Posted on 02/20/2020 9:13:10 PM PST by Pelham
There is some good and some bad in just about everyone.
Even Marshall. He’s died.
Jeff Shaara’s four volume series on the Civil War caused me to have some grudging admiration for Sherman—something I would have thought impossible.
>>Hieronymus wrote: “Jeff Shaara’s four volume series on the Civil War caused me to have some grudging admiration for Sherman—something I would have thought impossible.”
My regret is that Sherman and the rest of Lincoln’s thugs didn’t hang for war crimes.
Mr. Kalamata
The series seems very balanced. Patrick Cleburne is portrayed much more favourably than Sherman, but Sherman actually had some good points
Generally, all politicians should be hanged.
War happens when the few convince or coerce the many that their cause is worth death. The end result is that the many give everything for a cause in which they have no real investment.
War should always be the last resort and one undertaken only when those who fight and die are invested in the reason for such sacrifice. Anything less than that and we are no different than medieval peasants who fight and die because two lords in castles argue over the ownership of a field.
> My regret is that Sherman and the rest of Lincoln’s thugs didn’t hang for war crimes. <
Only the defeated get hanged for war crimes, of course. And here one must give the North - and Andrew Johnson in particular - some credit. From the North’s point of view, the entire Confederate leadership had committed the capital crime of treason. Yet not a single one of them was executed.
If I’m not mistaken, the only Confederate executed for war crimes was Henry Wirz, the commandant of Andersonville prison.
the post war/reconstruction period was even more complicated that the cultural and political lead up to the civil war, which was obviously irresolvable without armed conflict. I’d recommend Fateful Lightning, by Allen Guelzo, a noted historian that conservatives can read without wanting to throw the book across the room.
the book I most enjoyed in the past few months was The Civil War of 1812, by Alan Taylor. I had no idea how ignorant I was of that frequently overlooked period after the revolution and before the civil war. that book filled many gaps in my understanding.
“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.”
- Aesop
And I’ve always felt this quote from Chesterton’s contemporary, Hillaire Belloc, was ever timely:
“We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”
The reason that Confederate leaders weren’t tried for treason is the probability the courts would have found them not guilty and secession legal. It was not because Union leaders were good guys, many of them wanted to hang Davis but were uncertain how the trial would turn out.
any e-reader fixes that. you have complete control over font size. I’d be lost without my kindle.
I’d also throw Ecstatic Nation, by Brenda Wineapple, into this conversation. She covers the cultural underpinnings of the political storms that were raging from about 20 years before the civil war through the end of reconstruction. she bounces around a good bit, but I was a bit surprised at the lack of attention that period seems to receive.
many works on reconstruction. entirely too many bullet-by-bullet accounts of every military campaign in the civil war. not so much on the economic and cultural lead up to the civil war beyond the single issue of slavery (not that it wasn’t the ultimate cause of the conflict, but it was by no means the only cause). but virtually nothing that takes you from, say, the Polk administration through the election of Hayes.
> The reason that Confederate leaders weren’t tried for treason is the probability the courts would have found them not guilty and secession legal. <
That’s an interesting take. But suppose Andrew Johnson was the vindictive type. He could have quickly set up a military court with hand-picked officers. Sort of the way Romania got rid of Ceausescu.
Fortunately for the country Johnson - in his own clumsy way - followed the more forgiving approach that Lincoln had envisioned.
republicans in congress spent more time prosecuting andrew johnson than former confederate leaders. lots of reasons for that, but the biggest was that virtually everything, including trying davis, stevens, et al, for treason, took a back seat to restoring the union, establishing a functioning and loyal government in the states that were formerly in rebellion, and grappling with what to do with 4 million freed slaves — soon to be 4 million brand new citizens after the passage of the 14th amendment.
thankfully, johnson lost control of reconstruction a couple of years after he took office - certainly after he barely survived impeachment. presidential reconstruction was a comprehensive failure. as president, he was erratic, unstable, unabashedly racist, and recklessly belligerent.
he also wasn’t a republican, he was a democrat. lincoln was re-elected on a national-unity ticket, not as a republican, and AJ, being from a border state, fit lincoln’s needs perfectly.
Some years back some freeper during one of these civil war re-enactments mentioned a book published some few years before the war that was fascinating. Whoever it was actually posted some screenshots fro the book. It was a very scholarly piece quoting all kinds of trade and banking facts and it predicted the war would come in the next 5 years because the New York Banks were draining the SOuth’s resources (sort of like “sending jobs to China, I guess, when yo think about it.)
Anyway, I didn’t take note of the book and have tried to find it again every since to no avail.
You can take consolation in the fact that some of the Confederate war criminals did hang.
Not some, one. Col. Wirz CO of Andersonville POW Camp..
Great read, but pretty depressing in retrospect - what a colossal waste of men and spirit.
Longstreet had an amazing memory for detail. I wonder what his IQ was.
Where is the quote from Belloc taken? From his prophetic work on Islam, the name of which escapes me at the moment (Survivals and New Arrivals?)
Until Francis decided to lift Newman to the glories of the altar, my tagline was a line from Chesterton:
It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.
My present one is from Newman, though unfortunately it is too long to include attribution.
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