Victor Davis Hanson Ping!
Posted on 05/21/2004 8:38:10 AM PDT by Mr. Silverback
General William Tecumseh Sherman--a quirky, difficult, and much misunderstood man--deserves a place on the roll call of great liberators in human history. More than any other person, he destroyed the institution of American slavery and the Southern aristocracy that was interwoven with it. In the late fall of 1864 he marched an army of over 60,000 rural, voting Americans--mostly farmers from the Midwest--into the heart of the Confederacy, a patrician society based on bound labor. Sherman’s agrarian citizen-soldiers upended that world of slaves and masters, instantly liberated tens of thousands, and helped therein to destroy forever the idea of privileged nobility in America. In a 300-mile march covering less than 40 days these armed men changed the entire psychological and material course of our national history.
Make no mistake about it--Sherman waged total war. After taking and burning the city of Atlanta, he set off across the heart of Georgia on his way to the Atlantic coast. Moving without an unwieldy supply chain, his men lived off the land. Earlier Northern battlefield successes had neither destroyed Southern morale nor dented the Confederacy’s ability to field new armies. Union forces had gotten to within a few miles of the Confederate capital in Richmond yet the South had not sued for peace and did not, in fact, feel it was beaten.
(Excerpt) Read more at victorhanson.com ...
Reminiscent of Band of Brothers, not that any of the enlisted men were calling Major Winters "Dick," but that same air of familiarity. I just got done reading Red Storm Rising again and it's there in the relations between Lieutenant Edwards and his Marines by the time you get to the chapter after they stop the Soviet troops from raping the farmgirl. Edwards just starts referring to the sergeant as "Jim" when they barely got along previously.
For example, there may have been only 10,000 or so really large slaveholders in the South. About 75 percent of the South’s white population had never had any connection with African chattels at all. Only 385,000 out of some 6 million citizens who lived in the Confederacy or border areas sympathetic to the South were themselves currently slave owners.
Something every American schoolchild should know.
In the process, these soldiers did more than any abolitionist or liberator ever born in our country to guarantee the American proposition that each man is as good as another.
Bears repeating.
Ping!
Victor Davis Hanson Ping!
Victor Davis Hanson Ping!
Actually, in some respects it was a Northeastern aristocracy with status gained at birth that defeated a Southern one.
vdh BUMP!
But ... But ... the folks at ANSWER say that war never solved anything! Can't we all just get along?
Ping, suh.
}:-)4
About how I feel about our current crop of corporate globalists.
Many of the Founding Fathers were "aristocrats" too, but they cared about the plight of the common man. If Northern aristocrats ended slavery, bully for the Northern aristocrats.
An absolutly brilliant article!!
How do you define "fair"?
Many of the Founding Fathers were "aristocrats" too, but they cared about the plight of the common man. If Northern aristocrats ended slavery, bully for the Northern aristocrats.
There are all kinds of indenture, some are simple, some are not. There is a long history of aristocrats who don't abide competition, believing themselves destined to "lead." The lash can just as easily be outrageous fines from an imperious bureaucrat tyrannically implementing rules designed to favor that aristocracy.
I could go into a long spiel here about how the early yers of the Industrial Revolution were marked by gross managerial efficiency and wages only became truly unfair post-war when blah, blah, blah, but instead I'll cut to the chase: Is there any wage that isn't fair in comparison to slavery? I don't think there is.
The lash can just as easily be outrageous fines from an imperious bureaucrat tyrannically implementing rules designed to favor that aristocracy.
I still don't see where moral equivalency can be drawn between management practices in the North and owning an African. Let's also remember that the Illinois farmboy was not ruled by the Industrialist, but everyone in Southern society was to some extent ruled by the wealthy plantation owners. Note also that the oppressed New England shoemaker could move West and become a homesteader, while the African could temporarily escape his bondage and end up hobbled for his trouble.
One thing he left out (possibly because he mentioned it in one of his An Autumn of War essays) is Sherman's use of the words "bottled piety" to describe the outrage some abolitionists expressed at his tactics. He was disgusted that these people railed against slavery for decades in the worst terms they could think of (and all of them justified) and then blasted him for doing the one thing that would end it.
If you take today's war protestors and remove the hard-core Communist/Anarchist types, what you have left is a lot of people operating on a hateful (mostly Bush-hatred) version of that same "bottled piety." They claim to want all sorts of justice, but they will not do what it takes to secure it, and that includes criticism of many methods that stop short of war.
I didn't say that there was. Although the assumptions and practices of slavery are despicable, that doesn't exculpate the sponsors of those Northern soldiers, however noble their motives might indivudually be, for political mendacity or the all too human predeliction to take advantage of the concentration of power in the Federal government that resulted from the Civil War. In other words, slavery is bad, but so is fascism.
Without slavery, Jefferson might have ended up a Jeffersonian small farmer.
"They deemed themselves great raiders and marauders, who harassed fixed garrisons and terrorized timid populations."
So does that mean that by today's standards we would deem the confederacy terrorist?
The Case of Victor Davis Hanson: Farmer, Scholar, Warmonger
Address:http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1138659/posts
Yes, but if the Southern apologists discover this thread, VDH better duck :)
Eerie shades of the Iraqi prison scandal, no? The reason Sherman was he most hated of all Northerners was his humiliation of the aristocracy. I'm not so sure that deep humiliation of Baathists and Al Quaeda is such a bad idea--especially when the photos of it are available for all to see.
The dog leash photo strikes me a Shermaneqsue in that sense. Mounds of naked Baathists does too. By 1864, the North was sick and tired of the deaths imposed by the Southern Aristocracy in trying to save their 'way of life.' Sherman's humiliation of the aristocrats was accepted and embraced. He made the South howl and the North applauded.
How long before our multicultural nice-guy pretensions are sufficiently eroded that we are willing to do what needs to be done to win the WOT? When Islam finally howls its humiliation to the sky, I will lead the applause.
As always, Wow!
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