Posted on 07/06/2013 7:37:16 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
A Conversation with Thomas Fleming, historian and author of A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War.
Thomas Fleming is known for his provocative, politically incorrect, and very accessible histories that challenge many of the clichés of current American history books. Fleming is a revisionist in the best conservative sense of the word. His challenges to accepted wisdom are not with an agenda, but with a relentless hunger for the truth and a passion to present the past as it really was, along with capturing the attitudes and culture of the times.
In The New Dealers’ War Fleming exposed how the radical Left in FDR’s administration almost crippled the war effort with their utopian socialist experimentation, and how Harry Truman led reform efforts in the Senate that kept production in key materials from collapse.
In The Illusion of Victory, Fleming showed that while liberal academics may rate Woodrow Wilson highly, that he may have been the most spectacularly failed President in history. 100,000 American lives were sacrificed to favor one colonial monarchy over another, all so Wilson could have a seat at the peace table and negotiate The League of Nations. Instead, the result of WWI was Nazism and Communism killing millions for the rest of the century.....
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
Because Gideon Pillow had invaded and occupied Columbus.
Then Kentucky was not a union state at the start of the war. Neither was New Mexico Territory, Arizona Territory.
There were confederate supporters in Missouri and in Maryland as well that controlled parts of those states at the start of the war.
BTW - the legimate authority in Kentucky, Magoffin, condemned Grant for his invasion of Paducah.
BTW - the legimate authority in Kentucky, Magoffin, condemned Grant for his invasion of Paducah.
And Jefferson Davis sent a personal letter to Magoffin one week earlier promising that confederate troops would stay out of Kentucky.And when the state legislature passed a bill demanding the confederate forces leave the state, Magoffin vetoed it, a veto that over overridden. Eventually his pro-confederate stances made his position untenable, given the overwhelming pro-union sentiment in the legislature, and he resigned.
“There had been a request to both sides that they stay out of Kentucky.”
And who made that authority? Magoffin.
Again - Kentucky, at the start of the war was not Union territory. This is why Grant occupied Paducah and violated Kentucky’s neutrality.
So then you confirm that:
1, Magoffin was the legitimate authority in Kentucky and that:
2, Magoffin condemned the invasion of Kentucky by the union.
Thank you. That’s what I was after. Again - Kentucky was not union territory at the start of the war.
When? Yesterday?! Certainly not during the Civil War.
Because the confeds invaded, silly.
Nope. It was a resolution passed by the state legislature.
Again - Kentucky, at the start of the war was not Union territory
Sorry, but you saying it over and over again doesn't make it so. There was never any vote by the state legislature, a convention, or the people to secede.
This is why Grant occupied Paducah and violated Kentucky’s neutrality.
Grant moved troops into Paducah to keep it from falling into the hands of the confederates, who had invaded three days earlier. Or does their violation of Kentucky neutrality somehow not count?
It certainly counted to the state legislature, since they immediately ordered the US flag to be raised above the state capitol.
Did they put the stake through his heart, cut off his head and fill his mouth with garlic?
Like you said, no simple affair.
It is my understanding that his African son by one of his slaves, one Stephen Davis, did not attend.
Davis had no authority as the pretended selection of Davis by the states that pretended succession was null and void.
I know it's probably foolish, given your history on this thread of making statements and then refusing to back them up with any sort of evidence than an insistence that we accept your say-so, but perhaps you could give some sort of link to the date on which this secession took place.
Have you been staring straight into the sun again?
Yes, Magoffin was governor. Magoffin scolded BOTH sides for violating Kentucky’s neutrality. And even though he was a southern sympathizer, they means exactly squat in terms of the affiliation of the state - unless you are as lawless as the confeds were.
Of course Kentucky was a US state, and thus Union territory.
They had no authority to secede absent consent by the rest of the US, winning a SCOTUS case, or a constitutional amendment.
Therefore their directions to stay out of Kentucky had no merit, just as the pretended orders by SC to the US government to evacuate Ft Sumter had no merit.
I'm betting that the only reason you are making this statement is that you and I have different definitions of what "Union" is.
For me Union territory is the land that was under the governmental authority of the United States of America during the American Civil War.
New Mexico territory would fall under this definition. It's territorial government was established in 1850 (1846 if you count the provisional government) by the United States of America and it continued to be a U. S. territory throughout the Civil War. Now the Confederacy did declare that the area of the New Mexico territory south of the 34th parallel was actually the Confederate territory of Arizona, but this was never recognized by the United States or the Territorial government of New Mexico.
Maryland would also fall under the Union label since they voted against secession (53-13 in fact). Kentucky did not secede, they passed a resolution of neutrality but they never left the United States. This is why there is no readmittance of Kentucky to the United States.
The situation in Missouri was so strange that calling them "split" is probably not a bad assessment.
Then why were there senators and congressmen from Kentucky holding office in Washington DC and voting as part of the US government?
Receiving the Peace Commissioners and negotiating with them would have meant recognizing the Confederacy, something the US government wasn't ready to do at the time. The secessionist states of the Deep South had already sent Secession Commissioners to the Upper South to stir up rebellion. As the Peace Commissioners were in Washington, Davis was also organizing a War Department and calling for an army. It would take a while to untangle the timeline, but I'm pretty sure Davis had other irons in the fire: most likely he had other, alternative plans in the works and wasn't relying on the Peace Commissioners.
Davis did not what Beauregard to fire upon Sumter, but only agreed when Lincoln moved to resupply the fort against the express wishes of the Confederacy for him not to do so.
So, you go against my "express wishes" and it's war (because it very much is war if Davis attacks the fort)? You're not doing Davis any favors here. The important thing here is how a leader handles a crisis -- an "eyeball to eyeball" situation, like the Cuban Missile Crisis a century later -- and Davis didn't handle his crisis well.
I always assumed that Davis acted to get out in front of the hot-heads in Charleston. There may be some truth in that, but looking at the timeline, I'm not so sure. Beauregard communicated that the fort was low on supplies and could be starved out, but this had no effect on the plans Davis had made.
About the time Davis made his decision, he and his appointees were told by an Alabama politician, "Gentlemen, unless you sprinkle blood in the faces of the people of Alabama, they will be back in the old Union in less than ten days." This message came from Virginia: "Strike a blow! The very moment that blood is shed, Old Virginia will make common cause with her sisters of the South." Who's to say that Davis didn't make his decision based on such advice?
When it is said not to push the US around, it can argued that the folks in the South WERE the US, just as much as those in the North.
I was being a little tongue in cheek with the "Don't push the US" around, but there is some truth in it. Confederate types keep saying how arrogant and overbearing the federal government was and is. Fine, but if Confederate leaders behaved with the same arrogance and haughtiness (as they did) they really can't complain about the federal government's inequities.
More modesty, a greater sense of one's own fallibility would have served Davis well. As it was, he was no improvement on anything one could have objected to in the federal government of the day.
I'm wondering, though, if part of the price for leaving is: you can't say "Hey we are the US too!" if you reject the country and leave it. If that was too high a price to pay, then there was something wrong with secession. What I'm trying to say is that if you're expecting to break an established tie with your country and you think there should be no price whatsoever attached to it, you may not be thinking clearly.
As far as the military defeat of slavery, the ultimate defeat of slavery would have come with mechanization of the agricultural processes starting in the mid 1870s.
Mechanical cotton harvesters didn't come into widespread use until after WWII. Presumably slavery could have been formally abolished before that (maybe around the turn of the century) but something similar to slavery could have endured for decades beyond formal emancipation.
When Jefferson’s heir released them, they refused to leave as Monticello was their home. They wanted to stay and work the land. That was a microcosm of what faced slaves— the fear of the unknown, and a society that could not and would not be structured to assimilate them.
The Hemingses, whom Jefferson freed in his will and who were in some way related to him, made it to Ohio not too long after they were freed. According to the letter of the law, they were required to leave the state or face re-enslavement (though enforcement of the law wasn't uniform).
I don't know when the other slaves were freed. Some were auctioned off to pay Jefferson's debts. Some were rented out by his daughter. So I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about. After the Civil War, Monticello was rundown and there were a lot of people hanging about the place, but I don't know if any were descendants of Jefferson's slaves or how many former slaves may have left when they were emancipated or how many people may have drifted there on their way to somewhere else.
To be sure, slavery was a problem. Abolition would have brought more problems. But for many opinion leaders in the South, slavery was a solution. For some it was the best solution available to other problems. To others it was the best solution imaginable: a positive good.
The North gave a wink and a nod to the South’s Jim Crow laws, the Ku Klux Klan, and a two tiered economic system that stripped the black man of any economic power.
So that's the Northerners' fault? Y'all didn't have anything to do with that? Or you needed us forever after you to prevent it?
The victor writes the history, and history tells us that Lincoln was a saint. He was a decent fellow, but how was keeping States that already expressed a desire to part, worth a four year war that killed 600,000 men out of a population of 30 million a reasonable trade, for the hundred years that followed?
That is what troubles me. The human cost, then, and since then, was more than man could imagine.
Nobody seriously says that Lincoln was a saint. And nobody could imagine beforehand what the cost of the war would be. The idea that Lincoln is responsible for all those deaths because he didn't roll over and give the Confederates everything they wanted -- well, it looks pretty childish. It takes two sides to make a war, and it could be argued that the 1861 war was a "war of choice" for Jefferson Davis. The war didn't work out well for Davis, but he certainly had a role in its making.
My point is to suggest that biblical discussion of slavery provides either justification for or guidance on the practice of slavery in 1860 is itself an anacronism.
What I like to call "Having your cake and seceding from it, too."
That is rather like the lost causers who claim that the insurrection was not bound by the Constitution because they pretended to secede from it, but Lincoln was forbidden to put down the insurrection because those who made war to support the insurrection should have been protected by the rights under the US constitution.
In like manner, the slave power complained when the free states set conditions (such as common rules of evidence) for their cooperation in enforcing the Fugitive Slave provision of the US constitution. Then, when such provisions were struck down, so that only federal authorities could enforce the Fugitive Slave Acts, the slave power complained because the free states were not sufficiently cooperating with the slave power.
They really didn’t like that the free states were free. In that way, the slave power was opposed to states rights.
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