How the Civil War Changed the World

New York Times Disunion ^ | May 19, 2015 | Don Doyle

[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...

[Pelham]

Goods bound for the American market as a whole could have gone to any port when tariffs were equal. Lower tariffs would draw off trade. This had been illustrated for years in New Orleans where the Baratarians ran a thriving smuggling business. The long border between a coastal Confederacy and its US neighbors would have been hard to police.

[DoodleDawg]

Goods bound for the American market as a whole could have gone to any port when tariffs were equal. Lower tariffs would draw off trade. This had been illustrated for years in New Orleans where the Baratarians ran a thriving smuggling business. The long border between a coastal Confederacy and its US neighbors would have been hard to police.

You can hardly compare the relatively small amount of goods smuggled in by Jean Lafitte with they hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods that the North imported every year.

[Pelham]

“You detract from your already flimsy case when you attempt to demagogue.”

What I posted is a statement of fact- George Washington was one of the largest slaveowners of his day. You can call it demagoguery if you want, most would regard it as simple historical fact.

“Well, there you go again. You overstate both Brown’s influence, his support, and his impact. If he was “widely praised as something akin to a Messiah” some of that praise should have survived to the present.”

It’s not hard to find:

“Just days after the raid, Brown’s trial began. It would take a week. On November 2, the jury deliberated for forty-five minutes and reached their verdict: guilty of murder, treason, and inciting slave insurrection. The South rejoiced in Brown’s execution. But hanging was not the end of John Brown; it was the beginning. Throughout the North, church bells tolled for him. In Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau proclaimed, “Some 1800 years ago, Christ was crucified. This morning, Captain Brown was hung. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.” “

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/brown/filmmore/description.html

http://antislavery.eserver.org/poetry/john-brown-poetry

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/brown/filmmore/transcript/transcript1.html

[Pelham]

John Brown’s backers:

www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/brown/filmmore/description.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/brown/peopleevents/pande06.html

http://www.adirondackalmanack.com/2009/09/the-last-days-of-john-brown-the-secret-six.html

“John Brown has often come down to us as a lone nut, bent on an suicidal mission, but this is far from the truth. Brown was part of a larger movement to free slaves that grew with passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (which required the return of escaped slaves to their masters with all its potential for torture and death at their hands) and the large Underground Railroad movement. It’s little understood that Brown was intimate with northern politicians, industrialists, ministers, and folks from all walks of life, including the leading intellectuals of the era – the Transcendentalists.”

[Pelham]

It’s a difference of scale and not type. A thousand mile border would have been difficult to police compared to a port.

[dsc]

“the worship of jackals by jackasses.”

That’s good. I wonder if he was comparing democracy to a representative republic.

[Georgia Girl 2]

Well we are probably going to get another go at it real soon. :-)

[dsc]

“some of that praise should have survived to the present.”

If by “the present” you mean 2015, it seems to me like very little of our history has survived to the present.

Why is Arlington a cemetery? Who was the Yellow Rose of Texas? How many people did German saboteurs kill within our borders? How many people did FDR clap in mental hospitals without due process? What did Kennedy give Khrushchev in return for publicly ceasing to install missile silos in Cuba?

If you like historical novels, there is a great one about John Brown. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flashman-Angel-Lord-Papers-Book/dp/000721720X?tag=duc08-21 (Caution: contains some indecency.)

[rockrr]

Just as I thought - a few fringe characters attracted to a fringe loonie. Some of them referred to as a “Secret” group. There were never any throngs of admirers. There was never an official sanction by any government.

I will admit that there was an uptick in the curious who were attracted to all the fuss, but where were all of the “copy-cat” uprisings? The vast armies of grass-roots abolitionists sweeping over the southern countryside? It didn’t happen and those who squawked dire about it were looked upon as “chicken-little” characters.

[Pelham]

John Brown was personally known to Frederick Douglass, who declined to get involved in Brown’s terrorism. Brown was well known among abolitionists.

The Secret Six were prominent men, rich men who supplied him with guns and pikes and wagons and whatever else he wanted. His past murders at Ossawatomie were known to them.

Brown was championed by the Transcendentalists, the premier literary set of the time. Brown’s supporters were far from fringe. They were rich and influential, similar to today’s Hollywood and Silicon Valley radicals.

[Pelham]

I’ve read a couple of biographies of John Brown. Otto Scott’s “Secret Six” being one of them, the title of the other escapes me at the moment.

[DoodleDawg]

It’s a difference of scale and not type. A thousand mile border would have been difficult to police compared to a port.

And hundreds of millions of dollars worth of imports would have been impossible to smuggle over the border, given that there were a limited number of rivers and railroads to ship them on.

[Pelham]

‘To Purge This Land With Blood’, Stephen Oates, Univ of Massachusetts Press is a very detailed biography of John Brown.

Large sections of it are available for free at google books:

https://books.google.com/books/about/To_Purge_this_Land_with_Blood.html?id=ugB4_JPfieYC

Even a cursory reading will dispel the idea that Brown was a “fringe loonie” with insignificant admirers. He was very well known within abolitionist circles. He had known Frederick Douglass since 1847, and spent a month living with him in 1858 as he was hatching his conspiracy. His supporters, Gerrit Smith for example, owned mansions. They were men of means and influence.

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

So what you’re projecting is a southern economy where smuggling into a neighboring country is a major activity.

[Pelham]

Pretty much

[max americana]

PING me when this idiot shows up.

[wardaddy]

Really Dog

You know damn well why Virginia votes democrat now

Cause libtard yankees have streamed in for that DC trough From Uncle Sam

My money....our taxes

Yankees ruin about everywhere in the south if their numbers are great enough

First Florida then Virginia and maybe North Carolina

That was a faux pas by Doobie Dawg

That’s french btw ...for saying or doing something you should know better of

[DoodleDawg]

That was a faux pas by Doobie Dawg

I was aware that the truth sometimes hurts, but I wasn't aware that it was a faux pas.

[wardaddy]

Yeah if you spoke the truth

If you libtard yankees stayed home Florida and Virginia and North Carolina would be solid conservative states

But you didn’t

Your bunch rurnt where they are and headed to Dixie to ruin it too with the same mindset which killed where they came from

You can’t blame southerners for that not the white ones anyhow