He did have a nice beard. L O L
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Interview with civil war soldier in 1947
- Thread starter dakota port
- Start date
This is one of the great unanswered questions. I have had the privilege of listening to some of the greatest scholars of the civil war in the last 50 years, and I have asked them one question, none of them have a good answer.
What would have happened if South Carolina had not fired on Ft. Sumter and none of the other southern states seceded?
These are the points:
1: Slavery was recognized and protected by the U.S. Constitution. This is fact is best explained and memorialized in the Dred Scott decision of the U.S. Supreme Court.
2. It takes 3/4 of the states to ratify a Constitutional Amendment, which would have been necessary to abolish slavery. In 1860, there were 33 states, and between the Southern States, and border states, not nearly enough anti-slave states to pass what eventually became the 13th Amendment. The Southerners were not stupid, and could count to 12, so they knew that the "North" could not abolish slavery. So why did they start the war, especially when it is well documented that many leaders in the South knew that it did not have the industrial capacity to wage or sustain a modern war, and that if such were going to be the ultimate outcome, time would be better spent preparing for such.
So why didn't the South just wait it out.
A footnote to this is much of the industrial and financial strength of the north came from producing cotton cloth - the south could have wrecked the national economy by embargoing cotton sales to the north. We live in an age of plenty so it is hard to transpose ourselves to an age when a rapidly expanding immigrant population need to be clothed, to continue to provide cheap labor to run the factories.
3. To say that the South fought the Civil War to preserve slavery is overly simplistic because in the South "slavery" had so many connotations. It represented the enslavement of people who had done nothing wrong, or offended anyone in the south. On the other hand, slavery came to represent the entire capital structure of the south. Southerners did not invest in gold, they invested in land and slaves to work the land. Slavery depended on expanding to the cheap lands to the west, Miss, La., Ok, and so on. Va. and N.C. were "cropped out" so to speak, totally developed, and their involvement in slavery was selling their surplus to the expanding western states. If they couldn't do that , they knew that they had an unsolveable problem, the slaves kept producing, and they had no local demand for them. So not only were they capital, they were capital with with mouths, - the classic definition of a white elephant.
So to say the southern states fought to preserve slavery is correct, but it's also correct that to abolish slavery would have caused the collapse of the entire southern economy just as much as if the federal government would declare tomorrow that no corporate securities had any value. Not only that, but the southerners recognized (and history has proved them correct) that there was no infrastructure to deal with millions of freed slaves, especially when you have dissolved all capital.
An interesting footnote that gets lost, is that in Dec. 1863, the Civil War was so expensive for the North, that just a few days of sustaining it cost as much as the value of all the slaves in the south. Lincoln recognized the problem with dissolving capital, and proposed to his cabinet to purchase all the slaves, and free them, as it would be cheaper than continuing the war. The radical Republicans in his Cabinet and Congress would not agree to this, as they felt that the South must "pay" for causing the Civil War, no matter what the cost (think Treaty of Versailles). So the war continue for 4 more months.
One thing the snowflakes pulling down the statutes don't understand is how many Southerners are still close to the Civil War, and I'm talking the idiots who put a Confederate flag in the back of their pick up truck and do spin outs in the Wal Mart parking lot.
My father told me many times how he rode in a carriage with his Civil War veteran great uncle on Confederate Memorial day, in Florida. It is a documented fact that you can look up that even after WWI until WWII, Confederate Memorial Day was a bigger holiday in the South than what is now Memorial Day. Confederate Memorial Day has basically been eliminated from the calendar by our current "conservative" leaders.
Point being that I often think I'm only one generation removed from a Confederate Veteran.
My mother grew up with her grandmother, who was a child during the Civil War, and who came of age during Reconstruction. According to my mother, my great grandmother hated Yankees with a passion, due to the many insults and deprivations the locals suffered at the hands of foreign invaders. So again, I feel like I have first hand knowledge about the people who endured the Civil War.
I have the best records of my folks on my father's side, and they were what historians would now call "yeoman". They owned their own land, some livestock, cropped the land. They weren't "poor", they were substantial citizens of their communities in South West Georgia. When the War of Yankee Agression broke out, those of age all volunteered -- and they didn't own a slave amongst them. Never had. I want so bad to ask them what made you decide to leave a nice farm in Houston County Georgia, and go fight the Yankess at Gettysburg among other places. I have to ask myself, would I in similar circumstances have done the same thing? Probably not.
My father told me many times how he rode in a carriage with his Civil War veteran great uncle on Confederate Memorial day, in Florida. It is a documented fact that you can look up that even after WWI until WWII, Confederate Memorial Day was a bigger holiday in the South than what is now Memorial Day. Confederate Memorial Day has basically been eliminated from the calendar by our current "conservative" leaders.
Point being that I often think I'm only one generation removed from a Confederate Veteran.
My mother grew up with her grandmother, who was a child during the Civil War, and who came of age during Reconstruction. According to my mother, my great grandmother hated Yankees with a passion, due to the many insults and deprivations the locals suffered at the hands of foreign invaders. So again, I feel like I have first hand knowledge about the people who endured the Civil War.
I have the best records of my folks on my father's side, and they were what historians would now call "yeoman". They owned their own land, some livestock, cropped the land. They weren't "poor", they were substantial citizens of their communities in South West Georgia. When the War of Yankee Agression broke out, those of age all volunteered -- and they didn't own a slave amongst them. Never had. I want so bad to ask them what made you decide to leave a nice farm in Houston County Georgia, and go fight the Yankess at Gettysburg among other places. I have to ask myself, would I in similar circumstances have done the same thing? Probably not.
Its prudent to point out that the state of South Carolina tried to purchase Fort Sumter multiple times from the IS government. Each delegation was treated increasingly poorly and the last delegation was ignored completely.
It’s also prudent to point out that the US reenforced Fort Sumter, which was considered an act of aggression, which prompted the bombardment. It was not a decision that was undertaken lightly.
