I kind of love when one of them is like “well actually the south were tactical geniuses, they just lost because they couldn’t produce enough weapons and uniforms”. Bro, a tactical genius doesn’t start a war with an economic powerhouse. Ability to produce supplies and get them to the front lines literally the biggest factor of war.
not to mention all their tactical victories were against an actively self-sabotaging traitor McClellan
And I’m sure it wouldn’t come as any surprise that even the tactical acumen of senior Confederate commanders has been overstated, to say the least
They got cocky because their railroads gave them internal supply lines, which made them able to defend more land per unit. But it doesn’t matter how much you can ferry resources within your territory if you can’t maintain the external supply. The north basically had to just continue the fight until the south ran out of resources
the only way the union didn’t fail was when they didn’t stamp the confederacy repeatedly in the face, forever
Yeah. Pretry sure the guys who wanted slavery were worse
The Union was crap for a lot of reasons. They set the bar way down low. Drafting migrants and press-ganging sailors, kitting soldiers out with crap so war profiteers could rake it in, losing battle after battle through mismanagement and cowardice, generally fucking up the first two years so hard that Gettysburg Pennsylvania was a battlefield people were dying on.
But by god did the Confederacy manage to limbo under. Virtually every sin the Union committed was echoed by the Confederates several times over. And on top of it all… you know… slavery.
both sides were garbage and white supremacist, it’s just that the confederacy was obviously way way way worse (not that this is the point the meme is trying to make)
if you care why click me
A few points I always like to make when talking about the civil war.
- The Republican party platform was to contain slavery to existing slaves states through the free soil policies. Only fringe Republicans were openly abolitionists, and most were even timid about terms like “free soil” and “containment” because they were afraid of losing elections or being assassinated.
- The Republican party wanted free soil policies because they viewed the capitalist “free market” as superior to forced labor, not because they were particularly class conscious.
- Lincoln was an avowed white supremacist on the campaign trail, and asserted that black people and white people could never be equal. People point this out as a defensive posture, and a strategy for getting elected, but nonetheless.
- For a long time Lincoln’s plan for black people in the United States largely consisted of arranging for them to the leave the country and set up colonies elsewhere. Which is to say, he wanted to use ex-slaves for a colonial agenda.
- Lincoln privately (not very openly) despised slavery as an economic institution that discriminated against white men who couldn’t afford to own slaves and, thus, could not profit from the advantage in the marketplace that slaves provided. At the same time, however, he was deeply ambivalent about the status of black people vis-à-vis white people, having fundamental doubts about their innate intelligence and their capacity to fight nobly with guns against white men in the initial years of the Civil War.
- Lincoln was not in favor of black suffrage until he was close to his assassination, and even then, it would have been for black union soldiers and wealthy black property owners only, all male. Also, he only expressed these sentiments as sentiments, he made no attempts to carry this out as policy.
- Lincoln did not do the Emancipation Proclamation until it became a strategically advantageous move for the union during the later stages of the civil war. Even then, he maintained slavery in confederate states which had surrendered. The Emancipation Proclamation was therefore only selectively abolitionist in its scope, even more so than the 13th amendment, which came later.
- Lincoln was a “free soil” advocate. He wanted newly annexed (read: stolen from natives) states to be non-slaveholding states. Some see this as incrementalist abolition, because it meant that free states would eventually outnumber slave states, and that the legislative power of the free states would overwhelm the legislative power of the slaveholding states, and force abolition. I don’t see it as abolition, personally, because it’s too slow. And it doesn’t take into account legislative countermeasures that the South would have taken and did take. The slaveholding aristocracy had plenty of tricks up their sleeves to prevent this policy from working as incremental abolition, and they had already violated the Missouri compromise anyway by passing the Kansas-Nebraska act. They also began to raid federal armies and draft documents of secession while Buchanan was still president.
- The South’s reaction to Lincoln’s election was to secede from the union and attack Fort Sumter. Lincoln was a milquetoast centrist compromise between abolition and slavery. That milquetoast compromise was too far for the slaveholding aristocracy. They literally broke up the country and created a competing nation to avoid being even slightly inconvenienced by a president who wasn’t even going to take their slaves from them. This is why you can’t compromise with fascists (or in this case, their prototypes). Fascists will view any “centrist” compromise as inherently too far left. They’ll spit in your face as you let them win. Then they’ll kill you.
- One can argue that the South’s hostility towards centrist compromise did more to accelerate the conflict and bring about abolition than anything Lincoln did.
- The civil war was probably inevitable from the moment America became a country. The ideological battle between southern plantation owners and northern manufacturers, between anti-federalists and federalists, created the material conditions that led to various slave rebellions. As did the institution of slavery, it goes without saying.
- Even though the United States had stopped importing slaves long before the civil war, the breeding of new slaves, along with territorial expansionism to the west, and the systematic genocide of natives, meant that the slave population in the USA was higher than it had ever been when the civil war started. This also made civil war inevitable. The number of people who had a direct material interest in abolition was higher than it had ever been.
- Slavery was replaced with sharecropping, black people were given no reparations (or had their reparations actively taken away by Andrew Johnson, in the case of some instances of land redistribution), the Klan and other groups continued to terrorize black people after the war, lynchings became increasingly common, as did voter intimidation, and the slave aristocracy not only went unpunished for their treachery, they were actively compensated for the loss of their ‘property,’ making them significantly richer and able to enter the ranks of the industrial robber barons during the gilded age that was right around the corner.
- Despite all its imperfections and shortcomings, this is how the Republican party was depicted by its conservative enemies.
- Abraham Lincoln, for some godawful reason, thought he needed to bring in a racist (yet anti-secession) southern democrat as his new VP to win reelection. Lincoln kicked Hannibal Hamlin to the curb for Andrew Johnson.
- Lincoln won under the “national unity party” ticket, and was promptly shot, leaving a Southern Democrat in power in the immediate aftermath of the civil war. Johnson promptly pardoned all the confederate leadership, gave them back the land that was going to be redistributed to slaves, quickly pulled the union army out of the south, and basically allowed the red shirts and the redeemers and the first klan to institute a reign of terror that laid the foundation for Jim Crow and the “dunning school” which institutionalized and systematically taught a “lost cause” civil war narrative to every student in the southern education system until about the 1960s.
- Lincoln’s “centrist” political instincts got him shot, and destroyed any prospect for radical reconstruction and land redistribution in the united states, and caused slavery to continue to exist through the sharecropping system, the prison system, and “anti-vagrancy laws” which criminalized newly-freed slaves for not having land or jobs.
One can argue that the South’s hostility towards centrist compromise did more to accelerate the conflict and bring about abolition than anything Lincoln did.
It’s been over 150 years and we still have slavery though
they had this weird theory that slavery needed to expand to survive and it exhausted the soil or something.
They figured if slavery failed to expand to newly “acquired” territories then slave states would no longer have a legislative majority and slavery would be able to be abolished legislatively without recourse to a civil war. They were wrong about this because the slave aristocracy’s desire to pursue their material interests outweighed their desire to remain in the union. So keep in mind that the “free soil” path to abolishing slavery “without civil war” required genocidal war against natives and continued westward expansion. This is shitty and white supremacist.
I’d hardly call figures like Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens ‘fringe Republicans’, they were major national figures
Thaddeus Stevens and his self-styled “Radical Republican” coalition were absolutely considered politically fringe at the time. The party moderates were free-soilers like Lincoln. Lincoln represented the face of the party for a reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Republicans
The Radical Republicans (later also known as "Stalwarts") were a faction within the Republican Party, originating from the party's founding in 1854, some 6 years before the Civil War, until the Compromise of 1877, which effectively ended Reconstruction. They called themselves "Radicals" because of their goal of immediate, complete, and permanent eradication of slavery, *without compromise*. They were opposed during the War by the Moderate Republicans (led by President Abraham Lincoln), and by the pro-slavery and anti-Reconstruction Democratic Party. The Radicals were heavily influenced by religious ideals, and many were Christian reformers who saw slavery as evil and the Civil War as God's punishment for slavery
The Radical Republicans opposed Lincoln's terms for reuniting the United States during Reconstruction (1863), which they viewed as too lenient. They proposed an "ironclad oath" that would prevent anyone who supported the Confederacy from voting in Southern elections, but Lincoln blocked it and once Radicals passed the Wade–Davis Bill in 1864, Lincoln vetoed it. The Radicals demanded a more aggressive prosecution of the war, a faster end to slavery and total destruction of the Confederacy. After the war, the Radicals controlled the Joint Committee on Reconstruction.
the Emancipation Proclamation was always a ‘strategic move’.
Yes.
it never had anything to do with freeing slaves,
From ‘Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution’ by Eric Foner:
Excluded from its purview were the 450,000 slaves in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri (border slave states that remained within the Union), 275,000 in Union-occupied Tennessee, and tens of thousands more in portions of Louisiana and Virginia under the control of federal armies. But, the Proclamation decreed, the remainder of the nation’s slave population, well over 3 million men, women, and children, “are and henceforth shall be free.”
it notoriously freed basically no slaves.
it legally freed slaves in regions that were in rebellion. the scope of enforcement was weak obviously since the South could only be compelled to follow this by force of arms. But slaves found out about the Proclamation through word of mouth and it inspired many to run away from their plantations and flee to the North or join the union army. This is especially the case since the plantations were poorly guarded with the masters and overseers and other white men mostly drafted into the war.
Also from Foner:
Even in the heart of the Confederacy, far from Union lines, the conflict undermined the South’s “peculiar institution.” Their “grapevine telegraph” kept many slaves remarkably well informed about the war’s progress. In one part of Mississippi, slaves even organized Lincoln’s Legal Loyal League to spread word of the Emancipation Proclamation. Southern armies impressed tens of thousands of slaves into service as laborers, taking them far from their home plantations, offering opportunities for escape, and widening the horizons of those who returned home. The drain of white men into military service left plantations under the control of planters’ wives and elderly and infirm men, whose authority slaves increasingly felt able to challenge. Reports of “demoralized” and “insubordinate” behavior multiplied throughout the South.
it was a political move to make the war about slavery and largely succeeded in that right.
If it was only a political move to make the war about slavery then it would have not provided special exemptions to slave states that were loyal to the union. But as you and I have both established, it was both a political and a strategic move. But it also showed the ideological limits of the “good guys.” In many ways it was “too little too late.” The Union had all the leverage when it won the war. It could have gone out of its way to forbid the type of racist prison slavery we have in the US today, and it could have told the loyal slave states to suck it up and deal with emancipation.
no one had any idea Andrew Johnson would have been so awful. he was most famous before becoming president for saying “treason must be made odious and traitors punished” and railing against the ‘slavocracy’. the Radical Republicans were actually excited at first when Johnson was set to take over for those reasons.
I don’t buy this. These men are politicians and were much more educated and cynical than this. They did not merely take each others’ rhetoric for granted. Andrew Johnson was an on-again off-again slave owner. His record of sometimes owning slaves directly contradicted his populist rhetoric and presented a clear conflict of interest. Lincoln should not have felt the need to pick a Democrat VP. The union had all the leverage after the war was won. There was no reason for these “National Unity” civility gestures. He should have picked a real radical Republican as his VP. That would have made assassinating him a much bigger mistake for the South.
THE UNION FOREVER
HURRAH, BOYS, HURRAH!
DEATH TO THE SLAVERS
AND UP WITH THE STAR
AND WE’LL FILL OUR VACANT RANKS
WITH ONE MILLION WORKERS MORE
SHOUTING THE BATTLE CRY OF FREEEEEEDOM!!
:rb-star: :marx-guns-blazing:
