The Top 40

Even better would have been a South that was less belligerent and a north that was less patronizing so they worked together to end the institution of slavery which was plainly on its way out anyway.

What was needed was a system to help compensate farmers for the loss of slaves and retooling to not need them combined with a system to introduce blacks into society through education. It would have been expensive, but no more so than the war, and would have cost far fewer lives.

However, without the war, its conceivable that the organization, determination, and logistical ability that allowed the transcontinental railroad to be built would never have existed...

As a Southerner, the best thing that ever happened to The South was its defeat by The Union, and Sherman's march to the sea. Grant and Sherman give us the model for how we should deal with the Nazis, Japanese Empire, and al-Qaeda. Until you make the people that support a bad idea face the consequences of that idea they will never reevaluate their idea.

You don't need to waste time trying to read their minds from drones, if they aren't fighting on your side they are the enemy during war. The "civilians" will be pointing out the enemy in their midst or they are the enemy. Make the civilians race to help you or they are the enemy. Total war until victory, no half-measures. It's the most humane war possible. All other options are immoral and ineffective.

The Transcontinental Railroad was made possible by the Civil War only in the sense that all wars are socialist by nature, and so was the railroad. It was not a good deal for the taxpayers. A entirely private and profitable transcontinental rail in the far north was built through more difficult territory at the same time. It's an old story that keeps repeating itself.

The Union had been spared succession three times in the fifty years before the war, the first threat coming from New England, no less. But in the end, it was an evangelical religious war whipped up in the North, a movement which took twenty-five years to make itself irresistible. Uncle Tom's Cabin triggered the deluge, as Lincoln told the little lady himself.

It is little known that Lincoln's plan was to deny the former slaves suffrage during reconstruction. He knew what would happen otherwise. And so it did. It's not your enemies who will ruin you, it's your friends; also a recurring theme.

For a somewhat less laudatory (but very brief) view of Lee's generalship see Michael Walsh's comment at NR: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/301106/best-american-general-michael-walsh.

Does McPherson actually believe the slavery issue would have never come up again? By McPherson's logic, if the South had won in 1862 they also would have remained a viable culture with slavery intact. Also, as someone whose homeland and ancestors (none of whom owned human beings to my knowledge) suffered the effects of the March To The Sea, I would rather Sherman had practiced his scorched-earth, civilian-murdering ideas on someone other than his fellow citizens, which the North by philosophy presumed we were. The French, perhaps.

It was Lee's talent that dragged the war out; it was Lee's reputation that permitted the war to end when he said it was over.

if they aren't fighting on your side they are the enemy.

FIFY

If Stonewall hadn't died from friendly fire after Chancellorsville Gettysburg would have been a Southern victory. Not saying that would have been a good thing, just a fact. North and South would probably not have reunited until the perfidious Japanese attack on the Confederate territory of Hawaii.

Sherman was right. There would be no peace without victory, and no victory without the cream of the South dead on the field first.

I am highly skeptical that any combination of Union mistakes/Lee's brilliance could have brought about a negotiated peace so early. McClellan was a magnificent organizer but weak in strategy. He made Richmond, the city, his objective. He was going to take a geographic location and thus win the war.

Grant was interested in cities as a matter of logistics. His priority was always the enemy army, and that was that.

Sherman and Grant were the only two Union officers to understand the nature of the war, and what it would take to win, from just about the beginning.

Islam will be a deadly threat until we start destroying Saudi Princes and bombing their palaces. Anyone, ANYONE, that supports keeping the war away from the Saudis is throwing away American lives because they are more comfortable with that outcome.

The politicians, in their high-security offices and armored limousines, are prepared to manage the "late unpleasantness with the unnamed group" for a century or more, no matter how many dead proles that causes. A government that won't fight for you deserves no loyalty from you.

Did those firemen, that heard GWB at Ground Zero, think our response to the terrorist would be a slow-drip of American blood for as many decades as it took to become distracted by the next reality TV series? Or did GWB give them reason to think the US was finally going to fight a war like we thought the outcome was important, rather than just an agenda item on some bureaucrat's calendar? The fact there is so much as one living goat in Afghanistan should be the everlasting monument of failure and undying shame for GWB.

If GWB had told us on Sept 12, 2001 that the US would sacrifice a few thousand more American lives to punish al-Qaeda and the Taliban and then turn the country back over to them would he have reason to fear a lynch mob of Americans? Does anyone have reason to fear a lynch mob of angry Americans? Can ANYTHING cause Americans to be angry enough to take action? If Sept 11 didn't demand a nuclear retaliation what will? Will that happen before the US puts its last nuke in a museum display? I don't see signs Americans believe their country is at risk. America could have nuked one hundred targets in the Middle East before lunch on Sept 11. Instead it chose to begin a neighborhood rebuilding project without first defeating the enemy. Great Powers don't do that and there is no new way of war, or half-war, or better war. There's war and there is surrender. If you aren't sure which you are doing, it's not war.

Trust me, Charleston never surrendered. What an paternalistic little racist town if ever I've been in one. . . and I was raised in the South!

Note to self: Road trip to Charelston in the spring; get Stars and Bars decals for the roadster. I'm a sucker for pateralistic racist women.

^^ Funny how those decals keep popping up in places
far afield from the Old Confederacy.

One thing we tend to forget about the Civil War is that the South, like Europe fifty years later, saw the war remove a generation of it's better men from the reproductive cycle. One rural county in Georgia had three men between the ages of 16 and thirty left alive and whole in 1865.

Lee's unquestionable tactical brilliance seemed to mask a strategic myopia in which he constantly sought a war-ending Austerlitz that never came. Chancellorsville was his best chance, and though he won a decisive victory, the Army of the Potomac remained intact, and was able to withdraw north of the Rappahannock to fight another day, which would come two months later at Gettysburg. Once the plodding but sufficiently competent Meade took over, the Army of the Potomac had a commander who wouldn't beat himself, and then it was just a matter of time before the Union's greater numbers and superior logistics began to tell. The later addition of Grant and Sheridan from the West added the offensive drive that Meade lacked, and for the last year of the war, Lee would be closely shadowed by forces that eventually outnumbered his 6 to 1.

In reviewing the history of McClellan's failure to seize the initiative and press home his victories, the military historian Mackubin Thomas Owens came reluctantly to the conclusion that McClellan was not trying to win the war. He hoped for a negotiated settlement (such as he proposed during his nearly victorious campaign for the presidency in 1864) and deliberately held back.

Owens wrote (http://www.cwbr.com/index.php?q=4811&field=ID&browse=yes&record=full&searching=yes&Submit=Search)

"Lincoln understood that what appears to be the case at the outset of the war may change as the war continues, modifying the relationship between political goals and military means. The fact remains that wars are not fought for their own purposes but to achieve policy goals set by the political leadership of the state. And the truth is that, as James McPherson has observed, Lincoln turned out to be a better strategist than any of his generals.

"Perhaps the most important political-military challenge Lincoln faced was that, early in the war, his generals pursued the war they wanted to fight rather than the one their commander-in-chief wanted them to fight. The clearest example of this problem was General George McClellan, who disagreed with many of Lincoln’s policies, and indeed may have attempted to sabotage them.

"This it was not McClellan’s “incompetence” that caused problems for the Union. Instead it was that he essentially refused to fight the war on the basis that Lincoln wanted, especially after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

"It is easy to criticize McClellan, but his view of the war was not uncommon during its early phases. Even Lincoln deplored the potential resort to a “remorseless revolutionary struggle” against the South. But by the summer of 1862, he realized that the Confederacy would not relent unless the character of the war changed. There were substantial political risks for Lincoln and the Republicans, but he concluded that the only way to save the Union was to ratchet up the pressure. The successful Union generals were those who adapted to the changing circumstances; McClellan was not one of them."

(End quote.)

We might also remember that the strategy that won the War Between the States was developed when Lincoln became convinced he would very likely fail to win re-election. He directed his war cabinet to develop a strategy that would win the war by the early spring of 1865 (if elected, McClellan would have taken office on March 4).

In the event, Lee surrendered on April 7. The strategy adopted to win the war even had Lincoln lost the election worked. The brilliance of Lee, even had it been served still by the faithful Jackson rather than the fanciful Stuart, would not have prevailed against the grim determination of Sherman, Thomas, and Grant.

If the north wanted to fight then the south would lose. By the end of 1862 many southern ports were in the hands of the north. The Mississippi was almost cleared. Lee kept an army in the field in northern Virginia near Washington. That caught all attention - the two capitals - but the south was being eroded everywhere else. When Grant came east he fastened the Army of the Potomac on the Army of Northern Virgina and kept both in play, letting neither rest (and the AotP could do that longer than the AoNV) and letting all of the other federal forces play havoc in the south.

By the time of Vicksburg/Gettysburg it was militarily over, it just was a wait to see if the will of one side would fail before the strength of the other did.

"...essentially refused to fight the war on the basis that Lincoln wanted, especially after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation."

A valid conclusion, and not limited to McClellan --

"If I thought this war was to abolish slavery, I would resign my commission, and offer my sword to the other side."

--- Ulysses S. Grant, quoted in the NY World

Remember, they were fighting for states rights first and foremost and ironically, Lee himself wanted to end slavery.

"With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State, with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword..." Robert E. Lee

I assure you,that sentiment is alive and well in the South, still.

If you want to know why South Carolina and Mississippi, inter alia, seceded from the Union, why they were willing to go to war to secede from the Union, and what they thought were persuade the more reluctant State legislatures, such as Virginia's, to secede from the Union, read what their own "commissioners" said and wrote when they dispatched to Virginia and North Carolina to plead for secession.

You'll find their plaidoyers verbatim in "Apostles of Disunion," by Charles Dew (University of Virginia Press, 2002).

The short answer is, they thought that secession and war were necessary in order to protect . . . the institution of Negro slavery. That was the underlying reason for the war, and the protection of Negro slavery was also the reason for the Compromise of 1830 and the Missouri Compromise . . . the issue of Negro slavery embroiled the young Republic for 50 years before war broke out.

The South DID rise again. They lost the war, but won the peace. Reconstruction did little to "reconstruct" white southern attitudes. Once federal troops left in 1877, the long instituional march of southern recidivism began. The Democrats reasserted themselves, officially sanctioned segregation became the norm, and the notion of white supremacy persisted nationwide -- not just in the South -- well into the 1920's. Licoln was not held in as high regard as he is now, and the "progressive" Woodrow Wilson was good friends with D.W. Griffith, and Southern Democratic Congressmen used the seniority system to dominate both houses.

I-RIGHT-I has the correct view.

A valid conclusion, and not limited to McClellan --

"If I thought this war was to abolish slavery, I would resign my commission, and offer my sword to the other side."

That quote is, to say the least, disputed.

Michael Medved, IIRC, read from the various rebel states' secessions statements and Punditarian has it right. State's Rights is a post hoc and less objectionable cause which supplanted the original cause. Defending State's Rights is the PC reason for the war since slavery couldn't be defended by anyone respectable.

If Grant and Sherman had brought the full horror of war to the civilians of The South sooner many Southerners would have lived, rather than been cannon fodder for the dream of the plantation owners. The best war is a swift and terrible war which ends quickly and decisively.

When folks bring up states rights as the driving force of secession, I always ask them "A state's right to do what?"

And I always I get hemming, hawing, and uncomfortable silence in response.