Battle of Appomattox: Understanding General Lee's Surrender

Discussion? What you referred to was a mislabeled post that was apparently altered to change its meaning. Maybe by the Deep State. Or Jim Robinson. You should recheck it.

Prove it didn’t happen.

I’ll leave that to you.

I’m sorry, your post is garbled. It’s unintelligible. It may have been mislabeled, apparently altered to change its meaning. Maybe by New York shipping interests. You should recheck it.

I am afraid this dialectic has degraded into a humorless amateur exchange that is boring. Good night.

Sweet dreams, mon chéri.

In reference to you having stated that the quote was erroneously attributed to Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens, during a part of the Cornerstone Speech, I submit the following, from wiki:

“The speech was given extemporaneously and thus transcripts of it were published based on notes, approved by Stephens,[12] written by reporters who were in attendance.[12] After the war, Stephens attempted to retroactively downplay the importance of slavery as the cause of Confederacy's secession. In a 1865 diary entry, he accused reporters of having misquoted him and that constitutional issues were more important.[13][14] He further expounded on this allegation in his 1868 book A Constitutional View of the Late War between the States.[13] According to one scholar, the "misquotations" alleged by Stephens after the war are so numerous as to be highly unlikely.[13]

There is a misconception that Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy's leader, was outraged by Stephens's admission that slavery was the reason behind the slave states' secession as the former was attempting to garner foreign support for the nascent regime from countries that were not very accepting of slavery. However, there is no evidence that this actually happened. Stephens, Davis and the latter's wife Varina did not discuss any such disagreement in their respective autobiographies, nor did Stephens's official biographers. The first mention of Davis's supposed reaction was in a 1959 biography of Davis by Hudson Strode, who appears to have presented his own conjecture as fact.[12]”

Also where do you come off referring to it as a “stump speech”? Are you implying that the Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens was running for something?

Do you mind if I pay you a compliment? I’m serious. No joke.

Doesn’t look like you wrote anything worth reading.

Yeah because you know I am right. Too bad yopu haven’t wrote anything meaningful on here since your first day.

So then when the Confederacy adopted conscription the year before the North passed their conscription act, was it because nobody wanted to fight for Southern independence?

The North and the South needed the their form of the conscription act for opposite reasons.

The war was popular in the South all the way up to the fall of Atlanta. The problem retaining troops was not the mission, rather for the South the problem with troop retention was just being in the Confederate Army because it was so arduous, feast or famine food, maybe decent uniforms maybe not, and strict disciplinarian generals that loved to fight but cared little about the day to day running of armies. The Southern Quartermaster corps was corrupt and "sutlers" were never allowed in to relieve shortages and provide a few things to make camp life bearable.

The problem for the North was the war was not really popular. The Union had all the supplies it needed and compared to the South camp life was a vacation. Sutlers, "Hookers" and supplies were plentiful. Discipline was lighter than the South. There were a few times the Union had supply problems but that was on purpose as a tactical move they chose to break of and go without supply lines, like the "Sherman's March". There are other examples of where Union Armies were cut off (Nashville and Mississippi Campaign) but those are the exceptions.

So the war was unpopular in the North and the mission unclear. First, the war was to "preserve the union". Then, after losing battle after battle, they switched to freeing the slaves which went over like a led balloon. Draft riots and conscription soon followed.

Don’t you have few statues to pull down?

The North and the South needed ~~the~~ their form of the conscription act for opposite reasons.

Fixed it.

The war was popular in the South all the way up to the fall of Atlanta.

Then why the need to enact conscription in 1862 and forcibly extend all enlistments for the duration of the war? Something Lincoln never dreamed of doing?

The problem retaining troops was not the mission, rather for the South the problem with troop retention was just being in the Confederate Army because it was so arduous, feast or famine food, maybe decent uniforms maybe not, and strict disciplinarian generals that loved to fight but cared little about the day to day running of armies.

So they were willing to fight but not willing to put up with hardships? Really? I imagine if faced with a Valley Forge the Confederate army would have deserted on day one, huh?

The problem for the North was the war was not really popular.

And yet the Union army remained overwhelmingly powerful throughout the war. The army could have faded away in the spring and summer of 1864 when the three year enlistments ran out. It didn't because the overwhelming majority of the troops reenlisted to see the war through to its successful conclusion.

Don’t you have few statues to pull down?

Not me. I think this jihad against statues of rebel leaders is incredibly stupid.

Only if foreign ships arrived with empty holes.

That seems to be the case when you compare the imports coming in, as indicated by tariffs collected, with the bales of cotton being exported. They arrived empty, loaded up, and went home.

Speaking of Confederate troops:

“I know that this country without slave labor would be wholly worthless, a barren waste and desolate plain— We can only live & exist by this species of labor; and hence I am willing to continue the fight to the last.”

Captain William Nugent, writing to his wife from headquarters, 28th Mississippi Cavalry, Tupelo Mississippi on September 7, 1863

I am with the South in life or death, in victory or defeat. I believe the North is about to wage a brutal and unholy war on a people who have done them no wrong, in violation of the Constitution and the fundamental principles of government. They no longer acknowledge that all government derives its validity from the consent of the governed. They are about to invade our peaceful homes, destroy our property, and murder our men and dishonor our women. We propose no invasion of the North, no attack on them, and only ask to be left alone.

Surrender means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the War; will be impressed by all the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit subjects for derision.

It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.

Gen. Patrick Cleburne - CSA

“It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all.”

So he’s saying slavery wasn’t all they fought for, but it was a part of it. Was that disrespectful too?

“I am not ashamed of having fought on the side of slavery – a soldier fights for his country – right or wrong – he is not responsible for the political merits of the course he fights in . . . The South was my country.”

“I notice that … [one Lost Cause apologist] says the charge that the South went to war for slavery is ‘a slanderous accusation.’ I always understood that we went to War on account of the thing we quarreled with the North about. I never heard of any other cause of quarrel than slavery.”

Colonel John Singleton Mosby, Colonel 43rd Virginia Cavalry, CSA

Now if you can explain to me how paid labor in India and Egypt could provide lower prices than slave labor, I would like to hear it, but it looks to me that without Lincoln stopping the trade, Cotton would have continued to be bought from the South in large quantities by the Europeans.

A similar topic is still discussed in our own day: whether peasant small cultivators of crops like cotton, coffee, tea, cocoa and rubber can compete with large plantations that pay poorly or not at all. There may be economies of scale that make the big operation cheaper per units produced. But living standards and costs in developing countries are low. An African, Asian or Latin American peasant family doesn't need to make big profits. They just need enough to stay alive and keep the farm going.

Rates of exchange matter a lot. If your currency isn't worth much on the international market, you might well be able to compete with large operations, even large slaveowner operations. Land and soil management is also a factor. A lot depends on whose operation degrades the soil and whose enriches it. American plantation owners could also count on having more land than the cultivated and moving to new plots when the old soil was exhausted. But all in all, whether Egyptians or Indians could outcompete the American slaveowners is not a simple question question to answer.

*

Cotton factors (also called cotton brokers or commission merchants) weren't all Northerners by any means. The idea that Yankees fanned out all over the South to buy up every last bole and bale and ship it away is a little silly. Most of the factors were Southern and had offices in Southern cities. Some of them bought and shipped cotton directly to Northern or European factories. But they also were looking to find the market where cotton would bring the most money.

New York City was the center of shipping, insurance, and finance. It was easier to finance and insure ships sailing from the place where the money was. There were other speculators in the city willing to buy the cotton in hopes of selling it for still more money. That was what they spent their lives doing, and it would have been foolish to expect them to buy high and sell low to satisfy the planters' ideas of economic justice. Ships that took cotton from New York city could count on bringing large quantities of European goods on the return trip. The New York metropolitan area had a large population and the city was connected to others by an extensive railroad network. No Southern city could compete with New York in terms of market size.

I believe Southerners had the option of using Canadian or West Indian ships for coastal shipping. My understanding is that these were exempt from the restrictions imposed on ships from the British Isles. But they don't appear to have used that option. They did ship directly to Britain and Europe. That they didn't ship more is as likely to be the result of New York City's commercial advantages than of any nefarious legislation. They could also have spun and woven their own cotton, but they chose not to do that on any large scale either.

Several chapters of a relevant book are available here: Fair to Middlin': The Antebellum Cotton Trade of the Apalachicola/Chattahoochee River Valley. Ships could leave the small port of Appalachicola directly to Europe or to Boston and Providence for the textile mills in the area. That so many went to New York was because of the economic advantages of doing so.

There's a shell game in which people enjoy the advantages of government policies that benefit them and cry "free market" about those that they believe don't benefit them. Don't be naïve and take such claims at face value.

“ Cotton factors (also called cotton brokers or commission merchants) weren’t all Northerners by any means.”

Absolutely true. Not all banks were in the North either. Lehman Brothers started in Montgomery Alabama!

“Capitalizing on cotton’s high market value, the three brothers began to routinely accept raw cotton from slave plantations as payment for merchandise, eventually beginning a second business trading in cotton. Within a few years this business grew to become the most significant part of their operation. Following Henry’s death from yellow fever in 1855,[18][21] the remaining brothers continued to focus on their commodities-trading/brokerage operations.“