Posted on 10/15/2005 8:38:50 AM PDT by teldon30
The problem with this theory is that conscription in the North didn't start until late summer of 1863, and was pretty much a failure. Only about 6% of the Union Army was made up of conscripts. By 1865, on the other hand, about a quarter of the confederate army were draftees.
You're welcome. Speaking of lunch, it's nearly 11:30 here. Time for me to go get something productive done with this Saturday. ;-)
An accurate statement. But in fairness to Meade, I can't think of a single time where Lee pursued a defeated Union army either.
If you get a chance, read The Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury. The major "anti-draft" riot in NYC was actually an excuse for the gangsters who ran the poor parts of town to attempt to take and ransack the whole city.
OK, so what was it that the south was importing in such massive quantities that the tariffs unfairly impacted them?
The California gold rush peaked 12 years before the beginning of the rebellion. They were called '49rs', remember?
Had the South had 20 years to develop its infrastructure and economy, and started to abandon slavery, what reasons would there have been to rebel? --- According to Paul Johnson, what was the basis for the rebellion?
Do you "Rebels" want an apology from the federal government and an "interpretative and contemplative" display at the Smithsonian done by revisionist, socialist, history professors to tell your side? Sure sounds like it.
OK, how about a rebellion, which Merriam-Webster defines as "open, armed, and usually unsuccessful defiance of or resistance to an established government"? That more accurate?
I undersdtand that he did not scout the battle field as he often did, but relied on other pairs of eyes.
wbts ping
You are correct!
Lee's health at Gettysburg was no better and no worse than it had been 8 weeks earlier at Chancellorsville.
I'm more of a Lincoln man than a Davis man!
If you do not want to be compared to Farrakhan, you should not think and act like him, which you are.
When you smear dozens of sincere principled conservatives as anti-southern evangelical bigots, you are acting like Farrakhan, who smeared whites as somehow scheming to flood New Orleans to kill black people. It would be bad enough for you to smear one person in this way, but you manage to smear every conservative with a principled concern about a candidate with no documented judicial philosophy.
Both your theory and Farrakhan's, involve hallucatinatory, slanderous allegations of bigotry. Both theories serve only to forment hatred.
What would you think if someone alleged that Bush nominated Mier's precisely because she was a southern Evanglical SMU grad like his wife? Discriminating in favor of these things? It's a mirror image of your argument, quite ugly isn't it? Hallucinating discrimination, and impugning the motives of others, is a terrible thing.
Numerous references in history...Just google marx lincoln and you will find lots of information.
Surely you jest.
For starters, the Union didn't institute a draft until the summer of '63. The early war Yanks were all volunteers. The confederates had a draft from the fall of '61 forward, and it was a great advantage because it stabilized their order of battle and enabled them to keep veteran units up to strength. The Yanks, on the other hand, bled their veteran outfits white while the politicians back home raised brand new units that had to climb an entirely unnecessary learning curve. Think what it meant for whole regiments -- whose men had been in the army all of two weeks, had never fired their weapons, and barely knew the manual of arms -- to be thrown into places like the East Woods and the Miller Cornfield at Antietam. The insanity of the personnel system is not a reflection on the men.
That said, the only example of a Union army collapsing in defeat was First Manassas, where a force of 90 day militia -- whose march discipline was very poor on the trek out from Washington -- dissolved into straggling on the way back. Btw, that force, untrained though it was, still very nearly won the battle. It executed a long and tiring flank march, broke the initial confederate position, and very nearly stormed the second before the fortuitous arrival of reinforcements squarely on their flank forced them to withdraw. Even then, they were not broken on the battlefield; they simply lost organization on the march back to Washington, which was unpursued because the equally raw confederates were just as disorganized in victory.
What other examples of "running conscript Yanks" do you want to propose? Chancellorsville? Sure, the 11th Corps broke, having been flanked and being in an entirely untenable position. But if you think the Yanks didn't rally, you've never walked Hazel Grove and seen the back-to-back gun emplacements. Joe Hooker lost that battle, not his troops; aside from the 11th Corps, whose misdeployment left it no chance at all, the Yanks stood their ground at every turn.
Fredericksburg? There was nothing at all wrong with the Yanks who walked up Marye's Heights. There was a lot wrong the the commanders who ordered them to.
Antietam? Yanks won that one, sort of.
Seven Days? Apart from Gaines Mill, Lee lost every battle and McClellan withdrew after every Union victory.
Valley Campaign? The confederates won that through marching more than fighting. Jackson had the only good map of the Valley and the federals he opposed, while outnumbering him in the aggregate, were drawn from three separate military divisions (the Valley being a transitional zone on the federal organizational map), had three separate chains of command and lines of supply, and never managed to cooperate.
Western Theater? There the federal commenced to win early and often, which is why the West is such a perfect counterpoint to the war in Virginia -- and why it tends to be ignored by Lost Cause mythologists.
Now, to answer the question posed by the thread. The confederates, informed by the example of the Revolution, thought the sheer size of the South would defeat any federal attempts at occupation and control, provided the Southern population remained resolute. They might have been right 50 or 100 years earlier, but they reckoned without the railroad and the telegraph, which gave the Yankee invaders strategic mobility, logistical staying power, and command and control over continental distances. New ballgame.
The Gold Rush peaked in the mid 1850's, but hard rock mining took up the slack and gold mining continues to this day. 100 million (in 1860 dollars) in gold went to the Feds just from my little area of the Sierras.
Marx's admiration for Lincoln was not reciprocated, and isn't surprising. Would you expect Marx to side with the slave owners?
True, but there is nothing to suggest that there was a sudden burst in gold output in California that helped pay for the war.
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