Barry,

Congressman J.P. Benjamin (Louisiana) gave a speech to the United States Senate, specifically addressed to President James Buchanan, on December 31, 1860, regarding South Carolina's secession from the Union and the future of the southern states. In his speech he notes many times how the southern states tried to come to a compromise with the northern republicans in Congress, but were jeered at and called derisive names. Although this is one congressman's opinion, it does call into question the long-held statement that war was inevitable. In fact, according to Benjamin, the northern republicans were telling an ever-alarmed public that the South was too weak and dependent on the North to ever secede; that it was only bark with no bite. If the southern states had tried time after time to come to a compromise as Benjamin says, then even the statement that Lincoln had tried everything possible to prevent the war is in question.

JAG

Mainz, Germany

Dear Turner,

It strikes me that one good place to start out on this question is to devote some thought to Kevin Phillips' book, The Cousin's Wars, which sees both the American Revolution and the Civil War as extensions of the English Civil Wars of the 1640s.

There are some reviews available which give a taste of the book. Here is a quotation from one, more academic review by Robert W. Burg of Purdue University:

In an interview with David Gergen on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on 15 March 1999, he discussed the book's primary themes: 1) the importance of the cousins' wars to Anglo-American development, and 2) the similarities shared by the wars' "winners," i.e., those who supported the emerging republican majorities (or at least pluralities) of the 1630s, the 1770s, and the 1860s. Phillips' winners were England's Puritans, New England's Pilgrims, and Greater New England's Emigrant Aid Societies. More specifically, winners were low-church Protestants as opposed to high-church Anglicans; republicans as opposed to monarchists; middle-class merchants or small industrialists as opposed to aristocrats or monopolists (like crown appointees); economic market revolutionists (favoring the development of banks, tariffs, and a currency system) as opposed to economic traditionalists (favoring manorial agriculture and its tools), and westward expansionists as opposed to anti-expansionists, or consolidationists (p. 153). Phillips' definition, though quite specific, remains flexible enough to include Tidewater planters like Jefferson during the American Revolution. It is more akin to a pattern than a mold--some variation between each war's winners is expected and accounted for.

---End quotation

See:

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3085

The review also offers some criticism of the book. Since you (Turner) emphasized continuities between the American Revolution and the Civil War, I think this book and its detailed arguments might be especially interesting --and challenging.

H.G. Callaway

Good ol' Judah Benjamin.  An English barrister.

H.G.  I will get that book.  I have just read a very harrowing account of the Civil War in This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust.

Like Free State of Jones it tells the human story of the war away from all the ideology.

There was also the film (or set of films) by Ken Burns, released in 1990, then remastered into HiDefinition in 2015.  It focuses on the life of the combatants. I watched it in installments fairly recently and it seemed to be a very honest portrayal.  I recommend it highly. Oh- the name of the movie is "The Civil War".

Hate and fear were the main causes, followed by crisis and opportunity. Injustice drove a mechanism of changing composition. Discovery of gold in the West removed from the North a need to compromise, while accumulating foreign debts in the South reached a crisis and were not sustainable. Everything was mortgaged to the hilt including the slaves to support a life style of pretentions deemed to be essential for continuing the debts. 

Campaigners for Abraham Lincoln advised him that his chance to win the presidency depended on his ability to exploit the Northern fear of expanding slavery to the West. Campaign  speeches were interpreted by Southerners to mean that Lincoln's oath of office was a lie sworn on a bible, giving a pretext for war in the South already bankrupted by tariff laws.

Lincoln expected a cheap and easy victory judging by the size and leadership of his first military response. By the war end the North had spent all the western gold and gone deeply into debt. with far more spent on the war than it would cost to buy all the slaves and free them, in addition to the casualties of war.

The previous system was not sustainable and the people who dealt with the conflict were not capable of bringing about a peaceful resolution. They practiced for war and failed to develop other capabilities.

Lincoln carried an inherited trait that shortened his life expectancy and others of his family. He acted in the time he had available and probably would have died in office even if he wasn't murdered. 

Competency was lacking which seems to have reoccurred in recent times with other issues and different situations that are also not sustainable.

Let us not forget that Massachusetts and Connecticut and some of the other areas of New England threatened to secede from the union in 1814 because of opposition to the War of 1812 and because many of the representatives thought that Thomas Jefferson's unilateral purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France was illegal. Leading up to the War of 1812 Jefferson imposed embargoes of Britain, which hurt the sea merchants in New England. After war broke out, many in New England felt that the United States government was not doing enough to protect them and their livelihoods.

I mention the New England secession threat in this Civil War thread for one purpose. Almost 50 years prior to the Civil War there was threat of secession from the union by several states. While this did not come to pass, at the time it was noted that there was nothing in the Constitution prohibiting a state from leaving the compact. Why then did the U.S. Congress not pass an amendment afterwards concerning whether a state could leave the union or not? The whole question of the right to secede could have been clarified at that time, but the Federal government failed to act.

Mainz, Germany

Dear all,

I've come across a short video (about 1/2 hour) of Kevin Phillips talking on his book, The Cousins' Wars, and those of you who may have found the review of the book of interest might want to take a look:

https://vimeo.com/26060564

This talk emphasizes religious or social-religious aspects of Phillips' history, of the 3 great wars and how they influenced Anglo-American history; but as I think you will see, the book is very much a kind of historical survey of cultural differences which have political significance. I was somewhat surprised at how much emphasis he gave to the religious elements in the story. However, as he presents the argument of the book, these historical and cultural elements had greater salience in his studies, because of his prior awareness of particularities of American voting patterns and political alliances. Phillips has it that these old divisions are still present but in significantly diminished form.

From the perspective provided, I came away with the sense that the Confederacy not only divided the country but also divided the South. In significant degree, the South which supported the American Revolution had been subjugated by the plantation elite--given the growth of "King Cotton." That puts the break away of West Virginia at the time of the Civil War (and the story of Jones County, MS.) in the same category with the support for the American Revolution coming from the small farmers of the Piedmont areas of the Carolinas, say.  On the other hand, at the time of the Revolution, the Virginia planters has been roused into alliance with New England, in part, because of the oppressive role of the tobacco traders who had been granted a monopoly position --forcing all exports to go through GB.

I am sure that viewers may draw their own conclusions. In any case, it is a provocative talk.

H.G. Callaway

The right to secede must be an inalienable right in any democratic federation.  After all was that not the motivation that led to the Revolutionary War.  The colonies were 'seceding' from Britain.  

It is hardly surprising that having seceded from one tyrant that the more independent minded states would not want to succumb to another.  Neither is it surprising that some in the Confederacy regarded the 'insurrection' as a second war of independence.

The Yankee administration was corrupt and had no mandate in the South.  What it could not achieve by gerrymandering and bullying it intended to impose by military force.  The secessionist movement was well matured by 1861 but it did not start the war.  The North should have allowed the states that wanted to to secede to do so without threats and coercion.  A political and economic resolution to slavery would have been achieved within a few years, possibly in even less years that the war took and certainly with a lot less death and destruction.

The war could have been avoided and the Union preserved.  The determination of the Lincoln Administration to maintain the Union by coercion, in part by leaving Union garrison troops in the Southern States made the war inevitable.  What was the 1775 Revolution about if it was not about remote dictatorial governments and standing armies coercing the people?

If Fort Sumter had been evacuated instead of the attempt to reinforce it it need not have been attacked.  If Lincoln had not ordered the raising of militias to invade his own country several of the to be Confederate States, the most crucial Virginia would not have seceded.

I do agree entirely with H.G. that by strange paradox the Confederacy divided the South.  Not only a paradox but an irony of spectacular proportions.  Jeff Davies imposed a 'Union' on the very states that had rejected one

Coming back to the present and a contemporary political fantasy.  If the people of California ever did decide to 'Calexit'  what would the world think if the Washington administration ordered the US Military to force it back in the Union?  

The UK has seceded from the European Union,  would the World forgive the 'Brussels Government' if it ordered the Armies of the other 27 nations to preserve the EU by force?

States and political organisations that need to use force to 'preserve' themselves are not democracies.  The Lincoln Administration was an elected dictatorship. 

Mainz, Germany

Dear Turner,

The E.U. treaties explicitly specify how a member state may leave the Union. GB took advantage of the stated provision, called "Article 51," as I recall.

There is no corresponding provision of the U.S. constitution, which was written and ratified in the name of "We the people of the United States." Only the people have the right to abolish the constitution or dissolve the Union. The federal courts have explicitly stated that there is no legal basis for any state to seceded from the Union.

Though the U.S. is a federation of the states, it is also a nation. This is the idea of dual sovereignty. Many Europeans seem to have great difficulty with the idea, in my experience. But in any case, if you are hoping for a Calexit, then I think you will be disappointed. These issues were effectively settled by the Civil War; and I do not understand why anyone with the least bit of sympathy for the U.S. would want to put them in question.

The idea that Lincoln was a dictator is little less than an absurdity.

H.G. Callaway

H.G.,

But what does "We the People" mean? In South Carolina's secession from the United States to form its own, albeit temporary, nation, its statesmen argued that its people had voted to enter the union and had voted to leave it. Their stance was that since they could not enter into compact with the other states to form the Union without a vote of the people and since there was no language pro or con in the Constitution about secession, that meant that all that was necessary in order to leave the Union was a majority vote of its people.

President Buchanan and then Lincoln saw that permitting that one state to secede, especially with the dissatisfaction with the Federal government that was prevalent in the South, would lead to a cascade effect. However, I am sure that they also saw that by militarily forcing South Carolina back into the Union, that very fact would be seized upon by the other southern states as reason to rebel.

The point is that South Carolina claimed the right to secede based on the already established requirements to enter into statehood. The vote by its people to secede was rejected by the northern majority-held Congress. So, did "We the People" mean different things depending on context? Did it mean "all of your people" upon entering the Union, but "all of us" in order to leave it?

JAG

H.G.

The US today, as you well know is nothing like the Union led by Lincoln, or for that matter the one promulgated by the founding fathers, neither of which were real democracies any more than pre-Reform Act Britain was.  Until universal sufferage was introduced, and some argue we still don't have it nowhere was a democracy.

I have never argued that there is a constitutional mechanism for secession, only that there should be.  If we are to argue legal purity the 1775 insurrection was 'illegal'.  

I am certainly not hoping for a Calexit and would have preferred that the UK had stayed in the EU, in the 21st century secession is almost always negative.  

I am talking in purely historical terms and have every sympathy with the US, which I consider the absolute bastion of freedom in the world, in spite of recent electoral choices.  My observations on the aspirations of the rights of states to decide their own destiny free of demagogues and imperialists needs to be seen in a historical as opposed to a contemporary context.  Of course the colonists had a right to rebel, but so did the South.

The Confederate Army composed in the main of poor white folk with an aspiration of state's rights fought long and hard, in fact to virtual destruction against what they certainly perceived as a despotic usurper.  You may not think Mr Lincoln a dictator but they did and took up arms in protection of their native states.  Even the more sophisticated and educated among them objected strongly to distant strangers dictating how they should run their lives.  

It is not that I 'sympathise' with the Confederacy or the individual secessionist states.  They were atavistic and in a state of arrested political evolution that had no future.  On a different thread* speculating on a Confederate win I proposed that a Confederate States of America could not have 'won' the Civil War, not simply because its military & industrial capacity was limited but because it had no single winning aim.  

I would just like to ask one question, do you think Lincoln would have started the Civil War if he had imagined for one minute the cost of it?    

*https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_would_have_happened_if_the_Confederacy_won_the_civil_war

Mainz, Germany

Dear Turner,

I don't think Lincoln started the Civil War. The Civil War began when the federal installation in Charleston harbor was attacked by southern forces. President Lincoln, as Commander in Chief of the armed forces had every right to have federal troops stationed there. Also, he was empowered by the Constitution to enforce federal Law anywhere in the Union. (And I think we have already gone around on these points.) 

You are starting to sound a bit like like Johnny one-note.

In any case, I do not believe for a moment that there should be a legal provisions for states to leave the Union. This should be ignores the specific character of the constitution and dual sovereignty in particular: specifically, that the U.S. is a nation, that only the people as a whole have the right to dissolve the Union. As a general matter, as the point is usually put, Americans as a rule are instinctively federalists.  

Customarily, the continuity of the republic is emphasized. In spite of that, one recognizes historical points of change: the constitution of 1789, was a very significant change from the prior Articles of Confederation; the nation which resulted from the Civil War, with an amended constitution was quite distinctive in many ways; again, much change came with FDR and the long ordeal of the Cold War, too. More recently debates have intensified. To me, that means that the U.S. is a long-term project and open to change. But one looks to history for plausible models and to see what has worked or not worked in the past. 

As I've said before, the American colonists had no proper representation in Parliament in London, yet that is where decisions were chiefly made. You might want to take a look at the Declaratory Act, past by Parliament at the time when the Stamp Act was repealed:

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/declaratory_act_1766.asp

What it says is that Parliament can legislate for the colonies in all cases whatsoever.

The colonists were involved in a great debate on the character of the British Empire from the end of the French and Indian Wars onward, but they had no say in the decisions in London--which was contrary to "the rights of Englishmen."

In contrast with this, the southern states where represented in Congress in 1861, and they had just participated in the election of 1860, which Lincoln won. Since they had legal and democratic representation they could have contested Lincoln's decisions in that way. True, he was intent on stopping the spread of slavery. That did not sit well with the southern, slave-holding establishment. But the movement for secession had no basis in American law.I think Lincoln acted prudently to preserve the Union and the constitution.

Let me ask you a question in return: do you think that King Charles I. and the royalists would have attempted to dissolve Parliament, against the parliamentary opposition to this, if they had known what the costs of this would ultimately be--including Civil War and the eventual execution of the King? The southern establishment, after all, was attempting in 1861 to dissolve the powers of Congress over them.

H.G. Callaway 

Mainz, Germany

Dear Green,

The way I understand "We the people" in the preamble to the constitution ("We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union..."), is that the entire people acted to adopt the constitution. That is very significant to the nationhood of the U.S. We are one people.

Without questioning in the least the (limited) sovereignty of the states, in contrast to the powers delegated to the federal government, the government of the U.S. is supposed to be "government of the people, by the people and for the people," to use Lincoln's words. In consequence, no part of the people, and no states acting in isolation, can legally break the union. Only the entire people could do that. 

A vote of the people within a polity is not sufficient for for it to enter as a state of the union. Puerto Rico, e.g. (no more than say, Guatemala), cannot legally decide to be a state without the consent of Congress. Statehood requires the acceptance of Congress, as representing the people and the existing states. In consequence, if the vote of South Carolina to enter the union was not itself sufficient to enter the union, without the agreement of the other states, and the people of the U.S., then a vote of the people of South Carolina was not sufficient for them to leave the union. 

This is another way of explaining dual sovereignty. It was there in the constitution from the start. Read that great Virginian--James Madison.

H.G. Callaway

H.G.,

I am aware of that. I was relating what South Carolina argued. However, many believed the deck was stacked against the South. The Abolition States were more numerous than the Slave States, thus enacted bill after bill that the South protested against, but ultimately could not keep from being enacted. One of these was the Wilmot Proviso, which was enacted to keep California and any other western state acquired from Mexico slave-free.

H.G.

I am certain from reading the transcript of the trial of Charles I  that he would indeed have continued along the path to civil war, even if it meant his own death, along with the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

To some that is regarded as courage, to most it is supreme arrogance bordering on psychopathy. 

Charles I was rightly convicted of treason and waging war on his own people.  He shared many of the obsessive traits of Lincoln.  A belief in the divine right to rule, his based on a perverse interpretation of religion, Lincoln's on a convenient interpretation of the Constitution.  Charles I engaged in double dealing, cheating and scheming, as did Lincoln.  Charles I had little respect for parliamentary democracy and Lincoln held Congress in similar contempt.

Charles lost his civil war, the soldiers of the Union won theirs.  The outcome for the perpetrators was similar.

As for Fort Sumter, The garrison would not have been molested if they had left but the Yankees deemed it more prudent to reinforce the standing army that 85 years earlier Americans had rejected.  It was certainly a mistake to fire on it because it would have made more sense politically and strategically to leave it isolated.  Sooner or later it would have become untenable and abandoned.  The Southern Confederacy however never had the political or economic savvy to form a cohesive state and the autonomy and impetuousness of its individual military and political leaders doomed it to defeat. 

When Secretary of State Simon Cameron ordered the states to raise militias to supress their own people in abject abrogation of the Constitution, that could only be a declaration of civil war.  If Governor Letcher’s reply is not in the spirit of Patrick Henry it is difficult to see what would be.

The events at Fort Sumter would of course have made no difference to the eventual outcome.  Mr Lincoln would have found another excuse to use military force to subdue the Southern States, he had too.  Like Charles I he had really no choice.  So deep dyed in his own self-image of infallibility, with Lincoln like Charles I before him civil war was inevitable.

One more point on the guilt of Charles I for treason.  He claimed constitutional immunity in that the court had no legal authority to try a king.  The war criminal Milosevic tried the same futile defence centuries later.

It worked for neither of them demonstrating that reliance on unjust law is no substitute for the rule of law.  Charles Stuart was a traitor and by modern interpretations a war criminal but we can be thankful for him for one thing.  His crazed and anachronistic idea of government was doomed by his actions.

Neither Cromwell not Washington wanted to wear a crown!

PS.  Who said this?

"Even brutes do not devour their young; nor savages make war upon their families"

Mainz, Germany

Dear Turner,

I think we more or less agree in evaluation of Charles I. I was wondering about your view  of the question. On the other hand, I find the comparison of Charles to Lincoln utterly unconvincing and contentious.

It seems you makes a long series of doubtful criticisms of Lincoln, and when one gets shot down, you simply go on to another --equally contentious, IMHO. This is becoming a familiar pattern. 

Do you really see this as a fruitful approach to the question?

The usual answer is that the causes of the Civil War were slavery and related economic sectionalism. Slavery stood in contradictions to the founding ideals of the Declaration of Independence, and it had to go. The founders generally believed it would go. It became embedded due largely to the success of King Cotton and the relationship of the slave-holding planters to the rising industrial use of cotton. This development was encouraged under several southern Presidents, including, in particular, Andrew Jackson. 

Lincoln was certainly right when he said that the nation could not long exist, half slave and half free. See the "House Divided Speech" of 1858. I quote the speech:

"A house divided against itself cannot stand."

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new -- North as well as South.

---End quotation

See:

http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/house.htm

The reasonable thing to do, we say in retrospect, would have been to use federal money (say, from the sale of western lands) to buy the freedom of the slaves. But I think this plan, which certainly had its popular support in some quarters in those times, did not work, because the South was invested in the slave system as an economic and social way of life. The slave-holders did not want to see the slaves freed. They did not want to be left without slaves.

One lesson to take from this analysis is that we will pay a dear price if we allow economic interests to become entrenched where they have, in fact, divisive social and political consequences. That's an argument against pure economic libertarian conceptions of markets --and maybe an argument against neo-liberalism, too.

Do we not notice that politics seems to be going bonkers in the wake of free-wheeling globalization?

H.G. Callaway

Mainz, Germany

Dear Turner,

I think we more or less agree in evaluation of Charles I. I was wondering about your view  of the question. On the other hand, I find the comparison of Charles to Lincoln utterly unconvincing and contentious.

It seems you makes a long series of doubtful criticisms of Lincoln, and when one gets shot down, you simply go on to another --equally contentious, IMHO. This is becoming a familiar pattern. 

Do you really see this as a fruitful approach to the question?

The usual answer is that the causes of the Civil War were slavery and related economic sectionalism. Slavery stood in contradictions to the founding ideals of the Declaration of Independence, and it had to go. The founders generally believed it would go. It became embedded due largely to the success of King Cotton and the relationship of the slave-holding planters to the rising industrial use of cotton. This development was encouraged under several southern Presidents, including, in particular, Andrew Jackson. 

Lincoln was certainly right when he said that the nation could not long exist, half slave and half free. See the "House Divided Speech" of 1858. I quote the speech:

"A house divided against itself cannot stand."

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new -- North as well as South.

---End quotation

See:

http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/house.htm

The reasonable thing to do, we say in retrospect, would have been to use federal money (say, from the sale of western lands) to buy the freedom of the slaves. But I think this plan, which certainly had its popular support in some quarters in those times, did not work, because the South was invested in the slave system as an economic and social way of life. The slave-holders did not want to see the slaves freed. They did not want to be left without slaves.

One lesson to take from this analysis is that we will pay a dear price if we allow economic interests to become entrenched where they have, in fact, divisive social and political consequences. That's an argument against pure economic libertarian conceptions of markets --and maybe an argument against neo-liberalism, too.

Do we not notice that politics seems to be going bonkers in the wake of free-wheeling globalization?

H.G. Callaway

The politics of today are clearly not working.  The Ancien Regime in just about every democratic country is in crisis and their governments are becoming utterly dysfunctional.

The general election in the UK has resulted in a hung parliament, a system that cannot function even in stable times.  At the present time it will implode at the first challenge and that will not be long in coming.

Lincoln was quite right in his speech about houses divided against themselves and most democratic houses now are.  The US is ungovernable under Trump the UK under May. These states of affairs are themselves crises but neither of those governments will survive an external crisis.  

In ten days time the Brexit negotiations start and rebel backbenchers will get their chance to torpedo any hard Brexit.  The Democratic Unionist Party, a throwback to the sectarian troubles in Northen Ireland have the upper hand with the shattered Tory government.  They want a hard brexit and a soft border, an impossible position by any standards.

Trump is living in a fantasy world in which he thinks he can govern single handed with his trusty Royal household and gaggle of loyal retainers around him.  He has no idea that what he calls 'the swamp' is essential in American politics.  He has turned on the body politic but when the fight really starts the swamp wil not be drained, he will drown in it. 

We will not be seeing any civil wars this time but the Ancient Regimes everywhere will fight to maintain their now untenable position.  Like dying dogs biting at their own wounds they will soon expire.

Returning to the causes of the civil war it is clear that slavery was a central cause of political turmoil in mid 19th century America, but it was not the cause of the war.  Slavery would not have lasted much longer in the South even though the plantation owners were too short sighted to see it in 1860.  Even if the shooting had not started at Fort Sumter the two largest markets for cotton would have boycotted the Confederacy before long.   Lincoln's observations on slavery's 'ultimate extinction' was also correct, it would have died out even without an abolitionist government in Washington.

The middle of the 19th century was one of the rare moments in history when things were really changing.  The Confederacy wanted to stay the same.  We are now in such a moment in history.  The old ways must give way.  The two party systems in the US and UK are obsolete and failing.   Both of our political systems are the reason the houses are divided against themselves.  No call to unity from either of these will acheive it.   

Prior to Texas entering the Union, the Texas Constitution made it illegal for a slaveholder to free a slave without the express approval of the government. They also abolished all rights and privileges, except for freedom, of all free blacks who were within the boundaries of the new republic at the time of its independence. Its no wonder that the Abolitionist in Congress held off admitting Texas into the Union for almost ten years. I think that the appeal of having the vast, relatively vacant lands in southwest Texas as a buffer between the U.S. and Mexico probably ultimately influenced the decision to admit it into the Union. This was seen as a win in the Slave-holding States.

"We have not forgotten altogether that we are a revolutionary people; in fact we were born of it, and nurtured in it, and reached our very manhood by its triumphs; and however dull the scenes of that glorious period may seem to us at this remote lapse of time, they were fresh and vivid to our fathers who framed the Constitution. They never lost sight of its history or its principles (C. L. Scott, 1861, Constitutional Right of Secession)."

good greeting:

Almost every country after its construction to be exposed to civil war and internal when the various political or religious groups resort to armed conflict in order to impose its objectives, the dialogue has run out and remains violence is the last solution to these teams, and many countries have been these crises in the stages of composition And the causes of these civil wars are usually directly related to the social, political and cultural structure combined. The intensity of the armed conflict is therefore very large because of the heterogeneity of this society. The aim of these wars is either political power and control or an attempt to impose a social nature The majority of the cases are not the economic factor alone in such wars, and many cases of civil wars through modern history indicate that civil wars are directly linked to the process of formation And the attempt to impose the concepts of legitimacy within them, and therefore may be linked by some stages of the emergence of the state, but this is not a rule that may occur such wars when there is a process of changing the concept of legitimacy within the established state, examples are very many, such as England during the seventeenth century, Of the French revolution, and many of the European countries in the European Spring of 1848, and here these wars are not because of the emergence but the factors of change.

The United States of America was no exception to this rule. The 13 states merged and confronted their fledgling and united army, the British army, with the goal of independence until it was achieved after the declaration of independence in a few years. The US Constitution was drafted to ensure a delicate balance between the various states, Considering their different sizes as a unique precedent in the political systems that prevailed in the modern world. This fledgling nation overcame all difficulties over time, but could not protect itself from the evils of the civil war that broke out in 1 861, which was a slightly different war, was not linked to one or another attempt to change the political system of the State or to rebalance or disperse power, but mainly for socio-economic reasons.

The majority of historians do not differ from the fact that slavery is the main cause of this civil war. Otherwise, the American economic and social structure would not be the same as in the rest of the world. The strong northern states relied mainly on the industrial base and, to a lesser extent, agriculture. directly in the creation of different social and cultural environment for the southern states that depended on agricultural economies, basically, has led this pattern of evolution and development in the north to create an intellectual and cultural environment and a different way of life dramatically from the south, which could not turn that Developed in the form required, the economies of the southern states relied primarily on agriculture, especially cotton, sugar, tobacco and other goods that were generating a high return of material cash crops, and this resulted in direct dependence on labor, which was not readily available among the people of the layer As the countries of the South expand in the agricultural economic development, the need for more slavery increases. Some historical statistics indicate that the size of American slaves at independence did not exceed seven hundred thousand. , And But this figure directly jumped to nearly two million by the year 1830 and then jumped back to nearly 4 million by the year 1860.

However, the states of the South America have not sought at any stage of its development to introduce the industry to reduce its reliance on agriculture or to make the required diversification. There were many opinions on the reason behind this industrial laziness, which led to the views of the southern environment of such modernity, that the slaves was not possible to rely on them to try to establish this economic system, and therefore confined to the industrial base in the south on agriculture-related, such as textiles and other industries, this has led to the social development of the south is completely different from the north, where he slipped this society in its direction Alajtm Cultural consciousness and then different, became a conservative society based on forms similar to patterns of evolution in the European Middle Ages is completely different from the states of North social composition, which made the gap widening between the goals and interests in the north compared to the south.

The fact that the seeds of civil war began since the founding of the United States of America, the political and social structure prompted many intellectuals and church and politicians to try to eliminate the phenomenon of slavery, which was seen by the states of the South as a direct cause of hitting the economic and social environment, and began to call for the abolition of slavery , And of course were politicians and thinkers who directly contributed to the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, led by «James Madison» and «John Adams», but this movement did not go beyond the scope of abstract calls to free slavery and its prohibition, it was not surprising that the Dla this movement gradually from the state «Massachusetts» which was the War of Independence, the source of more US urbanized culture, but this movement quickly began to spread in other states, and in the southern states themselves, and began a broad social movement demanding the need for liberation, and soon broke liberation fire to The South also began to show voices calling for an end to slavery, but the southern resistance began to emerge. Even many churches in the south began to seek the appropriate justification for this social phenomenon on religious grounds, based on the fact that slavery is contained both in the Old and New Testaments. Prohibition, a By the fourth decade of the 18th century, political skirmishes began in Congress, where many politicians sought to seek their constitutional amendments to abolish slavery in the south, which the representatives of the South faced with wars. Political and rhetorical power in Congress.

The fact is that this war broke out in the US Congress before the various battlefields over the next four years. By 1818, there were 22 states, half of which sanction slavery and the other half reject it, and many cases of political consensus have been reached to address this crisis. Missouri, "which authorized slavery in the state of Missouri and prevented in the state of« Maine »And then erupted crises when the United States expanded at the expense of Mexico, what would be the fate of slavery in these states ?, The United States entered the specter of war by the fifties of the ninth century Ten, the solution was further harmonization and balance Within Congress and in those states where Congress decided to leave these states to determine their position on the issue of slavery, especially the states of New Mexico and Utah, which was later known as the 1850 harmonization, especially after it was decided that California would join the United States as an independent state with the right to leave slavery Or not, in the framework of what is known as "popular sovereignty", while the decision on the other hand the intensification of the punishment of slaves fleeing. Throughout the 1950s, the debate on slavery, which took on political tensions, turned on one occasion into a show of hands in Congress, which foreshadowed that the spread of violence in the states had become a matter of time. Kansas was the candidate to witness scenes of violence from this debate The raging.

Thus, fighting became the only solution when the political scene turned into a north-south conflict over slavery, a political conflict that extended to the new way of life in the United States. This was at the core of civil war becoming a tool for changing the North-South way, way of life and style.

Asim,

You bring up a good point. The North was industrialized and relied, but was not wholly dependent, on the South for agricultural products. The South, on the other hand, was a primarily agrarian society that depended, in part, on the North for its machinery. The North was also more urban than the South. A few of the politicians in the South prior to the Civil War commented on the United States being composed of two different cultures, neither of which could fully understand the other. It was that difference in both lifestyles and values that appealed to many secessionist as a rationale for dividing the country.

H.G.

With regard to Lincoln it seems we are both intransigent.  I perhaps over criticise him while you will not countenance any fault in him.

I have no doubt that Lincoln saved the Union and that in hindsight that was a good thing.  I also have no doubt that it was at a cost of nearly 650,000 Americans and the destruction of South, both of which were utterly unnecessary.

Lincoln like some modern presidents wanted a war, his bellicose attitude towards the South guaranteed it.  The ending of slavery and the preservation of the Union were simultaneously possible via negotiation and economics.

Had Lincoln not been murdered at the end of the war I suspect that he would not be quite the martyred hero he is today.  Certainly there was no plan to emancipate the black slaves via citizenship and neither was there any plan to reintegrate the Southern states, only to occupy and suppress them.  Had Lincoln lived and gone on to form another administration he may at some point have faced hard political questions about his responsibility for the slaughter and destruction.

We also seem to have different views on the values of the Constitution and the 'legality' of secession.    I am certain sure that the founding fathers, who of course recognised the necessity of 'union' in 1776 did not intend that the democratic right to secede would be banned for ever.  What kind of inverted logic would that have been?   How could a document deny democratic rights of self determination?  Was that not the very principle on which the Revolutionary War was fought?

Do you think that the founding fathers who shouted for liberty or death wanted to deprive future generations of Americans of the same aspiration?   Was the purpose of the Constitution to substitute divine rule by Kings with divine rule by document? 

King George used the law to impose hegemony and oppression on the colonists and they rejected it.  A Constitution that imposes hegemony and oppression is not something to celebrate, it is dictatorship by decree and it is prefectly acceptable that it too should be rejected.

Fortunately in Britain we have never accepted a written constitution (although in the main the British wrote the one the Colonists used)  We have a constitution and it works.  It is far from perfect but as was demonstarted this week, no one can say that the UK is not a democracy.

I am looking forward to the 4th of July which like the 14th July I celebrate as dates on which unjust regimes were 'illegally' overthrown.  I leave you with two final questions, what would North America have looked like today if the founding fathers had hesitated because there was no constitutional provision for breaking away from Britain? 

And:

In what way was The South's response to Cameron's demand to raise militia to suppress the insurrection in the cotton states any different to the Powder Alarm response of the Colonists to Governor Gage's attempt to mobilise troops to supress them.  

Secretary of State Simon Cameron (Lincoln Administration) ordered the States to raise troops to suppress the insurrection in the secessionist states.

It vastly inflamed the political crisis and made full blown Civil War inevitable.  Even though the 'first shots of the war' had been fired at Fort Sumter Lincoln's intention to invade and supress by force the will of the people in the Southern Confederacy induced more states to secede.

Governor John Letcher of Virginia sent a forthright response to Cameron's demand which is legendary.  Letcher had discouraged secession but when the Lincoln Administration threatened invasion of Virginia's neigbouring states he refused and Virginia too seceded and joined the Confederacy.

EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT.RICHMOND, Va., April 16, 1861.

HON. SIMON CAMERON, Secretary of War:

SIR: I received your telegram of the 15th, the genuineness of which I doubted. Since that time (have received your communication, mailed the same day, in which I am requested to detach from the militia of the State of Virginia "the quota designated in a table," which you append, "to serve as infantry or riflemen for the period of three months, unless sooner discharged."

In reply to this communication, I have only to say that the militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purpose as they have in view. Your object is to subjugate the Southern States, and a requisition made upon me for such an object -- an object, in my judgment, not within the purview of the Constitution or the act of 1795 -- will not be complied with. You have chosen to inaugurate civil war, and having done so, we will meet it in a spirit as determined as the Administration has exhibited towards the South. Respectfully,

JOHN LETCHER.

Cameron's ridiculously belligerent call to arms was the linchpin that ensured the insurrection would become  a full civil war. 

Barry,

I agree with you that the south had an intrinsic right to separate if it wanted to.  I agree with Callaway that it wanted to do so to keep the slavery system.  But this thread is about the real causes of the civil war.  The official version at the time and now was that it was to end slavery and maintain the union under the principle of its foundation.  The south were violating these principles and were more attached to slavery than to the constitution.  You seems to say that the war could be avoided, the union maintained, slavery ended if Lincoln would have been more patient with the south.  Is it your thesis?

Louis

Lincoln should have made larger concessions to the South.  It was clear that its antiquated economy, reliant as it was on slavery could not survive and that it needed encouragement to join the 19th century with its expanding commerce and industrialised society.  Lincoln and his myrmidons wanted to subjugate rather than discuss.  His idea of Union meant far more to him than the welfare of the individual, either North or South of Mason-Dixon.  Demagogues and ideologues rarely bring peace, harmony and prosperity 

Trying to force the Southern States into what was a Northern hegemony rather than a true democracy, in which the proper emancipation of the slaves would naturally have taken place was disingenuous and in many respects as anachronistic as the political/economic system in the South.

The Yankees tried at the time to sell this a moral crusade (well, after Gettysburg at least) to free the slaves, at a time when miners, foundry workers and agricultural workers in the Northern states lived equally squalid and unfree lives.  It was more to do with supporting the rich (and getting richer) mercantile class than anything to do with freedom and emancipation.

The institution of slavery was an evil, of that there is no doubt but there was a better way of eliminating it than starting a war.  It is true that the politicians of the day could probably not have seen it.  Lincoln was not a clever man, just a stubborn and a devious one.  The 'aristocracy' in the South were too stuck in their largely fantasy view of their 'way of life' so I may be projecting rather too idealised a view on the causes of the war.  I do think however that it is no more idealised than the one that suggests that it was about freedom, democracy and the Constitution.

It is very certain that by far most of those who fought and died in the war spent little time in ruminating over constitutional issues or the 'rights of man'.  They were in the main farm boys, labourers and the working class from both North and South, not to mentions the many thousands of German, Irish, French and other European immigrants that were arriving in America post the mid-century revolutions and famine in Europe..  To most of them they were fighting for home and hearth, not for or against slavery.

It is a disgrace that they are all not honoured equally as those who built America but political correctness is driving for the obliteration of the Confederacy from American history.  Modern America needs more John Letchers.  I would love to know what he would have said to Trump.

Eeeeeeeeeeehahhhhh!

Something to think of, I read in some historical document a complaint of a southern politician about the "abolitionist north" being hypocritical. He charged that many of the slaveholders in the north did not having any qualms when they decided to get rid of the institution of slavery within their borders by selling those slaves to southern plantations.

Mainz, Germany

Dear all,

There were no doubt powerful economic and ideological incentives to maintain the slave system. This is a chief point which Turner seems to continually ignore--claiming that slavery was due to expire in any case. It may be in that is some larger, economic perspective the slave system was antiquated and would eventually expire. I don't think that anyone need dispute that idea. Yet in Turner's hands this retrospective judgment turns into a continually repeated, and unjustified criticism of Lincoln. The fact is that once the South Carolina militia attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, the general judgement in the North was a charge of treason. The southern act of aggression galvanized the North and divided the nation.

Whether or not the slave system would have expired without the war, the fact is that the slave-holding planters who dominated southern politics did not believe that it was about to expire. They made some very handsome livings by means of it and enjoyed widespread social and political power and prestige. Moreover, if you will consult the writings of John C. Calhoun, U.S. Senator from S. Carolina, and former Vice President of the U.S., you will find an elaborate political theory seeking to justify the slave system on the basis of the supposed racial inferiority of the African-American slaves. The South obviously did not believe that the slave system was about to expire on its own, as it were, and the best proof of this is that they were willing to fight for it and disrupt the Union to protect it.

See Calhoun on the "positive good" of slavery:

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/slavery-a-positive-good/

Here follows a shot quotation from a second article on Calhoun:

John C. Calhoun, the South’s recognized intellectual and political leader from the 1820s until his death in 1850, devoted much of his remarkable intellectual energy to defending slavery. He developed a two-point defense. One was a political theory that the rights of a minority section — in particular, the South — needed special protecting in the federal union. The second was an argument that presented slavery as an institution that benefited all involved.

Calhoun’s commitment to those two points and his efforts to develop them to the fullest would assign him a unique role in American history as the moral, political, and spiritual voice of Southern separatism. Despite the fact that he never wanted the South to break away from the United States as it would a decade after his death, his words and life’s work made him the father of secession. In a very real way, he started the American Civil War.

---End quotation

See:

http://www.historynet.com/john-c-calhoun-he-started-the-civil-war.htm

There are basically two crucial elements of the evaluation of the role of slavery in the causes of the Civil War. The first is the economic incentives it provided in maintaining the social and political system of the prewar South, and without a proper understanding of this, I think no one will understand why the War came. The slaveholders were willing to fight to maintain their way of life. The second is the moral question of slavery; and without a proper evaluation of the moral question, often missing in the slave-holding South, there is no understanding the question of the aggression which started the war at Charleston harbor.

It seems clear to me that Lincoln proceeded step by step and that his first objective was to preserve the Union. Most people thought the war would be over quickly. 

Turner's criticism of Lincoln are based on two unjustified assumptions: 1) that everyone knew that slavery would expire; 2) that Lincoln could reasonably estimate at the start of the war all the negative consequences it would bring. War, in an important sense, is always a human failure. We can certainly regret  the Civil War and its consequences. But on the other hand, I think it fairly clear, even in this thread, that the mistakes involved had been made long before --Emerson saw the crucial errors as those made at the constitutional convention in 1787. The mistakes included the economic incentives of the slave system to the distinctive development of the South and the rationalization of the system as a moral good.

Those better aware of American history are more fully aware of the problems and conflicts which stood behind the attack of the South Carolina militia upon the federal fort protecting Charleston harbor. People will, as a rule, fight like cats and dogs, if sufficient economic incentives are provided. Add to that a moral rationalization to cover the purely economic conflict and you've got a perfect storm. 

H.G. Callaway

Mainz, Germany

Dear Green,

I think you need to be careful about the evidence of moral hypocrisy in the North on the issue of slavery. Were there instances of this? Surely. When Pennsylvania instituted gradual abolition (during the Revolutionary War), some PA slaveholders simply transferred their slaves across the border to Maryland, and went on as before.  Again, I happen to know that in Philadelphia, there was considerable sympathy for the South, and important business relationships. The Union League in the city was originally founded, because of the other chief social clubs contained too many southern sympathizers. Sympathy for the South ended, however, when Pennsylvania was invaded --resulting in the battle of Gettysburg. At that point, Philadelphia sent out one of its own to lead the Union forces.

---you wrote---

Something to think of, I read in some historical document a complaint of a southern politician about the "abolitionist north" being hypocritical. He charged that many of the slaveholders in the north did not having any qualms when they decided to get rid of the institution of slavery within their borders by selling those slaves to southern plantations.

---End quotation

There were important economic incentives in the North to maintain the slave system. The slave system in the South was tolerated in the North, because it seemed to add to national prosperity. Of that there can be no doubt.

Early on in the colonial period, slavery was accepted, as it was throughout most of the British empire. It is well known that William Penn himself held slaves on his estate on the Delaware. But the earliest written protest against slavery also came from the Quakers.  Instances of moral hypocrisy can be found in any great moral conflict.  It is something quite distinct to see them as generally governing conditions.

Neither Lincoln nor the North were morally perfect, and moral perfection is not the appropriate standard to use in evaluating the conflict.

H.G. Callaway

Mainz, Germany

Dear Schwartz,

Turner seems to maintain many misunderstandings of American history and of the constitutional system.

We have heard from Turner that Lincoln used a "standing army" to suppress the (apparently legitimate?) aspirations of the South. But then he also says that the Secretary of War asked the states to raise militia troops. But if Lincoln had a large standing army at his command, why the need to raise troops from the states? 

The states maintained each their own militia, and that was part of the reason that there had been no need of a large standing army. In the face of rebellion, and the polarization of the country after the attack on Ft. Sumter, the federal government could only rely on the states at first to supply sufficient troops quickly. 

The idea that the federal response to the attack on Ft. Sumter was the cause of the war flies in the face of common sense and the usual accounts of the matter.  The authority of the federal government had been openly challenged. If Lincoln was to uphold his oath to defend the constitution, he had to respond. Notice that merely raising troops from the states is not yet an attack on anyone.

Turner seems to use just about any poorly conceived argument to attempt to justify his apparent animus against Lincoln-- who is, in spite of that, generally regarded as one of America's greatest Presidents.

---you wrote---

Thanks a lot, Barry, for this profound explication!

---End quotation

Profound? Misconceived is more like it.

H.G. Callaway

By April 1861, slavery had become inextricably entwined with state rights, the power of the federal government over the states, the South's 'way of life' etc. – all of which made a major contribution to the causes of the American Civil War.

https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/the-american-civil-war/causes-of-the-american-civil-war/

https://www.thoughtco.com/top-causes-of-the-civil-war-104532

H.G.,

I am only repeating an accusation that is in the historical record. Whether there is any truth to it or not I do not know. I can, if you wish, try to find and supply that reference. I have tried to avoid the rabid and often belligerent pro-abolition and pro-slavery opinions and writings as too unreliable. However, while still considered a southern state, one of the places that the person could have been talking about was Maryland, which was basically neutral during the Civil War, though many battles were fought there and many of its people joined both the armies of the North and the South. However, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to the slaves in Maryland because they did not secede from the Union. This, apparently, was not an issue for Lincoln and Maryland continued legal slave ownership until 1864 when they voted to abolish the practice. Then there is Georgetown University, which apparently owned and sold slaves, not just the 272, into the 1850s, both in Maryland and the District of Colombia. Quallen (link below) notes that many of the slaves provided to the Slave States (I assume after 1808) flowed through Washington, D.C., which he says was the heart of slave trading in the U.S." If this is correct (and I have not researched it), then the gentleman would be justified to be hypercritical.

However, you say "Neither Lincoln nor the North were morally perfect, and moral perfection is not the appropriate standard to use in evaluating the conflict." Maybe not "moral perfection", but morals and morality are one of the primary reasons given for the conflict. Not only that, northern soldiers, many of them still children, were worked into a fighting frenzy by politicians and commanders expounding the evils of slavery and the justness of the North's cause. I believe, if memory serves me correctly, that even Lincoln himself, when it looked like the North was faltering, gave a great speak on the righteousness of the North to rid the South of slavery. How can anyone, even a northern, reconcile this with the fact that Maryland, the state adjacent to Washington, D.C., was allowed to keep her slaves until the end of the war?

JAG

http://msa.maryland.gov/msa/intromsa/pdf/slavery_pamphlet.pdf

http://features.thehoya.com/beyond-the-272-sold-in-1838-plotting-the-national-diaspora-of-jesuit-owned-slaves

H.G. & Barry,

I will have to find the reference tomorrow. I read so much per day that I feel like I need to make a crib-sheet table to keep track! However, one of the historical documents I skimmed through addresses the northern army and accusations of predisposition of both men and guns even before hostilities broke out. From what I gather the document was purportedly disproving claims by southern politicians that Lincoln had sought pledges from each northern state on the number of men and weapons that they could supply, as well as sending guns to various federal forts across the country so they would be ready when hostilities erupted. The denier claimed that the shipments of guns were coincidental; that they were guns that had been on back-order for several years and the manufacturer was just getting around to completing the orders. If I remember correctly, the person whom was addressing these rumors was in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh.

Mainz, Germany

Dear Turner,

Among many other errors, you claim:

Lincoln like some modern presidents wanted a war, his bellicose attitude towards the South guaranteed it.  The ending of slavery and the preservation of the Union were simultaneously possible via negotiation and economics.

---End quotation

But, this, as seems clear, is simply a counter-factual historical speculation. There is no way to test it and no way to say, with confidence, what might have happened if Lincoln had acted differently. Historians rarely if ever engage in such speculation. That such a development is abstractly possible tells us little or nothing about the practical possibilities in those times. Politics doesn't go by abstract possibilities. 

On the contrary, there is much direct evidence, sketched on this thread in part, that the southern slaveholders wanted to keep the slaves, and that they had the social and political system in the South largely lined up in their favor. Not only did they keep the black slaves in bondage, but since free labor in the South had to compete with slave labor, the free South was also held in bondage to the slave-holding elite, which stood in a position to quickly marginalize white opposition, and cultivate support with its favors.  An aristocratic elite with effective control of its domestic economy will rarely allow itself to be sweet-talked into anything more reasonable.

That is reason to think that the federal authorities had to act, if the union was to be saved and the rule of the slave system contained or diminished.

Similarly, who believes, in our own times, that the economic advantages acquired by international elites (trading favors among themselves), in the wake of globalization,  is going to be controlled without appropriate legislation and determined state action designed to level the various domestic playing fields?

It may be in place here to recall the high levels of southern sympathy in Great Britain during the American Civil War. Emerson, as I am well aware, was deeply disappointed by the British response. It almost destroyed his long friendship with Thomas Carlyle.

Here is a little hint, of the limits of British liberalism in those times:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08905490008583508

In general, terms, the British (like many in the North who sympathized with the South) were profiting from the cheap production of cotton on the basis of slave labor. Might it be that some see similar profits to be derived by a policy of divide and conquer directed along contemporary American sectional lines? 

In brief, the causes of the American Civil War, on the usual account, as argued by historians for a century, are briefly: Slavery and sectionalism --with the sectionalism deriving directly from the slave system. That this analysis is about to be over turned on the basis of present objections is, to put it lightly, absurd. 

H.G. Callaway

H.G.

I would like your view on why so many non-slave owning poor folk flocked to the colors of the Confederacy when Mr Lincoln gave them the opportunity to get rid of the slave owning elite.

There was sympathy for the South in Britain and France but no possibility of military or political support while the institution of slavery remained in place.  It took no time at all for the cotton to be resourced from India after the Confederacy foolishly stopped exporting it and once that had happened the Southern economy was finished.  If Britain and France had supported the Confederacy to maintain the cotton trade the US Navy would have been powerless to stop them, the blockade would have failed and the Confederacy would have prevailed against the Union

The British were not liberal at the time of the Civil War.  Britain was at its peak as an imperial power as was France.  The home and foreign policy of both would not be to 21st century tastes but there was nevertheless no appetite in either Britain or France to support slavery, which they had both supressed by military force decades earlier. 

The Southern slaveholders did want to keep their slaves, such is self evident since they were at liberty to free them at any time but many Southerners did not keep slaves yet still fought for their native states rather than surrender to a Yankee hegemony.

One thing that is absolutely inescapable is that the freed blacks were freed into abject poverty and remained in the lower eschelons of society, or not in it at all for at least another 100 years.  Even in my lifetime they were subjected to appaling discrimination every bit as bad as South African apartheid, denied education and healthcare and forced to the back of the bus and out of lunch counters.   

That would not have seemed morally wrong to Mr Lincoln and certainly remained unchallenged by Republicans and Democrats alike for many decades after the slaves were 'freed'.  Was Emerson deeply dissapointed by that?  Let's look at his views.

“I think it cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family. Their present condition is the strongest proof that they cannot. The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all the other races have quailed and done obeisance.”

One final point, I have many books on the Civil War written by distiguished historians.  It is my experience that they frequently speculate on what might have happened.  Indeed a full understanding of historical context requires such speculation and forms part of any historical analysis. 

Mainz, Germany

Dear Turner,

It has never appeared to me, at least, that your getting the worse part of an argument was any particular impediment to your doubling down on the same or similar points.

The defense of Lincoln against your various criticisms does not depend on his being morally perfect or his meeting contemporary standards of moral standing. It depends on the fact that he acted to save the union and abolish slavery. If you have any doubts on that, read the thirteenth amendment.

A would suppose that the free southerners who fought for the Confederacy, although often not benefiting greatly from the slave system, where much like the people of Pennsylvania who helped turned back the southern invasion at Gettysburg. Although, as I noted, there was considerably southern sympathy in Pennsylvania, early on, the invasion of Pennsylvania galvanized the support for the Union cause. In those times, and before the Civil War, there was often greater felt loyalty to the particular states.

But, I think we have to ask, why you think this aspect of the question of greater importance. I think the local loyalties were well known and therefore discounted. Given the dual sovereignty of the constitutional system, the question was not, say, would Robert E. Lee, or the average free southerner feel loyalty to his state. That was expected. The question was whether there was sufficient loyalty to the Union to put down rebellion and treason committed in the name of the southern states.

The central question was not that of loyalty to the states. The central question was loyalty to the constitution, instituted in the name of  "We the people of the United States..." --to quote the preamble to the constitution.

As I've had occasion to remark, Emerson died in 1882, and he became incapacitated long before that. He was incapable of editing his last book of essays, published in 1876. Emerson did not see much of the Gilded Age excesses which followed the Civil War, though he criticized what he did see.

Take a look at my published Introduction to Emerson's 1860 book of essays, The Conduct of Life, originally published in December of that year. Emerson was certainly aware of the dangerous political developments of those times, and he had much to say about them--though he often avoided direct political comments in his books.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264161899_Ralph_Waldo_Emerson_The_Conduct_of_Life_A_Philosophical_Reading

One chief point is that Emerson elucidated the moral argument against slavery--in the face of a mountain of prejudice.

H.G. Callaway

Book Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, A Philosophical Reading.

H.G.

I will be delighted to read this.  I am at present trying to wrestle with the spectacularly contradictory positions of the Kentucky & Virginia Resolutions. Oh!  the wonders of the English language.

Barry,

Interesting pamphlet on an organization of 200 prominent New Yorkers supporting the South, but pleading for caution. Much talk about the South being harmed by those in Washington D.C. who hated the South and their lifestyle.

https://archive.org/stream/ASPC0001980400#page/n0/mode/2up

James

That is an excellent document conjuring up the feelings of these people on the eve of civil war.  It is clear from some of these voices that the sectionalism was by 1860 already so hide bound that conflict was inevitable.  It is also clear that while many saw secession as an evil it had become a 'necessary' evil.

The comments on the effect of the Constitution and how the North and South had effectively grown apart in a way which effectively nullified it are fascinating.  It is clear that many at this time believed the Constitution, for all its profound statements about "we the people"  could not function when the people were in fact two different people.

What is even more fascinating about the speeches at that meeting is that, as powerful and influential as those invited were they were untimately ignored by Mr Lincoln and his administration.

H.G

I take note a paragraph in your very interesing book on Emerson's antipathy towards slavery

It is not that Emerson thought reform does without incentives. In his “Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies” (1844), he notes that “in 1791, three hundred thousand persons in Britain pledged themselves to abstain from all articles of Island produce.

The planters were obliged to give way; and in 1807, on the twenty-fifth March, the bill passed and The slave trade was abolished.

Great Britain had been aroused to action and reform once the horrid facts of the slave trade became generally known. But the result did not come about without public action and economic pressures.

This is a most interesting passage which raises important questions.  Why was it not possible to garner such protest in the Northern States against slave state commerce? Could Mr Lincoln have not exerted sufficient influence in inducing the citizens of the Northern states to boycott Southern produce?

Book Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, A Philosophical Reading.

I always heard that the North depended too much on the South for cotton and produce, whereas the South's most pressing concern was machinery, which it could get from England, France, or Germany. If this is true, then a boycott would likely not have worked.

James

Since the Boycott of the British West Indies forced the planters to give up slavery it is likely that similar presure would have worked on the fragile economy of the South.   

Certainly if Britain and France had been convinced to join it The Confederacy would have had virtually no market at all.   Many Confederates were already opposed to slavery including some of the most influential.  

No one can know he outcome of slavery being abolished in this way and it is unlikely that it would have been without severe consequences for the slaves themselves.  The fuse that lit the Civil War was a very slow burn with long harboured grievances dating back to the start of the 19th century and possibly even to the Revolutionary War itself.  

Barry,

I am not so sure it was that fragile of an economy. The North thought that the South did not have enough resources to feed the Weapons of War, and they were wrong. Though I will admit that towards the end of the war the South was running out of money, thus the blockade runners trying to get sugar molasses, and cotton to England and South America to create revenues to maintain the war. I have not done a study of the economics, but all of my plantation and urban research during the course of my career does not suggest that the South was on extermely shaky financial ground like some people in this thread have suggested.

Re. slave consequences. I think anyone in this discussion should educate themselves on the effects of the sudden emancipation on the plantations, the slaves themselves, and other ethnic groups. Not only did this have unforeseen consequences immediately after the Civil War, but it had a profound and negative long-term effect on many lives across America in a practice that some say was even worse than slavery.

JAG

C.,

Thank you for that link. I would rather let people not familiar with what happened to the former slaves after emancipation find out on their own, rather than me tell them. It is not really pertinent to Barry's question. I know of a couple of documented cases where the Union soldiers freed the slaves on a plantation, then conscripted them without pay to go back to work on the same plantation because it was harvest time and Union needed the supplies. The Union did not seem to have very good plans, if any, for patriation of the former slaves into society. Many fled to the North, but there were an insufficient number of jobs available for the types of tasks that they were used to performing.

JAG

Ignorance, racism and blood thirsty!

C.,

I think my main point is that when the northern states eliminated slave ownership, some states that had very few slaves implemented abolition immediately, but other who had greater numbers of slaves swore to phase out slavery over a period of years or decades. The link below says that at one time there was a total of about 40,000 slaves in the North. Allowing years or decades to free the northern slaves allowed the North to merge those former slaves into society. The South had some 4 million slaves according to the U.S. Census Bureau who were practically released all at once. If they had been release, let us say by state, over a period of ten years, then the outcome for those estimated 1 million that died from starvation and sickness would have been much different. The North was so set on their righteous cause to free the slaves that they did not consider all of the ramifications.

http://www.history.com/news/deeper-roots-of-northern-slavery-unearthed

Mr. Mugaddam,

I welcome your comments, but would prefer a little more in the way of context for those four words.

Sincerely,

JAG

Mainz, Germany

Dear Turner & readers,

It is not exactly clear to me that you are keeping quite straight the abolition of the slave trade, which took place in 1807-1808, and the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies--which came considerably later.

The U.S. abolished the slave trade at the first opportunity provided by the constitution of 1789--which came in 1808. The British abolished the slave trade just before this. Afterward, both countries cooperated in stamping out the slave trade on the high seas.

Slavery was officially abolished in the British West Indies in 1833. See the following analysis:

http://abolition.e2bn.org/slavery_111.html

Emerson wrote to celebrate the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies as I note in my book. By the way, I would say that anyone who fails to understand Emerson fails to understand U.S. history. (N.B.: He was not doing politics. Also, he is clearly Anglophile --in a New England, non-conformist cultural style.)

The abolition of slavery in the British West Indies was facilitated (or replaced) by a system of "apprenticeship," in which the former slaves went on doing the same work in return for supplies. There was subsequently a long campaign --until 1868-- to abolish the system of apprenticeship. After the abolition of the slave trade in 1807-1808, the absolute numbers of African slaves in the British West Indies went into decline--once their numbers could not be augmented from outside; on the other hand, the number of African slaves on the mainland, in the U.S., continued to increase by natural reproduction. The slave system was expanded westward by these numbers.

Why was it possible, early on, to apply economic pressure to abolish the slave trade, but not possible, later on to abolish slavery itself by such means in the U.S.? Early in the 19th century, slavery was viewed as a moribund affair which was dying out on its own. That is generally the way in which the U.S. founders viewed it. Later in the century, however, with the emergence of "King Cotton" and the integration of cotton production with industrial processing, the slaveholders made much more money from the system --and it became more thoroughly entrenched. This development is also sometimes attributed to the invention of the cotton gin, which made the separation of cotton from its seeds much easier.

In general terms, it is important to act early to prevent economic entrenchment of social evils and morally destructive institutions and practices. Later, the economic interests themselves may become so powerful as to suppress the needed politics: you get, as it were, a "media feeding frenzy" against the critics.

H.G. Callaway 

To get a good idea of the state of the Confederate economy it is only necessary to look at any of the currency circulating during the war.  The Confederate dollar bills state that six months after the ratification of a peace treaty between the CSA and the USA the bearer will be paid on demand the value of the bill.  In other words the Confederate treasury was empty and its economy was supported by a vast unpayable national debt.

This combined with a self inflicted boycott of cotton exports to those it considered non-supportive destroyed its major export economy.  A major programme of military sequestration of property including crops and livestock was impoverishing its citizens.

In short the Confederate economy was hugely fragile and entirely dependant on exports of agricultural produce, which could easily have been subjected to economic sanctions.  As esteemed contributers to ths thread have pointed out the maintenance of slavery was allegedly to preserve a way of life, or some might more cynically argue profit.  Cutting off that profit would have rather undermined that argument.

While I appreciate (if not necessarily agree with Emerson's views) It is a tall order to suggest that he is the linchpin of American history.  As H.G.points out he was a New England non-conformist and an Anglophile.  Much of American history draws on quite different traditions.

What would Emerson have made of the events post his death where America became an industrial giant and an imperial power at the turn of the 20th century? Significant sections of American history, some might say the most significant took place after his death and in a very different land to the one of the founding fathers, of Lincoln and Emerson himself.

Understanding American history is enormously difficult (perhaps impossible) because America, like all other countries has more than one history.  History like science is not a set of answers, it is a conversation.  

Mainz, Germany

Dear Turner & readers,

Dwelling on the economy of the Confederacy during the Civil War, it seems to me that you essentially avoid the chief point of my prior note, which concerned your question of why it was not possible to end slavery in the U.S. (before war broke out) by economic boycott, public pressure and similar means. My answer is that slavery had become economically entrenched and the influence of the slaveholders was sufficient to suppress the political reaction against the slave system--especially in the South, of course,--but elsewhere as well in significant degree.

You fail to acknowledge the role of " King Cotton" and the difference between the economic and political situation early in the 19th-century --which allowed the abolition of the slave trade and the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies --and that in the mid-nineteenth century. Economic entrenchment of evil institutions was the key idea.

There are many lynch-pins of American history. Emerson is one of them.

In his scholarly and literary career, though he was born into the New England of Federalist--let me say, economic Anglophilia (which was largely discredited by the outcome of the War of 1812)--his work helped to convert New England first into Northern, liberal Whig country, and later to the Lincoln Republicans. Perhaps you are unaware that Emerson visited with Lincoln at the White House during the war and wrote an account of the visit with the President.

After the Civil War, the country was substantially ruled by the Republicans for many decades --for better or worse. In my home town of Philadelphia, this Republican domination persisted right up into the late 1940's.

H.G. Callaway

H.G

I am not disputing Emerson's contribution to the history of the United States and you are quite right Emerson is one lynch-pin.  

I consider in great detail the importance of King Cotton and how it was in fact easy for the industrialised European economies to find alternative sources following the disasterous and reckless self imposed embargo.  The economy of the Southerm Confederacy was doomed and even without the war it would have collapsed in a very short time.  It can even be argued that the war economy propped it up for longer than it would have lasted under economic sanctions

I agree entirely that slavery was entrenched and nothing illustrates this better than the willingness of Northerners to support it by returning escaped slaves to a very uncertain fate.  The duplicity of many in the North would probably have made economic sanctions ineffective and that is likely the strongest argument that it would have failed.    It was a time of robber barons and carpetbaggers after all.  Neither sanctions not the terrible Civil War attenuated their avarice, in fact they profitted well from it.

I have had the privilege of working with distingushed US Law Firms on one of the best pieces of legislation to emerge from the Civil War.  The Federal False Claims Act was promulagted and confirmed by the Lincoln Administration, not against Confederate slave owners but Yankee war profiteers who exploited the Union soldiers and government alike.  Pity they were not tried as war criminals.  

Mainz, Germany

Dear Turner & readers,

The economy of the South and the power of the slaveholders was strong enough to maintain the slave system --within the Union. No doubt, the economy of the South quickly broke down during the war-- "Gone with the Wind."

But you will recall that we were concerned with the question of why the slave system was not ended by boycott or economic and public pressure without the war. To say that the economy of the Confederacy--outside the Union-- was doomed is quite another matter. While inside the Union, it could draw on support which became unavailable, given secession and the war.

The causes of the Civil War were slavery and the related conflicts of sectionalism. The North was only willing to tolerate slavery in the South so long as it was in decline and was not about to spread to the West and dominate national councils. Once the slave system became economically entrenched, this course of action had lost its plausibility.

Lincoln acted first of all to save the Union, on the basis of the argument that "A house divided against itself cannot stand." Abolition of slavery thus became necessary to save the Union. Lincoln both saved the Union and freed the slaves. The idea that he should be blamed for the war is a fundamental mistake --to say the least. Its a moral inversion of American history.

H.G. Callaway

H.G.,

While I agree with your points, I still say that the emancipation of slaves was either not well thought out prior to Lincoln's "great cause" to rid the Union of slavery, or else what plans were developed broke down in the field. In one instance Union soldiers freed slaves, who then begged for food only to be told that the army didn't even have enough to feed itself. With slavery entrenched in the South for decades, some compromise to allow southern plantation owners to phase out slavery and ease in the cost of hiring labor possibly could have averted the war. But from my perspective, it seems like Lincoln was "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!", which resulted in the deaths of approximately 1 million former slaves, as well as some 620,000 casualties from the war. This is a high price in human lives to pay for what was essentially a blitzkrieg against slavery.

JAG

James,

I am not well versed in american history.  As everybody, I have watched many movies depicting the american civil war and so my historical understanding goes along the main narratives of these movies.  But I have often in the past discovered in deepening a question that the main narrative was way off the marks.  In this thread so far H.G. has convincingly defended this main narrative. But you live in the south and there is also I guess a south main narrative that is not well represented in the popular movie culture produced in Hollywood.  There is a lot of south bashing in the main narrative and it is probably though for many people in the south.  In the main narrative it is only though for the racism people and not tough for the honorable peoples.  For example, any attempt to put a confederate flag in the south is equate to putting  the Hakenkreuz (swastika).  What do you think?

Mainz, Germany

Dear Green & readers,

It strikes me that you are telescoping the decisions made at the start of the war into events taking place somewhat later. After all, the Emancipation Proclamation did not come until 1863--and was viewed as a war measure, freeing the slaves only in the areas still in rebellion.

Have a look:

https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=34&page=transcript

I think that no one could have reasonably foreseen the final toll of casualties at the start. Most people in 1861 thought the war would be over in short order. They were wrong, of course. But, in any case, at the start of the war Lincoln was still willing to tolerate slavery in the South--as it was tolerated, say in Maryland which did not leave the Union. So, the lack of an overall plan for the slaves is no surprise. At the start, there was, I assume, also no overall plan for the non-slave population, whether loyal or in rebellion.

What eventually arose, after the war, was the share-coping system. The former slaves often continued to work on the same lands as before the war. The differences was that they got a share of what they produced, though the ownership of the land continued in the same hands. Much else was done during Reconstruction, of course. 

My primary point above, in reply to Turner, was simply his mistake in blaming the war on Lincoln--a moral inversion of American history. I notice you do not comment on the point.

H.G. Callaway

Louis & H.G.,

The way I see it, the main theme is the real causes of the Civil War. The abolitionists in the North for many decades tried to get the South to abandon slavery. Towards this goal they passed or tried to pass legislation, which the South tried to block, forestall, or mitigate. Some of this legislation was perceived as restricting the way the South conducted their business, thus claims of interfering with States Rights. This led directly to South Carolina declaring secession, followed by the other Slave States. I do not see how you cannot say that the start of the war was not about slavery (e.g. emancipation). If Lincoln did not explicitly say this, he at least felt the pressure of northern social opinion to once and for all end this unsavory institution.

While no one could foresee the death and devastation that the war would cause, it is with blinders to not realize what the sudden freeing of 4 million slaves would do to the U.S. economy and employment.

Louis,

FYI - Yes, I am a southerner. My direct ancestor was the first senator from Alabama to the U.S. Congress and later to the Confederate Congress. One of my great uncles was named Jefferson Davis Green. Yes, I have a CSA flag, not the Battle Flag commonly thought to be the flag of the Confederate States. No, I do not display it nor am I prone to shouting "The South's Going To Rise Again" at random times. In fact, I rarely think about the "Rebel South" in day-to-day life and do not know any others who do. However, it is a part of the heritage and history of not only me, but this country. That being the case, it serves as abject lessons about we, the United States, as a country and a people. It is the penance that we had to pay to get to where we are today. The history of the United States in the 20th century is unfathomable if the Civil War had not occurred.

There are many misconceptions about the South and southerners that are propagated by both northern writers and the media. I can say that unequivocally. That being said, I am foremost a professional, archaeologist, and researcher who tries to weigh evidence in the historic record and determine what is the truth. I try to do this in as unbiased a way as possible. Fact, not fancy, rules my life, but there likely is some cultural ideology that seeps in from time to time.

H.G

I do not blame Lincoln for starting the war but I do expect that his contribution to it should be recognised. You are quite right that no one foresaw the catastrophe that the war would bring.  Spectators turned up at First Manassas and like many wars before and after the participants thought it would be over in weeks or months. 

Lincoln was utterly short sighted in a very similar way to the secessionists and just as stubborn.  James is absolutely correct, the history of the United States is unfathomable without the war.  It could be argued that the war was in fact inevitable, as inevitable as the Revolutionary War before it.  The people that made the US were traditionally opposed to being dictated too, whether by distant Kings or remote Presidents.

If the war had happened a decade earlier or a decade later no one would have heard of Lincoln.  His place in history was determined by the war, not by his intellect or compassion.  In the history of America its failure to abolish slavery in the 1830's and its hideous treatment of black people long after the war is the greatest stain.  That is a fact and certainly no fancy.  Very few of the abolitionists believed in racial equality and many expressed ideas about Africans every bit as hideous as those who kept them as slaves.

I have three Confederate flags only one of which is the Saltire battle flag that today causes so much offence (the other two most do not recognise, including remarkably some Americans).  I also do not wave them or pine for the resurrection of the Confederacy, to do so is plainly absurd.  It has to be said that pining for the Union of the mid 19th century would also be ridiculous, there was little about that society to be commended either.

We British had our Civil War too, two hundred years before the American Civil War.  The 'rebels' won our Civil War and changed not only the history of these islands but of America too.  Oliver Cromwell is the 'hero' of that Civil War, like Abe Lincoln a very flawed character and a huge set of contradictions.  When we study history we should think of Cromwell, he like Lincoln had a collection of sound-bites and catchphrases.  When having his portrait painted he instructed the painter to include "warts and all" and not to falsely flatter.  We should view our history "warts and all" and we may get closer to understanding it.  The Confederacy was as much American as the Union it should never be sanitised out nor the history of the United States be romanticised. (Neither should the history of Britain for that matter) 

In my home town here we are in the 800th anniversary year of the Second Battle of Lincoln, that took place in a much earlier Civil War less than a mile from where I live.  The first battle of Lincoln happened 66 years before that in an even earlier Civil War.  Few know what those wars were about, few understand the Wars of the Roses 250 years later.  Even the Civil War of 1642-1651 had complex causes and effects. 

We are all products of Civil War, our nations were forged in them.

Hi

The fact that the seeds of civil war began since the founding of the United States of America, the political and social structure prompted many intellectuals and church and politicians to try to eliminate the phenomenon of slavery, which was seen by the states of the South as a direct cause of hitting the economic and social environment, and began to call for the abolition of slavery , And of course were politicians and thinkers who directly contributed to the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, led by «James Madison» and «John Adams», but this movement did not go beyond the scope of abstract calls to free slavery and its prohibition, it was not surprising that the The movement gradually moved out of Massachusetts, which was the source of the War of Independence and the most civilized states and culture, but this movement soon began to spread in other states, then in the states of the South itself, and began a large social movement demanding the need for liberation, The South also began to show voices calling for an end to slavery, but the southern resistance began to emerge. Even many churches in the south began to seek the appropriate justification for this social phenomenon on religious grounds, based on the fact that slavery is contained both in the Old and New Testaments. Prohibition, a By the fourth decade of the 18th century, political skirmishes began in Congress, where many politicians sought to seek their constitutional amendments to abolish slavery in the south, which the representatives of the South faced with wars. Political and rhetorical power in Congress.

The fact is that this war broke out in the US Congress before the various battlefields over the next four years. By 1818, there were 22 states, half of which sanction slavery and the other half reject it, and many cases of political consensus have been reached to address this crisis. Missouri, "which authorized slavery in the state of Missouri and prevented in the state of« Maine »And then erupted crises when the United States expanded at the expense of Mexico, what would be the fate of slavery in these states ?, The United States entered the specter of war by the fifties of the ninth century Ten, the solution was further harmonization and balance Within Congress and in those states where Congress decided to leave these states to determine their position on the issue of slavery, especially the states of New Mexico and Utah, which was later known as the 1850 harmonization, especially after it was decided that California would join the United States as an independent state with the right to leave slavery Or not, in the framework of what is known as "popular sovereignty", while the decision on the other hand the intensification of the punishment of slaves fleeing. Throughout the 1950s, the debate on slavery, which took on political tensions, turned on one occasion into a show of hands in Congress, which foreshadowed that the spread of violence in the states had become a matter of time. Kansas was the candidate to witness scenes of violence from this debate The raging.

Thus, fighting became the only solution when the political scene turned into a north-south conflict over slavery, a political conflict that extended to the new way of life in the United States, and that was at the heart of it. The civil war has become a tool for changing the North-South way, way and way of life as we shall see.

American_Civil_War

We followed how the moral battle over slavery turned into a political battle within and between the various states of America until it became a tool that almost destroyed the union built in the wake of the wars of independence from Britain, and how it turned the issue between the anti-slavery North and the South into a state of bipolarism. Many politicians sought to try to bring the North and South closer together, but the election of US President Abraham to be president at the end of 1860 began to narrow the chances of reconciling views among states, Both immigrants and farmers, which is threatening the South completely, and although the President-elect did not officially declare his complete rejection of slavery in the United States, his political statements were gradually moving in this direction, his policy to ward off the threat of civil war was to keep the situation As it is so that the southern states remain on slavery for their economic need to be free of all other states of this social disease, but the gap increased between North and South, and before his inauguration of the Republic of North Carolina rushed to declare independence from the Union in December ) 1860, yet he managed to remain on his firm position not to accelerate the war, but soon 6 new states joined North Carolina and withdrew from the Union in February 1861 declaring Independence and inauguration of Davies as President of the 7 th states. His steadfast position.

 Many attempts have been made to heal the new rift outside Congress, which has not allowed internal divisions to resolve this political impasse, and a final attempt has been made to reconcile it with the preservation of slavery within the states in which it existed through a constitutional amendment. , And the drums of war began to ring in every direction, yet Lennon managed to lead the United States after he entered the capital Washington at night and the new president had two problems: first, how to settle the issue of slavery, but the second was even more difficult. It is the responsibility to seek restoration But the efforts were not successful because of the intransigence of North Carolina, which decided to lead the siege of the Union forces in one of the camps, which prompted the new president to work on trying to lift the siege by force of arms through the extension and siege of the ports of this state, but already The sword was isolated when the camp leadership had to surrender after the ammunition was carried out on April 12, 1861, which could be considered the date of the outbreak of the American Civil War, followed by a series of clashes in various states, followed by the declaration of 4 southern states renewed independence from the Union, «Virginia And the formation of the Confederacy with a new capital in the city of Virginia and the election of President Davis as its president.

In fact, the northern states were theoretically at least more powerful than the South for reasons of increasing their population and industrial strength compared to the agricultural south. In addition, there were many federal foci in these Confederate states that led to the use of repressive means of killing and torture to clear these foci, And the solidity of the Northern States. However, a decisive element that served «Let» be »in the following years is the possession of the Union army of a very strong military and trade fleet compared to the South, which was strategically in a weaker position in this area, The abolition of slavery for him ultimately means the end of his economic and agricultural, independent states have succeeded in appointing one of the most prominent American leaders, Johnson, called the "stone wall" because of its hardness to take over the responsibility of the southern army, and thus threw the fate and political differences the United States for the most difficult since Its inception and even today, it has become a matter now depends on the results of the battles on the ground on the ground.

In the beginning, President Lincoln was very dangerous. The capital, Washington, is very close to the concentration of the South, and the Northern Army has not yet been sufficiently prepared. His military captivity, and indeed this army was able to enter Washington and go after securing the president towards Virginia to defeat the Confederate armies. Were it not for the weakness of the Northern Command in the battle management after the victory, it would have been resolved by the fall of the Confederate capital. , They immediately sold But the logistical forces of the Confederate Army could not seize the opportunity and siege of Washington, DC, and so the civil war entered into a series of four-year-old sporadic battles.

The military plan of the Federalist Army changed after this new situation. The commander-in-chief of these armies, Winfield Scott, realized that relying on volunteers would be of little help to the strong Confederate leadership, and therefore he had trained armies for nearly a year, He could fight, especially as President Lennon resorted to forced conscription, the same as the one followed by the Confederate army, but the South's balance of fighting power was much lower than that of the Union. The Feders had developed a long-term plan to take the south at a steady pace, long But the Lennon and the public did not support this plan because they wanted to resolve the conflict as soon as possible. Federal armies began to move toward Virginia to eliminate the capital of the Confederation, The Feds realized that the war would be extended and the intuition of the isolated leader convinced everyone that the previous commander-in-chief's plan was the most effective and was immediately implemented through the ingenious leadership of some military commanders such as General Ulysses Grant (who later became president) to The United States), where he managed to inflict a series of defeats on the Confederate armies, but he gave up his guard in one of the important battles in Shailoh and cost him large numbers of soldiers and equipment, which led to the withdrawal of his command, but the war continued regularly in the East and West, The mission was on the Western operational stage.

The Union army continued to pressure the Confederate armies, with massive naval blockades of the Confederate coasts, especially after the leadership moved to one of the greatest military commanders, General Ley Lee. This man immediately sought to break the naval blockade of the Confederacy Through the development of their naval equipment, but the army of the Union had the industrial base, which gave him the victory in the race to develop the sea, and therefore imposed a large siege on the south, greatly weakened by the impact on the reduction of trade, especially arms trade, which relied on the armies of the South to supply weapons from Europe The lack of an appropriate industrial base, coupled with the fact that the export movement of agricultural products from the South to Europe has contributed significantly to the weakening of the southern economy,

Cecilia

Lincoln Cathedral was also defaced by iconoclasts and the Bishop's Palace destroyed in the Civil War.  They are only 15 minutes walk from where I live and the cathedral towers over the street where my house is.  The cathedral is over 900 years old but my street (Hungate) was here centuries before it was built.

The painting of Cromwell lifting the lid of Charles 1st is allegorical.  Cromwell knew very well Charles was dead having attended both his trial and execution.  The painting probably refers to Cromwell being unsure if the war and subsequent abolition of the monarchy was right.  In reality it is unlikely he had any such doubts.  

Puritanism stamped itself hard on the early American psyche.  Today we would regard it as a form of extremism and it shares many of the characteristics of today's political and religious extremists.  

I wrote a paper on psychiatry in which I refer to the Salem Witch Trials it is on RG and its title is There be Witches.

Mainz, Germany

Dear Turner & Kausel,

I suspect that a point which needs to be made in the context of any comparison of Cromwell and Lincoln is that puritanism is one thing and moralism something else again. Cromwell was definitely a Puritan leader; and protestant puritanism was (and sometimes still is) a typical expression of the attempt to establish Protestantism --independent of historically contenting forces. It is important to notice, too, that puritanism is not unique to the Protestants. There are important puritanical strains in all religions--consider just the vowel of chastity and the phenomenon of monasticism and nunneries in the Catholic church.

One chief accusation against Cromwell, and part of the reason for the restoration of the monarchy, presumably, is that Cromwell ruled by use of the army. Turner seems to want us to think of Lincoln in similar terms. But as it seems to me, Cromwell ruled by use of the army in times of peace, while Lincoln commanded an army in war time. During Reconstruction, after the Civil War, the country was substantially ruled, by the radical Republicans in Congress. These were the folks who brought us the 14th and 15th amendments and who attempted to maintain the rights of the freedman in the South. They were certainly determined defenders of the Union, but in spite of that, the Union army was reduced, within a few years, from over a million down to 30,000--a level which was maintained for a period of 30 years. There is little evidence of any intention to rule the country by means of the army.

But, beyond that, recall the closing words of Lincoln's second inaugural address (1865):

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.

---End quotation

See:

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln2.asp

(The speech is quite short and worth reading in full.)

My point is that this does not sound like the words of a Cromwell, or of a soldier --Cromwell was a soldier. Lincoln was a moralist and a politician, and moreover a Jeffersonian by conviction --as suspicious as any of large standing armies in times of peace. The comparison of Cromwell and Lincoln goes wrong in projecting the character of Lord Protector Cromwell onto President Lincoln. Cromwell was a puritan warrior, in the time of the great religious wars in Europe, while Lincoln was a republican (small "r"), a civilian official in time of war. Events may make the man, as is often said. But mastering events is a genuine sign of greatness.

H.G. Callaway

H.G.

It was not a direct comparisson of Cromwell with Lincoln, there are some similarities that's all.  Cromwell was a brilliant statesman as well as a soldier and both the democracy of the UK and the US owe some debt to his fierce determination to see representative government over despotic kings.  A sentiment I do believe that was shared by Jeffersonians.

Cromwell was also a man of his time, he recognised that the parliament was just as capable of corruption and tyranny as the King, perhaps far too late.  His dissolution of the parliament and rule as Lord Protector must have been a great disappointment to him.

It is not quite accurate to say that Cromwell ruled by military force in 'times of peace'.  Post the English Civil War and during the interregnum there was little that could be described as peace.  

We will never know if English Republicanism would have worked in the long term or if Lincoln would have stood by his grandiose sentiments expressed in speeches.  It is true events make the man, history similarly unmakes them.

Neither, Cromwell, Jefferson or Lincoln ever lived in a true democracy, of the sort we would recognise today.  None of them extended the franchise to the more than half of the adult population, who did not get to vote untill well into the 20th century (although some of the radical Puritan sects were in favour of it in the 17th Century) 

In a historical context all contributed to the democracies we enjoy today.  We properly celebrate their achievments by acknowledging their faults.  The great founders of modern democracy do not need laurel wreaths or panegyrics.    

Barry,

There a lot to celebrate about modern democracy but they are not doing very well and there are a lot to be worry about them but I will stop here given that this is the topic of:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_liberal_democracy_in_decline#view=5944d3fced99e1af37190d62

Mainz, Germany

Dear Kausel & readers,

Many thanks for your thoughtful summary remarks on the foregoing discussion. I much appreciate your kind remarks on my contributions.

I believe that there must certainly be room for compassion for the woes of the South in the wake of the Civil War. War itself, I regard as always a human failure --to be regretted afterward and resisted before it starts. On the other hand, it makes little sense to blame one side alone for the human failures involved; and I do not see a case for blaming President Lincoln for the excesses of the war. Surely, there were excesses on both sides, and war is always a rather indiscriminate affair. It takes two to tango in these things.

President Lincoln did not, strictly speaking, declare war. At the time at least, this was treated as a prerogative of Congress. Lincoln governed with Congress and not on his own. What he did was to react to a rebellion in the Southern states to re-establish the powers of the federal government. Union forces were attacked first at Charleston. During war, unfortunately, people do what they see as necessary; they "do what they have to do," and such things quite naturally spin out of control. That is one reason why war is always a human failure. One may argue, then that the Southern states should have remained in Congress and pressed their case by legal means.

Regarding the aesthetics of protestant puritanism, I think there can be no doubt that this is a rather austere affair. The image is rejected in favor of the word. The puritans have always seen themselves as a "people of the book," and like the ancient Hebrews, they saw all graven image as dangerous and potentially misleading. One may view this as a proto-functionalism in architecture, and a literary turn in the arts. The great paradigms are the sermons and essays and the oratory of the preachers. Think of Johnathan Edwards, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.," e.g.,

http://edwards.yale.edu/archive?path=aHR0cDovL2Vkd2FyZHMueWFsZS5lZHUvY2dpLWJpbi9uZXdwaGlsby9nZXRvYmplY3QucGw/Yy4yMTo0Ny53amVv

In the American context, one may argue, this develops in the direction of the more liberal streams of Emerson's essays, say "Worship" (1860):

http://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/worship.html

Emerson later wrote that this was the essay that gave him the greatest trouble as he edited the essays of The Conduct of Life, for publication --in December of 1860.

In any case, I also believe that being rooted in one or another of these aesthetic traditions should not prevent us from appreciating the alternative on an aesthetic basis. Keep in mind that the South has always been deeply impressed with the religion of the reformation.

I agree with you, and with Lincoln, that our soldiers are more the victims of war.

Thanks again for your comments and your contributions.

H.G. Callaway

I agree that Lincoln felt profound sadness for the plight of the soldiers and was clearly outraged by the exploitation of them by crooked businessmen and politicians.

Union soldiers were being supplied with defective equipment and uniforms by war profiteers.  The Lincoln Administration took steps to halt this in the Federal False Claims Act, the introduction of which punished those bilking the federal taxpayer and causing hardship and death to the soldiers.

Qui Tam is a superb American law which every other capitalist democracy should adopt. I have assisted is some cases in the US and lobbied both UK and EU politicians to introduce a Qui Tam law in Europe (to no avail)   

I criticize Lincoln for his many faults but even I do not think he was all bad.  A law that empowers American citizens to attack the robber barons of big business is a Lincoln legacy that is too often forgotten.  It should be used far more often.

The causes of war ?

I can consider today a contexte of war for independence (for exemple, in Lougansk & Donezk), but not civil war ...

And I hope with you C. Lewis --" the most likely cause is the unwillingness to accept a president and his party's proposais".

MTT

Dear Lewis,

I often with my family went back in forth Vancouver and Chicoutimi and on one of these trip I stopped on a campground  in Iowa just after Obama first election.  I was talking with a guy in the swimming pool and he was explaining to me that Obama would get shot.  He was a white supremacist.  The first time I met one in person and since I am a white guy he felt at ease to tell me what he thought. Nothing of the sort happened although we saw a rise of shooting of blacks by police.  There is a connection I think.  Also Obama was politically opposed very effectively. Trump is now opposed politically so far.  Of course Obama managed to do many things opposed as Trump is able to do.  But so far it is political business as usual and not really closer to a civil war than before.

Mainz, Germany

Dear Kausel, Brassard & readers,

Regarding the recent shootings in Alexanderia, VA, I heard it remarked by one conservative commentator that this came close to being a Ft. Sumter moment. Consider what might have happened if the entire Congressional leadership had been targeted in the attack --and there had been no police protection.

I think the media need to do a bit of self-criticism and some sorting out of the better and worse of conservative media figures. Its no good constantly featuring the loonies and ignoring the others. Of course, dumping on the loonies makes for spectacle, and that is apparently a primary incentive. The PC prohibition of public discussion of respectable conservative opinion must go!

Its a matter of much needed self-restraint in media and discourse. American politics and the media have received a shot across the bow --from "Nature," as Emerson might have put the matter. We cannot expect to have continual, unrestrained and all-out competitiveness and public discord without eventually suffering the consequences of the lack of public virtue.

H.G. Callaway

There is also media overload, where the news agencies spend enormous amounts of time covering single horrendous to mediocre events in minute details, replete with every possible speculation and on-call expert. This is creating a populous of those caught in rapt attention of each nuance and tagline and those that reject news as self-fulfilling and self-propagating commercial establishments set on influencing every aspect of American life. Those caught in between are tormented with mixed feelings of trying to stay informed versus shut the cacophony of conflicting reports out of their daily lives.

:~)

"There is also media overload, where the news agencies spend enormous amounts of time covering single horrendous to mediocre events in minute details, replete with every possible speculation and on-call expert"

News is a product and fake news and 'nuanced' news has always been with us.  The modern media is a full of news from all angles.  All that is needed is for the consumer of the news to be educated as well as informed.  

Congress may make no law abridging the freedom of the press but every TV set has a remote control.  

Read the New York Times, everything in its is true!

Read the Washington Post, nearly everything in its is true.

Watch Russia Today, get the whole story.

The 2015 film Spotlight which is about the Boston Globe's "Spotlight" team illustrated how quality investigative journalism is crucial for democracy.  I have a sense that the choices on the  remote for this kind of journalism are shrinking.

I thought the conversation here was on the causes of the American Civil War...and a great insight is abundant in the literature that spans the period where real and imagined protagonists fiercely make choices or are compelled to participate on either side. The American South was a recalcitrant, cotton-based, plantocracy that refused to let go of the 'loot' of slave hands. The 'industrial north' had somehow heeded to the a new 'seductive tyranny' that allowed slaves to 'buy' their freedom and participate in re-making their identities in the 'diasporic intimacy' of being in-homed...

Mainz, Germany

Dear Kausel, Brassard & readers,

Regarding the recent shootings in Alexanderia, VA, I heard it remarked by one conservative commentator that this came close to being a Ft. Sumter moment. Consider what might have happened if the entire Congressional leadership had been targeted in the attack --and there had been no police protection.

I think the media need to do a bit of self-criticism and some sorting out of the better and worse of conservative media figures. Its no good constantly featuring the loonies and ignoring the others. Of course, dumping on the loonies makes for spectacle, and that is apparently a primary incentive. The PC prohibition of public discussion of respectable conservative opinion must go!

Its a matter of much needed self-restraint in media and discourse. American politics and the media have received a shot across the bow --from "Nature," as Emerson might have put the matter. We cannot expect to have continual, unrestrained and all-out competitiveness and public discord without eventually suffering the consequences of the lack of public virtue.

H.G. Callaway

Mainz, Germany

Dear all,

I have just put up notice and some details of my new book, Pluralism, Pragmatism and American Democracy: A Minority Report:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317741621_Pluralism_Pragmatism_and_American_Democracy_A_Minority_Report

I have been working on this book over the past couple of years, and basically it assembles a collection of my essays, old and new, concerned with the revival of American pragmatism--and where, as I see the matter, this has gone wrong.  The book is chiefly concerned with moral, social and political themes--and the revival of interest in John Dewey in particular. 

I would say, in general terms, that the themes of my newly published book are congruent with what I have been saying on this thread. The political and social means employed are always capable of corrupting the ends at which people aim; and there have been similar developments in the revival of pragmatism. It has not been easy to work through the materials in this book, but it does seem particularly topical--given recent discontents and political developments in the U.S. and elsewhere.

The Introduction to the volume, which I have made available from RG turns on the contrast between traditional modes of American pluralism on the one hand--how people can manage their differences in a multi-ethnic and multi-racial society, and interest-group pluralism on the other--which, as I argue, lends itself to unprincipled political and quasi-political movements and tends to degenerate into oligarchy as a result of intensive competitions for power and wealth.

I'll also be putting up some of the new papers in this volume.

H.G. Callaway

Book Pluralism, Pragmatism and American Democracy: A Minority Report

Mainz, Germany

Dear all,

Readers of the present thread may find the following review of Berlin's The Roots of Romanticism of interest:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317845465_Review_of_Berlin_The_Roots_of_Romanticism

Comments invited. Dwelling on Berlin's version of value pluralism, the review reflects on the contrast between European and American developments of the 19th-century Romantic movement.

BTW: Please pay no attention to those attempting to suppress more adversarial debate and discussion--within the boundaries of scholarship and research. 

H.G. Callaway

Article Review of Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism

C. Lewis Kausel,

The removal of all traces of the Confederacy will not alleviate the racial woes in this country. Those that are prone to racism, hatred, and bigotry carry their symbols inked or carved into their bodies, on scraps of cloth they have sewn together, and items readily purchased in many retail outlets. The removal of Confederate statues can only fuel their hatred; its in their nature. They have been poisoned, some by generations of bigots, others by association. We are likely going to see worse in the coming days.

The destroying of statues by baying mobs is the most atavistic of behaviours.  The erasing of history the mindset of despots.

No one would suggest that we honour America's slave owning past anymore than we in the UK are proud of the fact that we facilitated slavery.   But, and there is always a but however uncomfortable it may be for some, we live with the legacy of our pasts and that includes the unsavoury parts.

The speech of Trump at Trump Tower was as usual an appaling paranoid ramble but I would suggest he was correct in one part of it.  How long do people think Jefferson will be standing after all the Rebels have gone?

This crazed expression of anger and mob rule is not an expression of free speech and liberalism.  Violence in the name of free speech is as absurd as it is disgraceful.

In the UK we do not let opposing demonstrators near each other.  When our far right gather they are kept in one part of town the demonstrators against them in another part. The police stop them from getting within range of each other.  That protects freedom of expression while frustrating the thugs on both sides.  

One more point on Civil War Monuments.  The fields of Gettysburg are rightly hallowed ground and one big monument in themselves.  Do the statue wreckers want to erase that too?