Civil War Myths:
Northern Myth: “The war was fought to free the slaves”.
Southern Myth: “The war was fought over states rights”.
You might almost say, each side was really fighting against what it’s claimed the other side was fighting for.
After a very long delay I think I’d better come up with a more complete description than :rolleyes: . Your statement that antiaricraft guns that were shooting at bombers in the west couldn’t be shooting at Russians in the east is true. However it looks to me like a massive case of “presenting a target.” Now that’s fine as a tactic in order to force the enemy to reveal his positions and strength but I have great reservations about it as a good, long range plan.
In other words, if your goal is to tie up German anti aircraft guns, flying massive numbers of bombers over them in an attempt to draw their fire isn’t really the best way to go about it. It may have had the effect but it wasn’t the goal.
By definition, the native Americans could not decimate the bison herds they were dependent on without starving themselves. So they lived in a rough equilibrium. The white settlers could drive the bison to near extinction because they didn’t need the bison to survive. They could hunt bison for the hides which could be exported, and they shot bison both to clear range for cattle and expressly to deprive the natives of game. Yes the whites nearly destoyed the bison and the native Americans didn’t, but it wasn’t a case of native=good, white=evil; it was that the whites had an economic incentive to see the Great Plains covered with cattle instead of bison, and set out to make it so.
One of the biggest myths in history, and certainly in American History, is repeated every November in the US. Namely, that the Pilgrims came to America seeking religious freedom. It is somehow suggested that theywere proponents of religious freedom and toleration.
If you had proposed religious freedom and tolerance of all faiths to the Puritans who setlled Plymouth in 1620, they probably would have flogged you, or cut off your ears off, or at the very least banished you.
However, there WERE early Americans who made revolutionary breakthroughs in the concept of religious freedom: The people of Rhode Island. The “founder” of R.I. is Roger Williams, a religious leader who fled Massacchsetts in 1636 to escape arrest for his religious views.
Rhode Island became such a hotbed of exiles who had fled the intolerant Bay State that it was sneeringly referred to by the Puritans as “New England’s Latrine”.
Roger Williams even declared that Jews and “Turks” (he probably meant Muslims) were welcome in his colony. As early as 1647, representatives of the towns of Rhode Island declared that “all men may walk as their consciences persuade them. . . . .”
If you want to celebrate heroic advocates of freedom in early America, celebrate Rhode Island, not the Pilgrom Fathers, who were a bunch of self-righteous bigots!
[Nitpic on quasi-myth]
The Pilgrims were not Puritans. They were separatists who disliked the Puritans nearly as much as the High Church. It was not until after Bradford had died in 1657 that the Puritans (who settled Boston and other towns to the North of Plymouth) were able to cajole/coerce/co-opt the settlement at Plymouth to go along (mostly) with Puritanism.
I would argue that the loss of control of the federal government by pro-slavery forces was a serious setback if not quite an immediate threat. Federal support of slavery was vital to maintaining the institution. Republican Administrations could shackle the “peculiar institution” in a myriad of ways including nominating judges who wouldn’t automatically take a pro-slavery position, seriously attempting to enforce the embargo on importing slaves, and, perhaps most importantly, end the ban on abolitionist literature in the Post Office. Opposition to abolitionism depended to a large degree on maintaining the facade of them as a lunatic fringe. People exposed to genuine abolitionist rhetoric were often surprised at how reasonable it actually was.
Once the Republicans won the White House the writing was on the wall. Presidents could be elected with no support from the slave states and that spelled doom for plantation society sooner rather than later. The Southern decision to secede right after the election was perfectly understandable. They were going to lose their way of life unless they left the Union and the longer they waited the greater the disparity in the white population. Each year the North would have ever more potential soldiers than the South.
It should also be noted that talk of secession by prominent men in the North certainly predates the Hartford Convention. In A Wilderness So Immense historian Jon Kukla argues, unconvincingly IMO, that the impulse can be traced back as far as the machinations surrounding the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations in 1786. He does provide solid evidence that major Federalist leaders ( Timothy Pickering, Roger Griswold, and William Plummer being the most prominent ) considered dismembering the Union over the Louisiana Purchase.
Well, Republican Presidents could certainly be elected without support from the South on those occasions when the Southern Democrats deliberately forced the issue, sundering their own party for the express purpose of seeking a pretext to secede and generating two more rump parties that would further divide the electoral vote. There is no particular reason to assume that Lincoln would have won if the slave states had not engaged in a pre-secession at Charleston in April. While Lincoln had a clear majority of electoral votes, with 180, he did it with 40% of the popular vote. Some percentage of that vote was very clearly a rejection of the Democrats (Southern and Northern and their Constiutuional Union splinter) because they had divided themselves over the issue of Douglas. One cannot simply say that since Lincoln happened to get an electoral majority in a four-way race that he would have also gotten that same majority in a typical two-way race. He only carried Illinois (where Douglas was also the home state candidate) with 50.7% and only carried New York 362,646 to 312,510. With a switch of only those two states, the Democrtats win. (Other scenarios are also possible.) It is hardly a foregone conclusion that Lincoln would have won in a two-party race without the reaction against the divided (and loud) Southern Democrats and the (apparently weak) Northern Democrats.
In that context, it is clearly “understandable” that the South felt it needed to secede, but it was their “understanding” that caused it to happen as the specific issue that led to secession and war.
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The Constitutional Union Party, for the most part, was a party made up of former Whigs and Know-Nothings, not Democrats.
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I’m not arguing that Lincoln would have won in a two-way race. On the contrary, I would say that if there were a popular vote with a runoff then Lincoln would have fallen victim to the ABL ( Anyone But Lincoln ) vote. Lincoln’s presidency was due to the Electoral College and that is the thrust of my argument. The nonslave states had enough electoral votes to outvote the slave states even if they weren’t unanimous. And their electoral might was growing. Thus an openly or tacitly antislavery party was viable. The Republican victory in 1860 didn’t fall like a lightning strike. The facts were there to see and the more militant Southrons were ready to act. I would say instead that the election galvanized the footdraggers by demonstating that not only could it happen but it had happened.
I wouldn’t agree that the sundering of the Democratic Party was mainly deliberate. Natural divisions had been festering that the Party was finding more and more difficult to smooth over. So yes, I think the reality that they could no longer count on controlling the Executive led plantation society to the perfectly rational understanding that they must leave the Union if they were going to maintain the status quo.
Just my 2sense
I think you might enjoy reading some of the accounts of the Charleston Convention. Catton’s The Coming Fury, of course, but there are others, as well.
Doubtless I would though given the number of unread books on my shelf now it might be some time before I could get to it. What I would really like is a solid overview of the entire 1860 election. To be clear, I wasn’t contesting your assertion that Southern Democrats deliberately drew a line which they knew their Northern brethren could not avoid crossing. Instead I meant that such actions were the result of the growing tensions within the Democratic Party in the context of the continuing loss of the political power of the slave states.
Just my 2sense
Although, in fact, he would have. Much as I hate to cite wiki, I think it’s valid here, because the article includes tables showing the popular vote breakdown by state. Dave Leip for confirmation.
Anyway:
Only if we simply take the number of votes that were given to the other parties and combine them. This ignores the dynamics of the people who voted Republican who might have voted Democrat if they were not angered by the antics of the Democrats. It would have taken fewer than 27,000 vote changes in New York (where the Democrats had a very effective machine and a strong base) and even fewer than that in Illinois to swing the election to the Democrats. During the summer of 1860, there were a lot of people who started out opposing Lincoln and changed their minds as a growing perception of the secessionist movement angered traditional Democrat voters in the North. (And in 1860, the Republicans were the interlopers, only six years old, against the established organization of the Democrats.)
I do not claim that it was a foregone conclusion that a united Democrat Party would have beaten Lincoln. I do say that had the disruption of the Democrats not taken place, it is not realistic to simply assign all the votes as they were cast to two parties in November.
That gets into some what-ifs that are beyond the power of my reckoning. The salient point, I think, is Lincoln had a majority in 15 states, with 169 of 303 electoral votes, and had 40% of the total popular vote. Even if the electoral votes were distributed according to population*, Lincoln had a majority for 139 of 204 electoral votes. This has a lot to do with why the South seceded.
*No, they’re not. You were wrong then, weren’t you? Wyoming has 164,594 people per electoral vote. New York has 612,143 people per electoral vote. In other words, Each electoral vote that New York has represents more people than live in Wyoming (493,782).
??? :dubious:
I would add too, that the Sherman was a much more modern design than any of the Germ,an or Russian tank: for example, the Sherman had a servo motor-driven turret-the german turrets were HAND-CRANKED! So the Sherman could aim and fire much faster. And as for the T34 transmissions-the drivers often had to hit the shift levers with ahammer, to get them into gear… Also, I understand that the engine life of the TIGER and KING TIGER tanks was very short-due to the poor quality of the german synthetic lubricating oils.
Sorry. Pet peeve of mine.
And remember kids: alcohol, politics and EXCEL are unhappy bedfellows.
- In the American Revolution, the British were handicapped by the large number of inferior commanders who had acquired their ranks by bribery or influence, and fighting on unfamiliar territory 3000 miles from England.
- After John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton gave newspapers a picture of John’s brother Edwin as the assassin–they did not look anything alike.
- Whether the Soviets “beat the living hell” out of the Germans I can’t say. Mussolini had screwed things up by invading Greece, which prompted England to send troops there; this must have infuriated Hitler, who now had to divert his troops to protect the oilfields he had seized in Roumania: His planned invasion of Russia would be critically delayed, and it was–the German forces ran smack into the Russian winter.
- Some kid wrote that “Magellan traveled round the world and when he returned to Spain he told how he had been killed in the Phillippines.”
- People of my parent’s generation–including my high-school government teacher who seems a prototype of Rush Limbaugh–say that “FDR sold us down the river at Yalta.” I guess he never bothered to explain to us how the voters had preferred a “traitor” to Hoover, Landon, Willkie, or Dewey.
- As for Billy Mitchell–a relative of my stepfather’s told us about his appraisal of Mitchell and the U. S. Military in general at the time. He seemed to believe that Mitchell was “rocking the boat,” warning the American public about Japanese belligerence at the time when, so he claimed, the government refused to turn Marxist–this relative’s idea of how to end the Depression–and decided to spring a war on the public in a way that would generate more funds for the manufacturers of war materials.
