Especially after the Emancipation Proclamation. Some say that docment “freed no slaves”, but that’s false. It’s true that the EP only was in force in the CSA, and not the uSA. But the USA occupied some area of the South by then (not a lot) and thus some slaves were freed immediately, and mnay others are the was went on.
“Some slaves were freed immediately by the proclamation. Runaway slaves who made it to Union lines had been held by the Union army as “contraband of war” in contraband camps; when the proclamation took effect they were told at midnight that they were free to leave. Also, the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia had been occupied by the Union navy earlier in the war. The whites had fled to the mainland while the blacks stayed, largely running their own lives. Naval officers read the proclamation to them and told them they were free.”
“It first affected only those slaves that had already escaped to the Union side, but as the Union armies advanced, tens of thousands of slaves were liberated each day until nearly all (est. 4 million) were free by summer 1865. Some slavery continued to exist in the border states until the entire institution was finally wiped out by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment on December 6, 1865.”
Many experts now think that the EC was the turning point of the war- that once it was issued, neither GB nor France could yeild to the Pro-CSA factions and recognize the South.
“Abroad, as Lincoln hoped, the Proclamation turned foreign popular opinion in favor of the Union for its new commitment to end slavery. That shift ended any hope the Confederacy might have had of gaining official recognition, particularly with Britain. If Britain or France, both of which had abolished slavery, continued to support the Confederacy, it would seem as though they were supporting slavery. Prior to Lincoln’s decree, Great Britain’s actions had favored the confederacy, especially in its construction of war ships such as the CSS Alabama and CSS Florida. As Henry Adams noted, “The Emancipation Proclamation has done more for us than all our former victories and all our diplomacy.” Giuseppe Garibaldi hailed Lincoln as “the heir of the aspirations of John Brown.” Workers from Manchester, England wrote to Lincoln saying, “We joyfully honor you for many decisive steps toward practically exemplifying your belief in the words of your great founders: ‘All men are created free and equal.’””
I agree that it is foolish to imagine that if only the South had won one more critical battle it could have won the war. That’s nonsense, the South won battle after battle and still couldn’t win the war, because the North could lose whole armies and rebuild, while the South was stretched to the breaking point just keeping their armies in the field.
All the North had to do was keep fighting and losing until we found a few generals who weren’t incompetant, promote them, then crush the South.
So the Southern hope that one more military victory would force the North to a political settlement was always deluded. Losing another battle didn’t make the North more likely to end the war, because that would mean that all the previous losses were for nothing. So once war broke out, it was always a very remote possibility that the South could win, and that possibility decreased every day of the war.
I guess I just wanted to argue against “actualism”, the argument that everything that happened HAD to have happened exactly as it happened, because if it didn’t it would have happened differently, and since it didn’t happen differently that proves it had to have happened that way.
I’m sympathetic to this because there are myriads of small turning points in history that no one could have foreseen and could easily have gone another way that led to major developments.
However, if you change those you have no control over the next set of small turning points in history that no one could have foreseen and could easily have gone another way that led to major developments that would have resulted.
You cannot even say that some developments are more plausible than others. They are only plausible after the fact. Most of history would have appeared totally implausible to people before it happened.
While “what if” is a fun game to play, it has a flaw for meaningful argument in that you can fit any outcome you desire into a scenario. And I mean any outcome. However ridiculous your plotline is, it cannot compare with how ridiculous someone in 1906 would have thought of an accurate description of the next 100 years.
Try telling someone in 1960 that the amateur guitar bangers living over a soldiers bar in Hamburg, the band with the bass player so bad he has to turn his back on the audience, the underage lead guitarist who would get deported, the handsome but inadequate drummer, and the arrogant and sassy and pretentious and sassy rhythm guitarists playing covers of better performers’ songs would change the face of music forever and become the most famous people in the world and disrupt all popular culture for next half century and see where it would get you. This is as implausible as the world gets. Nobody ever sees how the future will play out in any aspect of any field.
Compared to that triviality changing our daily lives in major ways, how can one say that any change to history wouldn’t have ripples that are unimaginable?
It’s impossible to say anything deep about history without weighing the choices people made and the actions that they took. I admit that. Some degree of prediction about the effects of untaken steps is inevitable. I just get uneasy when people spin out what if scenarios and then insist something meaningful has been said. It’s a very fine line and sometimes too faint to see, but it’s real to me.
I agree. People are just quibbling over semantics when they say that the Emancipation Proclamation freed no slaves. It’s like saying the Nineteenth Amendment didn’t actually let any women vote because it wasn’t enacted on Election Day. In both cases, the goverment was announcing a policy that it was, from that point onward, going to enforce. The fact that they had no effect in the first minute following their announcement is ridiculous nitpicking.