Posted on 09/26/2004 8:41:19 AM PDT by GaryL
The FReeper Foxhole: As the federal government grows bigger, stronger, and more corrupt with each passing year, maybe it’s time to dream about how life would be today if the South had won the Civil War.
Richmond Times-Dispatch, Dateline: July 4th, 1863, Gettysburg, PA:
PICKETTS’ CHARGE SMASHES NORTHERN CENTER – YANKS FLEE IN DISARRAY! WEARY LINCOLN SUES FOR PEACE! CONFEDERACY VICTORIOUS!
Am I the only one who dares to speculate about how life would be today if the South had actually won the Civil War? I know, I know….“How dare he bring this up! Arrest this raving racist at once! Send for the Though Police!” It has to be the ultimate violation of political correctness to even broach this subject!
As conservatives, can we be happy that a segment of the country that fought valiantly for limited government, states rights, and the rule of law under a strong constitution was defeated? Indeed, one of the most malicious consequences of the war was the beginning of the vast shift of political power to the central government in Washington, with the resultant monopoly of power that the federal government extends over us today. This shift came, of course, at the expense of traditional Jeffersonian personal liberty and freedom, and a concomitant emasculation of the power of the individual states. It was also accompanied by a gradual corrupting of the Executive branch (which was virtually completed in the scandalous administration of Bill Clinton}, a corrupting of the rule of law, and a progressive coarsening of the culture - all outcomes, I might add, that serve as testimony to the wisdom of Lord Acton – a strong contemporary defender of the South – about the corrupting influence of absolute power. This is hardly what I would call a favorable result. As a matter of fact, I’d term it an absolute disaster – the Founding Fathers’ worse nightmare! Isn’t this the reason they fought the Revolution in the first place?
But, you say, had the South won, America would never have become the great nation that it became in the 20th century. Well, my response is that monopolies of power are never good – especially in government, as the totalitarian governments of the 20th century have shown us. . If the South had gained its freedom, there would have been two separate governments competing with each other to be efficient and honorable. Explain to me why this is bad. If either government fell short of these ideals, people would have had the option to “vote with their feet” – and option that doesn’t exist today. Competition is always good.
And, no, maybe we wouldn’t have become the “world power” that we became in this the latter half of the 20th century. Why do we assume that this would have been necessarily bad? Consider this: it’s highly unlikely that the two separate nations would have experienced anything besides limited involvement in World War I, especially since one of them – the South – would have been adhering to the wise admonition of George Washington to avoid foreign entanglements. And, as Pat Buchanan and others have suggested, WWI was an unmitigated disaster for Western civilization. Instead of making the world safe for democracy, we helped make it safe for Bolshevism, Fascism, Socialism, and Nazism.
Follow me on this. With limited American involvement, England and Germany would likely have fought it out to a resource-draining stalemate. There would have been no clear-cut winner and no clear-cut loser – and outcome, I might add, immeasurable more favorable than what actually did occur. Our involvement unquestionably tipped the balance against Germany. Without a victorious England and a defeated, humiliated Germany, there would have been no vengeful, retribution-extracting Versailles treaty sapping the German people of their pride and resources. And, it follows, there would have been no occasion for the rise of militant German nationalism, no Hitler, and, quite possibly, no World War II. All and all, not a bad tradeoff, wouldn’t you say? Oh, and I forgot to mention, no victorious Soviet empire after WWII extending communism over half the world.
But, you say, slavery was a monumental evil that had to end! Yes, I agree that slavery was terrible – but I simply disagree with the way it ended. Wouldn’t a period of gradual emancipation – which many Southern leaders were favoring by the 1860’s, although with terms not to be dictated by the North – have been immensely better for all involved, most especially the black slaves themselves? Gradual emancipation over a period of about sixty years was exactly how the North itself ended its association with slavery. Why couldn’t the South be allowed the same solution?
The problem with the Civil War as the solution to slavery was that it destroyed the fabric of Southern society, leading to immense poverty and destitution for the entire South. Would anybody deny that the worse part of this societal destruction was experienced by the freed slaves themselves? And the North wanted no part of the social problems created by freeing the slaves, as the many racist laws restricting the settlement of freedmen in the North indicate. What was the value of receiving freedom without justice?
Before the war, most slaves had a better quality of life than the poor white farmer. The war put an end to that. This massive poverty and total decimation of Southern society also served as the germination for the horrendous, nation dividing post-bellum racial tensions and animosities – the ramifications of which we have with us even today. The conditions of emancipated slaves was so bad that seventy-five years after emancipation, in a 1930’s government study called the Slave Narratives, over 70% of surviving former slaves stated that their standards of living were better before the war. We can all agree that slavery was a monumental evil, but surely gradual emancipation would have been better than this!
As a conservative who longs for limited government and the ideals of the Constitution, I am not ashamed to speculate that quite possibly we would have a better world today had the South won the Civil War. Maybe I’m dreaming, but I think limited government, personal freedom, and higher degrees of racial harmony are what we’d be experiencing. In addition, we would have a clear choice between two governments competing for our approbation. Or maybe you’re content with the rapacious, out-or-control, ever-expanding, corrupt federal government that is overwhelming us today!
Shhhh.... Don't confuse the boy with facts. ;-)
Very interesting. The Prussian Machine, without a Western front to drain their resources...would have finished off the Russian Marxists by 1919.
free the southland,sw
free dixie,sw
It's no more beside the point than you bringing the matter up in the first place. It has nothing to do with the historical fact that the Sectional Crises that led up to and caused the Civil War were driven by the South's desire to expand slavery into the western territories and states, and the North's desire to limit the spread of slavery.
arrogance, ignorance & hatefullness has forever been the province of the damnyankee.
free dixie,sw
Hm. You sound like a leftist.
NOBODY here would accuse me of being a leftist.
free dixie,sw
I was merely commenting on the fact that your "arguments" against Heyworth are the same ones -- even the same words -- that are used by leftists who haven't got a real argument.
Perhaps you should learn a lesson from that.
most scholars would tell you that the VAST majority of northerners cared NOTHING about slavery, the plight of the slaves OR the expansion of slavery in 1860 AND they certainly would NOT have prosecuted a war (that KILLED a MILLION people) to hasten the end of a dying institution.
the populus of the north WAS willing to fight a war to "preserve the union".
free dixie,sw
The Sectional Crises were about slavery. The Sections were North and South. The South wanted it in new territories. The North said no.
Yes, you could plow with them, if you wanted to, but it was cost prohibitive. Just supplying the beast with the water and fuel to keep it running required more horses than it took to plow the field. It required more men, to run the machine and run the teams of horses. They were also colossally heavy and very expensive.
But ultimately, since your whole thesis relies on the notion that the south was unable to mechanize farming until it did because the mean ol' yankees looted the massah's house and he couldn't afford it, why then did farming in the north, midwest and west not go to tractors until the 1910s, when internal combustion tractors came along? Could it be because they were cheaper, lighter, and required a whole lot less more technical knowledge and risk (since they didn't blow up like steam engines could).
Also, please explain how the labor-intensive process of chopping cotton (distinct from picking, as I'm sure you know) would have been made less labor intensive by mechanization, when, in the REAL WORLD, it was the development of herbicides in the 1940s the eliminated the need for it.
Contact Dr. Lubar yet?
That's it? That's your evidence? A letter from a general outlining a plan? Pray tell, what was Stanton's response? Since the slaves were not kept under permanent military discipline, we can only conclude that Butler's letter was ignored and did not become government policy.
That's the biggest laugh coming from you, Watie. In the thread where this started, I posted all sorts of evidence from academic histories of cotton mechanization. Your only bit of evidence was the refrain "Don't argue with me, argue with the agricultural curator at the Smithsonian." You know the rest. He refuted you, and you accused me of lying about it, but refuse to check it out for yourself by writing to him.
For anyone reading this thread, e-mail me and I'll forward the entire correspondence to you. And feel free to write to Dr. Lubar at the Smithsonian yourself. Only he's not, as Watie claimed, the agricultural curator. He's a history of technology specialist. He directed me, however to the actual agricultural curator, who sent a longer e-mail discussing the whole subject, and which also refutes Watie at every turn.
do you not know that KNOWLEDGEABLE people here are laughing AT you? don't you care???
i notice that you also didn't mention the mule-drawn cottonpickers/cultivators, that were pulled by 8-12 mules and required the labor of ONE man. is that because you aren't informed enough to know about them OR don't you care that your rant is FACT-FREE???
free dixie,sw
NOBODY else in the southland, except the slavers or course, cared if slavery was spread to the western territories. since only 5-6% of southerners EVER owned a slave AND the "peculiar institution" was DYING an UN-lamented natural death, most people north OR south did NOT care about the supposed "spread of slavery".
free dixie,sw
do you not know that KNOWLEDGEABLE people here are laughing AT you? don't you care???
I'm still waiting for just one of them to come into this argument on your side, Watie. You've become a laughingstock to the Lost Causers. They're all off arguing fine points of Constitutional law while you're raving about imaginary machines for which you still haven't posted a SINGLE PIECE OF EVIDENCE. ("Don't argue with me, argue with the agricultural curator at the Smithsonian").
i notice that you also didn't mention the mule-drawn cottonpickers/cultivators, that were pulled by 8-12 mules and required the labor of ONE man. is that because you aren't informed enough to know about them OR don't you care that your rant is FACT-FREE???
Uh, that's because I've posted about twenty pieces of evidence that prove that everbody in the world but you knows that, whatever bizarre early experiments were conducted to harvest cotton, nothing worked effectively until the Rust brothers developed their machine in the 1930s.
Evidence, Watie? You make this assertion a lot, but you still haven't posted one scrap of evidence for it, other than a mention that it was in the unpublished dissertation of a professor of yours who is now dead. I've posted academically-accepted evidence that about 30% of southern FAMILIES owned slaves, which is not a number incompatible with your 5-6%, calculated as heads of households with average size families, but you don't accept that formulation, do you?
Your namesake was apparently one of those slaveowners. It seems that the Ridge-Watie faction, in fact, owned most of the Cherokee's slaves.
We've already dealt with and disposed of this. The Sectional Crises, which ultimately caused the South to secede, and which thereby led to the Civil War, were about slavery. Nothing more or less.
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