Anybody watching the Civil War on PBS this week?

[foweler]

Open your mind to the idea that everything you were taught in school and everything broadcast by PBS on Lincoln might be distorted.
Then read DiLorenzo's book.
When you are done.....see how YOU feel about that man being made an American saint.
Admittedly, you would have to believe that free states working independently as proving grounds for ideas in societal organization being far superior to a national one size fits all method to really appreciate the irony.

 

[Dunkopf]

I am always amused by people that rewrite history and claim that the historians were all wrong about everything. Just out of curiosity. How do these people find out all the so called correct information? Do they have a time machine or something? It's kind of like claiming you have absolute proof the Bible is factual vs fiction. I've never heard of anyone that was alive back then that is still alive now.

I'm sure Lincoln was a racist. Everyone was a racist back then. Look how they treated Indians. racism is a natural human trait born of ignorance. The Civil War may not have been about slavery, but the abolition of slavery was the reason the south seceded. Isn't Texas supposed to secede? I would like to see what the feds would do about that.

 

[WyandotteTX]

Kristy,
I tend to agree with you. There is no right or wrong in terms of history there is only the perceived notion of what we have been told. It is our own responsibility to find out what happened, usually from detailed accounts of those who were there, and then surmise any truths we may think.
Somebody mentioned about how appalling Shermans march to the sea and the destruction of crops in the Shenandoah Valley by the Union. My thoughts about this are not emotional but my observation is how this was a pre-cursor or the first chapter in what we saw as "total war" of the 20th Century and also with the destruction of the native tribes of the Plains. If you destroy the populations will to fight and its ability to sustain itself you are destroying the backbone of your opponents life and economy and will to maintain that war. The tactics of southern General Nathan Bedford Forrest were the first instance of what would later be called "blitzkrieg" tactics. It was an odd time in history when technology and our power to wage war against each other in new and improved ways led to innovation of old tactics in warfare, part of the reason why the death toll was so catastrophic at so many Civil War battles. This concept is shown in even greater magnitude during World War I with the advent of the water cooled machine gun, tank and heavy artillery.
Kristy you also mentioned racism. It seems that no matter who it is there is always some prejudice against some other group, whether it may be because of race, gender, sexual persuasion, economic situation, social class. We all have our demons in one way or another but it is our good nature to overcome those thoughts and feelings that make us strive to be better human beings. I am not perfect, I have battled all of these issues myself. But anyways....

Lincoln was in imperfect man just as any man of power(or any man save one) has been, whether you are talking about Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt or any list of men. I do consider myself a historian, I did actually get my degree in History. I know there is much more to every story than what you have been taught, it is up to you to read, research and discover what you have not been taught before. And yes there are historians out there that have their own personal agendas to push to help sell their book and they do try and stir up issues with controversial or cover up spins on what has been previously thought as the truth.
I like the show from PBS because it does try and tell the stories of people on both sides of the war. The historian Foote who is on camera so much is most definetely a Southerner and is very nostalgic but is also very critical of Southern blunders that he thought cost them the war.

 

[WyandotteTX]

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As a tried and true Texan, if we wanted to leave and be our own country (again!) NO ONE could stop us....

 

[KristyHall]

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well said. very well said.

 

[redhen]

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Ever read Thomas DiLorenzo's book, The Real Lincoln? I think you'd like it if you haven't read it. I was a fan of Lincoln until I heard one of DiLorenzo's podcasts, then the book made me such an enemy of Lincoln that it's a running joke amongst my friends.

have you thought about finding a middle ground instead of going from fan to hate?
I mean Lincoln was a human being and a politician, like all other polititions. He had good and bad, he made deals and had agendas. He was likely no better or worse than most other polititions. We don't have to either love or hate something. We don't have to be one side or the other, us or them, yes or no, north or south. There is far more than just that and there is far more than just two sides to a human being like Lincoln

Yep.

 

[woodmort]

Ok before this goes any further off deep end I have to put in some truths. Any current US historian that is worth his/her salt would never agree to most of what has been written above because it is, primarily, untrue. It is fairly well agreed that the plan and simple cause of the Civil War was slavery. There were those in the North that wanted it abolished and did not want it spread into the western states. On the other hand there were economic reasons why there were those in the South that did not want to have it prohibited, especially in the new states in the West. It made economic sense to those who owned slaves to extend this institution beyond the Mississippi--stop and think for a minute how much wealth could have been generated if slave owners could have use their slaves to mine gold and silver in Nevada and California. In fact, it can be argued very well that the Civil War actually started in Kansas in 1856 when pro and anti slavery adherents were trying to wipe each other out so the state could be admitted either as a slave or free state. Also it was this conflict or at least the two state constitutions, that caused a rift in the Democratic Party that allowed the upstart Republicans to get a president elected.

It is also a fallacy that the North was an economic power at the beginning of the Civil War, in fact, most of the wealth of the United States was concentrated in the South—the slaves alone were worth over $3.5 billion. Also because slaves could no long be imported, the value of these assets was increasing rather than dying out. The South’s biggest export, cotton, generated most of the revenue in New England mills and on Wall Street which were dependent on the South. Unfortunately, cotton required a lot of hands to produce and slaves provided this labor. Those that had an investment in this economic system just wanted to extend it. On the other hand, the South was hardly the “bread basket” of the North but the Northwest Territory states were by and large producing most of the food for the Northeast. Even when slavery had been allowed in the North, and it wasn’t outlawed north of the Mason Dixon Line until 1848, the institution was losing favor both socially and economically—not so in the South.

Now there were firebrands on both sides that whipped up frenzy for their point of view—slavery proponents in the South through, primarily, the Southern wing of the Democratic Party and abolitionists in the North through the Republican. It was only a matter of time before the slavery people convinced enough people in the right places that their freedoms were under attack and the election of Lincoln was the catalyst that brought this to a head. Whether Lincoln represented the threat that the Southerners were led to believe or not, made no difference, the people were convinced he did. They challenged him by seceding and he answered by using military action to stop it. The result was the Civil War.

But the cause was slavery. Despite the call of the Declaration of Independence for freedom and equality for all, the writers of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights recognized that there were certain people that were property—according to the Constitution this meant they were only worth three-fifths of a person. Also the Constitution prohibited slave importation after 1808 and required that runaway slaves be returned to owners. So slavery was recognized in the Constitution and was the ticking time bomb that went off when Fort Sumter was fired on. The Founding Fathers preferred to get the Constitution ratified and unite the country than to face the problem—it took some 625,000 deaths to finish that job most of whom had little interest in slavery or its abolition but thought they were fighting either to split or unite the continent. Like most wars the soldiers were shooting for no other reason than that they were being shot at. It is unfortunate that, at the time, the lives of the individual soldiers were not considered and the tactics were mass attacks—something that continued into WW I. Because the North had the advantage of big city populations and hordes of recent immigrants, they had more bodies to throw into the attacks and, eventually, won.

 

[Q9]

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It's called primary source documents, buddy. Take some time to look 'em up. Using common sense and a basic understanding of human nature is a big help. The abolition of slavery is NOT the reason the South left - remember LINCOLN supported an amendment to make slavery permanent. Let me repeat this, since NOBODY appears to be reading what I point out in my posts. LINCOLN supported an amendment to make slavery permanent. Please read the bolded sentence repeatedly until it sinks in. And please do not tell me that the tarriff was only a minor cause, and that the argument over slavery in the West was not about slavery per se, but about power. The ENTIRE argument over the West was almost purely for representation. I honestly prefer reading diaries and letters from the era to get most information, and I sure as heck take them more seriously than the ravings of James McPherson.

I, for one, don't give a rat's hindquarters what most historians agree on. Consensus means nothing to me - what matters to me is whether what they say is backed up by the facts.

IT'S NOT.

Woodmort, the stuff you're saying is almost verbatim what a recent TIME article claimed. The idea that the North was not a power at the time is ludicrous. For all practical purposes, the South's wealth was irrelevant - the North had overwhelming industry, while the South was primarily agrarian. Again, history and common sense are both very useful in determining this fact.

Then there's the ridiculous suggestion that the high cost of slaves means that it was increasingly economical. That means it was MORE expensive, and ergo less economical. It was a well-known fact even back then that free labor was generally more effecient - the reason that most plantation owners didn't emancipate their slaves was due to the fact that they had all their wealth tied up in it. Compensated emancipation would have eliminated this problem.

Please, if you haven't already, do yourself a favor and study economics in addition to history. They go together like Oreos and milk.

Kristy, I don't care about sounding moderate. Lincoln was a dictator, plain and simple, who caused 600,000 deaths just to prevent the South's independence. He was a war criminal, and a tyrant who went so far as to elimintate critical freedoms in the NORTH in order to keep his war machine running. I don't care about middle ground - if the middle ground is WRONG, then I will not take it! A tyrant is a tyrant is a tyrant. They're evil, and evil is to be despised.

 

[woodmort]

Nothing worse than an Unreconstructed Rebel--I have a few in the Southern branch of my family as well and there is no way to convince them of anything but what they are sure about.(Gob forbid that we bring up FDR.) That being said, David Von Drehle, who wrote the Time piece, is a decent writer and usually has his facts right so I leaned on him mainly because he agrees with what 50 some years of studying and reading about US history has shown me. I've no agenda to promote, nor do I care, but the one thing I've learned about history is that it is complicated--even for those that were there. You can chose to believe what you want but keep an open mind about it and realize you may be wrong--it helps to read things on both sides, even if you don't agree with them.

BTW, I really don't have a dog in this fight, while my mother's family goes back to 1720 and fought on both sides of the Revolutionary War, as far as I know no one fought in the Civil War. The closes thing we have is a will of one of the men in our line from the early 1800's whereby he frees his slave upon his death--that was in NYS.

 

[KristyHall]

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i just learned something