Bump
Posted on 05/19/2015 10:33:26 PM PDT by iowamark
Even while the Civil War raged, slaves in Cuba could be heard singing, “Avanza, Lincoln, avanza! Tu eres nuestra esperanza!” (Onward, Lincoln, Onward! You are our hope!) – as if they knew, even before the soldiers fighting the war far to the North and long before most politicians understood, that the war in America would change their lives, and the world.
The secession crisis of 1860-1861 threatened to be a major setback to the world antislavery movement, and it imperiled the whole experiment in democracy. If slavery was allowed to exist, and if the world’s leading democracy could fall apart over the issue, what hope did freedom have? European powers wasted no time in taking advantage of the debacle. France and Britain immediately each sent fleets of warships with the official purpose of observing the imminent war in America. In Paris, A New York Times correspondent who went by the byline “Malakoff” thought that the French and British observers “may be intended as a sort of escort of honor for the funeral of the Great Republic.”
...the French forced Benito Juárez, the republican leader, to flee the capital and eventually installed the Austrian archduke Maximilian as emperor of Mexico.
European conservatives welcomed the dismemberment of the “once United States” and the bursting of the “republican bubble” that, beginning with the French Revolution, had inspired revolution and unrest in Europe. Republicanism had been in retreat in Europe since the failed revolutions of 1848, and some predicted that all the wayward American republics would eventually find their way back to some form of monarchy, or seek protection under European imperial rule. When Lincoln, in the darkest days of the war, referred to America as the “last best hope of earth,” he was hardly boasting...
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com ...
Are those not exemplary skills?
Nobody ever, to my knowledge, accused Grant of stunning brilliance.
But he hung in there and fought, and was apparently about the only Union general capable of being hit hard, regrouping, then launching a successful counterattack.
Imagine McClellan, Pope or Hooker in command at Shiloh.
Fascinating, as always.
The main “states rights” issue discussed in that document is SC objecting to northern states exercising their’s.
The same qualities could also be found in Ike, Omar Bradley, Chester Nimitz. Not much for show, publicity, ego, or headlines. Just get the job done, as quickly as possible then move on. JMO
In the aftermath of the war fearing takeover the Canadian colonies united in 1867 marking the birth of Canada.
If the South had been successful, Germany wins WWI and no Hitler no holocaust and no Israel, no A bomb, no cold war, no ISIS, no Al Qada and most importantly no Obama.....
I guess it was worth the freedom of 3 million slaves, millions of whose descendants have been casually aborted in America since Roe V Wade and thousands locked away in the awful inner city slums of our nations decaying megatropoli, Chicago,Detroit, Baltimore, Washington,DC.
No, the war was not about Slavery it was about savagery and taking the heart and gold out of the South.
I heard a talk recently about the Confederate constitution by a retired history professor (not a Confederate sympathizer). He pointed out that the constitution was written very hastily by men from the Deep South (where slavery was more important than in the Upper South, whose states did not secede until after Fort Sumter), also that it created a system where the central government had more powers than under the US Constitution (in other words, it was weaker on states' rights). Because of its Deep South origins it was less democratic than if the Upper South politicians had had a hand in it.
Not in the South it wasn't.
You have absolutely no way of knowing that.
Well, that’s certainly one way of looking at it.
How about two permanently antagonistic countries on this continent, certainly engaged in an arms race and possibly in repeated wars.
WWI and WWII fought here, for instance, as well as in Europe.
Huge improvement over what actually happened.
What your analysis does is simply assume that none of the bad things of the past 100 years would have happened had the South won, while ignoring the certainty that other bad things would have happened.
This is hyperbole, one really large country dividing into two big countries is hardly falling apart.
The Union Army was the largest Army in the world followed in size by the Confederate States Army.
The CSA Army could have destroyed any European Army at the time.
Right now I would not be under the boot of Fedzilla had the South won. Fact. It would be YOUR problem “up there”.
At the Founding it was (almost) universally acknowledged that slavery was a bad thing and should be gotten rid of. Since it wasn’t very profitable in most of the country, people generally assumed it would die out by itself.
Over the course of the 19th century slavery became very profitable indeed, and not surprisingly people’s ideas about it began to change. By 1860 it was almost universally believed in the South (by white people) that slavery was a positive good and should be expanded indefinitely in time and space.
There are lots of triumphalist books and speeches in Congress and of course the infamous Cornerstone Speech to demonstrate this.
You simply cannot know that something worse might not have resulted. Such as conquest of both nations by a Europe united under Germany, for instance.
For all you know your Fedzilla would be just as bad but coming from Richmond.
Who said this?
I would rather leave the Union with the Constitution than remain in the Union without it.
I guess you don't know Southerners. Without them the North would be fully communist by now. This is not disputable.
There are a couple of hundred other countries.
Nobody is forcing you to remain here.
Yep. Exactly right.
As far as I am concerned, any man who believes that he has a right to keep other men and women in a condition of hereditary slavery has forfeited his own inheritance, and is not entitled to the blessings of freedom for himself. It's that simple.
I have a question if a state or states left the union again would you take up arms against them?
Bump
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