mentalblog.com comments:
Sorry, but it is not perfectly OK to claim that the cause of the Confederacy was just. The cause of the Confederacy was the extension of slavery and its justification with racial hatred.
The War was forced on Lincoln, he did not incite it or start it. Four of five Southern states stared the rebellion before he was even inaugurated.
Grant and Sherman were not bloodthirsty, and they were not secretly promoted by Lincoln. They rose through the ranks due to the fact that they were competent and successful.
Sherman's campaign in Georgia and South Carolina, by the way, was remarkably un-bloody. He abandoned his supply lines and carried less than 200 rounds of ammunition per infantryman, so that he avoided battles the entire way.
Read a collection of Lincoln's letters and speeches, all of which he wrote himself, and tell me again why you consider him an uneducated hick. He was better educated and a better writer than either you or I.
As far as classical Yiddishkeit is concerned, by the way, Lincoln was no more a cruel warmonger than Dovid Hamelech or Yehoshua Hanavi. You are just vomiting back to us the propaganda of the people of Jericho for Heaven's sake.
Oh, and this is also nonsense:
"The world would have been a far better place had Lincoln not ruled and had the Confederate States of America been allowed their freedom and given the time to mature as a society in a world that accepts alternate political systems."
Had Lincoln acquiesced in the secession of the slave states, the United States would never have become a world power, and all of Eurasia would be under the heel of socialist tyrants to this day. Militarist Japan would have enslaved the Pacific without a doubt.
The subsequent history of the South would have been of increasingly bloody slave revolts, concentration camps, and massacres.
"The world would have been a far better place had Lincoln not ruled and had the Confederate States of America been allowed their freedom and given the time to mature as a society in a world that accepts alternate political systems."
How idiotic and myopic does one have to be to issue forth such drivel? Yes, the world would definitely be a far better place had America split into two insignificant countries in 1865 and never became a superpower in the 20th century! Good one!
If one is to assume the war between north and south was about industrial versus agricultural society then the demands of a flexible and mobile workforce versus stationary (enslaved) workforce is the background of the conflict.
In this light migrating blacks were powering the industrial machine from Detroit to Boston long before the emancipation in the conquered south.
Tzemach,
"In this light migrating blacks were powering the industrial machine from Detroit to Boston long before the emancipation in the conquered south."
But even if I accept your claim that migrating blacks rather than native-born and immigrant whites were the labor power that combined with the financial power and knowledge-power of the North to drive the industrial machine, that migration took place fifty to seventy-five years after the War Between the States, and would never have occurred if the blacks had remained as chattel slaves in the South.
Berl,
Quite right, except that the United States would have split into more than 2 countries. The then-northwest would have drifted off, dependent as it was on the Mississippi River for its trade, and who knows how many independent countries, as frequently at war as the European countries, would have evolved.
Tzemach,
I can't believe you posted this sophomoric drivel. Should you have occasion to speak with young Master Zeitgeist tell him: It is far better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. To paraphrase General Schwartzkopf: Discounting the fact that Zeitgeist is nearly totally ignorant of Lincoln and American Civil War history his assessment of Lincoln was brilliant.
Sorry for inadvertently posting as Anonymous. I am very comfortable with what I wrote. By the way you can add that Zeitgeist's moniker is as pretentious as his opinion of Lincoln. Hold me back fellas or I'll murderlize em. yuk, yuk yuk.
With this bon mot, "universalist Rav A.Y. Kook(?)" Here you sound like some apikores who was educated at Y.U. But with this eruption of bilge, "Lincoln was an absolute roshah merushah" you seem to possess the vitriol usually ascribed to an enflamed misnaggid. And are we talking about the same rav who leant his imprimatur to ha' t'nuat hatzionisti - and look where that has lead us. Sorry, with all respect to his learning and yiras shomayim he was not very adept when it came holding up his moistened finger into the winds of history.
what is it that makes web commenting so vile? i know truman, and he would never speak in such terms in real life. he is a pleasant, amicable and easy going fellow. heck, i know myself even better, and whatever i allow through in web commenting would rarely pass my lips off line. and experience shows that anonymity that the internet allows is definitely not the answer.
somehow, we feel more secure to be rude in the absence of direct confrontation. for a while i used to think about it as a phenomenon described in אין אדם םעיז פניו בפני בעל חובו or אשה בפני בעלה. but extensive holiday driving made me think of a better analogy, namely the occasional transformation into raging maniacs while driving in enclosed vehicles.
faruq,
Good point, although off topic.
However, I am always polite and considerate in my postings.
Moron.
indeed, Gandalin, you make a remarkable exception, of which i was very much aware while posting my comment.
as to the "moron", i am humbled. your lame attempt to look like the rest of us is nothing short of noble...
Faruq,
You are 100% correct. The anonymity of oneself and the disembodiment of the other creates the possibility for the worst to escape its usual confines. Still, there is a wild thrill and mad glory to be had in battle. So let me apologize for my foul temper; even if well aimed and deserved I don't have license to behave in such a way. That said, I will probably continue and ask the indulgence of others to remember that it's just role playing.
En guard!
Pity that none of the responses to my post offered a cool calm rational and logical counter-argument. Just a lot of screaming and shouting as if a hungry wolf had entered the chicken coop!
In toto, these are just some of my responses:
The establishment of the Confederacy was a slow and careful culmination of a historical process and had it been allowed to mature rather than strangled in its infancy it too would have had better results than were achieved by the war that ensued between the North and the South.
The discussions that led up to the war were part of a very civilized debate that was focused within the US Senate wherein both Judah Benjamin and Jefferson David served at various times. They eloborated and explained the issues and the legal arguments in great detail, with clarity and with conviction. Theye were not demagogues. In fact the whole style of the Southerners is till very much aristocratic and laid back to this day. The KKK came AFTER the loss of the South and unfortunately the KKK had a wide influence on America from all the resnetments of the war that lasted well into the 20th century. This could have been avoided. The Civil War, while putting down slavery, in turn gave birth to virulknet racism and splitting American society for ever, and official segregation as a near official way of life for 100 years after the war was over (so why were those 500,000 sent to their deaths by Lincoln the mad butcher?)
The issues involved were not just about "slavery" as such (that is such a tacky and baby-ish politically correct view not worthy of true intellectuals). It was a far deeper and broader debate based on multiple political, economic, geographic and sociological issues among Christian white America.
Much like the political dialogue in our times, often unfriendly in the extreme, between the independent-minded Western states of both the USA and Canada often acting in POLITICAL rebbelion against their respective capitals and power elites entrenched back East, just that in the 1860s the election of Lincoln aided by his war-mongering political and economic war-lords who were looking to push the aristocratic Southern leadership against the wall inevitably evoked a shooting war an actual shooting war, like anyone would react when pinned against the wall by enemies, which they got, but at too high a price for all concerned: 500,000 Americans died and Lincoln got a bullet in the head for his troubles and efforts in the end.
People here are funny. What is so great about one "united" states, why couldn't there be two, or three or more such countries? The UN is filled with multiple small states and the UN is pretty influential in many spheres. Do countries or states have to exist in eternal suffocating embrace to grow and thrive? Cooperation anyone? Even the Anglo United States has learned to live with its Latino neighbor to its present-day south that it had sliced down and defeated in many unprovoked wars, as well as with the former enemy territory Canadian dominion STILL headed by the British Monarch (yes, Canada is a CONSTITUTIONAL MONARCHY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Con...tional_monarchy under a parliamentary system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Par...amentary_system and noone is going to war with it either about that) but nevertheless the USA has been able to create the North American Free Trade Agreementhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement with rivals Canada and Mexico! North America is quite a big place you know!
So the USA has found ways to be at peace with INDEPENDENT countries to its north and south and there is no reason to assume that given enough good wiill and the desire to avoid unecessary bloodshed the Union and Confederacy could have arrived at a modus vivendi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mod...i/
Modus_vivendi and lived happily ever after.
The same liberals who retroactively cheer on Lincoln and his bloodthirsy generals (the Union troops are not to blame for the war because they were as much the war's victims and followed orders of their commanders admirably) are the same ones who denounce American intervetion in the world's hot-spots even with America's vital interests at stake.
Indeed the existence and development of Canada and Mexico, were NOT to the detriment of the USA and IN SPITE of the historical bullying they have had to endure from Uncle Sam, it disproves the claim that the existence of the Confedracy in North America would have created a "lesser state of political and economic being" or that the Union and the Confederacy would not have grown to a super-power status.
After the new "united" States was created it sought to finish off in the areas of Canada what it had done to the British in the 1700s, but the British had in the meantime learned the lessons of their defeat well (the Spanish and Mexicans faired worse, but the USA did not wish to swallow such a huge Latino bitter pill in any case, so they annexed what they wanted and let the Spanish and later the Mexicans wallow in misery till Mexico found it's own strength through its oil and natural resources (does drugs count here?) and cheap labor that keeps the US economy functioning -- since modern USA Blacks seem to imagine that the Civil War has freed them not just from slavery but from the need to perform any and all sorts of labor -- BUT the Mexicans and all Latin Americans have no such qualms and therefore they are much in demand for the good work they do at low rates.
In the War of 1812 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812 the British not only protected the territories of Canada from US war-mongering and aggression but put together a country that is EVEN LARGER in geographic territory than the USA is today, and they even managed to even come down and burn Washington DC and the White House to the ground. And guess what, a 180 years later there is still a Canada and it is the BEST friend the USA ever had and still has on all levels with the world's longest PEACEFUL border. This could well have been the same result had the Confedracy NOT been threatened with war and sanctions that forced them to launch self-defense attacks.
There is no reason do doubt that given the common bonds of culture, language and family, the Confederacy and the Union would have made the strongest allies on earth. Much like the former bitter enemies, and ongoing rivals, the USA and the UK became the closest of allies in modern times.
The notion of CONFEDERATION http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Con...i/
Confederation is as mature a political notion and political system (the modern European Union http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eur.../
European_Union for example is a confederation) as that of the Union's political system of FEDERATION http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation
Now as for the Union generals. What a sorry lot they were. Ask any West Pointer who is regarded as the greatest AMERICAN general of ALL time and 9 times out 10 it will be General Robert E. Lee http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob...i/
Robert_E._Lee who is even regardec as such at West Point http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Uni...ilitary_Academy
The first Union general were military and strategic failures and were judged accordingly by Lincoln the war monger (WHO CARES WHAT LINCOLN WROTE OR SAID BY TH WAY? A MAN IS JUDGED BY HIS ACTIONS). He wanted men of action and who were not afrid to crush the South to death as quickly as possible using maximum force. He rejected the reticence and deliberateness of the first leading generals whom he fired (who knows, they may have brought about a cease-fire and a peace agreement which Lincoln was dead set against) and instead he found his greatest men in Grant and Sherman in particular, noted for their brutality and ruthlessnes in battle against the South.
Zeitgeist,
At the moment I have not the time required to refute your arguments in detail. With G-d's help, I will try to do that later.
I would like however to contradict one of your points -- that the secession was not about slavery.
First of all, the entire history of the titanic debates and controversies that raged in the Senate during the first half of the XIXth Century was in fact a history of debate as to whether the Federal government should have the authority to control the spread of slavery to the territories. All of the great "compromises" had to do with that single issue.
Second, permit me to commend to your attention a singularly interesting book by a Virginia-born historian of the period. It is still in print, and Amazon will deliver it to your door for a reasonable price.
"Apostles of Disunion" by Charles B. Dew is an analysis of the speeches and articles prepared by the official representatives of the secessionist governments of Alabama and Mississippi, as they worked to persuade the other slave states to secede.
So what you have therein are not the 100-year-later revisionist excuses for the secession, but the actual arguments used by the secessionists to persuade others to join them, at the time.
Their arguments were 100% about protecting the institution of slavery, and about continuing the oppression of the Negro. Nothing else.
The core of the secession was the racialist subjugation of the Negro, and the literal kidnapping of free men and women to work as slaves. All of the other arguments are window dressing.
One minor point: Robert E. Lee was a fine upstanding gentleman. But go back to the historical record, and compare the survival rate of men under his command with the survival rate of men commanded by Grant or Sherman, and tell me again who was a better General. Rather than relying on the wikipedia, you might profit from reading the memoirs of Grant, Sherman, and "Old Pete" Longstreet.
faruq,
Thank you for your kind words. I've always enjoyed your comments here.
Gandalin: Of all things "the oppression of the Negro" was a false fine excuse for Northern racists whose attitudes to Negros was no less demeaning and racist (in our terms) than was found in the South.
Get this, slavery in the South was NOT a historical abberation because slavery in one form or another has existed as a positive economic system for millenia. Even in the Torah, you will note that after the Exodus, and the freedom of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage (that included enslavement) the Torah and Jewish law still permitted and allowed for slavery of Jews and non-Jews.
CLASSICAL JUDAISM AND THE TORAH DO NOT FORBID SLAVERY, IT COMMANDS THAT SLAVES BE TREATED WELL AND THAT THAT THEY EARN THEIR FREEDOM AT SOME TIME TOO!
On the contrary, the Talmud and Jewish law talks of different types of slaveries and how one can be sold into and be redeemed from it. Thus, from a classical Judaic perspective there is NOTHING wrong or evil in slavery per se, but what is wrong is when slavery, like anything else, is used in a twisted and brutal manner.
The same critiques of slavery can be used to critique freedom and democracy or any political and economic system.
The Greeks and Romans acted in the name of their citizens who decided things democratically that in turn led to bloodshed elsewhere. During the French Revolution and afterwards, the slogan of "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity" was twisted during the Reign of Terror and then by Napoleon who acted in the name of "the will of the people" to march them into foreiegn wars and beheadings of many French citizens. The Bolsheviks came to power after the Kerensky government DEMOCRATICALLY (for Russia) displaced the Czar, and Hitler rose to power using democratically elected alliances to reach the Reichstag. Robert Mugabe, like many modern African tyrants, destroys Zimbabwe's economy and intimidates everyone to vote for him claiming fake "democratic" victories. Russia invades Georgia, like Nazi Germany claimed the Sudetenland, in the name of protecting its ethnic minorities on its borders. And the list goes on and on. So please do not be uni-dimensional to make it sound that in the great historical debates leading up to the US Civil War, the nice, kindly, warm and fuzzy Northerners were worried about the welfare of the poor little suffering Negros in the South when they were not. That is such a paternalistic and narrow view that it is so obvious.
The core of the issue was that the South and the North had developed into two different societies. The North had started to rapidly industrialise and it needed LABOR to man its plants. That labor came from various sources, from Europe, which made it expensive, but freed poor blacks would work for a fraction and remain in that one-down position as simple laborers that industry needed and not like with the smarty-pants unionized white Europe-originating workers. The South on the other hand was AGRARIAN and, in an age before machinary would make the whole business of farming scientific and not labor intensive, it still required the old economic system of slavery that it had been practicing for centuries (that given the economic developments over the next century from the mid 1800s would have ended slavery in any case WITHOUT WAR) yet, outside of Europe (excluding the parts that practiced Feudalism, like in the Russian Empire), slavery had neen practiced for millenia.
And again ANY economic system can be abusisve and destructive of its core members. Modern office work is very destructive and enslaving in many ways. While there are no metal chains in modern offices (and there were few such things in the South either because the image of Blacks walking around with chaians like dogs on leads is false and stupid since they roamed the fields and worked in the houses openly) the billions of salaried workers in MODERN CORPORATE CULTURE are as much ensalved as are the slaves in the South. So it is easy to avoid reality and fall into semantical word games and to sat read this or that book when the facts and realities and truths are staring one in the face.
You seem to be into measuring bullets and soldiers. That is not how things are judged in history or militarily. THE NORTH WAS CLEARLY THE PREDATOR ON THE OFFENSE. And it started the war poorly given its industrial strength. THE SOUTH WAS MARKED AS THE TARGET (AS IT ONLY WISHED TO PROTECT THE STATUS QUO) AND IT WAS ON THE DEFENSIVE (ALBEIT A PREEMPTIVE TYPE AT THE START OF THE WAR).
The North displayed aggression in the histrical debates over decades (not just about the one topic of slavery because there were ramifications and connections to everything they practiced and believed in in all spheres) warning of dire consequences leading up to the war, while the Southern states wished to have a separate destiny reluctant to have to defend it, but once realizing that they had no choice, they did a fine job holding the North off as humanly as possible.
It cost over half a million American lives, almost all whites, few blacks died in the war supposedly fought about them as you surmise, it cost the war-monger Lincoln his life, it split up the country with cultural, regional, racial an ethnic wounds that are still not healed, it fueled the rise of the KKK and to be darned, it allowed for a new form of virulent racism, official SOUTHERN SEGREGATION to arise and function, as hypocritical disproof of everything the Northen Union armies had fought for.
So it is quite safe to conclude that Lincoln was no hero and was, on the contrary, a blood-thirsty tyrant who did not hold off until he bled his Southern enemies to death.
It is only propaganda and the historical revisionism engineered by the Liberal academic and intellectual elites that placed a metpahoric halo on Lincoln's head and set him up as a national hero, embodied to boot in the Lincoln Memorial in Wasington DC that should instead be turned into a memorial to the HALF MILLION AMERICAN DEAD VICTIMS of the war, just as NYC is now building a memorial to the less than 3,000 victims of 9/11 terrorism, when he was just the American equivalant of Attila the Hun or Ghenkis Khan.
Finally, I do not derive my facts from Wikipedia, I just thought that linking to some key concepts and people discussed on it would help.
Personally I rely on my life-long readings and the conclusions that come out of my own head. Try it.
Zeitgeist,
The confusion in your diatribe is evident in that you maintain both that the Civil War was a manifestation of longstanding cultural and regional differences and at the same time that the Civil War was the cause of those differences.
The war was started by aggressive pro-slavery men in the South. Lincoln in fact evaded and avoided many provocations before reluctantly going to war to enforce the laws of the United States in its own territory.
Gandalin, you say: "The confusion in your diatribe is evident in that you maintain both that the Civil War was a manifestation of longstanding cultural and regional differences and at the same time that the Civil War was the cause of those differences."
It is you that is confusing two things and I am not sure why you think that you can then call my words a "diatribe"? Get this, there are two sets of factors that you assume I am confusing, but which I am clearly not doing:
(1) There are the long term historical forces and factors that that led up to the Civil War. It was not an overnight scenario nore were the factors only about "rescuing" the Negro from slavery. It was a cultural, political, and above all ECONOMIC struggle between two sectors of the newly-minted USA that had developed apart by the mid 1800s.
(2) Once the war broke out and took place it then unleashed a set of historical forces and circumastances. Of course in some ways they were extensions of the pre-war era, but they would evolve and become something entirely new. The process of Reconstruction, Carpet-baggers, the rise of the KKK (it was a powerful movement for many decades, even reaching into the North and into all sectors of government), the death of over half a million Americans and millions of wounded with tens of millions destablized, entrenched racial segregation, and Lincoln's assassination, all of which introduced new and horrendous cultural, political and economic forces and changes that were new and not conjoined to the set of facts that are outlined in (1) above.
You say: "The war was started by aggressive pro-slavery men in the South. Lincoln in fact evaded and avoided many provocations before reluctantly going to war to enforce the laws of the United States in its own territory."
But that is so one-dimensional. First off, it was no "sin" for them to be "pro-slavery" and why do you assume that everyone has to agree with the "anti-slavery" position? You have failed to address or respond to my description regarding how slavery functioned as a legitimate economic system for millenia, indeed that even the Torah and Talmud are not opposed to slavery as such, but that slaves must be treated justly. All you can do is spit out the word "diatribe" but not debate and discuss like a mentch. Pity.
Then this notion about Lincoln defending the country. Well yes, of course he had a right to do that. But there are core issues and questions if he did the right thing. Confederacy was led by wise and able men. Since you like reading books, I suggest you read some biographies about Judah Benjamin as an example of the brilliant statesman that he was and the roles he played in the years before and after the war in the Confederate government. Read some serious biographies about Jefferson Davis and you will see that he towered over Lincoln in wisdom and leadership skills. He was not an overnight wonder like Lincoln started out. Sure, secession and civil war are painful and complex issues in history. The forces of history that drive nations and regions are complex and there are always controversies and differencse of views in resolving them.
Just look across the Atlantic at the original United Kindom that united four regions for hundreds of years. The Irish decided to fight for their independence and mostly won (except for Northen Ireland) so does that mean that they should have suffered the same fate of the Confederate Southern states who wishes to be free of the yoke of the Northerners' interference into their internal STATE affairs?
The modern oulook has been even more radical than that. Just look at how the former USSR and Yugoslavia broke up into MULTIPLE independent states and the world cheered them on without guilt or qualms and virtually no nations felt that the central governements in the USSR and Yugoslavia were permitted "to enforce the laws of the (USSR and Yugoslavia) in its own territory"!
And even though there were wars in Yugoslavia not so long ago, and the formmer USSR now trunctated into and acting as "the Russian Federation" wage war on their smaller neighbors, the international community does not side with them. How do you explain that and how does that compute with your view of the South's "wrongs" versus the North's "rights"?
So the least you can do is extend the historical benefit of the doubt to your fellow American Southerners, especially had it been possible to avoid all the death and destruction.
1) Whether or not being pro-slavery was a sin, the war was started when pro-slavery forces seized Federal arsenals attacked -- bombarded -- a military installation of the United States of America.
2)Lincoln did not have the "right" to defend the Constitution and the United States of America; he had the solemn and sworn legal obligation to do so.
3)You think that allowing the southern states to secede would have led to peace. That is you opinion. In my opinion, had the southern states seceded the subsequent history of the continent would have been 150 years of incessant wars, slave revolts, death camps, invasions from European powers, and a world in which American power was not available to defeat National Socialism, Japanese imperialism, communism, or (G-d willing) the Jihad.
So many things wrong in that post I don't know where to start. Well, whenever I see the lie that the confederacy was anything other than treason for the sake of maintaining slavery, I keep this link handy: http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war...ar/
reasons.html
As you can see, the Confederate states themselves said it was about slavery... Until they lost so badly and looked utterly disgraceful in the face of the whole world that they evolved their reasoning into 'states rights'... years after the war.
It's true that slaves could have gained rights over the next hundred years. But tell that to the man who should have been born free in 1870 that his grandson might be free by 1970. Slavery is wrong. It couldn't go on a minute longer than necessary. Those who fought for it were wrong. Those who fought against it were heros. That's about all there was to it.
Further more, it's tough to predict a history that never happened, but the idea that the south would have prospered as the only backward, agrarian economy in the industrialized world is more than a little naive.
But lets get back to the matter than really burns me personally (I'm white). The confederacy was TREASON. They betrayed their brothers, after benefiting for the the northern created economy and political system for nearly a hundred years they turned and stabbed them in the back. As the article pointed out Davis (and Lee as well) were highly successful military men. They took and OATH to protect and defend the United States. They betrayed that oath and committed the lowest, most disreputable act in the history of America. Benedict Arnold was a better General than any of the Civil War era, North or South, and when he committed treason, he was hung and his name reviled. It sickens me that scum like Davis and Lee actually have monuments in the more backward places of this country.
Rogue,
In general, I agree with the gist of what you are saying.
But Benedict Arnold was never hanged.
When he feared that his treason would soon be discovered, he went over openly to the Crown, served as a general for the British until recalled to England, later ran a business in Canada, and eventually died of gout and heart failure in 1801.
What's also interesting about honoring men who betrayed their oaths, Fort Bragg, Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Benning, Fort Rucker, Fort Hood, and Fort Polk are all named after men who bore arms against the Constitution and against the United States -- and I think all of them had previously undertaken the most solemn oaths to defend the same.
Fort Macpherson in Atlanta on the other hand, is named after a young Major General of the United States, who was killed in battle there in 1864.
Gandalin, you say: "1) Whether or not being pro-slavery was a sin, the war was started when pro-slavery forces seized Federal arsenals attacked -- bombarded -- a military installation of the United States of America."
This is pure nitpicking. You are ignoring the huge and open political debates, especially in the US senate, that took place over many decades that led the Southern states to formulate and create the Confederate States of America. By the time they opened fire in preemptive strikes, because it was clear that the North would wage war to keep the Union intact since both sides knew that war would be inevitable given the North's UNYIELDING resistance to the break-up of the Union.
Who fires the first shots or which skirmishes take place are not the definitive reasons for any major conflagration. It is the underlying historical process that makes things inevitable. Put simply, the South wished to secede from the Union, and it can be fairly argued that given the power of (US) states' rights to determine their own internal affairs and deny the will of the central government, the block of united southern states that wished to no longer be part of the union, were within their rights to assert their political will to no longer be part of the Union.
You know, things change in life and in politics and certainly in history. The Torah allows for divorce between a man and his wife. All sorts of entities become independent from their former partnersips and unions that are dissolved one way or another. When within one country part of that country wishes to secede things become problematic and the matter is usually resolved by force of arms and not always do the "good guys" win. It is military power that then determines the outcome in a civil war. In some cases in history, the seceding region succeeds and becomes a nation. It can then even be called a war of independence, as when the 13 Colonies seceded from the British Crown, also an illegal act. Or when, recently for example, Eritria seceded from Ethiopia and won and dictated the terms of surrender for its former central power. Countries are formed and countries break up. That is the tale of history. The Confederacy is just another of a secession that failed, but it does not diminish the validity of its claims or of the brutality of the armies it confronted and the question if it was all worth losing over 500,000 Americans (multiply that by 50 or so in today's numbers) for this cause.
You say: "2)Lincoln did not have the "right" to defend the Constitution and the United States of America; he had the solemn and sworn legal obligation to do so."
Noone denies the legal basis for Lincoln's actions as far as the Union was concerned. But that misses the point that the Confedrate States of America no longer recognised Lincoln as their leader and had instead chosen a new president of their own, Jefferson Davis who was in turn sworn to protect and defend his nation.
You say: "3)You think that allowing the southern states to secede would have led to peace. That is you opinion. In my opinion, had the southern states seceded the subsequent history of the continent would have been 150 years of incessant wars, slave revolts, death camps, invasions from European powers, and a world in which American power was not available to defeat National Socialism, Japanese imperialism, communism, or (G-d willing) the Jihad."
Well, don't get ahead of yourself too much. Since "death camps" and "invasions from European powers" sounds like you are fighting ghosts. Take it closer to the time. If the Union would have simply accepted that the Confederate States of America had as much of a historical right to its independence and existenese as any new nation and made it clear that it did not view it as the end of the world and seen it as the culmination of the political debates in congress where the southern congressmen and senators had amply made their case in a civil and legal manner, and perhaps had they been respected, there would have been no need for them to break away, but once having declared their total independence from the Union and been LEFT ALONE and everyone allowed to go home and spend time with families and pursue peace and not war plans, then there would not have been a war that saw the death of over 500,000 Americans, millions wounded and the destruction of about half the country at that time. Then there could have been harmonious relations between the brotherly states instead of the war atmosphere.
With all the anti-slavery rhetoric, and please note, most Northerners had little contact with Negros while Southerners lived cheek-by-jowl with them on the plantations and in towns, the mood swung to hostility and conflict based on regional and cultural differnces between Northerners and Southerners.
But once the politicians on both sides got over-heated then the people were not far behind. The North could have made things simpler by making it very clear that they respected the right of the South to secede given the history of the United States that seceded from the British when the time came. Then the war could have been avoided or stopped and those 500,000 people would have been spared. BOTH the Union and the Confederacy could easily have concentrated on nation building.
Ticking below the surfae were a number of unanswered broader historical and economic questions. There was still the question of who would own the western regions of the North American continent. And seen from purely economic terms it is obvious to see that by the mid 1800s the northeren and southern business centers had their sights set on western acquisitions, and perhaps even more into South America, so that business leaders of the North had much to gain by crushing and humiliating the South and vice versa, instead of peacefull economic competition.
And then all the difficulties of Reconstruction, the rise of the KKK and the worst of it, the establsihemnt of official racial segregation would not have seen the light of day. The Confederacy would still have had to face political and international pressure to change its ways, but war should have been and could have avoided and certainlly ended sooner and under better circumstances for all concerned.
In the first years of war Lincoln was annoyed that his armies were not marching quickly and forcefully enough. He wanted to see victories at any cost. He could have sued for peace if he was such a great statesmen, he was after all not up against strangers but against his own kith and kin. Cain killing Abel en masse! Instead, he had the first Union generals fired and once he had his type of bloodthirsty generals in place in the form of Grant and Sherma, there would be no looking back for the scorched earth rollercoaster from the North, even though it was PURE FRATRICIDE.
In our day and age, the absolute Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is totally undemocratic and practices near-slavery. It has a cruel Sharia-based legal system that relies on plentiful public decapitations. They rob the world via their oil, but so far noone has invaded them. Saddam Hussein crossed the line, and invaded his neighbors and threatened Saudi Arabia, so the US, under Republican President G.H.W. Bush expelled Iraq from Kuwait and invaded Iraq. But even George H.W. Bush was willing to give Saddam Hussein a second chance and he stopped the first Iraq war.
Thus wars can be launched, they can be negotiated to end, or they can be fought to the death for unconditional surrender. It is truly hard to respect Lincoln for his brutality to his own southern neighbors that not even FDR showed to the accursed German Nazis. if anything, Lincolkn come sof looking like the Pol Pot of his day, but people have been brainwahsed into viewing him as "Saint Lincoln" the "innocent" victim of a cruel assassin's bullet, when many hold that he got what was coming to him because the one who lives by the sword dies by the sword.
Zeitgeist,
I am never going to convince you, so I will stop wasting my time.
But your closing notion that George H W Bush did the right thing by giving Saddam Hussein the opportunity to continue murdering his own people for another decade shows that your head is so far up your arse that it would take an orthopedic surgeon and not just a colorectal surgeon to remove it.
Good Shabbos!
Gandalin, I would enjoy debating you more, and I am convincable believe it or not, but once your revert to profanities and obscenities it tells me you have lost and can no longer think.
Zeitgeist,
Perhaps the image was obscene, but the language was not profane. Just a vivid anatomical description.
I apologize for resorting to it, however.
Will you forgive me?
I would like to continue this discussion, but I think we would have to break it down in pieces, and examine each piece, one at a time, rather than reaching out all over the rhetorical, historical, and epistemological world(s) all at once.
This thread is not the place to do it.
Do you have your own blog? Or should we set up a blog to discuss the Civil War/War Between the States from Two Jews' perspectives?
you can have this blog and talk all you want because I am tired of this.
Tzemach,
Thank you for the kind offer. It's just tedious to scroll down to find the original post, and then through the comments to continue. In its own place, it would be simpler. The reshimu format would be better for this sort of thing. It was possible to have many different discussions going on very conveniently there. I'm sorry it didn't take off.
whats with the gandalin blog? you used to have it.
Gandalin, this blog is just fine, no need to reinevent the wheel. An certainly no need to create a whole new blog and I do not have that much time to devote to the Civil War only, I usually work on mostly Judaic topics here and at a few others places online.
Tzemach doesn't mind, and he allows us to do it. Let him be the referee of the whole show as he has been till now and offer some insights as he chooses.
What clear-cut issue would you like to debate first? Personally, one personality I am constantly fascinated by is the elusive and mysterious Judah P. Benjamin from what I have read about him, and not just on Wikipedia. But because in our times Wikipedia has become the encyclopedia to which all readers with Internet access can refer, the article about Judah P. Benjamin at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Jud...dah_P._Benjamin is a good a place as any to start. Would you care to read it and offer your criticisms of it. It is a very short article in any case. You may even wish to edit it and see if some editors there will respond. let me know what you think of the article and its contents after you read it and I will respond in kind. That is agood a place as any to start. We needn't be obliged to follow only one track because the Civil War between the Union and the Confedracy, the factors that led up to it and its consequnces, is a vast and complicated historical topic.
The reason I choose Judah P. Benjamin is that if any man is regarded as "the brains of the Confederacy" it was him.
This is Wikipedia's opening description of him and it speaks volumes:
"Judah Philip Benjamin (August 6, 1811 – May 6, 1884) was an American politician and lawyer. He was born a British subject in the West Indies, became a citizen of the United States and then the Confederate States of America. After the collapse of the Confederacy, he settled in England and died in France.
Benjamin held the following posts:
Member of the Louisiana House of Representatives;
U.S. Senator from Louisiana; and
Three successive Cabinet posts in the government of the Confederate States of America
He was also a distinguished barrister and Queen's Counsel in the United Kingdom. He was the first Jewish Cabinet-member in a North American government, and the first Jewish nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court (he declined the position). He was the second Jewish U.S. Senator (after David Levy Yulee of Florida)..."
Photo (fee image) from Wikipedia. The Original Confedrate Cabinet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Ima...rateCabinet.jpg
The original Confederate Cabinet. L-R: Judah P. Benjamin, Stephen Mallory, Christopher Memminger, Alexander Stephens, LeRoy Pope Walker, Jefferson Davis, John H. Reagan and Robert Toombs.
(Description: The cabinet of the Confederate States at Montgomery / from photographs by Whitehurst, of Washington, and Hinton, of Montgomery, Alabama. Group portrait of the Confederate cabinet including President Jefferson Davis, Vice President Alexander Hamilton Stephens, Attorney General Judah P. Benjamin, Secretary of the Navy Stephen M. Mallory, Secretary of the Treasury C. G. Memminger, Secretary of War Leroy Pope Walker, Postmaster John H. Reagan, and Secretary of State Robert Toombs, seated and standing around table.)
Question: How "bad" or "evil" could the Confedarte cause have been if a man of the stature of Judah P. Benjamin served selflessly for the cause of the South, like almost all the Jews who lived in the South at that time (and many were of Sephardic ancestry, like Benjamin.)
Zeitgeist,
Not all of the Southern Jews supported the South. A man considered one of the most gifted military officers in America, a native of North Carolina who had served as an instructor while still a student at West Point, Alfred Mordecai, sat out the war in Philadelphia, from where his wife's family came, and did not serve with either side.
Moreover, the fact that Judah Benjamin was a talented and accomplished man does not bear on the question as to whether any State had the legal right to secede from the Union, nor on the question as to the motives which impelled that secession. Benjamin's event-filled and colorful life is not really an item of contention here.
Here are a few questions to discuss:
1) Is the chattel slavery of antebellum America philosophically, morally, and legally equivalent to the forms of slavery and indentured servitude described in Tanakh? How do they compare?
2) Wasn't the issue of slavery the real reason for secession and War?
3) Did the United States have the Constitutional authority to compel the obedience of the secessionist States?
We can get into some of the other questions, but they are speculative. We will never answer the "what if" sort of questions.
Thoughts?
HI Gndakin, we can do it your way since you seem to avoid my analysis.
I am going to surprise you by giving "yes," "no," and "maybe" answers to the three questions you pose here. I will then add further comments to each.
"1) Is the chattel slavery of antebellum America philosophically, morally, and legally equivalent to the forms of slavery and indentured servitude described in Tanakh? How do they compare?"
Yes. While in the Tanach there are different grades of slavery. But clarify why you have thrown in the word "chattel" here when you havn't used it vefore -- what other kinds are their from your point of view?
2) Wasn't the issue of slavery the real reason for secession and War?
No. Because the Northerners did not care about the Negros really, it was the CULMINATION of a historical divergence, industrial versus agrarian, a clash of Northern versus Southern (or Southern versus Northern, as you please) regional economic and political interest groups and powers.
3) Did the United States have the Constitutional authority to compel the obedience of the secessionist States?
Yes. From the point of view of the US. But once the Confederacy was established it was no different to the 13 Colonies that declared their independence from the British Crown and therefore, in likewise fashion, Great Britain had "the Constitutional authority to compel the obedience of the secessionist (United) States."
Zeitgeist,
Thanks for keeping your responses short and to the point. I think this is better than trading manifestoes.
1) There are several types of "slavery" described in Tanakh, which range from the condition of an indentured Jewish servant to the condition of a survivor of one of the Canaanite cities. In every case, however, I think, slavery is in the Tanakh described and defined as a sub-set of human-human social relations.
"Chattel slavery" in the United States, on the other hand, was based on the notion that the slave was an item of property like any other, and that slaves had no more rights than a beast of burden. (In fact, in the English courts, a ship captain who threw living slaves overboard because he was running low on supplies was sued for the destruction of consigned property, not for manslaughter.)
I think therefore that chattel slavery in the United States was in fact different than the slavery described in the Tanakh, and the existence of laws in the Tanakh to regulate "slavery" can not be used to justify the American institution, nor to claim that even the types of slavery described in the Tanakh were considered desirable and immutable.
2)If you read the history of the decades-long controversies between the North and the South, it all comes down to the issue of spreading slavery to the territories. As I noted in a previous comment, the seceding States' own plenipotentiaries were absolutely explicit in explaining to other Southern States that it was the slavery issue, and the prospect of legal and social equality with the Negro, that compelled their governments to secede from the Union. All the rest is just window dressing.
(Of course, large parts of the white Southern population opposed secession, too. David Williams, who teaches at Valdosta State, in south Georgia, has recently published "Bitterly Divided," which describes Southern opposition to the secessionist movement. He demonstrates that majority opinion was actually against secession, that secessionists avoided plebiscites on the issue, 300,000 Southern whites and 200,00 Southern blacks served in the armies of the United States. See his interview, here:http://www.ajc.com/search/content/living/
stories/2008/08/24/south_confederacy_civil.html
3) I think you are right about the Revolutionary War. And the men who signed the Declaration of Independence were in no doubt that they would have been hanged as traitors had the war been lost. The arguments for the Revolution, and for secession, have always reminded me of Satan's speech in Milton's "Paradise Lost," where he describes the establishment by the fallen angels of an independent commonwealth.
However, the cause of the Colonies was just, and the cause of the South was unjust.
That matters, too.
Here's a postscript. I don't think the illegitimacy or legitimacy of the secessionist State governments depends at all on their establishment of a new Confederacy. The States did not secede from the United States as a Confederacy, but as individual States. They maintained, and their supporters today maintain, that they had the right as individual States to secede from the Union. (In a previous controversy, when hotheads in Massachusetts threatened to secede, the Southern States were in no doubt at all that such secession was treason.) The acceptance by the seceded States of a Confederacy does not affect their legal standing vis a vis the Constitution and the government of the United States.
Trying to stay focused here and not get blind-sided by your pre-conconceived beliefs.
In response:
To (1) you're right that the Tanach has grades of slavery, but your description of the nature chattel slavery is also part of the Tanach's (and it's not "the Tanach's slavery" it is slavery according to Judaism, and nothing to be ashamed of, even though Judaism has not practiced it en masse since the destruction of the Second Temple and the end of sovereignty of Judea 2,000 years ago.) In Judaism, and more specifically in the Talmud when it is brought up, slavery is a cold economic measure of labor by someone who is or has become a slave based on his and her worth and strengths. So it is futile to create a romanticized and sanitized intellectual and emotional barrier between the South's slavery and that of Judaism's. At the end of the day, slavery is slavery, and it's not what people imagine it to be today as only being a cruel heartless system because it was not that at all over-all, just a system of measuring, purchasing, controlling and utilizing human labor from time immemorial.
To (2) you are missing my point. It is not to slavery as a narrow term that one must look. It is perhaps to slavery is a SYMBOL of and entire economic, social and cultural system that goes way beyond the purchasing and keeping of slaves as such. There is the cotton-picking and tobacco-growing industry. Animal farming. The growing and harvesting of fruits and vegetables and all types of farming and huge plantations to man and run that the South relied on and from which many parts of America and the world derived great benefit. When they used the word "slavery" it was as the symbol of something far broader and not just of this or that law and situation of Negro's in enslaved. Slavery could not be stopped overnight, it must be a process to be discraded in favor of a higher order economic system (that often mimics slavery in everything but name). And as you see, even after the Civil War, the South fell into a system of segregation of Blacks and Whites to keep Blacks in lower earning economic status doiung the same work in the South and from which they have still not emerged culturally and they never will based on the nature of the African peoples who are connected to agriculture more than they are to industry and science.
To (3) the Southerners were not "fallen angels" or failed men. They were up-front solid people who stood up for a political and economic ideal and fought hard for it in war that was thrust on them given the North's unyielding adn non-compromising attitude. They were defeated fair and square on the battle fields, but that does not diminish or negate their cause or disprove their positions on anything.
Your post-script makes no sense. Regardless of how the Southern states came to create their combined method government, it does not diminish from the fact and reality that they created and organized a type of union of their own choosing a confederate type of unification, not uncommon in history, and in turn called themselves the Confederate States of America. A kosher name for a kosher political idea.
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