This continuing attempt to deify those who would have destroyed this country in order to save slavery is on of this country's greatest shames. These were not men intent on preserving a noble society. These were men intent on destroying a noble expermient so that they could hold humans as chattel, and be able to point to the feilds and say "Lo! I am clearly better than that beast there." Fie. To hell with them, all.

Sherman put it best.

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.

Alan Barra also implies that the U.S. has healed the wounds of the American Civil War. I have to agree with Patrick that I'm not sure which Civil War he's talking about, because there's plenty of open wounds around--witness the controversy over the placement of a statue to Lincoln in Richmond, Virginia recently. As one resident of Virginia was quoted (my paraphrase), "There should never be a statue of Lincoln in Virginia after what he did to us." Ahem. I think a large segment of the Virginia population is quite happy with what Lincoln did to Virginia, as on that day when he stepped off the boat and toured Richmond he was greeted by them with song and cheers.

Hear, hear.

For a book length case against Mr. Lee, see "Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History", by Alan T. Nolan. Some of that book's charges are questionable: it's not reasonable to have expected Lee to give up after Gettysburg, although pointing out that it wasn't just Grant's armies who suffered high casualty rates is fair game. (The "failure to give up" charge earns a demerit from James McPherson, who gives the book what I'd call a B+ review in "Drawn by the Sword.") The "Lee as traitor" and "Lee as post-war revanchist" sections were new ground to me.

The Amazon 2.5-star rating is a badge of honor. The reader reviews are interesting in their own right; at least one reviewer suggests that Thomas Connelly's "The Marble Man" may be a better historical re-evaluation.

If the Civil War wasn't the worst period in this country's history, I'd like to know what was.

I'd argue that Barra is dead wrong about most of the
rest of the war. I remember going to Antietam and
seeing photos of all the bodies all over the road
near the fence. Completely appalling. War should
never be romanticized.

In the West also (Texas, bleeding Kansas) the Civil war was brutal, with the civilian massacres, etc., characteristic of civil wars elsewhere.

A friend of mine who went to college in the middle 60's says that the Southern-revisionist story of the Civil War was orthodox almost everywhere. Immediately after the war the abolitionists were blamed for it by many, including many Yankees. ("The Philosopher's Club" talks about this). With the end of Reconstruction the anti-Abolitionist point of view became stronger, and as the Southern voting bloc in Congress became more important it became part of the political consensus. The Civil Rights movement shook the consensus, but since Reagan it's started to reestablish itself.

It's very odd that the solid RepublicanSouth should have such a hatred of Lincoln, but if you look at voting maps of 1870 or so and 2000, a very high proportion of states have switched parties in one direction or the other.

Barra sounds like a Sobran/Buchanan derivative on the Civil War. Sad to day, this junk is not unfamiliar on the right in journalism....

> If the Civil War wasn't the worst period in
> this country's history, I'd like to know what was.

Well, once there was this thing called "disco"...

No, Christopher of Incoming Signals. Disco claimed a few drug overdoses, and two baseball games. The Civil War was about the right of one man to enslave the other. There is no useful comparison between.

Thousands died to ensure that the federal government could continue, that government of the people, by the people, for the people, would not perish, and that every human being would be one of those people, not merely those with less than a certain percentage of melanin in thier skin.

Disco was merely a boring pop version of funk, not a tragedy -- and those wanting to bring back disco or deify those who created it are merely afflicted with poor taste.

Those wanting to deify the leaders of the Confederate rebellion, or wanting to bring back the Confederacy, are actively persuing a course of evil.

If the Civil War wasn't the worst period in this country's history, I'd like to know what was.

Ummmm... the eighty-odd years immediately preceding it?

Um ... may I stick in a few contrary notes without being accused of defending slavery?

Barra didn't say the US Civil War was "a gentlemanly affair" in comparison with peaceful civilized society, he said it was so -by contrast- to other countries' civil wars. And even including CSA execution of black POWs, it quite probably was. This policy eventually stopped under Union threats to cease prisoner exchanges altogether, and bad as it was, it's not quite systematic genocide of blacks as a group as there was, say, of Muslims in Bosnia.

Which is not to say that the things done to blacks in the US Civil War, and before and after, were not very bad. But as far as the Civil War goes, even Patrick's corrected version isn't accurate either. Insofar as blacks didn't have a gentlemanly affair (above & beyond the fact that they had been slaves -already-), whites didn't either.

To my eye, the most glaring error in Barra's comment is his claim that the Civil War wasn't a "scorched-earth affair." That's ironic, as modern scorched-earth warfare was pioneered by Gen. W.T. Sherman in his march through Georgia. Call it justified, or denounce it; either way Sherman's deliberate policy was to wreak such complete destruction on the South's capacity to supply itself that it would wipe out their desire and capacity to continue fighting. It seems pretty much to have worked.

I'd also query Barra's bit about "wounds that didn't heal for centuries." The specifically party political echoes of the English Civil War took about a century to die down to background noise; with the U.S. Civil War it was about the same. (And that's leaving out other echoes which continue, but, insofar as race relations are concerned, pre-date the Civil War and were not caused by it.)

Erik, I think COIS was trying to make a joke. Not in great taste, maybe, except as comic relief, but I hardly think he was attempting a serious comparison of the Disco era to the Civil War.

Eric's inability to recognize a joke, even if it's a bad joke, is rather alarming, as is some of the vehemence of his attitude.

Lee's motivation was not defense of slavery, for which he had no special beef (any more than Jefferson did, though they were both slave-holders themselves), but his decision that patriotism towards his state trumped patriotism towards his country. That sounds quaint today, but it was the nationalism forged by the Civil War that made it quaint.

Yes, Lee's decision made him a defender of an evil system, and he did evil things in its name, as Patrick observed, and he should be criticized for that.

But it's the blanket "go to perdition, go directly to perdition" card issued to anyone who'd say the slightest ameliorating word about a slave-holding system ("Those wanting to deify the leaders of the Confederate rebellion" - deify? is Barra doing that, really?) that's disturbing.

Eric, would you apply that blanket denouncement to the entire American Revolution as well? Dr. Johnson asked at the time, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" It was a good question.

Yes, and thanks for coming to my defense. The only reaction I was expecting from that comment was a mild chuckle.

If you really want to find 20th-century pop music that's Civil War-scale bad, you have to go to Pat Boone's metal album.

Alan Bostick quotes me saying "If the Civil War wasn't the worst period in this country's history, I'd like to know what was," and replies:

"Ummmm... the eighty-odd years immediately preceding it?"

However you slice it, you have a long period of slavery, then four years of slavery plus bloody civil war. It's hard to argue that the latter is "better", although good things can and do happen as the result of wars.

Simon asks, in an aside:

("Those wanting to deify the leaders of the Confederate rebellion" - deify? is Barra doing that, really?)

I have no idea if Barra is doing that or not, but there is ample evidence of the glorification, if not deification, of Southern War leaders. I've been reading quite a bit of James Branch Cabell recently. Cabell was born in Richmond in 1879 and pretty much spent his formative years there. In one essay, he relates how he listened to his parents, grandparents, and their friends talk about Robert E. Lee as if he were King Arthur, who would return one day to restore the South to her glory (Jefferson Davis became Merlin, while the other generals became knights of the round table). Part of this is Cabell's young romantic imagination, but it doesn't take very long on a visit to the south to see how much of it is quite close to the truth.

Glen, remember Mark Twain's observation that the entire Civil War might have been averted if the United States had had the foresight to ban the works of Sir Walter Scott.

Simon, I think Erik (note spelling) has simply had it with the unending efforts to make excuses for slavery and its enthusiasts. You can sniff at "the vehemence of his attitude" if you like. Personally, it seems to me that if there's a political proposition worth being "vehement" about, it's the idea that there's no excuse for slavery, and certainly no excuse for taking up arms in its defense. Then again, according to Thomas Cahill, my saintly namesake was the first guy to articulate the idea that slavery is flat-out wrong. Not "it's wrong to enslave those people" or "we should treat our slaves better," but "slavery is wrong." Maybe that's an "alarming" level of "vehemence."

You're right about this, though:

"Insofar as blacks didn't have a gentlemanly affair (above & beyond the fact that they had been slaves -already-), whites didn't either."

True. Teresa this morning remarked on a semi-ancestor (the second of a polygamous great-to-the-nth grandparent) whose family home in Tennessee was raided and destroyed multiple times by both sides. There was a lot of that, particularly in border states. One need only read the history of Missouri to dispense with the fraudulent notion of our Civil War as a somehow nicer event than the wars of those Europeans and South Americans.

The fact is that civil wars everywhere, wars fought among the members of a semi-homogenous population, are defined both by intermittent outbreaks of humanity (both sides, after all, come from the same or similar stock, and combatants may well be socially acquainted or even related) -- and, similarly, by episodes of breathtaking brutality (for the same reasons). This is true of those South American and European wars to which Barra alludes and it was true of the American Civil War. Aside from being a rehash of one of the classic cliches about 1861-1865 (and an inadvertant demonstration of just how nicely those cliches serve to whitewash the slave power), Barra's remark is an exercise in American exceptionalism, the (usually unexamined) belief that we're nicer and better because, why, because we just are, that's all.

"Dr. Johnson asked at the time [the American Revolution], 'How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?' It was a good question."

It was indeed. The basic American attitude, and you will find it everywhere you look, is that all 280 million of us get to be proud of the parts of our historical heritage that we enjoy thinking about -- the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the defeat of the Axis powers, the landing on the moon, make your own list. But perish forbid we should be asked to feel discomfort about the parts that are less enjoyable. I didn't enslave black people! I didn't wipe out entire populations of American Indians! You liberals just want people to feel guilty for stuff they didn't do. Yeah, well, you probably didn't write the Bill of Rights or land on the moon either, buster. (Okay, so I have at least one author for whom that argument doesn't actually work.)

So Franklin pulled off that trick with the brandy barrel?

(Actually, I know who you mean.)

Those wanting to deify the leaders of the Confederate rebellion, or wanting to bring back the Confederacy, are actively persuing a course of evil.

Umm...I have a southern cookbook, and in it there's a recipe for "Jefferson Davis Pie." If I bake it, am I actively pursuing a course of evil?

I think at a certain point, some romanticizing is useful.

Simon, Erik is being earnest. He has a sense of humor. And I don't find his emphatic remarks at all disturbing.

There's a difference between mistakes made at the time of the Civil War, and making those same mistakes now.

And by the way: No man ever died for states' rights.

Kevin, that depends. Is it Jefferson Davis's own recipe, or was it named in honor of him, or does it use Jefferson Davis in the filling?

Alternately, is it a recipe for hash, only you announce at the end that if everyone at the table indomitably wills that it's a pie, it'll be one?

Glen: Sure, absolutely, there is real deification of the CSA leaders, and I'm just as skeptical as you are of what they're being deified for. But Erik [sorry about misspelling; memory doesn't always hold long enough to scroll down to the comments block] brought up the topic of deification unprompted by anything except Barra's remarks and Patrick's criticism of them. Either that's over-reaction or it's a response to people a lot worse than Barra; and if the latter, he should have said so.

Patrick: Whatever we may think about people like Trent Lott going around today, the vehemence that I'm sniffing at is the one that seems to be saying, "This person in the past condoned slavery, and is therefore utterly evil and should not be praised or excused for in any way." I don't believe that's justified, and I'll continue sniffing at it.

As you seem to be saying, if St. Patrick was the first person in human history to condemn slavery outright, it'd be a big stretch to say that everybody before him was evil.

Even Lincoln was not an abolitionist; even the Emancipation Proclamation was a political tactic that didn't free slaves in any Union-controlled territories.

L.P. Hartley said, the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. Morality evolves; it's a messy thing. Every time we say, with our hindsight, that the abolitionists were entirely Right and everyone else was entirely Wrong, I hear echoes from 300 years from now, when perhaps it will be said of us, "Some of these people actually -condoned the eating of animal flesh-! And even wrote praises of its delectability!" And they might say, "It seems to me that if there's a moral proposition worth being 'vehement' about, it's the idea that there's no excuse for carnivorism."

I am no vegetarian, and don't intend to become one. But I can easily imagine a future in which theirs becomes the moral standard as abolition is today. So I'm willing to cut the slave-holders of the past a little moral slack. Because while some of them were evil (animal-torturers of today are evil), others were merely conflicted, imperfect human beings, creatures of their time like you and me. That includes Robert E. Lee. Condemn what they did, but don't condemn them in their entirety. Or, judge not lest ye be judged, as somebody once said.

Teresa wrote,

"Erik is being earnest. He has a sense of humor."

Was he joking in his response to Christopher? It sure didn't read like it. And if not, whatever sense of humor he had elsewhere went right out the window on this topic. Which is a sign of what's disturbing about it.

"There's a difference between mistakes made at the time of the Civil War, and making those same mistakes now."

Oh, indeed. But trying to understand and explain the past, and failing to condemn it with sufficient vigor, is not that mistake.

"And by the way: No man ever died for states' rights."

If Robert E. Lee had died in battle, he would have died for states' rights. That's what -he- was fighting for, even if nobody else was, poor deluded bastard.

(What did the US and UK troops who died in Iraq die for, do you think? If your answer is, "For the lies of George W. Bush," they're just as culpable as he is. But I don't think you'd say that.)

It appears only to have been named in honor of him, though the note says that if you leave out the nuts and spices, it's Kentucky Pie.

Of course, mumia was used as a spice occasionally in 19th century recipes, and Jefferson Davis should be the right age now that I suppose I could make Jefferson Davis pie with some real Jefferson Davis.

Where is his tomb anyway? All over SF we have these signs that say "Free Mumia!" but there's never anyone handing out samples or even directions on where you can get it.

To all of you who think that my blanket condemnation is a little over the top, let me sum up the very basic and salient facts here.

1) The southern states attempted to break the union in order to continue a practice that is morally undefensible, by activly waged war against the legal civil authority. There is *exactly* one word to describe this conduct. Treason.

2) Each and every southern officer who was a former US Officer, including Mr. Robert E. Lee, not only committed treason, but violated thier oath taken as a officer to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. They are traitors and oath breakers.

They should not be declared "romantic heros." They should be shunned and hated. What Mr. Lee did was a thousand times worse that what John Walker Lindh did. JWL might have taken arms against the US. Lee *lead* arms against the United States, causing the death of tens of thousands citizen and soldiers of the United States.

Lee, Early, Jackson, Davis -- all of them -- are traitors, by the very definition of the term. Any man professing admiration is admiring a traitor. Any man flying a Confederate flag is flying the flag of a traitor. Any man defending them is defending treason.

The harm they caused resonates still -- indeed, is once again insurgent in the land. Lincoln's first mistake was letting these officers renounce thier commissions to fight for the confederacy, they should have been ordered to stand for the US, if they refused, they should have been tried for failure to follow lawful orders. Johnson's big mistake was not hanging them after they were defeated, provided they lived that long.

The gentleness that Grant and Sherman showed when the rebellion collapses shows the favorable nature of thier souls, and reflects well on them, personally. But they should not have treated the leaders of the rebellion so. The final act of the Civil War should not have been Jefferson Davis dying in bed of old age, with his memoirs spreading the lie of "States Rights," while the KKK rages through the south, and Jim Crow becomes king. It should have ended with him swinging at the end of his rope -- the last casuality of the rebellion, and the end of a traitor, and those who professed pride in those actions called to task for admiring a traitor.

"Judge not lest ye be judged"

Good advice, generally. Except that, well, we are human beings and we judge. I hear what you're saying. But I don't think our collective understanding of the Civil War really suffers from an excess of condemnation of the slave power. Quite the opposite; since before the ink was dry at Appamattox, defenders of the indefensible have been striving, with impressive success, to muddy the issue.

Simon, slavery was evil. Robert E. Lee was not the worst of its defenders, but he was fighting to preserve slavery. Erik's opinions are more complicated than you acknowledge, and far more intelligent than your summarized version of them would suggest.

Suggesting that Patrick thinks everyone who lived prior to St. Patrick was evil is also an inadequate reading.

Lincoln was a politician first, a Unionist second, and an abolitionist third, but Southerners at the time never doubted he was an abolitionist. He abolished as much slavery as he could, as early as he could, without throwing the political system into even more chaos than it was already in, and without causing further damage to the Union.

L. P. Hartley's quote cautions us that the past is different, but that doesn't mean we can't understand or judge it. Our understanding of morality changes (some say evolves), but that doesn't mean morality is arbitrary. And if you go on insisting that you're arguing with people who've said the abolitionists were entirely right in all things and everyone else entirely wrong, I'm going to at minimum cast doubts on your reading comprehension, because that's not at all what's being said here.

Then again, in response to Erik, there's this:

"On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war97seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.9

"One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.' If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

If Robert E. Lee had died in battle, he would have died for states' rights. That's what -he- was fighting for, even if nobody else was, poor deluded bastard.

This is a complete, unmitigated lie. Lee knew exactly what he fought for -- the preservation of slavery. It is very clear from his letters, his actions, and his orders. Lee fought hard against the CSA recruiting blacks into the army, giving in only when all hope for his actions was already lost.

The entire concept of "State's Rights" and "The Noble Cause" are lies promugalted by Jefferson Davis, after the war, primarily through his memoirs, but also from his tireless efforts and travels.

Read the documents of secession of the various states. Read the coorepsondence between the confederate military leaders and their government. Look at the legislation these same men promuglated before the war, and tell me how much concern they had for states rights.

"State's Rights" is a lie, pure and simple, trying to disguise what the Civil War was about. It was about one thing, plain and simple -- the continance of slavery. The southern states were willing to help form the Union only when it was agreed that slavery would not be barred in the new land. The southern states committed treason against the Union when the Union was on the verge of deciding that evil comprimise, made in order to secure a good, was no longer justifiable.

It's that simple. The ample evidence of such is available in the public archives of the land.

Erik, Simon's opinion of what Lee was fighting for clearly differs from yours, as it does from mine. That doesn't make it a "lie".

By gad, Kevin, you're right. I'll add that to my list of advertised disappointments.

(You are certainly right, though, that "states' rights" is largely bunkum, and that the public statements of most of the Confederate leadership amply demonstrate that they had no doubt what the war was about.)

Lee would have died fighting for states' rights? No. A man who felt that strongly about the abstract principle of states' rights would have been fighting long before the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter. He'd have been denouncing the fugitive slave laws, at the very least.

I always end up being split in these kinds of arguments. I grew up in the South (family from LA,TX,OK) and the main involvement of my ancestors in That Late Unpleasantness was running Confederate cotton across the border into Mexico to evade the Union blockade. At the same time, I lived through the civil rights movement while in the South, including attending jr. high in Montgomery during the march from Selma. Unlike many of my classmates, I could just not see what the problem was with what the protestors were asking for (which caused problems until I learned just when to shut up and when speaking out worked).

Figures like Robert Lee are a real problem for historians. He is a wonderfully attractive person, while remaining a mystery in many ways. (It isn't unusual for that time, but it still amazes modern readers like me that someone dould write so much, be so quoted, and leave so little evidence about his own feelings, his internal life.) An exemplary husband and father, personally admired throughout the prewar army, an admiration that continued during and after the war on both sides. His behavior after the war in rejecting bitterness and promoting reconciliation while retaining his own dignity set a standard that few others could match. Calling Lee noble is not a stretch -- calling the war he fought noble, however, means that you are not paying attention.

The problem is that some confuse Lee's qualities with the war he fought -- a problem common to a certain kind of historiography, or more properly, historio-hagiography. Some of the leaders on both sides of the war may have been truly admirable men (and of course, very similar, as many had been members in common of the US Army and fought together in Mexico), but what they oversaw was the conversion of war from the Napoleonic maneuver art (which is how they were trained, it was the language they spoke) to logistics driven attrition warfare. The defensive strategy at Petersburg (where Longstreet deserves as much credit as Lee) at the end of the was a prediction of the Western Front. Almost everything that we hate most about wars, especially in the 20th century (outside of WMD's -- and lying about WMD's) was a part of the Civil War. The particular qualities of the leaders of either side, be they hateful or admirable, are irrelevant to the central issue -- the horrors of war arise from the pathology of warfare itself, enabled by available technology. They may have started the war leading a noble crusade, but they lead it to a charnel house. One may admire the qualities of the two leaders who met at Appomattox Court House, but those qualities seem less relevant when reading about Andersonville, or of the treatment that black Union soldiers recieved as prisoners of war.

Slavery is another difficult one. Opposing slavery was more sucessful as a unifying force in the Union, especially as the war went on, than supporting slavery was in the Confederacy. It's a subtle point, but the South's moral failing was not supporting slavery, but, not opposing it. Many southerners did not like slavery, but they tolerated it, they argued for the amelioration of its worst features, they might even free their own personal servants in their wills. Both sides had a problem seeing African-Americans as fully human (see Lincoln's own views on African repatriation), but the North strugged with it and made a few halting steps upwsard. The South refused to recognize it as a problem. The sacrifices made by the North in the war demanded that some great moral purpose be found for it -- and eradicating slavery fit the bill. Without the war, I'm not sure what would have brought eradication in the South.

The real problem, the real creator of confusion on these issuses, has nothing directly to do with the Civil War at all. It is the effort by those with a particular economic and political program, largely in the South, throughout the 20th century to oppose true human rights for poor whites as well as poor blacks. These groups used and twisted the languages and themes of the Civil War to promote their own ends, ripping symbols and phrases from their historic attachments, such as the Confederate Navy Jack (what is usually seen as the "Stars and Bars") or "states rights". These were used to divide, to make sure that there would be no threat to things as they were, no matter what the damage to Southern society as a whole. The painful memory of the Civil War lived on in the South well into the 20th century, but it gradually died out, with time and new challenges. (I have always marked the real end of the shadow of the Civil War as the first celebration of the 4th of July in Vicksburg - in 1941.) What we are dealing with now, the renewed celebration of some figures, the supposed Confederate Flag, "Dixie", is a new thing, growing out of the reaction to the changes brought to the South by the Second World War and its aftermath. Don't worry about Robert Lee -- it's Tom DeLay that should be worrying you.

No, Robert Lee would not have died for state's rights. What he would have died for is his own honor, and for Virginia.

That does not mean that he would have been right . . .

What Teresa said about Robert E. Lee and "states' rights."

Amazing how using the power of the Federal government to force the citizens of free states to enforce slavery isn't, as it turns out, a violation of "states' rights."

Just as amazing as the way that, today, Attorneys General who give interviews to Post-Confederate Gravy Eater Magazine have no problem trampling all over the rights of states, if what those states want to do is, for instance, decriminalize medical marijuana.

Excellent post from Claude Muncey.

Incidentally, as I've remarked in previous discussions like this, my only ancestor that I know of who fought in the Civil War, fought on the Confederate side.

Hmm, as I remember from my history lessons--and this in liberal California--there was also something to do with tariffs, and how southern plantation owners would rather send their cotton to England than to mills in the north, so the north wanted tariffs to keep it in the country, and....

Ye gods, doesn't that mean that mills in the abolitionist North were wanting cotton picked by brutally exploited slaves in the South? What were they thinking?

Weren't there children working in those mills too, come to think of it?

So far as I learned, the Civil War was about economics. States rights and slavery on one side and "the Union" and abolition on the other, both as convenient rallying points for what boiled down to dollars and cents. It made good economic sense for the South to leave. It made good economic sense for the North to force them to stay.

At the end of the day, slavery was gone, which was a good thing. But it wasn't the North's main objective, which was preservation of the Union and thereby the country's economic viability as a developing nation.

Patrick: However you slice it, you have a long period of slavery, then four years of slavery plus bloody civil war. It's hard to argue that the latter is "better", although good things can and do happen as the result of wars.

Well, this depends on your position on the Pacifism/Militancy scale, really. There are those who would say that a period of slavery without any chance to defend yourself or your family, fight for freedom, or have any hope, really, is worse than a period where slavery continues, but you know someone, even if it's not you, is fighting against it; where you have hope that it will end - even if the second period is filled with death and bloody conflict.

I'm not sure I'm one of them; I'm not sure you're not right. But it does seem to me that there's a case to be made that 250 years of suffering without hope are worse than 4 years of suffering and bloodshed WITH hope.

War is evil. Slavery is appalling and horrific. Our Civil War destroyed lives on a catastrophic level.

Having said that, there are always better or worse choices that can be made.

I saw a documentary on the History Channel a month or so ago about the week after Lincoln was assassinated, and one of things that struck me was how, when there was a choice between diving even deeper into retribution and bloodshed, or stepping back, surrendering on one side and allowing the loser to save face on the other, there were a few men (including RELee) who chose the side of healing, quite likely preserving the fragile US from years of further destruction.

In an anecdote which may or may not be apocryphal (I don't have enough info to say), RELee was said to have helped break the color barrier at a newly integrated church when an African-American man knelt for communion, and no one would kneel beside him until RELee came forward and joined him.

For what it's worth.

Simon -
Merely making a joke does not excuse one's statements from criticism; a joke can itself be unwise, ill-chosen, or ill to speak.

Erik is expressing views which, to my way of thinking, tremble on the brink of being unconscienably wishy-washy; I think Thomas Jefferson was a contemptible hypocrite, and that every slave owner in the South should have hanged at the conclusion of the American Civil War, along with every Confederate officer, every elected offical of the Confederacy and its component states, and every appointed offical of the Confederacy itself, that their archives, books, and papers should have burned, and that the right to own more land than a person themselves dwealt upon or farmed by their own labour or had there their place of business been forbidden throughout that territory until the last Confederate veteran was dead.

It is a great and culpable folly to pour out blood and treasure, to fight a great and ghastly war, to rend the fabric of the nation, and to then throw all such blood and sacrifice away by permitting the defeated to write such history as pleases them.

The United States has done this; you have the harsh and entirely unenviable task before you to do it again, or to go down into servitude, one based not on race, but on wealth, a transfer of moral justification from the dark man to the poor man, that he serve by the will of God made manifest in his state of servitude, a justification which forbids regard of what labour has been done to create for Almighty God this state of affairs, one which had the Almighty, maker and creator of all things, but sufficient time to devote from His judging of the nations surely have made Himself.

I would pray to whatever powers might hear me that you are this time more thorough and more wise in victory than your fathers before you proved.

hurrah Rachel.

Kevin Andrew Murphy: "Ye gods, doesn't that mean that mills in the abolitionist North were wanting cotton picked by brutally exploited slaves in the South? What were they thinking?"

Slavery was a system that benefitted the privileged and powerful in all parts of the country, as many a firebreathing pre-war Abolitionist would have been the first to tell you. It's no revelation that many New England business interests benefitted immensely from slavery; this was indeed the focus of much agitation.

Xopher: "It does seem to me that there's a case to be made that 250 years of suffering without hope are worse than 4 years of suffering and bloodshed WITH hope." Good point.

Rachel Heslin: "...men (including RELee) who chose the side of healing, quite likely preserving the fragile US from years of further destruction."

Maybe. Then again, there are those ninety postwar years of the sharecropping system, lynching, legally-enforced segretation, and all the rest of the apparatus of Jim Crow. Hard to see the "healing" in all the lives eaten up by this.

Graydon, on the other hand, you are getting carried away. Burning their libraries? Hanging all the officers? Jeez. Take a deep breath.

'All over SF we have these signs that say "Free Mumia!" but there's never anyone handing out samples or even directions on where you can get it.'

I was similarly disappointed to discover that the George Foreman Grill wasn't large enough to grill a decent sized cat, much less George Foreman.

Here is a quote on the fundamental motivations of the Confederacy, provided in Scalzi's essay on why the CSA was evil. From the CSA's vice president:

"...Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition.

"This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics...

"One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics; their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just -- but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails...

Keven Andrew Murphy asks where Jefferson Davis is buried. I was just there two weeks ago: Hollywood Cemetary, Richmond, Virginia. Given the direction of this conversation, people might be surprised at what's inscribed on one monument:

JEFFERSON DAVIS.
AT REST
AN AMERICAN SOLDIER.
AND DEFENDER OF THE CONSTITUTION
BORN IN CHRISTIAN CO. KENTUCKY JUNE 3.1808.
DIED AT NEW ORLEANS LOUISIANA DEC. 6.1889.
WEST POINT CLASS 1828.
MEMBER OF HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
FROM MISSISSIPPI.1845-1846
COL.1ST MISSI.RIFFLES MEXICAN WAR 1846-1847
BRIGADIER GENL.U.S.ARMY MAY 17.1847.
U.S. SENATE 1847-1851
SECRETARY OF WAR 1853-1857
U.S. SENATE 1857-1861.

A different monument reads:

PRESIDENT OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES
OF AMERICA. 1861-1865.
FAITHFUL TO ALL TRUSTS, A MARTYR
TO PRINCIPLE. HE LIVED AND DIED THE
MOST CONSISTENT OF AMERICAN
SOLDIERS AND STATESMEN.
---
BLESSED ARE THEY WHICH ARE PERSECUTED FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS SAKE FOR THEIRS IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.
---
ERECTED BY HIS WIFE
VARINA HOWELL DAVIS,
AND HIS DAUGHTER
MARGARET HOWELL DAVIS HAYES.
NOV. 9, 1889.

(I was there to visit the grave of James Branch Cabell.)

Kevin, as usual, there were almost as many reasons to go to ware as there were people to posess them.

For some, it was truly an geopolitical/economic war -- not a global conflict as we would see 70 or so years later (communications tech wasn't good enough). But "manifest destiny" was a given idea no matter which side you were on. We tend to see the Confederacy as the states stretching from Virginia to Texas, but many saw the New Mexico Territory, southern California (where there were large groups of organized Southern sympathizers -- a fascinating little corner of history in itself), Mexico and various parts of the Cariibean as natural extensions of it. (One reason a number of ex-Confederates formed colonies in a variety of Latin American countries.) At the same time, the northeast had becone a little image of the British industrial system (with our own twists) that saw the Brits as competitors and the rest of North America as a natural market, for the same reasons that the Brits built a colonial empire. The two visions of the future of what we call the US today were not compatible, and would have come into some kind of conflict at some point. Even if you had no problems with being part of the US, you could object to being a colony of Massachusets or Pennsylvania.

(And, BTW, if there is one part of the US that it is easy to see in almost classicly Marxist terms, it is the South, starting with the late Colonial period and stretching through to WWII.)

But the ambiguity over the essential nature of American government, over just what was an American nation-state, caused its own problems. The original Articles of Confederation did not work, but they were probably close to what a lot of people, especially in the South, wanted. A central resource for a navy and such, that would not threaten the sovereignity of their own homelands. The issue was not "states rights" (a 1950's bugaboo) -- it was over the nature of original sovereignity in the American polity. As has been so widely quoted, before the war, one said "the United States are" while afterward one said "the United States is". We find the idea that Robert Lee would fight first for Virginia quaint (for whatever reason) -- a Southerner at the time would have found it so natural as to not be worth comment.

Graydon, Jefferson was a very conflicted man, whose ideals far outstripped both his understanding and his will to put them into practice--as indeed they might have outstripped anyone's; in my view he'd have done better with less power and no right to own people. Kevin, for heaven's sake. Yes, sometimes Northerners profited from slavery. It remains true that it was the issue of the unCivil War (what Muncey said)--the only issue on which North and South could not find a political compromise. Less obviously, the contortions the Framers had to make to write a constitution which could incorporate both slave and free states remain a problem to this day.

I think this discussion points up the common conflict between the beliefs that a society uses to structure itself and the reality of particpation in that society. I rather suspect that, however little idealists like me like it, such a conflict is inevitable. The old South was full of would-be nobility--people who truly believed they were living out a revived feudalism with themselves as the benevolent ruling class. Their ideas about themselves remain part of US culture to this day. As Cervantes found, and as Tolkien's critics have found, the ideal of the nobility that is truly noble (the second meaning postdates the first) has more lives than a truckful of cats--hence the fascination with the honor of people who, really and truly, believed the good lay in fighting to preserve the rigid, cruel social order of the antebellum South.

Erik: I believe your vehemence is perfectly on display here; thank you for sharing it. Your position on what should have happened after the war is identical to that of the most extreme of the Radical Republicans. I urge you to read the words of Abraham Lincoln, kindly supplied by Patrick. I believe most historians today would agree that Lincoln was not only morally more generous, but politically wiser. He said on another occasion,

"Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced, and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them. ... Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides, and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions as to terms of intercourse are again upon you."

Even if the Union won the war decisively, as it did, the two sides were going to have to live together. How best to accomplish this? It was this, not revenge, which concerned Lincoln, and that was the fount of his wisdom. If you believe that the failure to execute more Southern leaders was responsible for the rise of Jim Crow, you are quite mistaken. Northern unwillingness to enforce civil rights laws, generated in part by the desire to avoid another civil war after the stolen election of 1876, caused that. Had we executed Davis and Lee, it would have generated nothing except to intensify the sense of grievance on the South's part. You sound like Israelis and Palestinians determined that this time, by gum, they're really going to teach the other side a lesson. Do you not realize not only how morally vacant, but how politically futile, that is?

Your notion that Lee was clearly a traitor is only clear in retrospect. At the time, seccession rights and the question of whether higher loyalty lay to state or nation were still very much open questions in US constitutional law. It was the war which settled them.

But if Lee was a traitor, consider this: the Signers of the Declaration of Independence were even more clearly traitors to the British nation to which they owed allegiance. Would you have had them hanged? Or did military success make them retrospectively correct?

The people who ran the Underground Railroad in the 1850s were in direct and conscious violation of the Fugitive Slave Law, the duly authorized law of the land. Some of them were government officials. Were they acting in violation of their oaths? Would you have had them punished in the same way?

Patrick wrote,

"I don't think our collective understanding of the Civil War really suffers from an excess of condemnation of the slave power."

In general, no. Within this conversation, I think it does. Not from you, though, but from Erik.

Teresa wrote,

"Erik's opinions are more complicated than you acknowledge, and far more intelligent than your summarized version of them would suggest."

I note this opinion, and I also note Erik's thirst for bloody revenge against men 130 years dead, and I will form my own opinion of the complexity and intelligence of his beliefs.

"Suggesting that Patrick thinks everyone who lived prior to St. Patrick was evil is also an inadequate reading."

That is indeed an inadequate reading, as I was suggesting exactly the opposite.

"Lincoln was a politician first, a Unionist second, and an abolitionist third, but Southerners at the time never doubted he was an abolitionist."

The opinions of one's most vehement political opponents are rarely an adequate guide as to one's aims and motives, as any liberal today could tell you.

"He abolished as much slavery as he could, as early as he could."

It was not good enough for the extreme abolitionists, who condemned him for not doing enough; and it was not his motive. Lincoln wrote,

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union."

Teresa further wrote,

"And if you go on insisting that you're arguing with people who've said the abolitionists were entirely right in all things and everyone else entirely wrong, I'm going to at minimum cast doubts on your reading comprehension, because that's not at all what's being said here."

In all things? I said nothing about all things. This was a discussion of slavery. May I cast doubts on your reading comprehension? What is being said - by Erik - is that slavery is so entirely wrong that all attempts to "deify" (his word) those who -even incidentally- supported it "are actively persuing a course of evil."

Those who held Erik's position at the time were called "abolitionists." Erik believes they were right, and he believes this with sufficient moral fervor (cf his posts, passim) that I do not believe it is a misreading to say that he believes all other positions were wrong. That is what is being said here, I believe. And if not here, it is certainly being said elsewhere. I doubted that Erik was referring to Barra when he wrote of deification; if he has the privilege of making reference to the outside world, so do I.

Teresa and Claude are correct that Lee would not have died for "states' rights" in the abstract; he would have died for Virginia's rights in particular. I accept the correction, but I don't think that changes the point. Erik's post on the subject is over-vehement again. State's rights was not a lie, not to Lee. It was a truth employed by Southern leaders to further false purposes, just as "Saddam Hussein was a bad man" was a truth employed to further false purposes. Eventually states' rights was employed so consistently and universally for that false purpose as to undermine any value it might once have had. Erik's comments about the motives of the South in general are quite correct, but they do not apply to Lee. Lee did know what causes his fighting would promote, and I condemn him for that - but it was not -why- he fought. My statement was not a lie; neither was it an untruth. Erik, by writing things like "Look at the legislation these same men promuglated before the war, and tell me how much concern they had for states rights," seems to think I was discussing the South in general. About "these same men" I am in full agreement with Erik, but I was not discussing them, I was discussing Robert Edward Lee (1807-1870).

Claude wrote,

"Calling Lee noble is not a stretch -- calling the war he fought noble, however, means that you are not paying attention."

A nice distinction, and generally a fine post. I hope you do not think I called the war noble, or even that Barra did.

As for Graydon, there is not one human being living who could pass the fine moral grain that his standards imply. Unless he's writing a parody, which for about half his post I thought he was.

Whoops - hit post instead of preview . . .

But we cannot eliminate a more idealistic reason, which appears to have been an important motive for Lincoln and others. We seem to have forgotten how deeply these people believed in political philosophy, and how well read they were in it. They took their Montesquieu, Locke and Hobbes straight, no chaser, thank you very much. For all his image as the rough frontiersman, we know Lincoln had no problems dropping legal maxims into a discussion, in Latin -- as any experienced lawyer would at the time.

To many, the issue was "can a stable democracy exist?" To them, any government that allowed the losing side of an election to just leave, to not be bound by that election, would soon not have elections at all. And that is what the South did. For all the discussions of slavery and state's rights, they did not like the election of Lincoln, so they decided to leave. Yes, the conflicts involved had been brewing for years, and discussions of "secessh" had been popular in the South for some time. But the ideals presented in the Gettysburg Address didn't just occur to Lincoln on a train -- they appear to have been on his mind the entire time.

Taking the original review on its face, I suggest it might be possible to disagree with the facts. The Swiss had some internal arguments which can be laid to religious differences or to economic differences or to population pressure (I'd like to read Juan Rico's writings on war) where the underlying difference in the local economy is emphasized by the need to share when they broke for lunch - one side had the grazing lands to contribute cheese, the other the growing lands to contribute wheat so they famously did.

Given that he has his facts wrong, the credit to Lee simply doesn't follow (leaving aside a possible reframing to allow absolutely anything to be logically implied by a falsehood).

On the notion of the fate of traitors I can hardly agree that being traitors made the fates of the White Rose or the Red Orchestra appropriate or justice or whatever loaded word you choose.

On Lee's postwar actions, I for one hold to the belief that nothing "may or may not be apocraphal" - to introduce the possiblity is to assert the fact - something apocraphal may or may not be true - like the death of Schrodinger's cat neither true nor false pending more evidence. In this case I believe the incident happened but not that it broke any color barriers, nor integrated any churches for the duration.

Losing my vowels won't bother me, this post is too long already - so I'll dare to say "you all" can argue why the North fought and why the South fought - I only know the family version of why my ancestors fought - some fought to end slavery (Quaker influenced), to save the South, some fought for glory, some because everybody else was doing it, some because it's what soldiers do and most of these might apply to the same person or from time to time - we still have a chest with a bullet from Quantrill's raid on Lawrence - I don't remember draft riots on the frontier, just desertions like Sam Clemens - does that make Bierce the better man or does Huck Finn count as fighting the good fight?

Alternately, is it a recipe for hash, only you announce at the end that if everyone at the table indomitably wills that it's a pie, it'll be one?

Now _that's_ funny. I laughed out loud at work.

I don't see how anyone could really make the case that this was about "states rights" - Virginia didn't attack Fort Sumter, and the Confederacy had a president and money, didn't they? I very much doubt that if Alabama had decided to drop out of the war after a few years the rest of "the glorious south" - not "the loosely associated temporary alliance of southern states" - would have shed a regretful tear and let it go.

For that matter, it doesn't seem to me that I recall territories being asked to make up their own minds on becoming slave or free states when they entered the Union in the years before the war.

I'm working on a project that has to get finished. I can't dive into this discussion. But lord, I'd love to; and I'm enjoying it tremendously.

Bravo, Claude.

Graydon, the archives should be preserved. I'm not sure about hanging all the officers, either. The Confederate Congress definitely got off much too lightly.

Stefan: The error-correcting modem. The stud finder. The universal remote control. (I really do keep a list.)

I forget whether it was Effinger or Dozois who, upon seeing a sign that said "FREE SOVIET JEWS", threw the car he was driving into a violent swerve while shouting "Let's pick up a six-pack!"

Simon wrote: I hope you do not think I called the war noble, or even that Barra did.

Not at all Simon. But I think that Barra is starting to slide in that direction. There is so much to admire in Lee, and in the military enterprise that was the Army of Northern Virginia. There is no doubt that some of the greatest human talents are proufoundly exercised by the military arts and sciences, and our finest virtues are often revealed on the battlefield in unique ways. I am the son of a professional officer, with all that entails. My reaction on the occasion that I met a person wearing a single blue ribbon with stars was nearly religious (no kidding). The profession of arms is an honorable one.

While war can often be necessary, It is never desirable. To me, there is not one capability or virtue produced or revealed by battle that in itself justifies going to war. Sometimes it seems that admiration for military talent or personal honor can blur that.

Catherine, nice quote. However, you and Scalzi would be better served with a quote from someone else. Stephens was no doubt a racist -- so were many others including the eventual Union VP and President Andrew Johnson. But Stephens was possibly the most irrelevant political figure in the Confederate government and took little part in it. In fact, he spent more time, with more effect, as a US Congressman both before and (ironically) after the war.

Teresa -
Hope the project goes well.

The reason for hanging all the officers is that the objective in this sort of war is to destroy the culture of the losing side.

(I happen to think that the antebellum South culture should be destroyed, but that's distinct from the question of competence in the prosecution of such a war. Also note that the Southern side seems to have had a much clearer awareness of this, and to have successfully defended their culture to a considerably greater extent than the Northern side has.)

Destroying the culture means getting rid of the sources of moral authority and historical continuity; that means getting rid of the leadership classes.

Compare and contrast the results of Bloody Cromwell and the American Civil War; the former did a much, much better job of producing cultural change than the ACW did.

Claude,
Is the Stephens quote an accurate representation of the philosophy behind the foundation of the CSA? Stephens may have been irrelevant politically. Dan Quayle seems to have been, too. However, if Quayle were to have lectured on "The Republican Party and the 3rd Ammendment" during his tenure, one could certainly assume it was a fair take on the GOP and the 3rd Ammendment.

I don't quite have time to search the plain of infinite monkeys for a better quote, and I think the main points of Scalzi's essay (and his earlier one, Southern Heritage is a Crock) stand unless one can show that Stephens' long lecture was not representative of the CSA. I imagine it will be hard to find evidence of this.

Other interesting points from the essay:
"Yes, the United States had slavery ... However, the United States did not codify evil into its Constitution by enshrining the practice of slavery; as Stephens proudly notes, it took the CSA, among all other countries in the world, to do that. The United States has done evil, but is not fundamentally evil in its formulation, as is the CSA.

"It comes to this: When someone tells you the Confederacy was about something other than people owning people, they're either being intentionally disingenuous or (more charitably) are ignorant about the deep and abiding role slavery had in the formation of the CSA...

"...as to whether a memorial for American soldiers who died in combat should include names of Confederate soldiers ... My response is that it shouldn't, for the reason that either the CSA was its own country, in which case its soldiers weren't "American" soldiers ("American" understood to refer to citizens of the US), or it wasn't its own country and the Confederate soldiers were in open and treasonous rebellion, and as a general rule one does not commemorate traitors, particularly ones whose rebellious actions ultimately caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands...

"...Now, look: I understand that for a lot of Confederacy fans, it really isn't about race or anything else other than pride for the South. My response to that is: Groovy. Go for it. Love the South. What y'all need to do, however, is get some new symbols, some that don't harken back to the Dixie Days, when you went to war for the right to keep owning people. The Confederacy was evil, and now it's dead, and its being dead is front and center the best thing that there ever was about it.

Graydon wrote:

"...every slave owner in the South should have hanged at the conclusion of the American Civil War, along with every Confederate officer, every elected offical of the Confederacy and its component states, and every appointed offical of the Confederacy itself."

Which presumes, of course, that the friends and relatives of the tens of thousands of men that would have been swinging from trees and gibbets *wouldn't* have written such history as pleased them. Talk about wild optimism!

Vehement disdain for the pathetic lie of "Noble Lost Cause vs. The War of Northern Agrression" is well and good, but haven't we learned how impossible it is to burn or murder a viewpoint into nonexistence? The Nazi Holocaust, the Great Cultural Revolution, Stalin's purges and mass murders... none of them (despite their genuine horrors) succeeded in eradicating their intended targets, even with more malice and more resources than the Union ever could have had.

The admittedly tempting possibility of direct vengenace against the perpetrators and servants of the CSA had to be weighed (and still must be weighed) against the poisonous hatred it would have sown in the already bitter South, and against the burning shame it would have wrought in the North for generations thereafter, and against the cumulative, compounded misery these factors would have heaped upon everyone, including all of us spitting electrons into Patrick's blog, born in the nearly fourteen decades since the war.

You think the pro-CSA folks are bitter, vengeful, and deluded now? Imagine how pleasant they'd be if a nontrivial percentage of their great-great grandfathers had danced on the end of a rope after a war they'd already resoundingly lost. Would such an act have spontaneously convinced the South's survivors that the Negroes were a-ok, and that the Yankees were swell folks? Or would it have offered ironclad proof that the Unionists *were* the callous devils that Southern delusion and propaganda had made them out to be?

One of the drawbacks of living in a free and civil society is that you sometimes have to put up with the willful historical ignorance of the completely fucking deluded. They'd still be here if all of their great-great-grandfathers and uncles had swung. In fact, I'd argue they might even be worse off, and so would we all.

Teresa,

For your list then:

A couple years ago, I was at a con, and Alison Lonsdale said, "Oh, I can't stand the Gorian bondage scene down here," which I heard as 'Gorey-an,' asking, "You mean, as in 'Gerald did a terrible thing to Elsie with a sauce-pan'?"

Then again, that may just be me. For years I couldn't hear people talking about 'Riff-Raff' without thinking about the Mafioso wolf from Underdog instead of Dr. Frankenfurter's faithful handyman. It's also embarrassing when talking of 'The Misfits' to confuse the punk act with the evil girls band from 'Gem.'

On the subject of this thread, however, part of my point with the northern mills taking southern cotton is that boiling the whole conflict down into slave vs. free has the unfortunate consequence of making both sides look like nothing but glassy-eyed zealots. Not everyone in the north was an abolitionist, the same as not everyone in the south owned slaves or even gave a damn about owning them. Sherman burning your house, on the other hand....

"Compare and contrast the results of Bloody Cromwell and the American Civil War; the former did a much, much better job of producing cultural change than the ACW did."

He also did it in a totally different country, at a totally different time, against a totally different social backdrop. I politely pooh-pooh this comparison as not even a case of "apples vs. oranges," but "apples vs. breadfruit."

I certainly sympathize with you, Graydon. I'm just not at all convinced that the actions you advocate would have served the greater historical good rather than a "sperm urge" of limited utility.

Um, what Scott Lynch said. I like Graydon, but on this issue I think his bloodymindedness and determination -- good character traits in the right circumstances -- have the better of his judgement.

Kevin, of course "not everyone in the South owned slaves." Indeed, the history of Union sympathizers in the South, even in the middle of states like Alabama and Mississippi, is an interesting one. Some people were quite clear on the idea that the interests of the planter aristocracy were not theirs.

The impolite term used by CSA supporters for the white Union sympathizers in their midst was "scalawags" - this term has been adopted, without impolite intent, by historians, and some interesting things about them may be read by googling it.

I92m continually amazed at the ability of the USCW to cause raised voices, despite the fact that the shooting stopped almost 140 years ago.

For years, I held so tightly to the image of the CSA as the embodiment of evil, that my ears were effectively closed to any opinions to the contrary. I92m still convinced that the CSA, and the institution that it was founded to preserve, were evil. There is a place for apologists and moral relativism, but this is not one of them.

That said, I can now listen to people who think otherwise without getting angry. Why? Perhaps because I have traveled more in the South and understand that the story, and it92s retelling is pretty complicated. Or, it might be because I can see the potential for (and history of) acts of evil by the USA. No government, organization, society, or individual is completely evil, or innocent of evil.

It92s perfectly understandable that people would want to put a varnish of respectability or at least of justification over the actions of their ancestors. I92m willing to ignore most of it, just as I can ignore monuments to Robt. E. Lee in front of Southern courthouses. That said, what I cannot ignore is failure to learn the lessons of history, and condoning the contemporary evils that still haunt us as a legacy of the Civil War.

Evils such as using Southern anti-black sentiment to drive electoral strategy. Or deliberately disenfranchising African-Americans in ways that would be tolerated nowhere else. Or redlining. Or basing school funding on the property tax base. Or a host of other things that black Americans routinely deal with that spring from slavery and from the backlash against Reconstruction.

A little bit of romanticizing of R.E. Lee or the Confederacy pales in comparison, except when it ties into an oppressive agenda.

So, back to the original point 96 if Alan Barra wants to think that Lee was a better person than he probably was, or that the most terrible war in American history was something other than a bloody horror 96 it just discredits him. It92s disappointing, particularly in a publication like Salon, but not the end of the world. And it92s probably more of a reflection on the increased militarization of American culture, not an aggravating factor.

"You think the pro-CSA folks are bitter, vengeful, and deluded now?"

Thanks to Scott for writing this response, which is better than anything I could come up with.

Slavery and aristocratic societies aren't the result of some rare toxic meme; they wouldn't go away by burning some books and hanging ideologues. These ancient and odious institutions are the result of a _lack_ of a meme . . . the Proposition Lincoln describes in the Gettysburg Address.

Anyway . . . can you imagine the twisted Our Lost Golden Age fantasies that the survivors, refugees, and exiles of a humiliated South would come up with if the official records had been erased?

Hmm. There's the seeds of a very interesting Alternate History story there. There actually was a colony of exiled Southerners in South America, dreaming of a triumphant return and living out their dippy aristocratic dreams. A critical mass of them, claiming the authority of an exiled government, could cause real trouble.

Just reminding those of you hanging on the free mumia subplot of the Kliban cartoon playing off a mid-20th c. slogan: "Save Soviet Jewry! Collect them all, trade them with your friends!"

Myself, I hear red-meat commentary like Graydon's, and the logophile, pacifist, and 'Bama boy inside of me find themselves in utter agreement. Not often that happens. --I'm perversely proud to count as ancestors folks from Winston County, Alabama--the only county to secede from the Confederacy, so far as I know. It wasn't all that principled a stand--my father likes to say it was because they were all poor, owned no slaves, and just wanted to be left alone with their moonshine. Still: I think I like them best of all my family tree's branches, better than the Wiggin who rode with Sherman, whose cavalry saber is in a closet somewhere in my folks' home, and who then carpet-bagged his way into the remnants of a branch of the Middletons; and I like them better than those Middletons, who made a fortune growing rice along the South Carolina coast with techniques picked up from their West African slaves, and who add signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Ordinance of Secession to the ancestral pool; and I like them a damn sight better than Robert E. Lee. Or Ulysses S. Grant. (To neither of whom am I related. Though the Spouse is descended from a relative of Lee's, now I think of it.)

Of course, seceding from the secession didn't do Winston County a damn bit of good. And it didn't make the world one whit of a better place. Being left alone is all too often an unsupportable luxury. And I think they mostly appeal to the cantakerous streak of libertarianism in me that my good liberal guilt usually keeps in check.

But I still like those Winston County folks a lot.

To bring it back to an ostensible point: Barra's an idiot. This comments thread is in its own civil way proof enough (along with the hundreds of others more and far, far less, from every conceivable perspective on the Late Great Unpleasantness, that you can find day or night on the Stateside web) of just how scorched the earth still is, from those courtly gentlemen and their chivalrous affair.

You know the tune they play for the groom to come in, at a wedding, rather often? I have no idea how often, where you might happen to be, but at least hereabouts, it's rather often.

Hail the Conquering Hero Comes.

It was written for the Duke of Cumberland, in comemoration of the successful conclusion of his genocidal policies towards the Scots after 1745.

Those policies most certainly did work; that culture is as dead as Ancient Egypt.

All the Scots are not dead; there are people clean around the world who sing Jacobite songs in pubs and make a point of Burns Night and have no clue that what they're celebrating is a Victorian romantic construct, a myth of nation blessedly free of the contamination of history.

There were any number of cultures, tribes, what have you, that Stalin quite successfully erased; it's not impossible to argue that he got all of them and that post-Soviet Russia is precisely that, a collection of fragments struggling to recreate itself in the form of a nation.

There isn't a surviving Miteleuropan Jewish culture; it's gone, Yiddish is headed toward dead language status at great speed, its cultural position destroyed, its people scattered.

You could look long and hard before you found a First Nation -- what is the American polite term? -- with a continuous cultural tradition.

The point is not to kill everybody; the point is to break the chain of cultural transmission and authority. This is not in concept difficult nor in logistics excessively demanding, there are successful examples from before Sargon of Akad. It's highly unpalatable in its particulars, and it perhaps says good things about the persons prosecuting that war from the Union side that they -- unlike their grandfathers, burning out loyalists -- were reluctant to resort to such measures.

My own view of the matter is that there was such a disproportionate slaughter of the Northern Abolistionist idealists that even 'free but not equal' became a political impossibility to implement, and that the New England civilizing culture never recovered.

And, Graydon, you know what they call the people who did those things, erased those cultures?

The United States would have been monstrous to have done what you asked. The war would have been worse than lost if the peace had been waged the way you suggest.

All the Scots are not dead; there are people clean around the world who sing Jacobite songs in pubs and make a point of Burns Night and have no clue that what they're celebrating is a Victorian romantic construct, a myth of nation blessedly free of the contamination of history.

I thought Burns Night was an excuse to read Burns poetry, drink scotch and make jokes about haggis.

Celebrated it for the first time this last one. Grand fun, and after compositing a recipe for vegan haggis, using banana leaves in place of sheep stomach, had something likely rare for a Burns Night: Requests for seconds and thirds of the haggis and no leftovers.

Meat was salmon.

Catherine, concerning your quotes from Mr. Scalzi:

It comes to this: When someone tells you the Confederacy was about something other than people owning people, they're either being intentionally disingenuous or (more charitably) are ignorant about the deep and abiding role slavery had in the formation of the CSA...

...as to whether a memorial for American soldiers who died in combat should include names of Confederate soldiers ... My response is that it shouldn't, for the reason that either the CSA was its own country, in which case its soldiers weren't "American" soldiers ("American" understood to refer to citizens of the US), or it wasn't its own country and the Confederate soldiers were in open and treasonous rebellion, and as a general rule one does not commemorate traitors, particularly ones whose rebellious actions ultimately caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands...

Fine, but you might be surprised by who would disagree with you both -- like Abraham Lincoln, and many of those who fought for the Union. Lincoln, as the good lawyer he was, was out to establish more than that the Southern armies had been defeated and the Confederate goverment put to flight. He did not accept that these states had ever effectively seceeded, and denied that their governments ever had the power to -- which was the whole legal point of the war. His interpretation, was that specific persons had comitted treason and usurped control of state governments. Lincoln combined this with a wise policy of promoting postwar reconciliation -- he knew that whether we liked it or not, the South and North had to live together somehow. So he (by proclamation in 1863) pardoned "persons heretofore engaged in said rebellion to resume their allegiance to the United States" as long as they took and maintained an oath of renewed allegiance to the US Constitution and to support the legal emancipation of slaves. (BTW, senior CSA government and military officials, as well as anyone who had not properly treated black soldiers or their officers as prisoners of war were excluded.) Lincoln's entire reasoning was that the South could not cease being American for a moment -- but individuals could screw up state governments and foment rebellion. The answer was to concentrate on them, but allow everyone else to resume their lives as citizens, and reconstitute local governments.

As far as cemetaries and memorials and such, that is an issue that was settled many years ago. In the couple of decades after the Civil War, the veterans of the two sides tended to exclude each other. For example, Union dead at Gettysburg were interred in the national Soldiers Cemetary there, while Confderate dead were gathered up some years later, and returned to their home states, or to well known cemetaries in the South as Hollywood in Richmond. But as the years went by, the two sets of veterans felt a closer bond with each other than with those who did not know the War. Today, memorials for both Confederate and Union units dot the battlefield at Gettysburg -- and often had representatives from both sides at their dedications. Union and Confederate veterans often met separately, (especially with groups like the GAR having political power) but often cooperated on major anniversaries and encampments. By the early 20th Century, each had largely accepted the presence of the other and their memorials at historic sites. (BTW I'm not a big fan of the use of the "Stars and Bars" by some at these sites, as it is often unhistorical and has come to represent too many other things.)

...Now, look: I understand that for a lot of Confederacy fans, it really isn't about race or anything else other than pride for the South. My response to that is: Groovy. Go for it. Love the South. What y'all need to do, however, is get some new symbols, some that don't harken back to the Dixie Days, when you went to war for the right to keep owning people. The Confederacy was evil, and now it's dead, and its being dead is front and center the best thing that there ever was about it.

I can agree with you that the the Confederacy is as dead as Julius Ceasar -- but that is not the issue anyway. Those who have promoted the the use of these symbols are not promoting the CSA or slavery -- they are promoting a much more recent political, social and economic agenda. Go ahead and argue about statues and memorials all you want -- a good historical argument is hard to find. But don't confuse a worthwhile historical argument with the issue of flying the supposed Confederate flag and such.

That said, I can now listen to people who think otherwise without getting angry. Why? Perhaps because I have traveled more in the South and understand that the story, and it92s retelling is pretty complicated. Or, it might be because I can see the potential for (and history of) acts of evil by the USA. No government, organization, society, or individual is completely evil, or innocent of evil.

I lived in the south for over 10 years. I watched the promising political career of a black man, the Mayor of Charlotte, Harvey Gant, destroyed in one night by a well placed ad by Jesse Helms, that played one card and only one card -- the race card. It worked. Gant went from a 5 point lead to a loss. In one day.

The idea that "A little bit of romanticizing of R.E. Lee or the Confederacy pales in comparison, except when it ties into an oppressive agenda" is missing the point. The whole fucking reason for romaticizing Lee is to hide the evil that he and the others in the confederacy did, and allow that evil to fester in the dark. This evil is simple.

They killed thousands in a futile bid to keep a group of people enslaved.

Period.

Lee was no gentleman, nor humble. To his "equals" -- fellow Virginian Aristocrats and the like, he might have been. But to anyone not of his percieved social status -- such as *any* member of the US Military -- he was anything but. Indeed, his own hubris cause the travails that beset him from Gettysburg onwards -- he assumed that he could give Grant and Meade one thrashing and send them on the run. He never thought, until the bitter end, that the Union would ever send anyone to fight him -- since, of course, the Union didn't have any fighters -- all the fighters were Confederates.

And so forth.

I will not tolerate the romaticization or deification of these monsters. Oh, and Simon, who can't figure out the difference between the American Revolution and the Civil War? One was fought to secure freedom from tyranny for a people, and the other was fought to secure enduring bondage for a people. I'll leave it to you to figure out which was which, since you are such a *good* judge of character. I'm glad I've earned your disgust and emnity -- if I were to earn your praise, I could find little stronger proof on how wrong I was.

Kevin -
You will note that I didn't say that the Union should have emulated the Duke of Cumberland; I said that it should hanged a list of people who were all -- by the Union's legal theories -- unquestioned traitors, who had either taken up arms against the Constitution or given very substantial aid and comfort to those enemies by collecting taxes to support the war effort of the first group and otherwise gone about lending their names to such appearance of legitimacy as the rebellion was able to maintain.

That would have fit very squarely into the scope of the rule of law, as many of the things the Union had already done in the prosecution of that war did not.

It is a great pity to have Sherman's March, and the campaigns of movement in the West, and the comprehensive slaughters of the long Eastern stalemate, and then not act to secure the victory thus brought so near to achievement.

The idea that "A little bit of romanticizing of R.E. Lee or the Confederacy pales in comparison, except when it ties into an oppressive agenda" is missing the point. The whole fucking reason for romaticizing Lee is to hide the evil that he and the others in the confederacy did, and allow that evil to fester in the dark.

Ah, at last, the sinister purpose of "The Dukes of Hazard" is revealed! Little did I suspect the ulterior motive when, as a child, every Friday I watched Bo and Luke repeatedly wreck the shocks of the undefeatable General Lee, stars and bars prominently displayed on the roof. Not to mention Daisy Duke's lace-edged cut-offs tantalizing me between car-jumps, keeping my mind away from the festering evil....

Please. People need heroes, and if they don't have them, they'll invent them. Elementary schools don't talk about Lincoln's actual politics ("Screw the slaves--Just preserve the Union!"), Jefferson's slaves and mistress, or Benjamin Franklin's membership in the Hellfire Club or authorship of the letter on why young men should have sex with older women. So if folk in the South want to paint similar rosy pictures of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee as brave rebels (glossing over the unpleasant bits about what they were rebelling to protect), I'm not particularly alarmed about it.

Unvarnished truth is all well and good for college students, but I somehow think there would be strong objection to "Mistresses, Slaves and Blowjobs--Our American Presidency!" becoming a standard text in the country's elementary schools.

Well, Kevin Andrew Murphy is certainly demonstrating a positive talent for saying things I would have said in a way that makes me wonder whether I'm full of shit after all.

Thanks for the lesson in how the little people can't be trusted with the truth. I'll keep that in mind.

Unvarnished truth is all well and good for college students, but I somehow think there would be strong objection to "Mistresses, Slaves and Blowjobs--Our American Presidency!" becoming a standard text in the country's elementary schools.

It is one of the duties of the office, after all. The president is a solar fertility deity; if he has lots of sex in office, then the economy will thrive. Clearly Dubya's not up to the job.

Graydon, there's no need to go hanging all those people, except maybe in Charleston, Savannah, the James River plantations, and a few bits in and around New Orleans. Everywhere else, the most objectionable features of Southern life had an economic rather than a cultural basis.

As I think you've heard me say before, for me the interesting fact about those pretty antebellum mansions is that most of them had been built within the lifetimes of the people who were living in them when the war started. Unless you're talking about one of the abovementioned areas, that genteel old Southern tradition was of relatively recent vintage.

Watch: Cotton. Textile mills. Eli Whitney. Reliable cash crop. Reliable market. A labor system that, like the steam engine, removed the limitations hitherto imposed by an individual human's endurance. That'll raise up a nice crop of nouveaux riches in nothing flat.

Once you had the land and the human capital in place, you could could pretty much count on the crop coming in and the market taking what you had to sell. It's that thing capitalism loves best: a predictable product and market creating a reliable profit.

There's an interesting quote from someone visiting the antebellum South who said the only thing anyone wanted to do was get hold of some land and some slaves, become a planter, and join the landed gentry. Endquote nowme: Naturally, they'd claim afterward that they'd always been members of the gentry.

(I have this urge to say something seriously politically incorrect, like "a bunch of jumped-up Scots-Irish on the make who knew a good thing when they saw it and weren't going to let it go without a fight." Good thing I know better than to do that.)

The really distinctive streak of Southern culture didn't have much of anything to do with the slaveholding plantation system. It's people like Kip Manley's ancestors in Winston County, and the ancestors of three out of four of Patrick's grandparents. They've never been a political power. As Patrick once observed, you couldn't chop up the Appalachian uplands between more states if you tried, which could be taken as an indication that maybe someone did. The upland population in one state has always had more in common with the uplanders in the other states than they did with the lowlanders in their own state.

They're poor and self-sufficient, and never did get into owning slaves. Until recently they spoke a dialect of Elizabethan English, and their culture is so tenaciously traditional that half the old English ballads we have were collected in the Appalachian hollers.

The Appalachian uplands were always trouble for the Confederacy, and would have continued to be troublesome if the Confederacy hadn't cocked up its toes and died. They're why West Virginia is a separate state. It used to be part of Virginia proper -- the Old Dominion. When Virginia seceded, West Virginia said "Hell, no!" and counter-seceded.

Comparable areas in other Southern states would have done the same thing if they'd been sure they could get away with it. But they couldn't, so instead they stayed in, and had their young men forcibly conscripted by the Confederate gummint. If any of those wound up being officers, it was a minor miracle. I wouldn't have hanged them when the war was over.

Others enlisted on the Union side. This is another one of those nifty facts that post-Confederate revanchists never get around to mentioning: Every Southern state except South Carolina sent units to fight for the Union. Appalachia sent a lot of them, relative to its sparse population.

The South never was unified under the Confederacy, and I don't think we should hand it to them now.

Why did God make me earnest and long-winded, instead of punchy and funny like Avram?

TNH scripsit: "This is another one of those nifty facts that post-Confederate revanchists never get around to mentioning: Every Southern state except South Carolina sent units to fight for the Union. Appalachia sent a lot of them, relative to its sparse population."

What she said. Say, this Teresa Nielsen Hayden person should write a blog or something.

Of course, the real point Kevin Arthur Murphy makes is that "glossing is okay" -- since glossing over Lincoln's conflict about emancipation, or that Thomas Jefferson held slaves and was conflicted about the direction this country should take is okay, that glossing over the true purpose of the Confederacy is also okay.

Hint, Mr. Murphy. Lincoln was conflicted about freeing the slaves -- at the beginning of the war. By his death, he'd decided the right thing -- the slaves must be freed. Thomas Jefferson made similar choices for the greater good -- even though he committed an evil -- he allowed slavery to be established in the new country he had helped build.

Robert E. Lee and Jefferson David activly stood up and fought for four years to preserve slavery -- and stood to *destroy the nation* in order to preserve that evil notion.

Is is so hard to see the difference?

The idea that "There must be heros" may be true. But, if so, there must be villians. And the fact that there are so many willing to declare Lee and Davis heroes shows just how wrong our handling of them was.

So, yeah, when I see the General Lee on TNN, I feel nothing but disgust. Because there our Our Heros, bent on making it Just Fine to bear a flag born on the principle that Slavery is Right.

To hell with them.

Avram, I bow to you, I am not worthy . . .

The only time I was ever that funny was by mistake!

Jeez, i am really surprised at the level of humorless idiocy being displayed here by certain people. (Simon, and both Kevins, and a few others, are certainly exceptions.)
No doubt Erik Olson has a sense of humor and is capable of complex thought, as you say, Teresa, but there is absolutely no evidence of it here. Check the response to the joke about disco. Hello?
I've followed Allen Barra's byline since he wrote for the East Village Eye back when I worked there in the early 80s. Film, sports...he writes about a lot of different subjects. No doubt he is a nice person, but as far as his writing goes, I thought he had his head firmly wedged up his ass back then, and I've found no reason to change my opinion since. The last thing I remember reading by him was an idiotic pan of the Clint Eastwood film Unforgiven, which he referred to throughout the article as The Unforgiven.
As for the general topic, I guess the best way to begin is by stating my unequivocal opposition to capital punishment. Now, and then if I'd lived then. There are a lot of things to criticize about Lincoln, but his desire for peace after the long hard war is not one of them.
Peace is about breaking a cycle of violence, not about perpetuating it.
Anyone who says that slavery was not a primary reason for the Civil War is ignorant, but anyone who says that was the only reason for it is just as ignorant. The vast majority of Southern soldiers were not slaveowners, and didn't necessarily care about the perpetuation of the Peculiar Institution. And the vast majority of Union soldiers didn't care about it either.
And there's a reason the Cherokees fought on the Confederate side...

Symbols change.

Growing up in California, the only time I ever saw the stars and bars outside a history book was on the 'Dukes of Hazard.' To me it stood for fast cars, moonshine and Daisy Duke in hotpants--good, red-blooded American values.

Given enough time and reruns of the 'The Dukes of Hazard,' few will know or even particularly care about the original, darker meaning. People gloss over unpleasant things all the time, and I think it's a bad thing in general to go around telling children how much their ancestors sucked. Dirty laundry is better saved for middle and high school, when the kids actually want to hear about gay pirates with syphilis and Benjamin Franklin, master scam artist.

Since Lee and Davis weren't hanged after the Civil War, when people had far more reason to, I see little reason to hang them now. Besides which, as was mentioned upstream, after the war, Lee worked for reconcilliation. Seems an admirable quality to me, and probably did more to heal the nation than self-flagellation and ritual suicide would, or even a good old-fashioned hanging.

So yes, it's glossing and romanticizing. It's part of the process whereby history becomes history.

Jefferson Davis was some guy they named a pie after, and General Lee was Bo and Luke's car.

Graydon - the Duke of Cumberland didn't commit genocide, and the butchery he did commit wasn't against 'the Scots' but against the Jacobites (and any others who got in the way). I'm at the moment reading a new book, Neil Davidson's _Discovering the Scottish Revolution_, that helps to make sense of all this, and I'll review it shortly on my blog.

The symbols of the defeated, Wrong But Romantic, counter-revolution became part of the new national culture of Scotland. They were not originally symbols of Scotland. They are now, and more have been added. Tartan, the kilt, the clans, the Jacobite songs co-exist with Smith and Hume and the Covenanter martyrs' graves and Predestination in the stride o' yon connecting-rod and the Crofters' War and the Rent Strike and Clydebank burning in the blitz in a national consciousness that like all national consciousnesses is as logically consistent as a dream.

None of this minimises how awful in its consequences the counter-revolution would have been. But because it was so comprehensively defeated, it is no longer toxic. I hesitate to comment on a culture I know so little about, but I suspect that if it weren't for the still-open wound of racism the symbols of the South might have become likewise decontaminated. As it is, of course, they've become part of the ideological toolkit of a capitalist oligarchy intent on confirming the grimmer predictions of Daniel De Leon by way of fulfilling the more apocalyptic prophecies of Jack London.

Re: hanging the traitors. This was done in Ireland after the Easter Rising. It met with only partial success.

Kevin Andrew Murphy:

"So yes, it's glossing and romanticizing. It's part of the process whereby history becomes history."

I suppose, if you're one of those for whom "history" means "the folktales we tell ourselves." (Henry Ford: "History is bunk.") I'm not quite so ready to give up on the idea of that "truth" thing. More fool me.

Personally, I find this sort of comfy cynicism far more breathtaking, and appalling, than Erik Olson's passionate overstatement, even if I do wish Erik would armor his arguments a bit more carefully. No doubt Robert LeGault will find reason to call me names for that, along with his dissing of Erik.

Patrick, Robert said that Erik was being humorless in this argument, which is not inaccurate. Kevin Murphy's take on the assimilation of historic symbols isn't altogether cynical. It is focused on lightweight popular culture, though, which is not the arena where the Civil War is being fought over.

To the best of my knowledge, no one in this discussion is exceptionally evil or stupid, though a few of us have been less courteous than we ideally might have been. (I do not except myself.)

Ken -
I very much look forward to that review. Certainly, what I know of the Duke of Cumberland's activities would qualify as genocidal by the standards I use. I don't think that's principally a side effect of having a good emotional sense of what being dumped in Quebec would be like, and getting clearances tangled into the post-45 stuff.

Iain -
16 named martyrs is a different thing in its effects and consequences from a good-faith effort to erradicate a class of people. (Which certainly had happened in Ireland, quite extensively, over the previous five or six hundred years or so.)

Teresa -
The problem with the neveau riche is that they have quite frequently built their whole self image on being the new thing. That seems to make them in a perverse way somewhat less change fragile than an actually traditional culture, because they have only hostile responses to change, and the trad culture might actually have to think about it.

The problem with being regional about treason trials from a legal standpoint is that there isn't any way to do that and maintain equality before the law, and that is very important, perhaps especially in such circumstances. I would certainly not advocate treating conscripts in the same fashion as volunteers, but more or less by definition, there aren't any conscript officers. That may not be nuanced, it may not be one of the places where the law matches reality at all, and I surely don't like the New Model Army strong officer/enlisted split but I persist in the belief that there is something vital about it, and the Southern officer corps should not have benefitted from the entirely appropriate mercy shown to their troops.

What Ken MacLeod said.

If the ideals of the slavers were forgotten, weren't still bubbling along as a very unpleasant undercurrent, if everyone thought, the way that Sasha does, that segregation and inferiority of black people were so inherently stupid it couldn't be taken seriously, then romanticising the surface and the heroes of the US Civil War within popular culture (though not in serious histories!) would be part of the way popular culture works.

It's pernicious to have that happen in serious histories in any circumstances, obviously.

But it's the existence of people who secretly agree with the slavers that makes valorising them in any circumstances dangerous.

I sometimes think that popular culture will do it's work of preserving history weirdly, so that in a few centuries only people who are C.20 specialist historians will be able to answer the question "Who was this Goebbels who didn't have any balls at all?"

There's a very interesting Harry Turtledove story about the North winning the US Civil War and prosecuting the peace with repulsive thoroughness, it's in the collection _Counting Up, Counting Down_ and it's called "Must and Shall".

Graydon: You advocated hanging, not just the traitorous officers, but "every slave owner in the South should have hanged at the conclusion of the American Civil War". That's a monstrous request. Alternately, you advocated hanging those who supported the Confederacy by payment or endorsement; that's genocide.

On the larger issue, it's worth pointing out (as it is periodically) that the Confederate battle flag fell out of favor in the South until the early 1960s, when it was reintroduced deliberately as a symbol of defiance to the Movement to Treat Black People Like Human Beings.

...hit Post a little prematurely...

I would love to see the Confederate Battle Flag completely trivialized and unsignifying. Someone on alt.religion.kibology said something to the effect of "The world won't be right until a black man wearing a Stars and Bars belt buckle is kissing a Jewish woman wearing a swastika necklace in Times Square." But it isn't there yet.

Also, Erik: I was in North Carolina in 1990. Harvey Gantt didn't lose the election overnight on one commericial; the fact that he was leading in the polls by 5% shows that he had, in fact, already lost. For a complex of reasons, hard-right and pro-bigotry candidates usually perform better in the actual vote count than in the pre-election polls.

Apropos of this thread, who do I see peddling his own alternate-history novel GETTYSBURG when I turn on the TV this morning but our old friend Newt Gingrich?

Unsurprisingly, Publishers Weekly notes that the text "betray[s] a certain bias (the Confederate men are noble and wise, the Union leaders hot-tempered and vindictive)."

No doubt young Newt heard many tales of the War of Northern Aggro, growing up. And we can see in his actions since how well he took their lessons to heart.

That said, I doubt that introducing policies at the conclusion of the war that would have punished, in whatever way, all those who supported the CSA, in whichever way, "until the last Confederate veteran was dead" would have sufficed (in a world of alternate history, of course) to render Newt and his (in this instance, specifically, Southern) brethren any more reasonable, or even bearable, than they are, considering that the last Confederate veteran died in 1959.

I'm a bit daunted for my first post to either Nielsen Hayden blog to be in this excellent, intensive discussion, but you know, what the heck.

There seem to me to be two different arguments going on here (not counting the one about disco): should the Union have punished Lee, Davis et al. for their actions at the time, and should we presently be deifying, or even saying nice things about, those same people. These arguments are going on in parallel, occasionally crossing over.

On the first point, executing the traitors would have brought up many, many questions not just of morality but of immediate political necessity. A lot of those questions have already been brought up back up the page: Would mass executions have alienated the South, including those segments that had been anti-slavery but still considered themselves Southerners? In the worst-case scenario, was the Union logistically capable of treating the South as a hostile occupied territory in the much longer term - for instance, to borrow one of Graydon's examples, the nearly-300 years between Cromwell and Irish independence (and look how well that went)? Was that, or the idea of mass executions, consistent with the Union's conception of itself? It doesn't seem so to me.

Our present attitude towards those figures seems much more pressing to me, if only because it doesn't mean second-guessing the actions of dead people. Should we be "deifying" Lee? Certainly not, but it doesn't seem much more helpful to monstrify him, so to speak. (Devilize? Baalinate? Or maybe it's still deifying, but a bad kind of god.) Lee and Davis and others were humans, committing human actions based on human reasons - some good by their own lights, some bad by any measure, some apparently mutally contradictory. Rejecting out of hand the parts of Lee's character that might be called noble is as ahistorical as saying that slavery was an Alien Evil from another universe that somehow possessed our freedom-loving country for a while. It also adds fuel to the fire of Lee's most fervent admirers: look, they say, those Yankees just don't understand.

Kevin Murphy's take on the assimilation of historic symbols isn't altogether cynical. It is focused on lightweight popular culture, though, which is not the arena where the Civil War is being fought over.

Actually, for this Californian, it is.

Famous Civil War battlesites of California? Anywhere?

We didn't have any Civil War battlefields. What we had were Sambo's pancake restaurants, a chain whose mascot was a pinkish-beige Indian kid in a turban with a bunch of tigers. Sambo was kind of dorky so no one wanted him except to round out the set of the various tigers you could buy at the checkout counter. I had one, it was fun, and stopping at Sambos was a beloved part of family vacations.

Then they all went out of business. Not because of bad business practices or poor pancakes, but because the NAACP decided to sue them into oblivion because the name "Sambo" was the name of a black minstrel show character that had been appropriated by a British missionary to India, who had written "Little Black Sambo" (with the cool tigers in it) as a parable against vanity (but extolling the virtues of pancakes), which had later been reprinted in the US, then reillustrated with racist charicatures (since passed out of print), which some people still remembered, causing such horrific flashbacks when they saw the dorky beige kid with the tigers that everything had to go because they'd sue, sue, sue!

Consequently, Sambos restyled itself into the innocuously named "Seasons," which did poorly because it had no gimmick, which then morphed into the insipid Marie Calendar's rip-off, Baker's Square.

Toy tigers? The only place they can be found is on eBay and at the original Sambos pancake house in Santa Barbara, which remained in family hands after the chain folded to pressure. I made pilgrimage last summer, on my way back from San Diego, and the pancakes were good, it was fun, and I didn't see anyone being oppressed.

That's my experience, and being pop culture doesn't make it invalid. The same as I am not wrong when I think "Dukes of Hazard" upon seeing the stars and bars, as opposed to "Ah, the Pride of Dixie!" or "Oh, the Horrors of Slavery!" As an adult, I can be aware of all these meanings such a symbol may have for various people, but I don't have to abandon my own frame of referrence just because someone screams loudly.

I don't think its comfy cynicism to say that symbols change, and this is one of the ways that venom drains out of old wounds.

Erik is being humorless in his argument, because there is nothing funny about this. I quite deliberatly jumped on the disco line -- since it was an attempt to distract from the main point. Deflecting critiques with humor is an old, old rhetorical trick. I refuse to bite.

And before any of you continue with the "I don't see how it would be different if we'd hung Davis and his generals." Please, go read Mr. Davis's memoirs, and research what he did *after* the war.

Jefferson Davis spent the remainder of his long life building a facade around the Confederacy's truths -- and he was extraordianly successful doing so. History, the old line tells us, is written by the winner. This is manifestly not true in the case of the Civil War -- a vast record of the war, and almost all the common mythos surrounding it, was written by one man -- the man who lost. The entire "State's Rights" arguement is a fiction created and promoted by Jefferson Davis.

Patrick insinuates I'm over the top. I humbly disagree. I'm tired of glossing evil. The glossing of the evils of the Confederacy is one of the major reason that the neo-conserative movement has taken over this country -- they know that as long as you get to write the news and the histories, you can do whatever you want. You will note that they pull the same arguments out -- and point at the long history of argument over "State's Rights". Except, of course, there was little argument at all about such. There was a quite passioned argument, lasting from well before the Constitution to the final emancipation, that Slavery was acceptable -- nay, Just and Right, the "Natural Condition of the Negro."

The south wielded it's not inconsiderable political power for decades -- from the very start of this country -- to ensuring that Slavery would remain. Note carefully the various comprimises -- and the careful manipulation of terrorities becoming states, all to ensure that the votes needed to bar slavery wouldn't exist. It wasn't until the rebellion -- and the temporary loss of political power for the southern states in the Union, that the 13th & 15ths (and parts of the 14th) could pass. N.B., that passage of these amendments was required before the rebelling states were again allowed representation in the country.

So, I'm supposed to imagine Lee as a Romantic Hero? For Ghugle's sake, why? Show me the healing this romantization of the Confederacy has brought us!

(Aside: Thanks to Kevin J. Maroney for the correction of Gantt's name. I disagree with him on the effect of that add - I was working for Gantt's campaign in Greensboro, where we had an 11 point lead in the city -- and got 4 points at the vote, in very high turnout. That ad killed us -- and was a triumph of how to play the race card. I really, really wish I was better with names, having an eaisly mangled name myself. But I'm a non-speller, I try, I really do, but my brain groks words, not letters. I long for the days of Middle English, where close enough was okay.)

Kevin -
The actual slaveholders were the folks who prefered and enacted rebellion to ceasing to practice a monstrous injustice; it is very hard to see how they should not merit death if any were to be hanged for their treasons. (This leaves aside the monstrous injustice itself.)

Freely giving money or reputation to a rebellion is "material aid and comfort". (So that merely paying Confederate taxes ought not to count, but passing finance bills certainly ought to do so.)

Do you think that such treason does not merit death, or do you think that such acts are not treason?

Genocide is when you kill people because of where they are standing or who (you think) they are, in the hopes of removing them from any need to consider in the future; I don't think putting even a very great many people on trial for their treasonous acts qualifies.

Graydon, I strongly suggest that when we find that our desire for consistency is leading us to argue for the deaths of thousands or millions of people, we had probably ought to take a few steps back.

As you know, I don't admire the Confederacy any more than you do. But your ruminations about killing entire classes and populations are getting horrified reactions. That's because both what you're proposing, and the spooky even-toned manner in which you're proposing it, are pretty horrifying. You know, if four people tell you you're drunk, you should probably at least consider lying down.

Wow. As I said, I am continually amazed the raised voices generated by virtually any discussion of the Civil War.

Erik, you are free to have your opinions. I would, however, like to call your attention to the case of South Africa. There is little doubt that until recently, South Africa was one of the most oppressive nations on earth, and that the basis for this oppression was race. Certainly economics played a role in creating and maintaining Apartheid, but the main factor was race.

South Africans deliberately chose a path of reconciliation, knowing full well that monsters would go unpunished. Their neighbor to the north, Zimbabwe, did not choose that path, and a one-time grain exporter now faces a politically created famine. Now, while South Africa certainly has major problems, ask yourself where you would rather live 96 as a black or as a white.

Yes, both South Africa and Zimbabwe are different enough from Reconstruction-era America as to render my analogy vulnerable. It does illustrate that a society can choose to forgive even the greatest of atrocities. And note that I said forgive, NOT forget.

So, I stand by my opinion that romanticizing the Civil War is a bad idea, but an understandable one. In fact, one that I refuse to get my shorts in a twist about unless it's tied to a racist agenda.

Oh, and by the way, in my view, flying the 93Stars and Bars94 is the moral equivalent of flying the Nazi swastika. I suppose that92s the line that I, personally, am unwilling to cross.

Patrick -
It's not a desire for consistency; it is not even particularly a desire for the maintenance of the rule of law, though that gets into all my thinking on such subjects.

The American Civil War had hundreds of thousands of battlefield casualties; it caused massive amounts of death and suffering; it had geopolitical consequences well beyond American shores, and revebrations, especially in the subsequent character of the United States Army and the consequences of that character in the treatment of the Native population of the Western US and in the conduct of the occupatin of the Phillipines, that have had real lasting consequences for the Union and the other nations of the globe unto the present day.

It also, if one may consider that your rights are what a court will enforce, did not altogether succeed in freeing the black man; it also, if one may consider that your rights are what a court will enforce, did not altogether fail in Mr. Lincoln's objective of preserving the principles upon which the Union was founded, at the least from a philosophy evolved to explain how it was a good thing for one man to own another and entirely antithetical to those founding principles of your great union.

I think that to pour out such blood and treasure, to embark on such a horror as is war, and then to fail of your objective, is much the greater tradgedy than the great tradgedy the war itself holds.

I do not think any of you here would say that the Civil War should not have been fought; that the South should have been let to go its way and maintain its horrors and its injustices as it pleased it to do.

That is, in the strange retroactive hypothetical way that word applies, a choice to have the hundred thousands dead, the cities burned, the families broken, the job done by the means that came to hand and sufficed it, over the disolution of the Union or the continued enslavement of those with visibly more recent African ancestry than the rest of us.

What calculus allows that choice, and holds such a war pursued to its lawful ends, a war not held to cease with battlefield victory, a greater and unchooseable horror?

Actually Kevin (while I am not entirely without sympathy to your views) I would suggest a bit more attention to history, even from a (fellow) Californian.

Nope, no major battlefields. The closest actual battle was Picacho Pass in what is now Arizona. But two "battles" were fought in CA -- the economic battle of paying for the Union war effort (think gold) and the battle of keeping California in the Union. There was a brisk Confederate underground in Southern California that caused a lot of sleepless nights for the Union -- again, think gold. As for real battles, try Gettysburg, Ball's Bluff and Antietam -- places where the California Regiment (71st Pensylvania Volunteers) fought. We also supplied most of the soldiers patrolling the West while the army was occupied elsewhere.

And I would suggest a better example than Sambo's. I worked at more than one as a dishwasher and cook before and during college, and had aquantainces who had stores. Yeah, they had problems with those figures, but the stories about lawsuits were overblown. A few relatively inexpensive changes to decorations and some apologies pretty much handled that. The real problem was "bad business practices" -- or more precisely, a legally defective business model. An important part of Sambo's rapid growth was due to the "partnership" approach (I don't know if the particular arrangement was legally a partnership, but that is what it was called), in which the manager had a share in the store, the corporation held about half, and the rest was split up among district managers and other successful store owners who wanted to buy in. There were supposedly tax advantages to this, advantages that were eventually disallowed by the US Tax Court, which gutted the economic model for the corporation, which had overextended anyway. To the best of my knowledge, the actual sucessor to Sambo's was a short lived chain called "Seasons" -- Baker's Square is/was a CA chain that got started (clearly as a low end Callendar's clone) by some ex-Sambo's managers buing up and converting old stores.

Why care about this? Kevin, one of the core issues of this discussion is what is the truth about the Civil War and some of it's major figures, as opposed to their images. (The others are, what should have been done and what should be done now about it -- thanks Seth). History is more than just what we like to remember. I have nothing against the Dukes, but I would not look to that show as a guide to future actions or policies -- but I would look to what actually happened during the Civil War, if for nothing else but a bad example. But what I need to make that possible, is the truth, as best as I can know.

South Africans deliberately chose a path of reconciliation, knowing full well that monsters would go unpunished. Their neighbor to the north, Zimbabwe, did not choose that path, and a one-time grain exporter now faces a politically created famine. Now, while South Africa certainly has major problems, ask yourself where you would rather live 96 as a black or as a white.

Yes, both South Africa and Zimbabwe are different enough from Reconstruction-era America as to render my analogy vulnerable. It does illustrate that a society can choose to forgive even the greatest of atrocities. And note that I said forgive, NOT forget

And that, precisely, is the point. Note also that the South Africans did *not* completely forgive the oppressors. Many of them were jailed for thier crimes.

There's a huge difference between South Africa and the Confederacy. South Africa is not whitewashing the history of opression. They are very much remembering it -- keeping it alive, so that you will know, and reject, the evil that was done.

Southern partisans are doing something very much different. They are attempting to hide the fundamental truths of thier cause, dressing them up in the rubric of "the Southern Gentleman, fighting for State's Rights."

The difference here is compelling. I could make references to a worse tyrant, and let everyone yell Godwin, if you wish. But compare how the history of 1930-1945 Germany is written to the history of the 1800-1865 period of the U.S. South.

Erik wrote,

"who can't figure out the difference between the American Revolution and the Civil War? One was fought to secure freedom from tyranny for a people, and the other was fought to secure enduring bondage for a people. I'll leave it to you to figure out which was which."

You really think they were so clear-cut and distinctive? Remember that Southern rhetoric was that they were fighting from freedom from Union tyranny. Sure, it was a bunch of hooey, absolutely; but remember Dr. Johnson's reply to that kind of rhetoric: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"

Except that Dr. Johnson was referring to the 1770s American Revolution, not the 1860s Civil War. I don't think I have to tell you that Jefferson's draft clause denouncing slavery in the Declaration was removed by Congress, to get the slave colonies on board and because they didn't want to be seen as opponents of slavery. Or that the existence of slavery is built right into the structure of the U.S. Constitution. Or that the British Empire abolished slavery in 1832, so if there'd been no Revolution the issue would have come to a head 30 years earlier, as it did in South Africa (though hardly to a satisfactory conclusion there).

The bondsman's toil was not the cause of the Revolution as it was of the Civil War. But it was just as much blood on the revolutionaries' hands. It can't be sloughed off by denouncing Jefferson alone as a hypocrite, as some might do. The blacks haven't forgotten this; neither should the rest of us.

Also, you wrote an entire post (June 9, 2003 02:54 PM) denouncing the entire CSA as traitors without reference (save in passing at the end) to their cause. They were traitors in armed rebellion, period, regardless of their reasons. OK, but so were the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. No difference, except that the Signers won, and that they had a noble cause in the judgment of Mr. Erik V. Olson. (A judgment I share, but not in such a clear-cut manner.)

What I'm disgusted by, Erik, is your humorless bloodthirstiness. Patrick and Teresa have been cutting you a lot of slack, much more than I or several others posting here think your posts deserve. You may be a fine fellow otherwise, but this response is to these posts.

"Erik is being humorless in his argument, because there is nothing funny about this. I quite deliberatly jumped on the disco line -- since it was an attempt to distract from the main point. Deflecting critiques with humor is an old, old rhetorical trick. I refuse to bite."

If you refuse to bite, then just -ignore it-, or at the most say "That's not funny," and why (as you've just done above), instead of leaving your readers genuinely confused about whether you realized it was intended as a joke.

But what a severe regime you wish to install! It wasn't even a joke about the Civil War, it was a joke about people taking the Civil War too seriously. If ever anybody says that the P.C. "That's Not Funny" dour humorlessness sourpuss is a myth, I'll tell them about Erik V. Olson and his over-reaction to Christopher's innocent little joke. Do you have a list of things we're Not Allowed to make jokes about? May we sing the little ditty about Hitler and Goebbels that Jo Walton referred to? Surely that war is worth taking at least as seriously as this one. Serious, serious, we must be serious.

"And before any of you continue with the "I don't see how it would be different if we'd hung Davis and his generals." Please, go read Mr. Davis's memoirs, and research what he did *after* the war."

Wow, is that ever insulting. "If you knew anything about this, you'd agree with me." I've read Davis's memoirs - or tried to, they're unreadable. Even the staff at the Davis mansion historic site in Biloxi cheerfully agreed with me on that.

Sure Davis tried to defend himself and mythologize his cause. But do you think he was anywhere near the only one? Executing him (to prevent him writing his memoirs?) would have taken one drop out of the bucket ... and added cupfuls more by making him a martyr. (See Iain's point about the Easter Rising.)

I entirely agree with you that the Confederacy was a wholly evil thing, and those who thought they were fighting for a noble cause were, at best, deluded. (That was my description of Lee, "deluded," which drew a response from you as if I'd claimed that they were all, not just Lee, making genuine states' rights arguments.)

And there really is deification of Lee and Davis going on out there, and Barra (while no deifier) really is a romantic fool, and these things really should be fought. In general I think the nation has actually been far too forgiving of the CSA, though there were good reasons to let them get away with it in the immediate postwar period. Would the South African road have been possible, given the style of civilization back then? Maybe not, but I agree that it would have been superior if it were possible.

But trust someone to take any good cause way, way too far. Breathing fire every time some television redneck names his car "General Lee" is excessive, and is not goint to help anybody take your point seriously. And while you have every right to think you know better than Abraham Lincoln (who wouldn't have executed Lee and Davis either) how best to have bound up the nation's wounds, I'm entitled to doubt that your wisdom is indeed superior to his.

Graydon - you just haven't made a case yet that a massive cultural purge, in the form of thousands of deaths, would have qualitatively changed America's character for the better. Even if every single person who had ever colluded in slavery were expunged from the Union, what would be the effect of the purge itself? How would it even be enacted, given that each of those thousands of people must presumably be arrested, tried, found guilty and executed? Is there any historical precedent for a purge on such a scale that didn't eventually rely on assumption of guilt, forced confessions, informing of dubious accuracy, and the suspension or elision of judiciary process? I can't think of any. The process you seem to be suggesting would have required a powerful, unanswerable Federal authority of the same sort that, in the person of John Ashcroft, worries most of the posters on this blog today. Is that the direction you wish America had gone in?

A very important difference between the US south after the Civil War and contemporary South Africa is that in South Africa, the white minority did not retain control of the government. The point of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission wasn't, and isn't, just reconciliation.

If the former slaveowners hadn't made major and effective efforts to retain control of the Southern government and economy; if they hadn't instituted sharecropping; if the Republican Party hadn't sold out black southerners in order to steal the 1876 election; in that alternate world, it would have been a lot easier to forgive.

Much of this discussion has been about the refusals to acknowledge the truth--the truth that the Confederacy lost the war, and the larger and far more important truth that blacks are human. You cannot expect people to forgive those who are still oppressing them. You cannot expect forgiveness without at least an acknowledgement that the wrongdoings did in fact occur, and were in fact wrong.

Seth -
I think that the will to treat as treason the very real treason of the Southern upper classes, the actual, functioning, angry belief that the system of slavery was as entirely and loathsomely wrong as, say, infant canibalism, would have resulted in a better United States because it would have required a real felt belief that the enslaved blacks were as human, and as deserving of opportunity and justice, as they themselves were.

Acting like slavery was truly loathsome, even in the abscence of convinced belief, would have done something good.

Imposing upon the prostrate South conditions which required them to acknowled in their hearts that they were indeed defeated, and had no choice but to submit or die, would also have done something good.

Defeat happens inside people, not on a battlefield.

The actions of the United States as the occupying power in Japan after the Second World War provide something close to an historical precedent of trials on that scale, btw.

Ashcroft has a near-total disregard for the rule of law; it doesn't matter what the legal precedent is in his case, which is much of why he and his party are so dangerous.

It would have done much good to have established a precedent that the provisions of the contitution are binding on the conduct of government, too, rather than the treatment of citizens, but you didn't get that, either.

Any historical counterfactual changes the present day in uncountable ways--the course of history has an overwhelmingly sensitive dependence on initial conditions. (Just ask any Civil War buff about those damn cigars.) And I'm doing my best not to take this personally; it's just an internet discussion, after all. But I can't help but note that Graydon's proposal of going all Khmer Rouge on the South in the name of doing the job properly--that the sacrifice of blood and treasure not have been in vain--would render me a nonentity. It would have wiped out my mother's family, rather than leaving shattered remnants of Middletons and hangers-on. (And I have a hard time remaining sanguine about someone who goes after my mother.) Would have left my father's folks mostly alone--unless, in a desire for consistency, this rapacious moving finger having writ moves on to thunder counterfactual justice down on the heads of all the farmers who, eager for cheap, scrubby land, and betraying treaties entered into by their state and federal governments, muscled the Cherokee out of their federated nation and onto the Trail of Tears. --Of course, one of the Cherokee on my father's side was a Confederate scout; one of the Eastern Band who defied Jackson's treaty-breaking and stayed behind, fighting a brushfire guerilla war for their survival, throwing in with the Confederates (some of them) in the hopes of regaining some small scrap of stolen land. Who, exactly, was he betraying, and when, and how?

If we're going to play with counterfactuals, I'd much rather we go back and lean on the congressional commission that gave Tilden's electoral votes to Hayes in the election of 1876. The quid pro quo necessary to secure that decision killed Reconstruction, setting back the cause of civil rights and racial equality by 100 years, and that deal rang the death-knell of the Republicans as an idealistic party and cemented the hold of Big Business on the party (certainly, Grant's administration had already set the party down this path).

It might not be as tidy as Graydon's solution, and it's impossible to say for certain (aw, heck, it's a counterfactual--and any counterfactual is as true as any other), but I think it's a safe bet a Tilden presidency would have resulted in a measurably better world than ours by the benchmarks largely at stake. And it's much less bloody than Graydon's solution: some blackmail and a few twisted arms rather than hundreds of thousands more corpses and pyres of books and correspondence.

Paint me as a craven moderate or a cowardly milquetoast who can't stand to get his hands dirty, but flipping through history ought to be proof enough that not a one of us is pure enough to carry out the sort of retribution called for here. The Civil War was a tragedy--but I cannot condone compounding its tragedy in the name of doing it "right." Hell: I'll take even what we've been stuck with in this, the best-of-all-possible worlds--the 150 years of simmering resentment and hatred, the foul revisionism and myth-mongering in the name of fundamentally inhumane goals, and the hundreds of thousands of little unsung epiphanies, redemptions, and acts of forgiveness that have happened in spite of all that--I'll take this crappy, imperfect option we eked out over wholesale massacre, any day.

(Then, I'm a white Southerner. 'Bama born. Of course I'd say that.)

>>The actions of the United States as the occupying power in Japan after the Second World War provide something close to an historical precedent of trials on that scale, btw.

A quick google and we find: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/peopleevents/pandeAMEX101.html

Which gives a quick rundown on the postwar Tokyo trials. I note, from the piece in question:

>>Twenty-eight high-ranking political and military leaders were indicted on 55 counts of "crimes against peace, conventional war crimes, and crimes against humanity."

Fair enough. Further:

>>On November 4, 1948, Webb announced that all of the defendants had been found guilty. Seven were sentenced to death, sixteen to life terms, two to lesser terms, two had died during the trials and one had been found insane.

Seven in number, to be executed. Somewhat less than the entire Japanese officer corps, not to mention their civilian supporters, financiers, and attendant politicians (in this instance Jefferson Davis -- my fault, Hirohito -- again got away).

>>On December 23, 1948, General Tojo and six others were hung at Sugamo prison. MacArthur, afraid of embarrassing and antagonizing the Japanese people, defied the wishes of President Truman and barred photography of any kind, instead bringing in four members of the Allied Council to act as official witnesses.

My only remaining question regarding the aptness of this comparison is, then, did Japan secede from the Union prior to or following Pearl Harbor?

Great post from Kip Manley (which is to say, "--k"). I substantially agree.

[South Africa]

One of the identifying characteristics of the Reconciliation Trials was that those guilty of crimes were not allowed to whitewash or deny their culpability.

In order to be pardoned, the perpetrator must, in full, explicit detail, confess exactly what he had done. This was done in a public forum, and the story was told to the surviving family members of the person he had tortured, mutilated and murdered.

This allowed the possibility of closure on the behalf of the family -- their loved one was no longer an anonymous disappeared, and all knew what had been done so that the family had less of a need to carry the cross of vengeance themselves.

And then -- and only then -- in a conscious effort to break the cycle of retribution, the guilty party was pardoned and allowed to attempt to rebuild his life.

Pretty powerful concept, IMHO.

PS Seth -- so far, new poster notwithstanding, you're doing just fine by me.

Graydon--

While I see your legal and ethical point with regards to the prosecution and execution of the southern leaders as traitors to the Union, I’m not certain that your extension of it to include all the ‘supporters’ of the south would have been either advisable or practical.

Leaving aside the prickly issue of how ‘supporters’ would have been defined and how one could prevent that definition from being abused, none of those engaged in this conversation were alive contemporaneously with the end of the civil war, and while that (potentially, at least) gives us the advantage of perspective, it also estranges our understanding of the post-war political situation from that of the men on the ground. The best-researched history in the world cannot make up for the intuitive comprehension of a situation that someone who has been immersed in it for years possesses, nor can that kind of understanding (inevitably limited and biased) make up for the perspective given by a broad historical overview. Second-guessing the decisions of Lincoln and his advisors in the wake of the civil war strikes me as a largely futile academic exercise.

That said, being of a decidedly academic bent, I’d like to make a few points about the destruction of cultures and your theory that the victorious North did not do its best to annihilate the slaveholding culture of the South. ;)

In general (I’m afraid I don’t have any well-documented historical references at hand at the moment), most instances in which a conquering culture managed to obliterate or assimilate the culture of a conquered people involved either a willingness to destroy or co-opt the monuments and institutions of the conquered or so crushing a superiority in technology (usually, but not exclusively military) that the conquered were willing to transform their own society in an attempt to reach parity with their conquerors. In either case, the goal/end result was the transformation of the culture of the conquered into a form distinct from what it was before they were defeated. In its heyday, the Roman Empire was particularly talented at effecting this kind of transformation among conquered tribes.

There were several necessary conditions for this kind of assimilation, however, not least of which was that the culture to assimilated had to be distinct from that of their conquerors. If it wasn’t, then what was necessary wasn’t cultural assimilation, but the destruction of the political agents and forces that had turned a society against itself.

The American Civil War is problematic in that while the culture of the South was somewhat distinct from the culture of the conquering North, they were both part of the same overarching culture, so some degree of both cultural assimilation and political suppression would have been required to bring the South “in line” with the North. The war itself was a mechanism of political suppression, and like you, I believe that it was not prosecuted to its logical conclusion, in that secessionist congressmen and senators were not executed or barred from taking further part in local or national politics upon its conclusion.

As a military problem, however, the destruction of the South’s culture would have been all but impossible to effect. Most instances of militarily-inspired cultural assimilation occurred before the advent of mass literacy, freedom of speech, and the industrial age. It’s much easier to destroy a culture wholesale when the people who remember it can’t publish memoirs glorifying it or send inflammatory telegram messages across the continent or overseas. In such a situation, even if you kill everyone who actively supported the perpetuation of the culture, if there was any public support for those people or the culture at all, some portion of the ideals of that culture will linger about even under the most repressive political apparatus. Witness the revival of nationalism in the former Yugoslav republics and the USSR.

Kip Manley appears to have headed me off with regards to my point about Reconstruction being the actual critical point in the transformation of the South’s culture, so I won’t waste any more words hammering that point home, save by pointing out that a military solution is rarely the optimal means of dealing with what is fundamentally a social problem.

Claude--

Oh, agreed on the Slave-Free business, the Union regiments and gold being funneled around. However, the lack of battlefields has kept California from having the whole "Those damn Yankees (Rebels) burned your granpappy's house!" scenario. Tragedies were personal and didn't leave any scars on the local landscape to serve as reminders.

With Sambos, my objection is to the desire to censor. Even if the lawsuit is blown out of proportion in rumor and memory, it doesn't change the fact that something was changed in response to a pressure group, and in my opinion, it was a change for the worse.

So far as the truth of the Civil War goes, I agree with Patrick about Barra's review being rather fatuous in that passage, but the point is still made: This appears to be a better biography of Lee than most. But I don't think you can get the whole truth from any one book, especially in the case of biographies.

I read a biography of Catherine the Great when I was in junior high. It was entertaining, accessible, with some exciting passages, reading like a reasonably good historical novel. It completely glossed over her rumored predeliction for horses. Was it a bad biography because of this? I don't think so, the same as I have no problem with the Benjamin Franklin kite-and-key storybook I read when I was five, despite the fact that it left off the Hellfire Club and the letter about sex with older women.

The truth is usually buried among dry business correspondence, personal recollections and various and sundry bits of marginalia, and even then, it's still just another perspective on the past.

Graydon wrote:

"The actions of the United States as the occupying power in Japan after the Second World War provide something close to an historical precedent of trials on that scale, btw."

No. Sorry. You're obviously not familiar with the postwar Japanese trials, and thus should probably not be speaking in tones of authority about them as any sort of example for American policy.

Once, Graydon, in another forum, you came up with a memorable and evocative phrase to describe this sort of silliness: "bad insecurity management". Now you're practicing it. A shame, really.

I second the motion that Kip Manley's post rocks. Jack Womack beat me to the google, but I'd add that not only did Hirohito escape, he remained Emperor; and we retained most of Japan's wartime infrastructure; and MacArthur worked closely with the existing government (minus a few members at the top) to effect a fast transition to the new constitution. If it's a comparable situation at all, it's an example in favor of a peaceful Reconstruction.

Writes Kevin Andrew Murphy: "I agree with Patrick about Barra's review being rather fatuous in that passage, but the point is still made: This appears to be a better biography of Lee than most."

What "point is still made"? Nothing in this discussion has been about Roy Blount's book about Lee. As far as I know, nobody in this conversation has read it.

I meant the main thrust of the review seems to be "better bio of Lee than most" rather than the "it was a gentlemanly war" nonsense.

Then again, Barra made it pretty clear that Blount's book isn't Lee = Satan, so it won't be pleasing some.

Kip -

Hell: I'll take even what we've been stuck with in this, the best-of-all-possible worlds--the 150 years of simmering resentment and hatred, the foul revisionism and myth-mongering in the name of fundamentally inhumane goals, and the hundreds of thousands of little unsung epiphanies, redemptions, and acts of forgiveness that have happened in spite of all that--I'll take this crappy, imperfect option we eked out over wholesale massacre, any day.

That's a defensible position; we can't, after all, know what would have happened.

I would like to note that I can't see how this is
different from prefering the retail slaughter that we actual got, in the form of lynchings and unacknowleged murders, to a hypothetical in which there's a wholesale, or at least bulk rate, slaughter of those chiefly responsible for a great evil.

It might be a very clear difference in your imagination of the world, or in that of others here, but I can't see it.

Everybody -
I was remembering an account of a considerable number of executions among Japanese POW camp guards.

Since I am unable to find a reference on the web at the moment, I am going to say I fucked up; sorry about that, bad analogy.

Consequently, Sambos restyled itself into the innocuously named "Seasons," which did poorly because it had no gimmick, which then morphed into the insipid Marie Calendar's rip-off, Baker's Square.

I seem to recall seeing commercials for the renamed chain, calling itself "Sam's". Maybe I'm misremembering, or maybe they tried different names in different parts of the country.

Apparently the grandson of one of the founders is trying to start the chain up again.

Avram, they tried all sorts of things, but the boom time for building chains of sit down breakfast restauraunts had largely passed -- the late 50's through late 60's was it. As Kevin pointed out, the original store is still there on the beach in Santa Barbara (just about as good a location as you can imagine) and it is still a local icon. Chad has had no luck, apparently, in trying to get the new chain going.

Graydon, you're assuming your program for the destruction of ante-bellum Southern culture would have worked rather smoothly and with few undesirable side effects. For all I know, we'd have ended up with guerrilla war in the ex-Confederate states continuing into the present, and a precedent of destruction of inconveniant writing.

The actual policies of the North seem to have been enough to prevent further civil wars. That's quite a bit.

For all I know, what was needed was not so much more punishment, but a greater effort on the ideological side. I get the impression that people let the Southern propagandists have their way because they were able to present themsslves
as cooler, and there wasn't any strong mental image or impetus to oppose them. I don't know how that happened. Perhaps the North felt that winning the war was enough.
http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000039.html has a long essay about Little Round Top. Without getting into whether the analogies applied to the War in Iraq are reasonable, I'm noting that this was the first time in my life I'd seen a detailed description of a Civil War battle that was sympathetic to the North. Ok, I don't read history much, but I've never lived in a southern state--and I do read enough odds and ends that I may have a fair sampling of how much of a cultural advantage the South managed to snag.

Well, Graydon, I suppose we could start weighing pounds of flesh.

I think Thomas Jefferson was a contemptible hypocrite, and that every slave owner in the South should have hanged at the conclusion of the American Civil War, along with every Confederate officer, every elected offical of the Confederacy and its component states, and every appointed offical of the Confederacy itself, that their archives, books, and papers should have burned, and that the right to own more land than a person themselves dwealt upon or farmed by their own labour or had there their place of business been forbidden throughout that territory until the last Confederate veteran was dead.

That's your proposal to buy the farm in bulk, in a nutshell.

The number of retail lynchings varies from cite to cite--"Between 1889 and 1918, a total of 2,522 black Americans were lynched, 50 of them women"; Between 1882 and 1968, there were 4,743 lynchings in the United States. Of those lynched, 3,446 – or 72.6% – were black"; "Between 1882 (when lynching statistics were first kept) and 1930 (when lynchings began a rapid decline), nearly 4,700 persons were lynched in the United States, 84% of whom were lynched in the Southern states"--anyone with more comprehensive knowledge or better Googling skills is welcome to add in.

Here's the slaveholding numbers from the 1860 census:

"Almost one-third of all Southern families owned slaves. In Mississippi and South Carolina it approached one half. The total number of slave owners was 385,000 (including, in Louisiana, some free Negroes). As for the number of slaves owned by each master, 88% held fewer than twenty, and nearly 50% held fewer than five."

We need not tot up the number of officers or elected officials; I think there's considerable overlap with the slaveowning class in that case.

Even allowing for the fact that the number of lynchings might be woefully undercounted, and adding in blacks wrongfully executed by the state, or whose murders while not lynchings went unsolved, well, I myself see a dramatic difference in the worlds proposed. A whole order of magnitude, I think. --To say nothing of the fact that the one is a crime deplored, denounced, and regretted; the other a hypothetical coolly proposed as an acceptable (!) course of action.

Nor has the possibility that said drastic action might actually have meaningfully prevented resentment, racism, hatred, and retail murder been demonstrated or even markedly discussed. Destroying a culture does not tell us what sort of culture will end up taking its place.

I'm standing pat for the moment, I think.

Graydon,

Ahem:

From Article I of the US Constitution:

No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

Lincoln, President at the time, did not view the Southern states' secession as legal. Ergo, all Constitutional prohibitions and protections still applied to citizens in the South as well as the North.

Slavery was legal in certain states until December 18, 1865, with the passage of the 13th Amendment, after the end of the Civil War, at once freeing the slaves and simultaneously freeing their prior owners of the new crime of slaveholding.

You are not only advocating mass murder for a non-crime (at the time), but you are advocating smashing one of the cornerstones of the US Constitution and American justice.

I can imagine what Lincoln might say.

Patrick, i'm not going to call you names. Perhaps that's because I know you to be be an eminently sensible fellow.
Graydon, i don't know you, but I have actually enjoyed a lot of your posts on other subjects. The fact that (albeit hypothetically) you can advocate mass executions on a Rwandan scale boggles my mind. As i said before, I'm opposed to capital punishment, but even if i admitted that it might be expedient for certain heinous crimes, I can't see that death on that scale would do anything other than perpetuate a cycle of war. The Ku Klux kaln arose in the Reconstruction South over perceived injustices; what sort of organization would the sons and daughters of your Rebel hecatomb have formed? They hanged Wirtz; now we have Gitmo, with a death row planned. (not as bad as Andersonville--yet. But getting there.)
Erik, in a vague way I agree with you about the--not deification, but call it glorification of Lee and other Southern leaders. But I feel this is an inevitable proceess of history. Look a thow Christopher Columbus, a far greater butcher--and enslaver--than any Southern leader, is popularly viewed today.
Even the most evil of leaders often accomplishes some good. Francisco Franco was a cold-blooded butcher, but he managed to keep Spain out of World War II. (Yes, I know there were some Spanish troops who fought for the Axis. But basically.) Lee was a complex man who deserves to viewed as exactly that. Turning lee's home into a cemetery was revenge enough, I think.
The way to combat such current ignoroid revisionism about the glory of the antebellum slaveholding South is not by foaming at the mouth about leaders who did have some noble qualities, or regretting that they were =actually allowed to express their opinions= after the War of Northern Aggression, but by, say, talking about the reality of slavery (especially prior to the outlawing of the importation of slaves).

Graydon, you probably confused the Class A war crimes trials, which were of specific Japanese leaders for "crimes against peace", and were as Jack Womack described, with the Class B and Class C trials, which were of people charged with much more proximate involvment in crimes against Allied citizens and personnel.

Accused prison guards usually fell in Class C, and yes, many were executed -- after witnesses or victims brought charges against them, a criminal trial held to determine guilt or innocence, and sentencing.

Not because they fell into the general class of "Japanese prison guard".

[digs up stats]

A round 5700 defendants in both Class B and C trials, of whom 984 were sentenced to death, 475 sentenced to life imprisonment, 2944 to shorter terms, and the remainder acquitted.

And a note of advice: don't let a fancy knotwork of words push you into stupid views. Epigrams tend to make crappy policy.

Carlos -

"Do the job" is not, to my mind, a stupid view.

What was done, for whatever complex set of reasons involving Northern racism, lack of understanding of the extreme factual bogosity of 'race' as a concept (hardly their fault at the time, that), delicacy, or desire to recover something that (it turns out) could not be recovered, if it had existed at all, didn't do the job.

The slave-holding culture of the South persisted; it's mutated, and it has bred ideas and ideals that are a real threat to everyone's liberty and self-determination today. Anyone watching the justifications for the transfer of risk from the owner class to the middle class over the past thirty years, on the one hand, and the justifications for the War on Some Drugs, on the other, is aware of that.

Which raises the question, abstractly in the historical case, and sharply in the immediate case, what is the least sufficent means which will cause the people who ardently and assuredly believe various contrafactuals about races and the relationship between wealth and divine will to change their minds, to give up those cherished beliefs, to acknowledge themselves in some sense defeated.

If -- and it was not -- the military victory of the Union was not enough to do that, it might be that nothing would be; that these things, these false things, are things which those who cherish them would maintain unto death.

If that is so, you can either acceed, accepting life in a system of laws and custom that pour effort and treasure into maintaining the appearance of truth in material falsehoods, irrespective of the associated human cost -- one which tends toward the arbitrarily large over time -- or you can kill them.

So far as I know, no successful third option is known to history.

Kevin J. Maroney, your semiquote comes from a post I made, not in kibology but in another newsgroup. One of my pet peeves is the willingness of liberals to let conservatives claim symbols they're not entitled to. The Dixie battle flag is one of them. A lot of people fought under that flag for a lot of reasons. Defenders of slavery fought in the Civil War on both sides, and so did opponents of slavery. As some black historians like to point out, the U.S. flag flew over many slave ships, but the Confederate flag flew over none. If that battle flag and the swastika were to be used as symbols of interracial love, racists and Nazis would be stripped of their most powerful symbols. And I see no reason to respect anything that racists and Nazis claim as their own.

If anyone's interested in the argument that the Civil War was about something other than slavery (a position held by people like Marx and Dickens), I recommend going to

http://www.mises.org/jlsDisplay.asp?action=sort&volume=16&number=2&submit=View

and downloading "A Moral Accounting of the Union and the Confederacy." I'm not a Libertarian; I tend to agree with them on personal issues, but not social ones. This article is written not to glorify the South or defend slavery, but to defend the principle of secession by examining our most famous example. I think the writer does a good job.

I must confess, I believe there are arguments that are not subject to reason. The cause of the Civil War may be one. Some people believe it was about slavery, and for many who fought then, it was. Some people believe the US invasion of Iraq was about freedom, and for many who fought then, it was. But when looking for fundamental reasons, it's good to look beyond the ostensible ones.

This isn't meant as personal criticism of anyone. I have friends who are Catholics, Jews, and atheists. I don't expect their incompatible philosophies to be reconciled by logic, so long as they're willing to let each other believe what they wish. I'm happy having people believing whatever they want about the Civil War, so long as they don't use that belief to justify racism or revenge.

Graydon wrote:

"The slave-holding culture of the South persisted; it's mutated..."

True, but that culture was ingrained in women, children, and non-slave-owners as well as the men that the Graydon Experiment would have hung. And there's the real problem with your conjecture.

Mass hanging of targeted ringleaders is an effective (if brutal and messy) way of bringing a halt to an *active physical rebellion or insurrection.* Its effectiveness as an eraser of attitudes that are deeply ingrained across an entire culture (and as an insurance of future amity between the executioners and the occupied culture) seems to me, even with minimal consideration, to be thoroughly dubious.

My argument isn't against judicial execution for war crimes or treason, not even on a mass scale96 it's only against your suggestion that this tool should have been used for a purpose to which it seems absolutely unsuited, and almost certainly guaranteed to be counterproductive.

Back to you, Graydon, with:

"Which raises the question, abstractly in the historical case, and sharply in the immediate case, what is the least sufficent means which will cause the people who ardently and assuredly believe various contrafactuals about races and the relationship between wealth and divine will to change their minds, to give up those cherished beliefs, to acknowledge themselves in some sense defeated."

I'm not sure there is any sufficient means, short of a) divine intervention or b) knocking this entire planet into a collision course with the sun, and I'm *not* speaking flippantly. I simply doubt that there is any physical or political means, outside of a destruction so thorough and absolute as to be even now beyond human power, to force a human culture to unanimously accept the absolute and permanent defeat of certain cherished ideals and popular prejudices (a concept which you and I both differentiate from simple conquest).

Hell, counterfactual nincompoopery takes root even *outside* the cultures that get trounced and have to bottle their ambitions for a few generations. I encounter it all the time among American wargamers, in form of the persistent and romanticized belief that the German Wehrmacht was a nigh-supernatural entity and that the Allies were scrabbling, cowardly little dwarves who had to cheat to get the best of the noble Teutonic Tank-People. Sweet gibbering monkeys, don't get me started on *that* subject.

Anyhow, let's go back to our hypothetical 1865 and assume for a moment that Secretary of State Graydon did, in fact, succeed in convincing President Lincoln to have a good quarter or so of the South's surviving white men hung en masse. Do you think it plausible, for even a moment, that the tens of thousands of CSA sympathizers and dupes in the North wouldn't have "carried a torch" for the Noble Story of the States' Rights Rebellion? Or, as I've asked before, that this act would have somehow cleansed every trace of willful ignorance and smoldering, bitter fantasization from those it missed or left behind?

What you're asserting is that the use of limited, brutal, (and inherently socially divisive) judicial execution to slaughter a great mass of men could have somehow crushed a virulent set of ideals that *wasn't limited* to that mass of men. On every level96 practical logistics, legality, and logic96 the assertion falls apart, no matter how much many of us wish we could take a testosterone-fueled TARDIS back to 1865 and help shove the CSA into a shallow grave.

Put simply, you're saying that we didn't kill enough people to stamp out a cultural prejudice, and I'm saying that we *never could have* killed enough people to do so, because where ugly memes like this are concerned, genocide is an all-or-nothing affair, and *even then* the presence of sympathetic idiots in cultures outside the one targeted for termination can still render the whole gruesome undertaking a moot point.

If we're spending our time on the terrible anguish of "might have been" and "should have done" then surely what the North should have done was to provide the freed slaves with compensation -- wasn't it forty acres and a mule? If they'd been offered homesteading land in the West, which we shall assume for these purposes, as was assumed at the time, was empty and needed settlers, and if they'd gone as pioneers, then we'd have a very different US today, I think.

The US consciously adopted many of its institutions from classical models -- they even call the Senate the Senate. In the Roman world, when you freed a slave, you couldn't just let them starve, you had to see them established -- which often meant continuing to employ them but paying them wages -- and you gave them your family name. So there were freedmen of Scipio or Caesar who had those as their surnames, and so with their descendants down all the generations.

I'd not mind idealization of Lee anything like as much in a world where the mid-West was scattered with family farms settled in the 1870s and 1880s run by families called "Lincoln" whose ancestors used to be slaves, who settled among the Scandinavians and New Englanders and so on who were settling there.

But we're starting from here.

I don't think it would have been enough by itself; necessary but not sufficent, sort of thing.

Disarming all the Southern white males is right out; there's a constitutional provision about that, and it wouldn't be logistically practical.

Tax provisions heavily advantaging inheritance in the case of mixed marriages might have done something, but I can't begin to imagine the people of that time doing that.

On the other hand, Reconstruction, if continued, would have done much, and the opposition to it that actually happened didn't succeed by a wide margin; it suceeded by a narrow margin. Take out those votes, that network of connections, the common structures of the exercise of civil power, all represented by and constructed from those slave owners, and it seems much more likely for Reconstruction to continue longer.

There would have to be justifications; at that time, they would necessarily be religious. That's one of the very few angles from which it could be accepted that slavery was wrong in a way that the survivors would have a pattern to follow about -- it's a sin, ok, when one has sinned one does , for various related values of .

At a time when women did not have the vote and couldn't neccessarily own property themselves, taking out the male upper class would certainly cause social change. Some of it would be angry, bitter social change, but in the process of demanding civil rights for themselves, one undertaken against conservative political forces, who are the natural political allies of those women? Do the Appalachian highlanders manage to get effective political represenation and callused hands on the levers of power for the first time in the South?

So, no, I don't believe in the fallacy single perfect events; I do believe that removing the opposition of that Southern slaveholding class could have allowed Reconstruction to carry through, that it would have caused enough economic re-alignment to produce strong forces in opposition to the dominant landed interests, and that the pressure to recognize the rights of widows in a system that has at least nominal equality before the law would have had beneficial side effects.

Nothing that was present to rush in and fill the vacuum was as bad as that slave holding class, in very short form, and a belief that the mixing resulting would have tended towards a more reasonable outcome than the drive to maintain rigid barriers to black (and poor) men's access to economic choice which we did get.

Graydon wrote:

""Do the job" is not, to my mind, a stupid view."

Well, there you go again.

Look at how your language is *pushing* you into these extreme, bizarre views. It's palpable; an outsider like me can feel it.

It's a debasement of the language when the proposed killing of a million defeated people for political purposes becomes "doing the job".

"If -- and it was not -- the military victory of the Union was not enough to do that, it might be that nothing would be; that these things, these false things, are things which those who cherish them would maintain unto death."

I dislike doing this, because it's usually a cheap rhetorical trick, but:

Translation: if military defeat couldn't change their minds, then maybe nothing short of death will.

In your next paragraph, you assume your own conditional "might", and now present two and only two options, assimilation to the slave-owner culture or political mass killings, and conclude with the very tough-sounding:

"So far as I know, no successful third option is known to history."

Which is prima facie bollocks.

I don't have much use for tough-sounding, low-content rhetoric, whether it's inspired by Beowulf or by the shade of Lee Atwater.

If you're really interested in the comparative history of post-slavery societies, there's a vast literature out there.

But to my eye, it looks like you're much more interested in rehabilitating the idea of political mass killings than discussing historical fact.

Will: I've just re-read the Google archive of the posts you made to rassf in the last six months, and the specific image I cited didn't appear in any of them. If you can point me to it, I'd be grateful.

Re: "more interested in rehabilitating the idea of political mass killings"

Exactly. A utilitarian argument for atrocity? I thought history had judged the makers of such arguments, and moved on in sorrow and distaste.

Carlos -

You know the Le Guin story, Those Who Walk Away from Omelas?

That's a parable about slavery; the point (I think, that the critical responses I've read seem to think) Ms. Le Guin was going for is that it's still wrong, even if there's enormous benefit from taking access to choice away from even one otherwise useless (from anyone else's point of view) person.

It's never worked for me; I think, as a story, as a parable, it makes the wrong point about slavery.

The thing I think is the right point is that you, yes, you, are going to wind up in that basement covered in shit.

That's the choice; slave or slaver, as exits from a middle excluded slow or swiftly. Generationally, sometimes, but as a process it does get there.

That's pretty clearly not your emotional belief about slavery; it is mine.

Nor was I particularly speaking about ending slavery, when I said that sometimes people have beliefs that they'll die before they give up, and that there doesn't seem to be a third option; that applies across the whole spectrum of human belief. Sometimes such people are dead of their age, but pretty generally they're dead before peace comes back, if it comes back.

I would very much like a better answer, most especially to the current form of the problem; I would note that none of y'all have advanced one.

But, well, the choice between going into the chains and doing whatever least sufficent things there are to get the possibility of those chains out of the choice space of the society I'm living in doesn't go away when the cost of the least sufficent thing goes revoltingly high.

That is, after all, what the Confederate States tried; run the cost of getting rid of chattel slavery up to a serious war, and the Union will decide that the price is too high and let us away with this.

I don't think the Union should have decided that the price was too high. I don't think you do, either.

But, well, those chains aren't out of the choice space; if they stay in it, we're all going to be in them someday. Lots of determined people with wealth and power think they should stay, and are indeed doing their best to hasten us all out of the parts of the societal choice space which might let us avoid enslavement.

What's the limit on the price you'll pay, not to be a slave?

Kevin, I did a quick google for my name and things like "kiss" "flag" "jew" and "jewish" and came up with nothing. So maybe your kibology poster's memory leaked into my mind. I dunno. I wasn't trying to claim credit for something I didn't write or trying to get the quote right; I just found it amusing to see one of my posts being cited.

Jo, nice point about the "if only." But keep in mind that Lincoln thought the proper solution was to send blacks back to Africa, not to send them west. The romanticization of Lincoln is understandable, but arguably more at odds with history than the romanticization of Lee: Lee freed his slaves. Lincoln was prepared to sign an amendment to the Constitution that would have protected southern slavery. (I forget which amendment it would've been; it's mentioned in the article I cited in my last message.)

I better drop out of this discussion now, because one of the things I've learned about life on the internet is that religious arguments just end with people getting angry.

You know, much as I might like to blame all the atrocities of The War On Some Drugs on the slaveholders of the south and their physical and intellectual decendants, I feel that somehow the intellectual and spiritual descendants of that abolitionist-allied somewhat more northerly institution, The Ladies Temperance Union, have something to do with it.

That quote of yours, Will, was brilliant, and while I don't know of anyone actively working to reclaim the stars and bars, aside from "Dukes of Hazard" merchandizers, there is someone working to take back the swastika. May I introduce:

Manwoman

"I better drop out of this discussion now, because one of the things I've learned about life on the internet is that religious arguments just end with people getting angry."

Yes, it's funny how when I belittle people by labelling their arguments "religious", implying that they're not subject to reason or analysis, those people get angry.

And I can't imagine why, because I'm such a nice and reasonable guy.

Graydon wrote:

"That's the choice; slave or slaver, as exits from a middle excluded slow or swiftly. Generationally, sometimes, but as a process it does get there."

"That's pretty clearly not your emotional belief about slavery; it is mine."

I don't believe I have stated any of my emotional beliefs about slavery.

But I am getting the impression that you, Graydon Saunders, would prefer killing a million defeated men for political reasons because of your own personal emotional beliefs, rather than try any other solution.

At this point I see that you're not interested in a discussion based on appeals to reason or fact.

I also begin to see how the heroic and feudal ideals of northwest Europe were so easily perverted in the last century, even among people of good will.

Was it LMB who talked about the hypnotic appeal of the grave-narrow option? Anyway. I see Shetterly has shown up, which means the signal-to-noise ratio about the ACW will take a precipitous drop, so color me gone.

PS: "I would very much like a better answer, most especially to the current form of the problem; I would note that none of y'all have advanced one."

Hard-fought politics. I suppose some people might find the bullet in the head easier.

Graydon. This is getting extremely weird. I haven't said as much as I should because I've had trouble believing that you would advocate the killing of thousands of citizens, purely as a means for pursuing social policy, without regard to due process of law. You're deep into "cutting a great road through the law to get to the devil" territory.

Mass murder and the destruction of a regional culture are not among the United States' Government's legitimate pursuits. I know the basic list by heart: "...to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."

The failure of Reconstruction was a tragedy. We've paid for that and will continue to pay for it, as we have for all those other moments when we've flinched away from the implications of our laws and ideals. The original version of the Constitution didn't confront slavery. The Reconstruction era could comprehend liberty but not equality. Assimilating the Fourteenth Amendment has been a long slow process, and it's not over yet.

The grindingly slow pace of social enlightenment can be maddening. It took a huge fight to get rid of "separate but equal", even though it was obvious to the meanest intelligence that separate never turns out to be equal. The most thoroughly integrated segment of US society is the military, and the incidence of blacks in its management and executive positions is lightyears past anything you'll find in the general population, but the military allowed, enabled, and was complicit in the systematic racist treatment of blacks until a startlingly recent date.

We're dumb in so many ways. Within my own lifetime I've seen the dawning of a general realization that children ought not be beaten, punched, shaken, whipped, or otherwise abused. (The dispassionate single admonitory or informative smack on the bottom is still in contention.) The belief that infants and small children don't need nontrivial anesthesia for dentistry and minor surgery is still dissipating. It was only in my mother's and grandmother's lifetimes that the right of a man to occasionally smack his wife around ceased to be generally accepted.

We get smarter so damned slowly, and once we do learn something, we look back and are amazed that it took us so long to figure out such a simple and obvious thing. And when you're part of a minority (any kind of minority) that's waiting for the rest of society to get the idea, the sheer frustration of it can be temporarily overwhelming. It's understandable; but it doesn't make for good policy or lasting change.

If every officer in the Confederate military and every member of the Confederate Congress had been hanged, it would have been an atrocity that permanently discredited the supporters of Union and Emancipation; and the forces that stopped Reconstruction would still have been present and powerful in our society. Who, then, could have opposed them?

The pertinent line, then and now, is "I'd give the devil the benefit of law -- for my own safety's sake."

I interpreted Will as meaning that his stance was essentially a religious one, meaning unswayable by debate, as well. Not having grown up in the US, it always startles me somewhat to be reminded just how current and passionate an issue the Civil War still is here. And people say Americans don't care about history.

On a completely side note, when Kevin quoted the bit about the black man wearing a swastika, etc, I thought, "Didn't Will Shetterly say that?" So though I can't remember where, it's probably either something he came up with or something he quoted.

Regarding swastikas, though you probably all know that the Nazis appropriated the symbol rather than inventing it, you may not all know that to this day they're all over India, not as a nyaa-nyaa-Hitler re-appropriation, but because they've always been there, as good luck charms, as religious symbols, as a reference to the sun.

Swastikas, swastikas, everywhere you go, painted on temples, printed on blouses, regular and reversed, even advertising "Swastik biscuits." I'm sure I could find one as a belt buckle, and when I do, Will's getting it.

"What's the limit on the price you'll pay, not to be a slave?"

I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure, however, that I draw the line somewhere before we come to preemptive killings of people who aren't currently, actively, gun-and-whip-and-chains-in-hand, trying to enslave anyone.

Crossing that line puts you in the same camp, or at least the same campground, as all those nervous monarchs of fable, who went around murdering babies because the omens threatened doom if the babes were allowed to grow up.

T -
Once there's a war, there isn't a due process of law available, at least not about the issue over which the war is being fought.

I'm sure -- at least off in hypothetical land -- Mr. Lincoln could have got Congress to pass a law making slave holding a crime and directed the Army to enforce it; that would have been entirely ritualistically legal and entirely without the spirit of the law; the Confederate States were a place where that writ did not run, and there would have been no justice in acting as though it did. (Something that was pretty scrupulously observed, in actual practice.)

The rule of law is not only the forms, though due process is important; the rule of law is the submission of the people, as concious individuals, to the legitimacy of the law, even when that is not in their immediate best interest. (And I really do believe this.)

That went away with succession; starting a shooting war just confirmed it. (Much like the rule of law went away when a vote count got stopped by force in Florida, and no one did anything about it.)

Then what do you do?

Anything you do to those people in seccession, who have their own currency and army and laws, to re-impose your laws is done by force of arms, outside the rule of law. They can complain that it is not just, and be right.

The answers that come down to 'social and economic marginalization' don't work when there is anything resembling economic or population parity; those instead tend to radicalization, which is indeed exactly what happened to start the ACW in the first place.

I can accept your judgement that simply killing the slaveholding class wouldn't work; I don't understand American cultural myths, and I certainly don't like the idea as an idea.

"Something needs to have worked" is a thought with a lot of doom in it; it is very much the thought which I have about this.

Will, after your second referral to that article I went to the site, downloaded and read.

The author, Donald W. Livingstone (a philosophy professor at Emory), brings to the field of antebellum US history the same intellectual rigor that Velikovsky brought to the field of astronomy.

I imagine most US historians would be in the minority, were they to concur with arguments that propose African-Americans were freer in the South than in the North; that over time, down there, "slavery was developing into an apprenticeship system;" that the Confederacy had more right to secede from the North than the colonies had to pull away from Britain; that the Confederacy was a far more worthy bearer of moral principle than was the Union; that in fact there were more abolitionists in the South than there were in the North; that old Honest Abe was not only a worse racist than Jeff Davis (well, we all knew that) but was, indeed, a war criminal (we won't even go into Sherman)....

I most recently encountered this particular spin on this key part of US history in a book entitled "The South Was Right!" (Pelican, 1994, still available on Amazon I see...) Being meant for a general audience, that particular book had no footnotes, but I imagine the authors shared more than some of the same source material.

Graydon:
>>I can accept your judgement that simply killing the slaveholding class wouldn't work; I don't understand American cultural myths, and I certainly don't like the idea as an idea.

American cultural myths? You mean such as steering clear of liquidating the kulaks?

Here's one factor to be borne in mind when considering this hypothetical extermination of the slaveholders after the end of the Civil War: If it were to have taken place, I would not exist, as several of my forebears would have been killed.

Since, on the whole, I rather like existing, I think that this program has some serious deficiencies.

In a very real sense, advocating the extermination of slaveholders is advocating exterminating me. How can anyone advocate this and retain their vowels?

Alan -
None of us would be here; history would have changed, and we'd all go poof like soap bubbles as the thousand thousand strange co-incidences that lead to actual people would have happened differently.

Jack -
Such as thinking active rebellion to maintain a particularly harsh form of chattel slavery can somehow still exist inside the legal framework of the Union. I don't get that one at all.

Alan: as someone who brought up much the same argument as a folksy smokescreen under which to slip in the notion that the good and evil under discussion is not nearly so clearly cut or easily located as some would have it, I'd just like to point up the weakness of said argument when offered on its own: the destruction of your life--our lives--is counterbalanced by the unknown, wasted potential of all those lives cut short by racist violence, those opportunities crushed and quelled, those dreams deferred. The one (taken alone) does not and cannot outweigh the other. (Unless you accord the actual more importance than the potential, in which case why on earth are we even discussing mightabeens and counterfactuals?) Your existence is no more or less important in the objective scheme of things than the existence of some hypothetical individual in the hypothetical world, whose hypothetical existence would be rendered impossible without that butcher's retribution.

What renders Graydon's solution immoral and, yes, evil to me is the sheer bloody mass of it, the scope and the scale; the fact that it must be endorsed, supported, and carried out by the state (I don't think Graydon imagines an apology ever proving necessary for this massacre; his Union then becomes predicated upon the belief, the indisputable fact that this massacre was right); and that the ends towards which he imagines these bloody means will drive us can never be reached. --Graydon seems to have conflated our current political anemia--the subservience of the Individual to Big Business--with a mindset that divides people into owners and owned, slaveholders and slaves. From this, he has decided that to cure the modern body politic, this mindset must be destroyed, and that one way to have done so (in the United States, at least) is to have obliterated all traces of antebellum Southern culture. Even if I'm woefully misreading his logic, though--and I don't rule that out--his solution raises a startling host of unanswered questions. What other thought-crimes require such drastic solutions? Might our current winner-take-all fuck-our-contract you-snooze-you-lose attitudes not be cured by a wholesale slaughter of those who broke treaties with Native American nations, stole their land, and massacred them? Wouldn't the hypothetical that resulted be a better world? Sure, we can't pinpoint a single instance around which to base an auto da fe as easily as we can the Civil War, but why should that stop us?

Start laying blame, and you end up blaming the gods. Beams in the eye and first stones aside, I cannot trust anyone whose morals end up dictating mass murder without question. --I mean, I could lend them five bucks and still expect to get it back, yes. But I'd think twice before ever voting them onto a city council.

Even if the massacre that Graydon seems to be advocating had been entirely justified (and I don't buy his arguments that it would have been), it would have been a bad idea.

First, because it would have set a precedent of mass executions that would have been reused with much less justification, i.e. it's the top of a "slippery slope." For example, the National Guard at Kent State might have mown down everyone. No, that wouldn't have been legally justified, even under Graydon's Law, but a society where state-controlled entities kill large groups of people is not one where restraint will be used: violence begets itself. Positive feedback destroys the system. Would the US have lasted into the 20th Century, much less the 21st, had this been done? Hard to know, but I personally doubt it.

The other reason is that the next group of insurgents, of any kind, would fight to the death. This is a standard "no death penalty for crimes less than murder" argument: people will game whatever system you put them in; why would people who can count on being executed ever, EVER surrender? Even if you think they're totally evil, Graydon, they'd kill a lot more of the Good Guys if surrender can't be negotiated.

Bibliography: Machiavelli, Niccolo, The Prince. (Can't remember the rest, sorry.) Everyone maligns him, but he was the father of descriptive political science.

Graydon, consider how South Africa has been dealing with the end of apartheid. Or consider the great and obvious example--Gandhi's successful leadership of the Indian rebeillion. Conversely consider the French and Russian revolutions. The evidence is enormous that violence (including mass executions) as a method of social change does not lead to greater freedom ("expanded choice space," as you would probably prefer), despite the appearance that it might do so. Non-violent resolution, however slow, difficult and frustrating, has been consistently superior.

The belief that slavery was "evil" only became widespread in Western Europe and the USA after industrial capitalism began to make slavery obsolete. There was in fact no social and economic parity between North and South; the North was enormously wealthier, because its emergent industrial capitalism was enormously more efficient than the South's agrarian slavery. This is also what made it possible for the North to win the war; the North had logistic superiority due to economic superiority.

It is much, much, much easier to make peace with a defeated oppressor if one does not threaten mass executions. We are going to be facing this over and over in the century, as we assemble a world order capable of survival in the long term. However little we like it, we are, I think, going to have to make the kinds of compromises the original 13 colonies did when as they developed their federalism.

Alan: Because I didn't disemvowel it at the beginning, the conversation's been moving fast, I've had some fairly urgent projects that still aren't done, and being borderline croggled slows me down.

One of Machiavelli's repeated dictums is that, in public policy, one must be either wholly good or wholly bad: trying to steer a middle course ends up being the worst option. In this context, I guess Graydon's plan is wholly bad, while Jo Walton's is wholly good. Of the two, I prefer Jo's.

In fact, though I admit to being pretty out of my depth in this bit of history, my feeling is that the actual post-civil-war policy was just about close enough to good. Hanging a handful of ringleaders would have been worse, and not just for the ringleaders concerned. The question of whether it is possible, in the modern era, to be bad enough by Machiavellian standards is interesting, and is essentially the point Scott Lynch was making. (Speaking of whom, I for one would love to hear the Teutonic Tank-People Tale at some point.)

Sharyn McCrumb's forthcoming Ballad Novel, Ghost Riders, does a very good job of showing how brutal this war
was in the South. Neither North nor South, neith military nor civilians, showed anything that would suggest this was
a gentlemens war.

Graydon, I don't think you really grasp how unified the country was, as well as how divided it was. The division is obvious. At this remove, it can be difficult to see the many ways in which the states and their people were tied together. Some of the officers on both sides of the Civil War had been classmates at West Point, or served together in the Mexican War, some of them were related by blood. Officers were, more or less by definition, from well to do families. The world was not so big, then, so many of their families had social and business ties with each other.

Lincoln's passion to preserve the Union was not a legal fiction to permit him to fight the war. He cared more for the Union than he did about slavery, nor do I think that he was certainly wrong in doing so. The Union, the Great Experiment, this unique democracy on shores of the New World, was not yet 100 years old. The Revolutionary War was very nearly still within living memory. Whether or not the United States would stand was in grave doubt.

The founding fathers did not deal with slavery when negotiating the constitution because it was too controversial, and too likely to split the states. We paid for that during the Civil War. Would the price have been easier at the conception of our country? I don't know. Perhaps creating the Union was more important, and leaving the preservation of it to the next generation an appropriate choice.

The type of executions you have argued for would have antagonized not merely the South, but the North, as well. Moreover, it's practically the definition of a war crime. Hanging slave owners is the moral equivalent of declaring Padilla an "enemy combatant." By any standard I know, the slave holders were civilians. The military hanging civilians must always be wrong.

As Jo has pointed out, hanging the sundry and various Southern men doesn't address the actual problem, which is that the black citizens of the US have not been allowed to benefit from their own work. The theft of the economic production of the blacks is not trivial, is not secondary to chattel slavery. It is a central part of it. What the South really needed, in my opinion, was land reform. Jo's idea is better, though. Land reform almost always ends up causing more injustice than it cures, alas.

For those people who have argued that the Civil War wasn't _just_ about slavery, it was also about economics: What the hell did you think slavery was about? Oh, sure, it has prurient aspects which have been dwelt upon with rather sickening fascination. The central issue, though, is economic. Ownership is economics. The economic structure of the South was built on slavery. The relative lack of industrialization, compared to the North, was probably caused by access to free labor. The agricultural nature of Southern economy is, again, based on the benefits of free labor. Those damn cotton farms aren't, well, economic, without slaves. So, of course you're getting into overseas sales and trade balances and Northern fabric mills. _None_ of this makes the war about anything but slavery. Slavery drives it all. White men gaining wealth by enslaving black men. They didn't do it just for fun, you know.

it's funny how when I belittle people by labelling their arguments "religious", implying that they're not subject to reason or analysis, those people get angry.

And I can't imagine why, because I'm such a nice and reasonable guy.

Patrick, I know extremely intelligent Jews and Catholics who are great at reason and analysis. But their fundamental beliefs remain different. Too often, when discussing the Civil War, it seems to boil down to The Church of Lincoln versus The Church of Lee. The Church of Lincoln says, "You're defending slavery!" The Church of Lee says, "You're defending Big Brother!" The truth, I think, lies elsewhere. I think the Civil War is so important because so many different issues were at stake, and so many things about America changed, including the way we refer to it (from the plural "the United States are" to the singular "the United States is"), that to say that it's all about slavery is to miss the point.

And when I say "religious," I include myself. Among the divisions in this argument are those who believe that slavery could only be ended by violence and those who believe economic pressures would have ended it in another ten or twenty years, with a much smaller loss of life and, more importantly, with far fewer social repercussions: The history of the Civil Rights movement is a history of the consequences of the Civil War. Had slavery ended by itself, I believe blacks and whites would have become equals in the US (or the Confederacy) much sooner. Neither of those positions can ultimately be defended by reason, or if so, I sure can't do it and haven't seen it done.

Another division is between people who believe that war is sometimes necessary and people believe that it is never necessary. I fall into the latter camp. Definitely a religious position. Definitely mine. Everything I say should be weighed against that belief. I'm at least as subject to prejudice as the next guy.

Teresa: I wasn't in fact asking for disemvowellment. I'm trying to do something quite different: bring the discussion from the abstract to the personal.

Many of my forebears were Southern slaveowners. This isn't some alien Other whose fate we are dispassionately discussing. One of my dearest loves is descended from West Indian sugar slaves. We don't talk much about this, but it adds a complicating dimensionsion to our relationship.

A teacher of mine, Lane Arye, has been involved in a conflict resolution and community-building effort in post-war Croatia. The background of the stories he tells is that the Serbian atrocities in and after the breakup of Yugoslavia were strongly motivated by a desire for revenge for Croatian atrocities during the Nazi occupation, which in turn were motivated by a desire for revenge for ... a hall of mirrors of atrocity dating back through history, perhaps as far back as the days of Phillip of Macedon, if not further.

The lesson I learn from Lane's teaching is that I believe a systematic bloodbath after the end of the Civil War would accomplish many things. One of these things, unfortunately, would be the creation of a tradition of bloody resentment that in all likelihood would be orders of magnitude more virulent and violent than the tradition we have now of poseurs and wannabes joining Confederate heritage groups.

Jack, I'm a bit torn. On the one hand, I'm grateful that you read it, 'cause in my last go-around about the Civil War, the fellow who seemed to think I was a rabid slaver would not read the essay.

On the other hand, I wish you'd addressed whether a few of his points are true:

"On March 2, 1861, Congress passed what would have been the Thirteenth Amendment. This Amendment made it impossible ever to change the Constitution so as to give Congress authority to interfere with the domestic institutions of a state, including slavery. It established that:

"No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.

"In his first Inaugural Address, Lincoln went out of his way to endorse this ironclad protection for slavery in the states where it was established, as it was exactly what he had always maintained: ?I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.? So if the South had stayed in the Union, slavery would have continued as long as the states desired."

And this:

"Lincoln helped draft the new constitution of Louisiana. In it, he refused to acknowledge black citizenship and suffrage in Louisiana, even for black Union veterans, just as he had always publicly opposed granting citizenship to blacks in his own state."

And this:

"Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas voted to remain in the Union even after the Confederacy was formed. They reversed themselves only after Lincoln decided on an invasion that they considered both unconstitutional and immoral."

And, most importantly, this:

"If one had to pick one cause of secession around which the other causes revolved, it would have to be the forty-year-long moral and constitutional conflict surrounding the Northern policy of imposing a protective tariff at the expense of the South. As Charles Adams has shown in his brilliant study of the issue, such pundits as Charles Dickens, Lord Acton, and Karl Marx regarded the tariff as the fundamental cause of both Southern secession and Northern invasion. Marx supported the North, but he had no illusions as to what the war was about:

"'The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for sovereignty.'

"From 1820 to 1860, the United States suffered bitter sectional conflict over the tariff and surrounding issues. As of 1860, approximately 76 percent of American exports were agricultural staples. Nearly all came from the South, and were exchanged for British and European manufactures. The South raised little objection to an 1816 tariff to pay the debt from the War of 1812. The result was a 25-percent tax on woolen, cotton, and iron manufactures, a 30-percent ad valorem tax on various goods, and a 15-percent duty on all other imports. The 1816 tariff was to have expired in three years but was extended until 1824. Under this tariff, northern profits on manufacturing climbed as high as 25 percent, while agriculture yielded no more than four percent, and Southern land as low as two percent. Charles Wiltse observes that ?Tariff sentiment rose with rising profits. . . . The protectionist movement . . . came to be as completely sectional as slavery itself.?

"This spectacular increase in Northern profits prompted an increase of the tariff in 1824. The minimum duty on cotton goods, which had been 25 percent, was raised to more than 33 percent, for a stunning average rate of 37 percent. South Carolina?s economy depended almost entirely on exporting staples on an unprotected world market. A year after the new tariff, the price of cotton dropped from 21 cents per pound to 12 cents a pound, and the next year it dropped again to 8.8 cents a pound. From 1825 to 1827, her exports declined from 11 million to eight million. Not satisfied, the North again raised the tariff to an average of 50 percent on dutiable goods in 1828. This was done in full knowledge of what it would do to the Southern export trade. South Carolina?s response was nullification of the tariff until it came down to 10 percent. This led to the nullification crisis in 1832. A compromise was reached on dutiable goods at around 19 percent, where it hovered until Lincoln?s election in1860.

"In 1860, Lincoln ran on a Republican Party platform that proposed raising the tariff back to the high level that had prompted South Carolina?s nullification. The North, it was clear, would use its Congressional majority to pursue its interests even if it meant wrecking the Southern export trade. Accordingly, following Lincoln?s election, South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860. Congress promptly raised the tariff to 47 percent on March 2, 1861. Lincoln said that South Carolina could stay out of the Union if it liked, but he would still collect the revenue; like Rome, the North would live by tribute. To ensure that the North continued to receive its bounty, Lincoln reinforced Fort Sumter, located in Charleston Harbor. The purpose of the Fort was to protect the harbor?s tariff station. The Confederacy resisted paying tribute to the Union and, as their fathers before them had done, they drove the tax-collecting military from the fort. Contrary to myth, there were no casualties from the exchange at Fort Sumter. Clearly, none of this had anything to do with the moral question of slavery."

If the writer's a lying bastard, I'd like to know. Because I respect different interpretations of facts, and I even respect mistakes about facts. But I despise liars.

If he is a liar, I have to give him credit for one thing. A Libertarian citing Marx is a pretty canny guy.

Oh, and would someone who claims the South had no right to secede please tell me where it says in the Constitution that a state can't leave?

Will

Will, I will address three specific points.

First, read Lincoln's First Inaugural Address. You will find that he says that he has not read the proposed amendment; however, if it were to be enacted by the vote of the states, he would have no objection to it because that's how the law works. He was not arguing that slavery should be permanently enshrined in the Constitution, and it's flat-out dishonest to say so.

Second, I always find it amusing when someone cites an expert they would otherwise disagree with to bolster their point. Are we to assume that Livingstone would ever cite Marx approvingly on any other topic? If not, why should we trust him citing Marx on this topic?

Third: Article IV, Section 3: "The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State." Since there is no explicit Constitutional rule for a State to remove itself from the Union, that power is reserved to the Union.

Love the South. What y'all need to do, however, is get some new symbols

Pogo works for me. Actually, I guess what works is Pogo balanced against the overblown fantasies of gentility my Southern grandparents were prone to.

Having asserted my possession of Southern grandparents and therefore an ox to be gored... The argument that "saying X should have been done is tantamount to saying I should be destroyed, because I wouldn't have been born" is too wide a net. Probably most of us wouldn't exist if contraception and inoculation had been better two hundred years earlier; the first infants in a family would have survived, and sometimes been the only ones; not our later forebears. But the ghost cousins we don't have, because our grandparents could trust that their kids would mostly survive, don't trouble our sleep.

(Modulo larger economically desirable family sizes, and power of women, etc. But.)

Lydia--

I agree with slavery being an economic structure, but I think it's more honest to say that the war was about economics, with slavery as a subset of that, than to say it was about slavery and slavery alone.

Will brought up detailed notations on the Tariffs I mentioned earlier, which certainly had an effect on the war.

The trouble with wars is that people want a good/evil dichotomy, and it's never as clean as that. In my opinion, with the Civil War, the South was doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, while the North was doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. To explicate, the right thing to do was to peaceably secede from the Union, but to do it to preserve the morally icky practice of slavery wasn't the right reason; with the North, the wrong thing to do was to invade states who did nothing more than take their ball and go home; however, since the ball was attached to chains with slaves on the other end, that made the invasion a good sight more acceptable.

Thinking about this makes me think of a line in a poem I wrote which had a number of conservatives taking exception to it--"Men come for conquest, yet cry liberation"--because it was being applied to Bush's new pet war. However, that line can be applied to a great number of wars, and conquest/liberation--it isn't always an either/or situation. You can free the slaves AND be a carpetbagger. There's nothing that says you can't do both.

With Iraq, I feel that the US violated just about every international law, US precedent, and most moral and journalistic standards of truth and accuracy to prosecute a war against someone sitting on top of buckets of liquid money. However, since that someone was the leader of a gang of genocidal torturers and rapists with bad taste in art and architechtural stylings that can at the most charitable be described as ostentatious and nouveau riche (rather like the southern plantation mansions), this is likely what's going to be remembered at the end of the day.

Though to bring this back to the topic at hand, I think most will agree that the war in Iraq has not been "a gentlemanly affair." I doubt the Civil War ever was either, except in small, rare, fragmentary moments, as in any war.

Kevin Murphy: "Nothing more than take their ball and go home"? Have you, perhaps, forgotten precisely who fired the first shots of the Civil War?

Also, the only reason the South wanted to do what you term "the right thing" was because of... slavery. Take that away, and the South had no reason to want to secede in the first place.

Here's one factor to be borne in mind when considering this hypothetical extermination of the slaveholders after the end of the Civil War: If it were to have taken place, I would not exist, as several of my forebears would have been killed.

Honestly, Alan, so what? If not for WW2 and the Holocaust, my mother's family might not have left Europe, and my parents would then never have met. Does the Holocaust become a good thing because I wouldn't exist without it? That's crazy talk. Any great atricity, at any point in history, can then be justified by pointing at all the real-world people who wouldn't exist in the alternate universe where the atrocity didn't happen. Any child of rape (or descendant of one, and who can be certain of that twenty or thirty generations back?) can defend rapists on those grounds. It's an argument that undoes all rational thought about ethics.

Will wrote: Oh, and would someone who claims the South had no right to secede please tell me where it says in the Constitution that a state can't leave?

Well, I'll give it a try, but I will be addressing your question in a more general way -- it's late here too and I gotta get some sleep this week. Kevin has already given you the gist of the legal argument based on the bald wording of Aricle IV. At the minimum, it indicates that the exercise of sovereignity is a best shared between the central and the state governments. The real problem with looking at the language of the Constiution alone on this issue is that it is not clear -- and it was not supposed to be clear. The Constituion, above all, was a document designed to be sucessfully ratified. There was a basic disagreement among many of the signers about this concept of original sovereignity, and how much of it was retained by the states after entry into the Union. The controversies that arose as a result of this ambiguity helped lead to the Civil War, which comprehensively ended them. what happened in between is 1) that the founders and their sucessors views of the meaning of the Constitution developed over time, 2) accumulating experience and precedent weighed more and more against pure state sovereignity and 3) the basic logic of the secessionist's position was seen to have flaws.

The core argument of the secessionists was that original sovereignity was held by the individual states, and was never completely surrendered by them to the federal government. They would argue then that it was only up to each state, as a sovereign entity, to decide whether or not to remain part of the Union.

As most competent histories of the time will relate, many at the Constitutional Convention held with a strong view of state sovereignity -- and they had to or few of the state legislatures would have ratified the Constitution. But these views developed over time to accept that the federal government had its own unique sovereign role and powers. For example, Washington wanted to establish a military academy, but his Secretary of State, Jefferson, opposed it as being beyond the powers granted by the states. But one of Jefferson's first acts as President was to push, sucessfully, for the establishment of that academy. Consider the Louisiana Purchase, which under a strong state sovereignity model would clearly be outside the scope of Federal action, notwithstanding Aricle IV -- one or more indvidual states should have made the purchase, under that model. But Jefferson thought the federal purchase was a fine idea. This kind of development was routine in those years -- consider Marbury v. Madison (1803), maybe the most important court case in US history. In it Chief Justice John Marshall blithely established the concept of judicial review of acts of Congress, which appears nowhere in the Constitution.

This, time, and new territory lead to the next problem for secession theorists -- new states. In most US history books, you will find a map of the states at the end of the 18th century -- and the lands to the west that they claimed. That western boundary was not well defined, and there were conflicts. Many states claimed strips of land west from their Atlantic coastlines to the Mississippi River. Even before the Constitution was written, the Congress (the Confederation Congress) created the Northwest Ordinances that resolved these problems north of the Ohio, and set out the rules for establishment of new states. This process continued with the new Congress. Now, I think one might make a cogent argument for the original state sovereignity of say, Virginia, or even Texas. But Michigan or Mississippi? These new territories had been set out by federal law, and finally admitted by act of the federal Congress -- with the exception of Texas, none ever had sovereign existence apart from the US as a whole. How could the argument of original state sovereignity apply to them if they were not sovereign in origin?

Finally, as we gained a half century or so of experience in some sort of federal self government, the issue became clear: what was the nature of the agreement or compact between the states in ratifying the Constituion? Was is simple association,or did it have the nature of a contract? If it was the first, then a state could withdraw at any time. If it was the latter, then it would not be possible without the consent of the other states. This was derived from fundamental common law (which would have been close to holy writ for those on both sides of the argument) was that to be valid, a contract must bind both parties, and the consent of both parties is necessary to dissolve it. If you have made an agreement with another, you are legally bound to carry out your side of the contract, unless the other party fundamentally violates that contract, or you both agree to dispense with it. But the question of one party's (or one state's) obligations must be worked out under the terms of that contract itself in the light of the relevant law. Telling a judge that you just don't like the contract any more won't work -- and I've seen people try.

As the decades passed, many saw that if the Constituion was not binding on the states, whether a particular state liked it or not, there wouldn't be a United States at all. Others saw state sovereignity as a bulwark against tyranny. The test came in 1960, not over slavery directly, but over that wonderfully messy presidential elecion of Abraham Lincoln. Starting with South Carolina, states seceeded to "escape" being governed by a president they did not want. Lincoln studiously avoided the slavery issue for a couple of years, while agressively pursuing the southern states, asserting that any government that allowed groups to split off because they disagreed with an election, would not be holding to many more elections.

And in the end, the proof was in the pudding. There is no question that the smaller and more poorly equipped Southern armies usually beat the tar out of larger Nortern forces during the couple of years, most specifically at what may have been the most brilliant battlefield victory by any American commander, Chancellorsville. But they were defeated because the Confederate government, organized along the lines of state sovereignity, was an abject failure. It was a good thing that the Confederate president was elected for six years, because I have my doubts that the Confederate government could have put together a coherent election in the fall of 1864, as the Union government did. States could and did hoard troops and materiel in defiance of the Confederate government. Occasionaly, southern states, dissatified with one decision or another, threatened to seceede again. It makes you pity Davis, just a little.

The founders knew that if they wanted to: establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity they needed that more perfect union -- that these things did not spring up by themselves but required an effective government. Among other things, the Civil War settled the issue over the nature of that government, and that the union was binding.

Scuse, its late -- please read:

The test came in 1860

Emma has told me I may not post any more about the Civil War for at least two weeks, and she is a wise woman, so I won't. But, obviously, it's a pet obsession, so I'll continue to read what's here, so long as this thread seems to be active. (I'm currently reading MacPherson's single-volume book on the Civil War, because it's been a couple of decades since I've done much reading about it.)

I just wanted to say that I'm not running off in a huff. I'm only returning to lurker mode. I'm grateful for the corrections and suggestions offered so far, and will be grateful for any future ones.

And since I'm breaking the spirit and perhaps the letter of Emma's order with this final post, I'll add: thank you, Kevin, for the swastika link, and Claude, I am in awe; that's one of the finest late-night posts I've seen.

I especially admire "How could the argument of original state sovereignity apply to them if they were not sovereign in origin?" My problem with basing the supremacy of federal power on "The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State," is that "Territory and Property" would seem to refer to federal possessions, not to the states themselves, since the states can hardly be property of themselves; they're the entities that united to have shared property. Apologies for the previous sentence; I'm a bit tired to try to simplify it now. All that was only preface to saying that you have pointed out a complexity I had not considered, and I'm grateful for that.

Will, at no point did I say, hint, or imply that the author, Donald Livingstone, was a liar.

I did say, hint, and imply that his interpretation of the facts differs considerably from that of the mainstream of US history; that in this instance Livingstone's application of the facts to fit his thesis demonstrates an unexpected, and active willingness to view and present the Confederacy in a light far, far more positive than would seem necessary to support an argument for secession.

I thought I should point that out.

I've been watching this. People have been wondering about Graydon's zeal for mass executions here, and I think I understand why.

WARNING: Godwin's Law violation and amature psychoanalysis ahead:

I think that Graydon sees similarities between the present situation in the US, and the early 1930's. He's in a position similar to somebody in German thinking that perhaps a mass execution would have been much better than 5-year prison sentence for putschers (sp?). Mercy was given, taken, and used against those who showed mercy. Those who were shown mercy will show no mercy themselves.

In the US, a group of people has been engaging in high crimes and misdemeanors for the past 30 years, always getting a pass (the present cabal in charge has roots in the Nixon White House). They've attacked and attacked the Constitution, usually failing, but never being held accountable. Clinton went through more h*ll for made up scandals than these guys have gone through for crimes which would merit execution in a better system.

And now (IMHO), Graydon fears that they may be at the point where failure is no longer an option. Bush probably has the odds with him in the next election, *before* another few terrorist attacks, the next war, paperless voting machines, and the Supreme Court. The Democratic leadership at the national level has been castrated/bought off. The Supreme Court has a 4-5 right-wing wacko/conservative split; the odds are that the Scalia Court will convene by 2006, with a 5-4 whacko majority.

Combined with a GOP president, a GOP Congress, a media which shirks its traditional duty 90% of the time (with media 'deregulation' coming), a 3-1 advantage in money, and a continuing state of perma-war, things don't look good for the dominant economic/military superpower on the planet.

Any child of rape (or descendant of one, and who can be certain of that twenty or thirty generations back?)...

Indeed, you can be virtually certain that you are a descendant of a rapist, since virtually everyone is. (There are even some biological facts about male sexual response which...but that's off-topic.) The practice of killing all the men and raping all the women in a conquered community was practically universal 5000 years ago. Only if none of your ancestors were ever involved in a war can you claim to escape this, and no one can trace their ancestry back far enough for that.

Kevin said: "Though to bring this back to the topic at hand, I think most will agree that the war in Iraq has not been "a gentlemanly affair." I doubt the Civil War ever was either, except in small, rare, fragmentary moments, as in any war."

I don't quite know what defines a gentlemanly war.

Giventhe nature of modern weapons,and doctrine, there is never again likely to be a battle where only combatants are involved.

From the moment the Coalition crossed the berm, until some days after they took Bagdhad the figting never really stopped.

Right now the totals for non-combatant casualties are in the low thousands (though the tally is not complete). Given how nervous U.S. troops were when moving north on the Main Supply Routes, they showed an amazing forbearance (I can easily see how several of the people we passed when I was moving up could have ended up dead. I know because I thought about shooting them).

All in all, it seems to me that both sides pretty much played by the rules, and when it comes to something as brutal as war, that's as close to gentlemanly as it is ever going to get.

Terry

I agree with slavery being an economic structure, but I think it's more honest to say that the war was about economics, with slavery as a subset of that, than to say it was about slavery and slavery alone.

Kevin Murphy,

What makes it "more honest" to say that the war was about economics? It is more comfortable, certainly. However, the economy of the South was built upon slave labor. Describing it as a subset is misleading. Moreover, the abolitionists were _not_ fighting about economics. They were fighting about the enslavement of human beings. As I said, of course economics figures into it, how can it not? However, the conflict is between the perception of a basic right of man vs. the economic comfort provided some people by free labor. If the South could have created the same economic situation without the use of slaves, the Civil War would not have happened.

It is the confluence of economics, civil rights, and various attempts to use the Constitution to restrict or expand the territory where slaves might be held, that makes the Civil War about slavery, and nothing else. What do these things have in common? Along what lines are the alliances drawn? The unifying factor is: slavery.

Like nearly everyone else here, I don't agree with Graydon's proposal of mass executions. But I disagreed with someone upstream who contrasted the actual number of lynchings with the hundreds of thousands of slaveowners that Graydon might have executed.

There are a couple of problems here. First, owning a slave is just about as bad as killing someone, in my book. One should make allowances for the fact that a person raised in the antebellum South was socialized to think that slavery was good, just as I would make allowances for someone raised in an environment where murder was fine. But executing a slaveowner for owning slaves and funding a traitorous war is not morally the same as lynching an innocent person.

The other point I'd make is that in the real world, for all practical purposes the southern United States merely exchanged the slave system for a form of apartheid. (Not that the North was that much better.)

I'm utterly opposed to Graydon's proposal of mass executions for slave-owning, war-supporting traitors and I don't think it would have led to the good consequences that he imagines for it. But the path we actually did follow was in its own way even more monstrous and one should not obscure this point by looking at the narrow question of how many lynchings occurred. Those lynchings occurred (and were recorded on postcards) as part of a social system for keeping millions of blacks in their place.

Graydon wants an alternate history where slaveowners get what was coming to them and then someone else attacks Graydon's position by minimizing the evil of what actually did occur. So long as we're choosing parallel universes, I'd prefer one where the top southern leaders were more severely punished (but not hung) and the South forced to give the newly freed slaves equal rights.

I'm sure practically everyone agrees with this, but I was a little bothered when one person attacked Graydon's alternate history by preferring the one which actually did occur.

Although this string is long enough, I can't help commenting on the unearned moral fervor of so many participants. We all agree that slavery was a monstrous evil, but who among us actually opposed it? Did any of us ever free a slave? Help one escape to freedom? Risk life and limb denouncing it? Of course not. Generations before us did that, and only a small minority of the members of those generations. If slavery were now an existing fact, a living institution with deep roots in and spreading branches throughout our economy and culture, how cocksure are we that we would take a position, with its attendant risks, that damn few people took at the time? Unless human nature has changed fundamentally in a couple of centuries, isn't it more likely that we, like the real human beings who confronted the real problem, would be all over the lot? Some of us would be radical abolitionists, some non-expansionists, some popular sovereignty advocates, some expansionists. Some us of would think slavery a monstrous evil, some a sad necessity, some a positive good, better than the cruel "free" labor system of the heartless industrial North. Many of us wouldn't think about it at all.
Let's not pat ourselves on the back too hard for the moral achievement of having been born in the late 20th century.

Donald, as the person who so attacked Graydon, let me try to make a little more clear what I was doing.

Graydon said he couldn't see a difference between his atrocity and the atrocity that occurred, referring very specifically to numbers of people killed in either timeline--not the moral weight of each individual death. "I would like to note that I can't see how this is different from prefering the retail slaughter that we actual got, in the form of lynchings and unacknowleged murders, to a hypothetical in which there's a wholesale, or at least bulk rate, slaughter of those chiefly responsible for a great evil," he said. "It might be a very clear difference in your imagination of the world, or in that of others here, but I can't see it." --I went very specifically to some figures Googled up to try to provide some idea of the respective scopes of death being kicked around: there is a very real difference between the two in the crass physical bloody terms of body count, and since neither Graydon nor anyone else can offer up any proof that his solution would mitigate Bad Stuff in any meaningful way, those crass physical bloody terms are the only objective ways I can see of comparing the two timelines. (Subjective is another matter entirely.) There is a difference, a very clear one, on those grounds, not just in my imagination, and I wanted to make that clear.

I apologize if in any way I seemed to be minimizing the horrors of what actually occurred. That was never my intent. It is a crass argument--that's why I opened the post by referring to pounds of flesh. But the actual point, my moral point, was then and is still now this:

That the one is, however imperfectly, a crime deplored, denounced, and regretted; that the other is mass murder coolly proposed as an acceptable course of action.

That's the other difference that isn't in my imagination, and the one that's far more important.

You're damn right, though, that I prefer this world, where we continue to do what we can to muddle through, forgive what we can, learn the lessons slowly and painfully, and allow a generous swath of doubt's benefit. "We're dumb in so many ways," to quote Teresa's eloquent post a ways upthread; I vastly prefer a world where stupid though it may seem, we are all allowed space and time to realize our dumbnesses, repudiate them, and work to some small redemption. It is a hard, nasty, mean, cruel, imperfect world. The Civil War and the horrific aftermath of apartheid in the US is but one of the awful tragedies we've wrought. But I'll take this one over a world where justice is seen as something so swift, so terrible, so brutal, so final, so unforgiving.

I vastly prefer this world to Graydon's proposal, yes. If that makes me a monster, so be it.

Josh said: Also, the only reason the South wanted to do what you term "the right thing" was because of... slavery. Take that away, and the South had no reason to want to secede in the first place.

See, it's that type of oversimplification which grates. There were many tensions between the North and the South; slavery was The Big One--and, possibly, the only unresolvable one--but it wasn't the only one. That slavery was such a big cause of tension helps to mask the other tensions, and it was such a strong cause of tension in and of itself that the others were amplified.

The strongest evidence that slavery was the biggest tension was the fact (which I've dragged out on rasff and in other fora) that the Confederate states joined the rebellion in strict order of percentage of population enslaved--that is, the states with the most slavery joined first, and the states with the least joined last. And, of course, the mountains of Virginia counter-rebelled because they had, basically, no slaves at all.

But "only reason"? No, and saying so only gives people an excuse to say that it wasn't the reason at all.

Kevin: Fair enough. I wrote that paragraph a bit too quickly.

I'm still a little boggled by the assertion that the South wanted to do the right thing by seceding. (And yes, I realize that you're not the Kevin who made that assertion.)

C.J., there is slavery now. If anyone wants to free slaves, check out freetheslaves.net or humantrafficking.com. I'm not guaranteeing that these are the best sites--they're just the first ones that came up in a search on [modern slavery].

Imho, the least much needed to prevent slavery (afaik, there's no commercial structure with slave markets, but there are more than a few people kept trapped as workers or servants) in the first world is open borders. So long as immigration is restricted, there will be rightless people among us, and some of them will get enslaved.

To -K

I still disagree, but don't have time to, um, basically repeat myself. But I don't think you're a monster. I also don't think Graydon is a monster. Many Americans defend the bombing of Hiroshima, sometimes on the grounds that it "saved American lives", but sometimes on the grounds that deliberately killing 100,000 civilians saved more lives on both sides in the long run. Graydon's proposed legal hanging of a large number of traitors seems less horrible than that, though I think the bitterness it would have caused probably would have meant it wouldn't have had the effect he thinks it would. I'm not sure why the destruction of Japanese cities didn't stir up more hatred of Americans.

To CJ Colluci--

Some of us here probably know that if born into the 19th century we might have been on the wrong side of the slavery issue, depending on the circumstances. The same point also applies to any discussion of Nazi Germany.

It also applies when discussing current or recent American wrongdoing and as someone said earlier, our descendants might look at us with some degree of horror for the way we condoned policy X.

"merely exchanged the slave system for a form of apartheid" - see e.g. W.J. Cash the Mind of the South or wander around the cities for the notion that whatever it was it wasn't apartheid in the South, though perhaps in the North. See also why James Meredith put himself in position to be shot.
"why the destruction of Japanese cities didn't stir up more hatred of Americans" - no question it saved lives - there may have been more efficient ways to save lives but remember Fuchida told Tibbets the bomb was "the right thing"

Is there a concensus that Robert E. Lee did not uniquely soften the nature of the American Civil War?

Further I suggest that race relations were better in the American South than in the Belgian Congo or German South West Africa in the years after the American Civil War? Should a then victorious Grand Army of the Republic with the blood of all the Southern slaveholding class on their hands - man, woman and child, have then set things right in Africa? If not in Africa why in the South?

Will, I don't know these other arguments and other venues where you've been hanging out, the ones where discussions of the Civil War boil down to the church of Lincoln vs the church of Lee; but while I hope you'll forgive me for speaking bluntly, and I'm sure the people involved must be perfectly nice once you get to know them, those have got to be some damned stupid arguments. You should stop wasting your time on them, whoever and wherever they are. Why not write some more novels instead? You write swell novels.

Wow, quite an argument. A few points:

The argument that tariffs caused the civil war is an old one, and a bogus one. The southern states seceded because they didn't like the Republican policy that would ban slavery in the territories, and feared that this would be the beginning of the end of the slaveholding system. Period. The Whigs in 1840 won with a pledge to raise tariffs, and they won with, well, a great deal of southern support. Louisiana sugar planters, in fact, were explicitly dependent on high tariffs in order to make a profit - otherwise, cheap Cuban and Brazilian sugar would have driven them out of business.

As far as Graydon's proposal, not only is it rather horrifying, it's also, well, how to explain this? Graydon is upset that the Union didn't "finish the job". What, exactly, is the job he's referring to? For nearly everybody at the time, the principal job was not to ensure black equality. It was to ensure the restoration of the Union. For that purpose, what happened after the war worked fairly well. As far as helping black people achieve equality, well, I think a whole lot more could have been done without having to resort to the kind of measures Graydon has advocated, and I think his measures would, in many ways, have made the restoration of the union - by far the most important goal to the people of the time (and, even today, I think, one which most people would have to agree is an important one) - nearly impossible.

The Cromwell analogy Graydon made a long time ago was particularly inapt - if he was referring to Cromwell in Ireland, surely Cromwell's behavior did very little to quell Irish unrest in the long term, and even in the short term only left it to simmer beneath the surface. If he was referring to Cromwell in England, well, Cromwell really left almost no legacy in England - within two years of his death, the King was back on the throne, and things were back basically to how they were before the Civil War. 1688 (or even 1714, perhaps) was by far the more important year for English constitutional history (and was, surprisingly enough, a bloodless revolution)

Anyway, one thing this whole argument shows is the way that the Civil War is still a massively important contemporary issue in America today, due largely, I'd imagine, to the harrowing course of the history of race relations in this country. We don't find Americans arguing heatedly, for instance, over the merits of the Spanish-American War, which was surely one of the less justified wars that history provides us with example of. Nevertheless, a discussion of said war will rarely devolve into heated debates of possible counterfactuals.

And as far as the question of why secession would be unconstitutional, I believe the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution says that no state can, on its own authority, revoke the laws of the United States. Which suggests to me that an ordinance of secession passed under state law (which would, by the by, involve the revocation of numerous federal laws, such as tariff law) would be unconstitutional on those grounds. Secession would not be unconstitutional in and of itself, but congress would have to pass a law to legalize secession, which it did not do.

Very nice post John (also a lot of other people) -- but clark, I'm still trying to figure out just what you are talking about . . . perhaps my problem.

You are correct about the supremacy clause, John, at least in general. There is a historical reason why I didn't cite it last night. (Besides, it was late and my post was too damm long already.) The problem has to do with the Tenth Amendment, having to do with reserved powers:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. (my emphasis)

As an amendment, this will modify or limit the supremacy clause, and not the other way around.

As you know, many states would not ratify the constitution unless a commitment was made to add the first ten amendments, usually known as the Bill of Rights. (As pointed out above, the nifty part was that as amendments, they could have even more effect than if they were part of the original document -- all of the different portions of the original constitution have to be weighed against each other, but an amendment is, to put it badly, trumps.) The tenth amendment ws the last one but it was not just tacked on. The idea of state sovereignity was widely accepted throughout the country, just as much in the North as in the South. State legislatures such as Virginia's said in so many words that unless it was clear that the central government only had the powers that the states expressly granted it, Virginia would not ratify. A number of scholars and commentators of the period held that the right to seceed was expressly reserved to each state by that amendment, as well as by the language of the ratifying debates and resolutions in the individual states. Just google on secession and constituion and you will get a bunch of neo-states rights sites just chock full of quotes from that period.

That's why I was, and am, more concerned how the understanding of the nature of the Union developed The Constitution is always interpreted within a "frame", a set of ideas of just what the government is and is not supposed to be. States and individuals that were staunchly for state sovereignity in 1800, gradually became convinced of the need of a binding union instead of a provisional confederation, as time went by, and new circumstances had to be dealt with -- and began to evaluate the Constitutional provisions within that new frame. But many in the Southern states had the same view of the Constitution as when it was first ratified. To them, secession did not violate anything, it was a clearly understood option of any sovereign state under the Constituion. This difference of interpretation was not the cause in itself of the Civil War, as a state had to decide that it wanted to seceed before it mattered at all. But it was like a fracture plane in a stone -- latent until sharply struck. The issue in the end was which view of the Constitution best served its original purposes, a question answered by the Civil War itself.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. (my emphasis)

One would argue that the Supremacy Clause specifically prohibits to the states the right to nullify federal law (a broad class of actions which would include secession). But obviously, as you point out, the whole thing was disputed at the time. Which is one of the reasons why these kinds of arguments can be a bit silly. My point wasn't to make an airtight case against secession, but to point out that a pretty good constitutional argument can be made, using the text of the constitution, to show that secession, at least as carried out by the southern states in 1860-1, was unconstitutional.

Josh,

To undo the boggling a little bit about what I meant by "the right thing," my personal belief is that if you're in an ugly marriage, a bad contract, or any other legal arrangement where there's a marked inequity between the parties, especially with one happy and the other miserable--and moreover if it's a lifetime arrangement--it's the right thing to do to try to renegotiate the contract, and failing that, break it.

Yes, the South owned slaves. This was bad. However, it wasn't as if the North hadn't been willing to turn a very blind eye to the whole business when it had been in the mutual interest of both to break away from England--where, it should be noted, you couldn't really do the slavery thing, unless you called them "Irish tenants" or "indentured servants" or kept them in another country or had press-ganged them to crew your navy or whatever.

So, given this sort of history, I don't blame the South for wanting to leave the North. If slavery wasn't that big of a problem when they were both being taxed to death by King George, then it shouldn't have been that big of a problem later on.

Of course, it was, which led to the war.

Julia,

It may be more "comfortable" to talk about it as "economics," rather than "slavery," but I think it's also more accurate. Talking about it as slavery makes it sound like slavery alone, and a purely moral crusade. And Lincoln's rallying cry, so far as I remember, was "The Union must be preserved!" not "Slavery is evil!"

Though so far as the comfort end goes, you can also have a more rational discussion if you shy away from words that, as we've seen from this conversation so far, send some people off the deep end, screaming for mass lynchings and general genocide.

Talk of tarrifs generally doesn't send anyone into apoplexy.

As a certain wise man with the initials PNH has pointed out on more than one occasion, slavery wasn't as much a "big deal" in the eyes of the North as in the eyes of the South. For the 81 years preceding Lincoln's election, the federal government had produced a series of laws, court rulings, and practices which elevated the rights of the Southern states to treat human beings like livestock above the rights of the Northern states to treat human beings like human beings. The Dred Scott decision--which extended the consequences of the Southern states' unhumanizing laws into the Northern states--was just the most stark example. The South was willing to destroy the United States to preserve slavery; the North was willing to destroy the South to preserve the Union.

Other Kevin: Talk of tariffs doesn't now send Americans into apoplexy. It certainly did in the pre-War USA; tariffs were the main source of tax revenue for the federal government, and were blamed for everything from falling cotton prices to soured milk. Just google on the phrase "tariff of abominations" if you don't believe me.

Kevin A.: How exactly was the south mistreated by the north in 1860? Because the Republican party won a presidential election on a platform pledged not to allow slavery in territories that weren't suitable for slavery anyway? Forgive me if I am not particularly sympathetic.

As far as tariffs, again, they are a red herring. The "Tariff of Abominations" led South Carolina to action, but the rest of the south supported President Jackson in opposing the nullifiers. And economic issues had absolutely nothing to do with the origins of the war. What brought on the war was a bunch of southerners who felt that the north, by electing the Republicans president, had proved that it did not care about the south's interests re: slavery, and that there was no point in further association with it. Tariffs had pretty much nothing to do with it. The root causes can be brought deeper - my old professor, Michael Holt, argued that it was the collapse of a bi-sectional two party system (Democrats vs. Whigs) in the early 1850s, due to improved economic times which destroyed the Whig program, which brought the Republicans into existence and generally made everybody focus on sectional issues (since economic issues didn't really matter) which was the proximate cause of the war. Nevertheless, I don't think any historian would deny that it was the issue of slavery, and particularly the silly non-issue of the extension of slavery into the territories, which got the south upset. Basically, my opinion is that the whole thing was a bizarre mania. Logically, the Republican victory would not really affect slavery in any particularly notable way. But decades of paranoia (and the complete destruction of the kind of bisectional understanding that mitigated such paranoia) made the south abnormally sensitive about slavery, and brought on the war.

On a completely different note, I'm just wondering, but what are the opinions of people here on the Compromise of 1850? Here we see that a compromise was made to preserve the union which included many features that we would find rather horrifying (well, one feature, the despicable Fugitive Slave Act, at least). I've always been of two minds. On the one hand, the Northern Whigs who opposed it were dead right: the Fugitive Slave Act was monstrous. On the other hand, the other option was southern secession and civil war. Was that really a desirable result? Isn't a negative judgment of the Compromise really a result of us applying our own standards to a time where they can't really be applied. Wouldn't most of us, had we been living in 1850, have applauded Daniel Webster when he spoke in favor of the Compromise, saying that preservation of the Union was more important than either side scoring points? I don't know, to be honest, but I think anyone who says it was an easy call is being dishonest. It's easy enough now to say that slavery was really, really horrible, and that anything which perpetuates it ought to be opposed, but I think that one can see, at the time, serious considerations that would impel one to the view that this evil would have to be tolerated for the foreseeable future (for one thing, there seemed to be no practicable way of ending it in the near future - certainly, provoking secession by unwillingness to compromise would not seem a particularly plausible way to bring about an end to slavery).

So, anyways, while I have little to no sympathy for silly romanticization of the Confederacy, I have little more for the kind of present-minded arguments that try to judge historical figures by the standards of the present. Yes, we ought to condemn the Confederacy as a government which was based entirely on a slaveholding economic system, and we ought to condemn those individuals who led it for their devotion to it. On the other hand, is there any particular need to show off our moral uprightness by saying nasty things about Jefferson Davis?

When I first saw Graydon's comment about the Union's failure to "finish the job," I had a sense of naggigly familiar horror. I couldn't place the source for a while, but I finally remembered where I had heard that before.

Last spring, former Ambassador Dennis Ross gave a talk on campus. He used to be a special envoy (cue Warren Zevon) for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and unsurprisngly spoke about the future of negotiations in that conflict. He was, as you would expect from a career diplomat, very smooth and civilized, and found something positive to say to every person who asked a question, no matter how wrong-headed the question may have ended up being. With one exception.

At the reception after the talk, he got cornered by a couple of scary militant Israelis, who were insisting that the whole problem was that the Palestinians are just inherently untrustworthy, and there can be no peace with them. They would've fit right in on Little Green Footballs.

The ambassador was very polite, and pointed out that the current situation is simply untenable. They suggested that Israel should just re-occupy the whole Palestinian terrotiry in force. He calmly pointed out that that has been done, and didn't really work out so well. One of the scary militants then said that the previous occupation hadn't worked, but this time they would "finish the job."

Now I know what it takes to make a diplomat lose his temper. And, really, it's no less reprehensible a sentiment when expressed about people a hundred years dead.

This is, um, a book review, and not participation in this topic: McPherson's BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM has some interesting things on economic concerns of the South (not regarding slavery) under Chapter Three, "An Empire for Slavery," Section II (beginning on page 91 of the trade paperback). BATTLE CRY also has a nice mention of one of my favorite Unitarian ministers, Theodore Parker, who used the phrase "government of the people, by the people, for the people" in a speech in 1850.

James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom is indeed an outstanding one-volume history of the war.

A tangential book recommendation, based on someone's skepticism that slavery would be as clear an issue if we had been rich, free and white in 1855; The Southern Lady, Anne Firor Scott; University Press of Virginia, 1995. Has diary excerpts showing an enormous range of reaction by white women, who could conclude that slavery was an evil either because it was hard on the slaves or because it was hard on the white women. Remarkably outspoken, some of them, and more of them bitter in their diaries.

Neither slavery nor the war is central to the book; I recommend it as a sidelight for the imagination.

Hard to do much better than Shelby Foote's The Civil War, A Narrative History, which is a bit large (3 vols.). It also has been interesting to hear the development of Foote's own views since that book (finished early 1970's).

Foote's trilogy is, of course, a masterpiece. And it and McPherson compliment one another very well.

Patrick, I am no specialist on Foote (or on the Civil War for that matter), but I find the slow move of his views (at least as I see them) over the past 20 years to be significant. For example, in his books, as I remember it, he was almost dismissive of Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts. That has been (in a more general sense) one of the main criticisms of Foote in recent years -- he just did not seem to find the role of African-Americans in the Civil War a interesting or compelling subject, except as slaves, off there in the background. The exceptions were the usual ones -- Frederick Douglass, say.

But by the time Ken Burns interviewed him, he was much more admiring of Shaw. And that film, and more recent comments seemed to show quite a bit of change and development, a recognition that the role of blacks in the Civil War went beyond his earlier portrayal -- or so it seemed to me.

As someone who (I hope) has grown and changed, I have always found this kind of process of development fascinating, sometimes more interesting that the actual views that a person holds. It is sometimes too easy to come up with an explanation for why someone holds an opinion. But change can be much more difficult, and more important, to explain.

I like this Foote quote (from Burn's film):

Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean REALLY based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement with the European wars, beginning with the first World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us - what we are, and it opened to us what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the 20th century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the 19th century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.

I think the intensity of this thread bears this out.

Pardon me for coming in late to the party, but a couple of comments dovetailed neatly with some reading I've been doing lately about the history of California. (Well, I'm actually reading about the history of mineral strikes and swindles, which is why I have a copy of THE GREAT DIAMOND HOAX AND OTHER STIRRING INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF ASBURY HARPENDING, (c) A. Harpending, 1913, edited by James H. Wilkins, and published by the James H. Barry Co., San Francisco. Mr. Harpending does spend a considerable amount of time on his military experience, at least in the portion of the book I have read so far; he begins with his attempt at age fifteen to run away and enlist with General Walker. "The objective," he says, "was the conquest of Nicaragua." but he got stopped. In late 1860, when Harpending was nineteen or twenty, he arrived in San Francisco, California, and thereby hangs the tail of the dove.)

Kevin Andrew Murphy:
"Famous Civil War battlesites of California? Anywhere?
"We didn't have any Civil War battlefields."

Claude Muncey:
"Nope, no major battlefields. [...] But two 'battles' were fought in CA -- the economic battle of paying for the Union war effort (think gold) and the battle of keeping California in the Union."

There almost was a battle, though. Without quote marks, and with guns and everything. Harpending says, "I am now going to relate for the first time the inside story of the well-planned effort ot carry California out of the Union and by what a narrow margin it finally failed of accomplishment when success was absolutely assured." He calls himself, "young, hot-headed, filled with the bitter sectional feeling that was more intense in the border States than in the States farther north or south. It would have been hard to find a more reckless secessionist than myself. I moved among my own people, got off all sorts of wild talk about spending the last dollar of my money, and my life, if need be, to resist the tyrant's yoke, and so forth, and was actually about to leave for my home in Kentucky to be ready for the impending struggle, when a quiet tip was given me that more importtant work was cut out where I was." He signed up and took oath with a band of thirty; of this band, he says, "Our plans were to paralyze all organized resistance by a simultaneous attack. The Federal army was little more than a shadow. About two hundred soldiers were at Fort Point, less than a hundred at Alcatraz and a handful at Mare Island and at the arsenal at Benicia, where 30,000 stand of arms were stored. We proposed to carry these strongholds by a night attack and also seize the arsenals of the militia at San Francisco. [...] All of which may seem chimerical at this late day, but then, take my word, it was an opportunity absolutely within our grasp."

They did not succeed in the attempt, because they didn't attempt at all. They were beaten before beginning by two things. General Albert Sidney Johnston was one of them. According to Harpending, "General Johnston only figured as a factor to be taken by surprise and with force. We wished him well, hoped he might not suffer in the brief struggle, but nobody dreamed for an instant that his integrity as a commander-in-chief of the army could be tampered with." In January 1861, Harpending and two others set up a 'social visit' with Johnston to find out how much damage the indiscreet talk of one of the conspirators might have done.

Answer? A lot. According to Harpending, Johnston's opening remarks to his visitors were delivered with courtesy and civility, but nevertheless struck home: "Before we go any further, there is something I wnt to mention. I have heard foolish talk about an attempt to seize the strongholds of the government under my charge. Knowing this, I have prepared for emergencies, and will defend the property of the United States with every resource at my command, and with the last drop of blood in my body. Tell that to all our Southern friends."

Harpending says he and his pals "sat there like a lot of petrified stoten-bottles," which is a comment that charms me not least due to a spelling for Stoughton bottle I had not hitherto encountered. And shortly after, the second factor put the quietus on the notion of organizing a "Republic of the Pacific" by this particular band of thirty. (No doubt many of them got into the fray in other ways. Indeed, after Texas seceded, Johnston himself made his way to the Confederate army and died at Shiloh. And I'm only up to the point in Harpending's tale where he gets himself a captain's commission in the Confederate navy, a vessel, a couple of cannon, and some letters of marque, and sets himself up to turn privateer and nab a couple o' three gold shipments on eastbound Pacific Mail steamers at the first opportunity, so I expect there to be all sorts of excitement before we get anywhere near the Diamond Hoax that was this reader's original quarry. I think Teresa might enjoy this book a lot, as might many here; it's got ladies sewing secret dispatches into their petticoats, and )

I'm not sure, now, what else I started out to say, but it had something to do with Harpending's comment that "I am mighty glad now that my efforts to disrupt the Union failed and still gladder because it has been my good fortune to see the awful heritage of hate that so long divided two brave and generous people die out and disappear." On the other hand, he also says that "the text-books of our schools are still deformed by a spirit of intolerance and prejudice, most unfortunate and misleading in an age that has happily outlived the bitterness that divided us in the past." I'm not sure who all he means his "us" to include. Then again, he did help Grant out of his financial difficulties in later years in New York -- he mentions this by way of explaining where he got his quotes of Grant on Johnston and Shiloh.

Anyhow, yes, California was saved from the desolation of war by Johnston, if Harpending is accurate -- but it might have been a near thing indeed. (Fascinating stuff to one who was raised in a Lutheran jar and never taught much history; maybe this is old hat to everybody else. Reading accounts from people who were there is starting to make some sense of some patches of North American history to me. I still cannot unbraid and unsnarl all the things that led to current attitudes about the past, though, and doubt that I ever will, but it sure is educational trying.)

Friends,
I've bookmarked this website, amazed and pleased at the acuity of vision, the courtesy of retort, the depth of consideration and the breadth of subject-facets examined, while sticking to one basic tenet, one thread.

I'm an expat American, living in my 18th consecutive year in Thailand, and my 32nd year outside CONUS. When the 18-day War For Baghdad broke earlier this year, I was moved to examine in some detail just WHAT it all meant to me, and to my two sons (9 and 7) by my loving ethnic Thai/Lao wife.

It just so happened that a Brit expat friend had lent me the 6 videotapes of the award-winning "The American Civil War", and I watched them through, 3 times before moving to examine parts and pieces. Yes, I'd read Sandburg's "Abraham Lincoln" trilogy in high-school, and had taken and passed the requisite courses in American history, but at that time I was not prepared to learn the terrible, powerful and transformative lessons of what America's Civil War was about.

There's little I can add to the careful, well thought-out comments above on the 'causes' of the War, and the wretched revisionist 'War of Northern Aggression' or 'Lee was SO NOBLE... sigh...'

But my experiences this year, seeking to help my sons know their American birthright and legacy, led me to learn a bit about mine. I had family on both sides, in Confederate artillery, cavalry and infantry units AND Union infantry and artillery.

For me, there is a terrible poignancy in this, knowing too that 7 of my forebears were incarcerated at Andersonville, and 4 of them never got out of it alive... For me, I seek with all my heart, my mind and my very being, to honor THEIR sacrifices, THEIR sufferings and THEIR commitments HERE, NOW, in my actions and my efforts.

Am I mindful of where my fingers strike the keys? Must I say this or write that? What can wring some extra meaning from their maddened, enraged clawing at each other back there, on field after battlefield?

I find, now, some small nobility in this, that I do honor, in my word and in my deed, their efforts then, without gratuitous hindsight or arrogance, seeing and acknowledging how difficult it is HERE and NOW to make MY decisions and stand by MY commitments.

If my ancestors fought for the Confederacy, it truly and deeply was the best decision they could find, in their hearts and minds, in the context and matrix of all other options and constraints opened or closed to them... and I honor that, at the personal, human level, as my family.

And if my ancestors stifled their cheers at Appomatox, the cheers which they'd fought and survived for 4 hideous, bloody, painful years... only to be told in their moment of 'triumph', "No cheering, men, for these are our brothers!" who were vanquished, then my acceptance of that brotherhood, my unequivocal, heartfelt acceptance of that shared humanity, can be a basis for extending shared humanity to others around me today, not just my mixed-race sons, and my mixed Blue/Gray forebears, but ALL my brothers and sisters.

This is a great and honorable legacy, one worthy of their efforts THEN and my sons' futures TOMORROW. To me, its what makes America great, and I can live with that.

If the War Between The States wasn't the worst time in this country's history, what was ???
Hey, remember eight years of Bill and Hillary?
YOU GOT IT !!!

Yep.

Hey guys, you all seem to know quite a bit about the civil war, which leads me to ask you all if you would be able to help me!? My US history group is doing a debate on the souths right to secceed during this period of time. My side has to oppose this idea, saying that somehow it was illegal for them to leave the Union. We are having troubles arguing this fact because everything we have found in the Constitution says that they did have the right in one way or another. We have looked at Article I section X where it says that "No state may enter into any Treaty, Alliance or Confederation" We are ready to argue that they formed an alliance , but that doesn't seem to matter since Article IV, Section III where it says that "The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the US; and nothing in this Constitution shall be construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the US, or any particular states." So that right there says that the states are soverign and that they are able to make their own laws, and if they wanted to secceed they can do just that. But we were wondering also if they had done such in forming the alliance, which is illegal, and the second paragraph of section 10 says that they cannot have special trading. We were just wondering if you had any information, sites, or input that would be able to help us to argue this fact, because all that we have found says that they were able to secceed. Also, all the internet and books we have found really only offer the fact that they had the right due to the Constitution. So, would you please post something on here, or e-mail me at SolonJS@lcc.ctc.edu. Thanks so much!!