood guard at the polls and arrested Democrats and anyone else who believed in secession. A special furlough was granted to Maryland troops so they could go home and vote against secession. Judges who tried to inquire into the phony elections were arrested and thrown into military prisons. There is your great “emancipator,” folks.

And before the South seceded, several northern states had also threatened secession. Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island had threatened secession as far back as James Madison’s administration. In addition, the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware were threatening secession during the first half of the nineteenth century--long before the southern states even considered such a thing.

People say constantly that Lincoln “saved” the Union. Lincoln didn’t save the Union; he subjugated the Union. There is a huge difference.
In 1864, Confederate General Patrick Cleburne warned his fellow southerners of the historical consequences should the South lose their war for independence. He was truly a prophet. He said if the South lost, “It means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy. That our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by all of the influences of History and Education to regard our gallant dead as traitors and our maimed veterans as fit subjects for derision.” No truer words were ever spoken.

[Capt. Harlock]

AbwehrX:

Addressing all of the points raised gets perilously close to politics, which could get this thread locked. Let me try to address some of the historical points. It is not at all true that no one but Lincoln and the Radical Republicans denied the right of the Southern states to secede. Among many others were President James Buchanan, a "doughface" or south-leaning Northerner, and Stephen Douglas, Lincoln's opponent during the Senate race of 1858 and the Presidential election of 1860. Alexander Stephens, who would become the vice-President of the Confederacy, gave an eloquent speech to the Georgia legislature against secession, arguing that they should at least wait until the Lincoln administration did something unconstitutional. (Nonetheless, Georgia seceded before Lincoln was even inaugurated.)

There were indeed threats by Northern states to secede, but of course nothing ever came of them. Those threats were used as arguments against secession, by making the point that if the nation could be split in two, why not three or four or more, making any union a "mere rope of sand". And as it happened, the area of the Confederacy west of the Mississippi became for practical purposes a separate entity after Vicksburg.

The article in the link states that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave. As I pointed out in my blog (the January 1 2013 post) it immediately changed the status of at least 20,000 slaves who had run away into Union-held territory, especially the islands off the Atlantic seaboard. As the war went on and the Union armies advanced, the Proclamation freed many more slaves. For instance, during the March to the Sea and later the Carolinas campaign, blacks by the tens of thousands attached themselves to Sherman's forces. There were also liberation raids by Union gunboats on the coasts and rivers, which brought off blacks into freedom. Harriet Tubman accompanied one such as a guide, which probably freed more than she had managed during her entire time on the Underground Railroad.

It is however true that Maryland was held in the Union largely by military occupation. Benjamin Butler began the process in May 1861 after a pro-Southern riot in Baltimore and sabotage of the rail lines. He was relieved of command for exceeding his authority, but by that time the Lincoln administration dared not undo what was going on, for if Maryland had left the Union, Washington D.C. would have been surrounded. About one-third of the legislature was arrested in September. Interestingly, appeals against such proceedings went to Chief Justice Roger Taney (author of the Dred Scott decision), who decided in favor of the pro-Southerners. Lincoln and the War Department simply ignored the ruling, stating that "the Constitution is not a suicide pact".

[AbwehrX]

Thank you for your response. I wasnt attempting to make it political but I do seek reinforcement on the legal precedent for secession however. Curious that Lincoln seemed determined to preclude secession at almost any cost. Thanks for the information.

[Capt. Harlock]

In 1864, Confederate General Patrick Cleburne warned his fellow southerners of the historical consequences should the South lose their war for independence. He was truly a prophet. He said if the South lost, “It means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy. That our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by all of the influences of History and Education to regard our gallant dead as traitors and our maimed veterans as fit subjects for derision.” No truer words were ever spoken.

I wanted to handle this one separately, since I can't claim to be neutral. Cleburne was actually wildly off base. The American Civil War is easily the most written-about war that human beings have ever fought, and there is good reason to think that it will hold this record until humanity ceases to record history. It is also one of the few wars in which the losers wrote as much or more of the history as the winners. Nearly everybody who survived wrote memoirs (with the disappointing exception of Robert E. Lee), and of course most of them tried to make themselves look good (and their opponents look bad). The Southerners wrote such a huge number of works that it became known as the "Lost Cause" school of writing, and the textbooks of the great majority of Southern schools followed the line. George C. Marshall once remarked that when you compared Northern and Southern books it was hard to realize they were about the same war.

When I first started the thread, I only expected to write until the bombardment of Fort Sumter. (Or even less, since many of my other threads ended up locked.) I thought that the ground had already been well-covered by better writers than myself, and indeed there have been some superb works over the years. But the encouragement I received, and the realization that there was also an enormous amount of biased and less-than-accurate writing on the subject made me decide to keep going. One of the reasons for my including so many of the speeches and documents of the time is that the writing during the war is more trustworthy than the writing after the war. (e.g. the contemporary accounts of the Fort Pillow massacre compared with later material.)

In a real sense, the struggle over the Civil War is not over. The questions of "why?" and "what did it all mean?" are very much with us. I take a certain amount of pride in contributing to the ongoing effort; no one can honestly claim to be completely unbiased, but I attempted to report fairly on both the battlefields and the chambers where decisions were made.