Posted on 07/18/2004 8:40:59 PM PDT by canalabamian
Not only was William Tecumseh Sherman guilty of many of the crimes that some apologists portray as "tall tales," but also his specter seems to haunt the scandal-ridden halls of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Sherman had a relatively poor record battling armies. His lack of preparation nearly destroyed Union forces at Shiloh. He was repulsed at Chickasaw Bluffs, losing an early opportunity to capture Vicksburg, Miss. The result was a bloody campaign that dragged on for months. He was blocked by Gen. Pat Cleburne at the Battle of Chattanooga and needed to be bailed out by Gen. George Thomas' Army of the Cumberland. His troops were crushed by rebel forces in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain.
But Sherman knew how to make war against civilians. After the capture of Atlanta, he engaged in policies similar to ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia by expelling citizens from their homes. "You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm as against these terrible hardships of war," he told the fleeing population. Today, Slobodan Milosevic is on trial for similar actions in Kosovo.
An article on Sherman in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last spring asserted that Sherman attacked acceptable military targets "by the standards of war at the time." This seems to assume that human rights were invented with the creation of the United Nations. But Gen. Grant did not burn Virginia to the ground. Gen. Lee did not burn Maryland or Pennsylvania when he invaded. Both sought to destroy each other's armies instead of making war against women and children, as Sherman did.
After promising to "make Georgia . . . howl," Sherman continued such policies in the Carolinas. Not only did he preside over the burning of Columbia, but he also executed several prisoners of war in retaliation for the ambush of one of his notorious foraging parties. While Andersonville's camp commander, Henry Wirz, was found guilty of conspiracy to impair the health and destroy the life of prisoners and executed, nothing like that happened to Sherman.
According to an article by Maj. William W. Bennett, Special Forces, U.S. Army, Sherman turned his attention to a new soft target after the Civil War: Native Americans. Rather than engage Indian fighters, Sherman again preferred a strategy of killing noncombatants. After an ambush of a military detachment by Red Cloud's tribe, Sherman said, "We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children."
Bennett notes that Sherman carried out his campaign with brutal efficiency. On the banks of the Washita River, Gen. George Armstrong Custer massacred a village of the friendly Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle, who had located to a reservation. Sherman was quoted as saying, "The more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians, the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or maintained as a species of paupers. Their attempts at civilization are simply ridiculous."
Such slaughter was backed by the extermination of the buffalo as a means of depriving the men, women and children with a source of food. Many Native Americans not killed by Sherman's troopers were forced onto reservations or exiled to Florida to face swamps and disease.
Now we have learned about the abuse of prisoners in Iraq. Such events may seem unrelated, were it not for reports that Sherman's policies are still taught to West Point cadets as an example of how to break an enemy's will to fight.
Are we therefore shocked by the acts of barbarity against Iraqi detainees? As long as we honor Sherman, teach his tactics and revise history to excuse his actions, we can expect more examples of torture and savagery against noncombatants we encounter in other countries.
John Tures is an assistant professor of political science at LaGrange College who was born in Wisconsin, opposes the 1956 Georgia flag and still has a low opinion of Sherman.
evidently only FOOLS,LIBs,PC-idiots & other similar creatures are acceptable to him/her/it.
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
thanks.
(asbestos suit ON)
I have a pet hypothesis, based on close observation of the Southern Male Animal in the present day, for why the Seccessionists got stomped:
The Southern forces were habitually (or prone to be) a little late to the battlefield.
NOR will he/she/it admit that sherman, the WAR CRIMINAL,was PERSONALLY responsible for the rapes,tortures,robberies,looting,etc,etc,etc committed against INNOCENT,UNARMED civilians by the HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS.
free dixie,sw
you'll NEED your flameproof suit here!
rotflmRao!
free dixie,sw
If true, only because they were looking for food to replace the crops burned by Sherman [*SPIT*], or were worried as to the condition of their wives, children and homes. And maybe all those Yankkes were in a hurry so that those first on the scene could parktake of whatever jewels, silverware and other treasures they could steal from defenseless women and children.
PS. We were defending our right to 'Keep and Bear arms', and 'it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.'
You were interested enough to engage in criticising the people of the South and accusing the people of the period of "crimes against humanity" based upon your understanding of the era.
That led you to claim that Union army atrocities against the population of the South was, in your mind, justified.
Your inaccuracies in knowledge lead you to be incorrectly critical, and living with seething bias that is unnecessary.
With that in mind, I offer this as a good will lesson that narrowmindness followed by contempt, and finally with irritation are inappropriate attempts to preserve your perceptions. Open your mind, and grow.
Here again is an interesting passage for your reading pleasure:
"African slavery is so much the outstanding feature of the South, in the unthinking view of it, that people often forget there had been slaves in all the old colonies.
Slaves were auctioned openly in the Market House of Philadelphia; in the shadow of Congregational churches in Rhode Island; in Boston taverns and warehouses; and weekly, sometimes daily, in Merchant's Coffee House of New York.
Such Northern heroes of the American Revolution as John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin bought, sold, and owned black people. The family of Abraham Lincoln himself, when it lived in Pennsylvania in colonial times, owned slaves.[1]
When the minutemen marched off to face the redcoats at Lexington in 1775, the wives, boys and old men they left behind in Framingham took up axes, clubs, and pitchforks and barred themselves in their homes because of a widespread, and widely credited, rumor that the local slaves planned to rise up and massacre the white inhabitants while the militia was away.[2]
African bondage in the colonies north of the Mason-Dixon Line has left a legacy in the economics of modern America and in the racial attitudes of the U.S. working class. Yet comparatively little is written about the 200-year history of Northern slavery.
Robert Steinfeld's deservedly praised "The Invention of Free Labor" (1991) states, "By 1804 slavery had been abolished throughout New England," ignoring the 1800 census, which shows 1,488 slaves in New England.
Recent archaeological discoveries of slave quarters or cemeteries in Philadelphia and New York City sometimes are written up in newspaper headlines as though they were exhibits of evidence in a case not yet settled (cf. “African Burial Ground Proves Northern Slavery,” The City Sun, Feb. 24, 1993).
(The Author of this passage) "had written one book on Pennsylvania history and was starting a second before I learned that William Penn had been a slaveowner. The historian Joanne Pope Melish, who has written a perceptive book on race relations in ante-bellum New England, recalls how it was possible to read American history textbooks at the high school level and never know that there was such a thing as a slave north of the Mason-Dixon Line:
"In Connecticut in the 1950s, when I was growing up, the only slavery discussed in my history textbook was southern; New Englanders had marched south to end slavery. It was in Rhode Island, where I lived after 1964, that I first stumbled across an obscure reference to local slavery, but almost no one I asked knew anything about it. Members of the historical society did, but they assured me that slavery in Rhode Island had been brief and benign, involving only the best families, who behaved with genteel kindness. They pointed me in the direction of several antiquarian histories, which said about the same thing. Some of the people of color I met knew more."[3]
Slavery in the North never approached the numbers of the South. It was, numerically, a drop in the bucket compared to the South. But the South, comparatively, was itself a drop in the bucket of New World slavery. Roughly a million slaves were brought from Africa to the New World by the Spanish and Portuguese before the first handful reached Virginia. Some 500,000 slaves were brought to the United States (or the colonies it was built from) in the history of the slave trade, which is a mere fraction of the estimated 10 million Africans forced to the Americas during that period.
Every New World colony was, in some sense, a slave colony. French Canada, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Cuba, Brazil -- all of them made their start in an economic system built upon slavery based on race.
In all of them, slavery enjoyed the service of the law and the sanction of religion. In all of them the master class had its moments of doubt, and the slaves plotted to escape or rebel.
Over time, slavery flourished in the Upper South and failed to do so in the North. But there were pockets of the North on the eve of the Revolution where slaves played key roles in the economic and social order: New York City and northern New Jersey, rural Pennsylvania, and the shipping towns of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Black populations in some places were much higher than they would be during the 19th century.
More than 3,000 blacks lived in Rhode Island in 1748, amounting to 9.1 percent of the population; 4,600 blacks were in New Jersey in 1745, 7.5 percent of the population; and nearly 20,000 blacks lived in New York in 1771, 12.2 percent of the population.[4]
The North failed to develop large-scale agrarian slavery, such as later arose in the Deep South, but that had little to do with morality and much to do with climate and economy.
The elements which characterized Southern slavery in the 19th century, and which New England abolitionists claimed to view with abhorrence, all were present from an early date in the North. Practices such as the breeding of slaves like animals for market, or the crime of slave mothers killing their infants, testify that slavery's brutalizing force was at work in New England. Philadelphia brickmaker John Coats was just one of the Northern masters who kept his slave workers in iron collars with hackles.
Newspaper advertisements in the North offer abundant evidence of slave families broken up by sales or inheritance. One Boston ad of 1732, for example, lists a 19-year-old woman and her 6-month-old infant, to be sold either "together or apart."[5]
Advertisements for runaways in New York and Philadelphia newspapers sometimes mention suspicions that they had gone off to try to find wives who had been sold to distant purchasers.
Generally, however, as the numbers of slaves were fewer in the North than in the South, the controls and tactics were less severe. The Puritan influence in Massachusetts lent a particular character to slavery there and sometimes eased its severity.
On the other hand, the paternal interest that 19th century Southern owners attempted to cultivate for their slaves was absent in the North, for the most part, and the colonies there had to resort to laws to prevent masters from simply turning their slaves out in the streets when the slaves grew old or infirm. And across the North an evident pattern emerges: the more slaves lived in a place, the wider the controls, and the more brutal the punishments for transgressions.
Slavery was still very much alive, and in some places even expanding, in the northern colonies of British North America in the generation before the American Revolution. The spirit of liberty in 1776 and the rhetoric of rebellion against tyranny made many Americans conscious of the hypocrisy of claiming natural human rights for themselves, while at the same time denying them to Africans. Nonetheless, most of the newly free states managed to postpone dealing with the issue of slavery, citing the emergency of the war with Britain.
That war, however, proved to be the real liberator of the northern slaves. Wherever it marched, the British army gave freedom to any slave who escaped within its lines. This was sound military policy: it disrupted the economic system that was sustaining the Revolution. Since the North saw much longer, and more extensive, incursions by British troops, its slave population drained away at a higher rate than the South's.
At the same time, the governments in northern American states began to offer financial incentives to slaveowners who freed their black men, if the emancipated slaves then served in the state regiments fighting the British.
When the Northern states gave up the last remnants of legal slavery, in the generation after the Revolution, their motives were a mix of piety, morality, and ethics; fear of a growing black population; practical economics; and the fact that the Revolutionary War had broken the Northern slaveowners' power and drained off much of the slave population.
An exception was New Jersey, where the slave population actually increased during the war. Slavery lingered there until the Civil War, with the state reporting 236 slaves in 1850 and 18 as late as 1860.
The business of emancipation in the North amounted to the simple matters of, 1. determining how to compensate slaveowners for the few slaves they had left, and, 2. making sure newly freed slaves would be marginalized economically and politically in their home communities, and that nothing in the state's constitution would encourage fugitive slaves from elsewhere to settle there.
But in the generally conservative, local process of emancipating a small number of Northern slaves, the Northern leadership turned its back on slavery as a national problem.
State Mass. N.H. N.Y. Conn. R.I. Pa. N.J. Vt.
European settlement 1620 1623 1624 1633 1636 1638 1620 1666
First record of slavery 1629? 1645 1626 1639 1652 1639 1626? c.1760?
Official end of slavery 1783 1783 1799 1784 1784 1780 1804 1777
Actual end of slavery 1783 c.1845? 1827 1848 1842 c.1845? 1865 1777?
Percent black 1790 1.4% 0.6% 7.6% 2.3% 6.3% 2.4% 7.7% 0.3%
Percent black 1860 0.78% 0.15% 1.26% 1.87% 2.26% 1.95% 3.76% 0.22%
1. "RUN away on the 13th of September last from Abraham Lincoln of Springfield in the County of Chester, a Negro Man named Jack, about 30 Years of Age, low Stature, speaks little or no English, has a Scar by the Corner of one Eye, in the Form of a V, his Teeth notched, and the Top of one of his Fore Teeth broke; He had on when he went away an old Hat, a grey Jacket partly like a Sailor's Jacket. Whoever secures the said Negro and brings him to his Master, or to Mordecai Lincoln ... shall have Twenty Shillings Reward and reasonable Charges" [Pennsylvania Gazette, Oct. 15, 1730]. Mordecai Lincoln (1686-1736) was great-great-grandfather of President Lincoln.
2. Josiah H. Temple, History of Framingham, Massachusetts, Framingham, 1887, p.275.
3. Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and 'Race' in New England 1780-1860, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998, preface, page xiii.
4. Stanley L. Engerman, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, "Slavery,” in Susan B. Carter, Scott S. Gartner, Michael Haines, Alan Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, eds., Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2004.
5. "Boston News Letter," May 1, 1732.
'[A]nd, on calling on Mr. Lincoln, the following conversation in substance took place, as I learned from Mr. Lincoln himself. ... On the following Sunday night I was with Mr. Lincoln, and the greater part of the time alone, when Mr. Lincoln related the above facts to me.'
John Minor Botts, The Great Rebellion: Its Secret History, Rise, Progress, and Disastrous Failure, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1866, p. 195
'Mr. Lincoln informed Mr. Botts that he [Lincoln] had made this proposition to Colonel Baldwin.'
Ibid, testimony of John F. Lewis, footnote, p. 198
When asked, as President of the United States, "why not let the South go?" his simple, direct, and honest answer revealed one secret of the wise policy of the Washington Cabinet. "Let the South go!" said he, "where, then, shall we get our revenue?"
Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor; Or, Was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous To The War of 1861?, Baltimore: Innes & Company, 1866, pp. 143-144.
No wonder that Mr. Lincoln when asked, "why not let the South go?" replied, "Let the South go! where then shall we get our revenue?" [emphasis in original]
Admiral Raphael Semmes,Memoirs of Service Afloat, During the War Between the States, Baltimore: Kelly, Piet and Co., 1869, p. 59.
Related accounts of a DIFFERENT meeting:
Another effort was made to move Abraham Lincoln to peace. On the 22nd, a deputation of six members from each of the five Christian Associations of Young Men in Baltimore, headed by Dr. Fuller, and eloquent clergyman of the Baptist church, went to Washington and had an interview with the President. He received them with a sort of rude formality. Dr. Fuller said, that Maryland had first moved in adopting the constitution, and yet the first blood in this war was shed on her soil; he then interceded for a peaceful separation, entreated that no more troops should pass through Baltimore, impressed upun Mr. Lincoln the terrible responsibility resting on him - that on him depended peace or war - a fratricidal conflict or a happy settlement.
"But," said Lincoln, "what am I to do?"
"Let the country know that you are disposed to recognize the Southern Confederacy," answered Dr. Fuller, "and peace will instantly take the place of anxiety and suspense and war may be averted."
"And what is to become of the revenue?" rejoined Lincoln, "I shall have no government, no resources!" [italics in original]
Robert Reid Howison, "History of the War", excerpted in Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. 34, Issue 8, August 1862, Richmond, VA., pp. 420-421.
"But," said Mr. Lincoln, "what am I to do?"This meeting was also written up in the Baltimore Sun 23 Apr 1861 edition.
"Why, sir, let the country know that you are disposed to recognize the independance of the Southern States. I say nothing of secession; recognize the fact that they have formed a government of their own; that they will never be united again with the North, and and peace will instantly take the place of anxiety and suspense, and war may be averted."
"And what is to become of the revenue?" was the reply. "I shall have no government - no revenues."
Evert A. Duyckinck, National History of the War for the Union, Civil, Military and Naval. Founded on Official and Other Authentic Documents, New York: Johnson Fry & Co., 1861, Vol I, p. 173.
I am (how you say?) newww-trall!
Da streets!
Oh wait, he has one a' dem (whatchamacallits?) classical educations?(!)
I stand correcahmatid den!
"If it not too much trouble, the source for your claim that Johnson was really a New Yorker"
I will be glad to furnish you with even more than you requested. Enjoy the reading.
http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:HwsZNYyb8JEJ:www.newsday.com/extras/lihistory/specfam/famwand.htm+wanderer+%22slave+ship%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://members.aol.com/eleanorcol/LamarBios2.html#Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:1EPkXkK8fxYJ:www.petersnn.org/petersnn/glynncoweb7/ethnic_research.htm+wanderer+%22slave+ship%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:2mCEKiN114gJ:www.crownrights.com/books/south_not_responsible.htm+wanderer+%22slave+ship%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:wMUAdPy5O6MJ:www.slavenorth.com/profits.htm+wanderer+%22slave+ship%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:xze7kltW5GIJ:www.geocities.com/Heartland/Pines/3093/pages2.html+wanderer+%22slave+ship%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:74HJ9LxV52oJ:www.petersnn.org/petersnn/glynncoweb7/african_american.htm+wanderer+%22slave+ship%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:TI0BrXzriqQJ:www.museum-ordure.org.uk/Collection/Detail/%3Fserial%3DUKMOCAT0000011A+wanderer+%22slave+ship%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:m6e6CiTxNO4J:amistad.mysticseaport.org/discovery/themes/lane.navy.html+wanderer+%22slave+ship%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:UdvRQLlvH6gJ:www.savannahmagazine.com/archive/stpats04.shtml+wanderer+%22slave+ship%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:xze7kltW5GIJ:www.geocities.com/Heartland/Pines/3093/pages2.html+wanderer+%22new+york+yacht+club%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:e3sQM3kstswJ:www.rootsweb.com/~mowarren/schake/part1a.html+wanderer+%22new+york+yacht+club%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:dgcvvgfO18gJ:www.tenpound.com/137/101.html+slave+ship+%22new+york+yacht+club%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:dgcvvgfO18gJ:www.tenpound.com/137/101.html+slave+ship+%22new+york+yacht+club%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:EjiYA4UoLRkJ:www.history.navy.mil/danfs/w2/wanderer-i.htm+wanderer+johnson+%22slave+ship%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:mevwcMk8o3cJ:www.abetitles1.com/Title/85665/A%2BSacred%2BSeal.html+wanderer+johnson+%22slave+ship%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://www.newsday.com/community/guide/lihistory/ny-wandr4,0,4777608.photo
http://home.wxs.nl/~pdavis/Log_Wanderer.htm
http://www.savannah-online.com/full_story.cfm?sect=TourismOurCity&id=538
By the way, you misspoke. It wasn't my claim. I stated that others were saying this.
In the first site above, that author quotes your source, Tom Henderson Wells, author of "The Slave Ship Wanderer," published in 1967 saying that John (JD) Johnson commissioned that the ship be built.
In several of the other listed posts, it is revealed that he was a member of the New York Yacht Club, and had a home in Islip. There is also a site that lists the JD Johnson historical building in downtown Islip. He is also listed in the Islip geneology records.
In another site I sent you, the author describes how financiers in the North would cause their ties to slave shipping to be transparent. One author says this is the case with the Wanderer. Others describe that Corrie was the second owner. Another site says that Corrie and Lamar were partners from the beginning. Another lists two other investors associated with Corrie and Lamar.
As you look through these sites, you will see that these are the statements of the authors, not my claims. As I stated in my post, I offered them as "other sources".
As our good friend x would like us to do, we will not repeat others's speculation, and then speculate on that. We will just keep to the facts.
One other point for consideration. According to these records, there were at least four ships of the 1800's named 'Wanderer' that were seagoing vessels.
So your comment to stand watie: "So let me turn it around. You were lying when your said that you had information indicating that the Wanderer was New Bedford flagged and New England owned and crewed. You've been lying since. But where is that different than any of your other posts?"
In that, you accused stand watie of "lying" about a 'Wanderer' being New Bedford flagged. Here is a site that shows that a Wanderer was there:
http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:KWl4SDaYkk0J:www.whalingmuseum.org/kendall/old_nb/old_nb_wharves_ex.html+wanderer+%22new+bedford%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
This site (http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:dgcvvgfO18gJ:www.tenpound.com/137/101.html+wanderer+slave+trade+%22new+bedford%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8)
lists the following:
Manuscript. "SALE OF CONDEMNED SLAVERS" - ACCOUNTS OF BOSTON VESSELS APPREHENDED IN THE SLAVE TRADE, 1850S AND 60S. Ten manuscript pages of accounts, probably taken from contemporary newspapers, of Boston ships apprehended while persuing the slave trade. Vessels include "Mary I Kimball," "Ioccoa(?)," "Mary E. Smith," "Clipper," "Newsboy," "Fleet Eagle," "Wanderer," and "Erie." The latter apprehended in 1860, under the command of Capt. Gordon, whose trial is also recounted here. $50
So, it would seem that a 'Wanderer' was sailing out of New Bedfore, was engaging in the slave trade like stand watie said, and that you falsely accused him of lying.
That is the second time in a month you have done that to stand watie.
You should apologize.
Fer Righteous Truths will will fight you...
Fer Justice, we'll give all we have!!
The RightWing, we'll triumph ev'ry time and we're MAD!!
DemRATS support Vice...they like Tyrants!!
Left's words are just Socialist swill!!
Fer Power, RATS're STOOOPID, olde, and sad!!
The Left promotes TREASON...
Reject Dem Leftist RATS!!
Dethrone Dem Leftist RATS!!
Right's boldly standin' and fightin'...
Our FReedoms have been dearly bought...
Fer Justice, Right's gotta lead US to the top!!
Kerry's sayin' LIES just to trick you...
Hanoi John's no good...Fight The Man!!
He LIED, too, 'bout his "brothers" in Viet Nam!!
Right must fight 'gainst Treason...
The Left Loves Tyranny!!
The Left LOATHES all who're FRee!!
The Left's all 'bout Power...
The whole Human Race shall be better...
Our wealth is worth nuthin'...if we lose.
Left's just Commie SCUYM, don't be fooled...
Left's PRO-sedition!!
But Right's working to preserve Liberty!!
The FReepers need YOU!!
Right's boldly standin' and fightin'...
Our FReedoms have been dearly bought...
Our Nation...depends on soldiers atop the Wall!!
Right'll pay any price just to win this...
Culture War's 'bout Good against Bad!!
Must fight fools...Right can't empower RATS' Lib'ralMan!!
Right shall win with Honor!!
Rejoice...Lib'ralism's DEAD!!
Rejoice...Lib'ralism's DEAD!!
Mudboy Slim
Perhaps something that fittingly describes "Teddy" Kennedy.
Oh yeah, I think that about sums up the senior senator from Massachusetts.
-good times, "Shock G. II."
I like Justice Antonin Scalia - one of my favorites along with Justice Clarence Thomas. Two of the real conservatives on the Court.
However, I have to say that I tend to agree more often with Justice Thomas on a purely ideological level.
I do deny that he ever used those words. For what he might or might not have said about the matter, see my next post.
Davis sent Peace Commissioners to Washington to express his demands. His government also sent Secession Commissioners to other states to foment rebellion. He did the first in hopes that things would play out peacefully, but the second shows that he was also out for what he could get. He was using different means to cope with changing circumstances and it would have been foolish not to.
According to David Donald, on March 9, 1861, Lincoln put the idea of relieving the force on Fort Sumter. That was rejected, mostly because the US didn't have the troops to do so, and the conclusion seemed to be that the Fort should be evacuated. But that wasn't a hard and fast decision. Nor was the possibility of war the main reason for the choice. The US simply didn't have the resources at that time.
What I don't think you see is how things change from day to day and week to week in a crisis, and how leaders try to reconcile different goals -- maintaining peace, for example, with making a firm stand, and preventing a collapse of morale. You apparently want to see some dark plan, where I see changing circumstances, uncertainty, and the desire to avoid being lost in the shifting tides of events. I don't know how old you are, or if you've ever had to live in uncertain or dangerous times (I haven't either, so it's not a slam), but if you ever do, you might have more of an idea of how things play out in times of national crisis.
Did Lincoln talk to Baldwin about his revenue problems? It's certainly not proven, anymore than any account of a private meeting between two people can be taken for granted as being true. We have no way of knowing what was actually said, but somehow the questions and responses don't fit. It's not likely that if Baldwin told Lincoln that Sumter wasn't the right ground to make a stand, Lincoln would respond by saying how he needs the revenue. That might have been an answer to another question, but it looks out of place where Baldwin puts it. Sumter wasn't a revenue collection place, and holding Sumter wouldn't bring a penny into the treasure. There's an unevenness in Baldwin's account -- it reads a little more like what he wished had happened than what actually occured. That doesn't in itself discredit his account, but it doesn't inspire confidence in his trustworthiness.
Did Lincoln make the commment, "And what is to become of the revenue? "I shall have no government, no resources!" to the YMCA delegation. I don't know. It's within the realm of possiblity, though it's also possible that an anti-Lincoln paper might have put the words in his mouth. Those were tumultuous times, and the Baltimore Sun was very much pro-Southern. Edward Albert Pollard, news editor of the Sun at the beginning of the Civil War, quickly decamped to Richmond when hostilities began and became editor of the "Richmond Examiner" and one of the founders of the "Lost Cause" school of historiography, so I don't put it past the Sun to put the worst light on things or even invent material to suit its ends.
What is clear is that one can't assume that the quotation makes it a "slam-dunk" that Lincoln's actions and the war were "all about" tariffs. Revenues are very much on the minds of governments, and I don't exclude the possibility that Washington or Hamilton might at one moment have said that the Whiskey Rebellion was "about" revenue, or that FDR might have said that his China-Japan policy was "about" markets and trade routes,but there were other issues concerned in both of these crises, as there were in the Civil War.
Material and idealistic concerns are woven deeply in every political issue or conflict. There are some who leap at the idea that the Civil War or the World Wars or Vietnam or Iraq were "all about" money or oil or corporate profits or empire. But that's a cynical and simplistic point of view that rarely reflects everything that was goint on at any given moment. One of the more repellent things about today's neoconfederates is how they begin with the line that they are just trying to defend the honor of their ancestors, and end by making monsters out of those on the other side, taking the radical line that it was "all about" money or malevolence.
free dixie,sw
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