Posted on 07/06/2013 7:37:16 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
A Conversation with Thomas Fleming, historian and author of A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War.
Thomas Fleming is known for his provocative, politically incorrect, and very accessible histories that challenge many of the clichés of current American history books. Fleming is a revisionist in the best conservative sense of the word. His challenges to accepted wisdom are not with an agenda, but with a relentless hunger for the truth and a passion to present the past as it really was, along with capturing the attitudes and culture of the times.
In The New Dealers’ War Fleming exposed how the radical Left in FDR’s administration almost crippled the war effort with their utopian socialist experimentation, and how Harry Truman led reform efforts in the Senate that kept production in key materials from collapse.
In The Illusion of Victory, Fleming showed that while liberal academics may rate Woodrow Wilson highly, that he may have been the most spectacularly failed President in history. 100,000 American lives were sacrificed to favor one colonial monarchy over another, all so Wilson could have a seat at the peace table and negotiate The League of Nations. Instead, the result of WWI was Nazism and Communism killing millions for the rest of the century.....
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
Fleming is a revisionist in the best conservative sense of the word.
His challenges to accepted wisdom are not with an agenda, but with a relentless hunger for the truth and a passion to present the past as it really was, along with capturing the attitudes and culture of the times."
What a crock of BS!!
Whatever else he may or may not be, the author is a propagandist for the Confederacy, presenting it in the best possible light while mostly ignoring the other side.
In fact, from Day One of the Republic, the Slave Power was assertive, aggressive, demanding, expansionist, violent and uncompromising on its own basic principles.
There was to be no suggestion -- zero, zip, nada -- of abolishing slavery in the South, and every political negotiation involved questions of where slavery could, or could not, expand to.
The Slave-Power's high-water mark came the 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision, making that question all but answered: slavery was technically legalized everywhere in the United States.
And that is the point when slavery first became intolerable for most Northerners, even at the price of dis-Union.
This is the guy who appears on the History Channel, who has written novels, books on the Revolution, and revisionist studies of Wilson and Roosevelt. It's not the Chronicles guy. They're both kind of cranky, but this guy is sort of the loveable old Irish crank down the street, not the bearded ideological wild man the other one is.
His "new interpretation" goes back to what people were saying a century ago. It was the fault of the abolitionists who upset the political balance. He strongly implies that they were upset at New England's loss of power within the country and were using slavery to get their own back. That was probably what Fleming's teachers learned when they were in college and what they taught him in school.
It's not really a "new interpretation" and it doesn't really engage with what historians have been talking about in recent years. He doesn't take slavery all that seriously, in comparison with more recent writers.
The other half of his argument -- that fear of race war or racial uprising -- was behind Southern thinking and feeling at the time, chimes in all too well with contemporary debate on the causes of the war. I'm not sure how far you want to go down that road though. Fleming does come up with some interesting period details, though.
From a labor productivity standpoint, they were not as valuable as free labor... but. Unlike free labor, they had very high market value -- could be bought, sold or used as collateral and they reproduced at a high rate. You couldn't sell the children of free labor, but you could sell slave children.
So you're in agreement with the author, then.
As with most wars, there were many causes. “Abolitionism” was one of them. The “Tariff of Abominations” was another.
But, underlying all that is a basic disconnect between these two groups. It was this group of Northern, Republican, Industrial, elitists versus the Southern, Democrat, Agrarian, populists. That was the beginning of the shift from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy.
The populists lost and the geography shifted/expanded and conflicts came back with the rise of the great prairie populist democrat Williams Jennings Brian who not only exemplified his economic populism but also later his cultural populism when he prosecuted the Scopes monkey trial.
And eventually, after the Wall street crash and depression, the populists won with Roosevelt and his New Deal.
Not long after that the elitists split with the cultural elitists taking over the dem party while the economic populists stayed in the GOP. Then, using Nixons southern strategy, the GOP brought the cultural populists out of the dem party into the GOP.
Today, those two coalitions of (1)economic elitists & cultural populists in the GOP and (2) cultural elitists and economic populists in the dem party are both wearing thin.
Populists waves come with the changes.
So in the 19th/20th century these changes accompanied the integrating of the national economy and shifting from agrarian to industrial plus advances in communication and transportation.
In the 20th/21st century the changes come with integrating the world economy and shifting from industrial to information technology plus advances in communication and transportation systems.
IIRC, in 1861, he was just one of 5 full generals with Johnston being the most senior.
The "Tariff of Abominations" was 30 years before the Civil War, and even then, the only state that considered it abdominal was South Carolina. The rest of the South was not all that upset about it and certainly not upset enough to consider nullification or disunion as South Carolina did.
Slave Power greed caused the Civil War. Union politicians were willing to give up a great deal on slavery to avoid war, including the Corwin amendment. However, the Slave Power wanted to grab all the territory to the west, settling it with slave owners and their slaves. Breaking up the union and going on a land grab was what caused the Civil War.
This particular great-great-grandpa was buried, along with his wife and children
in the church cemetery that remained after...
“..The church used to stand right here (pointing)
but some of them yankee boys came down here from Indiana and from Pennsylvania
and tore down the church building to use the logs to build a big fence
right over there (pointing again) on the edge of that big gully.”
Great-great-grandpa saw the identification on some of their dead
before he helped to bury them in unmarked graves.
This happened at a minor battle that took place in Griswoldville,
about 10 miles east of Macon, Georgia.
I visit the cemetery a couple of times a year.
I don’t think the cause of the Civil War was any one single event or theme.
Animosity was brewing between two factions and areas of the country since 1820, and festered for over 40 years before hostilities broke out.
What has become evident to me, is that the North did not have to fight a war, causing 600,000 deaths and the ruination of the South for a century thereafter, solely because of an attack on one fort.
What would have been so bad about having two seperate countries in 1861? After mechanization displaced slavery in another 15 or 20 years, the country could have reunited without all the bloodshed.
The war happened because of absolutes, with each side thinking God was on their side. Each had their orators, who eloquently spoke and fanned the flames of passion.It became a war of attrition, which the North was destined to win because of its resources.
What cannot be denied is the courage of those who fought and suffered for four whole years, on both sides. And the fact that they forgave each other and demonstrated to the country how to close old wounds by the fiftieth anniversary of Gettysburg in 1913.
They were a remarkable generation—both because of the passions of their beliefs and their capacity to endure and forgive.
We can only speculate, as their times are not our times.
But we face a similar division in our land, due to conflicting beliefs and views. What will future Americans say of us?
Owners also got three fifths of a vote for every slave. It was a despicable system.
“the bearded ideological wild man the other one is”
Yep, that was the one I was cautioning about. He is a self-identified paleo Conservative (ie. he thinks that Monarchy is an acceptable form of government. [barf])
I have my own take on the slavery issue. We were once a nation divide, with slave states and free states. We fought a bloody war to resolve (sort of) that. That slavery was race based. Today we are again a nation divided, with slave states and free states. But this time the slavery I speak of is “Universal” slavery to the State. Universal Slavery to the State is a return to the condition that the American Revolution sprang from. Will it require a war to resolve that? This is not sarcasm, it is a real divide. Lets pray that it can be resolved without a blood bath.
“Oh, the stories she was told”
I must agree. The desolation left by Sherman and the abuses of Reconstruction were intolerable enough that great masses went GTT (Gone to Texas). They voted with their feet and moved 1/2 way across the nation to get away.
Those oral histories are very very common here. Only the complete take over of the Dem Party in the 1960’s broke the Southern Voting block. The Deep South, Texas and much of the West is Republican. (I have always been republican, never registered as Dem) The Dem Party has morphed into the ComDem Party.
Slavrocracy (southron slavers) = liberals
No.
Very few Northerners cared about slavery one way or the other in the South.
Abolitionists in those days were a fringe group equivalent to today's, oh, say, Libertarians -- meaning important, but a small minority.
Indeed, nearly all Northerners cared more about Union than about slavery, and that is why before 1856, they all voted for pro-slavery parties -- the Democrats and Whigs.
All Northerners were content to let slavery rule in the South, if that was the price of Union.
But what Northerners certainly did care about was slavery in the North and western territories: they didn't want it -- no way, no how, under no guise.
But the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision effectively meant slavery was legalized everywhere, and at that point, the North fully switched from pro-slavery Democrats & Whigs to anti-slavery Republicans.
Of course, neither Lincoln nor most other Republicans wanted to abolish slavery in the South, they just wanted to be d*mn certain it stayed there.
Sorry, but you'll never understand the Civil War if you begin by thinking of the Slave Power as a "victim".
From the beginning, slave-holders were aggressors on the American body politic.
In order for Slavery not to be prohibited by the constitution the slaves must not be Human. Slavery was always prohibited by our founding document.
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