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Coming to grips with the American Civil War

• akozak 5y ago
  Feels like a story half-told without looking past the war to the failure of reconstruction policy post-Lincoln.
  • binarynate 5y ago
    That's a good point. I look forward to learning more about reconstruction, which will be the next stop on my reading journey. Like the civil war, I remember very little of the details of reconstruction that were covered in school.
    • zozbot234 5y ago
      One could easily argue that true reconstruction was not really tried in the Democrat-dominated South until well after the 20th-c. Civil Rights Era. It was only with radical Republicans' reform efforts culminating in the 1980s that the formerly backward, socially archaic "South" was turned into the free-wheeling and economically successful 'Sunbelt' of the present day. This is often overlooked by many political commentators who look at the otherwise unexplained, sudden popularity of Republicanism in the Sunbelt, and make up weird theories such as "the parties must have switched", or something. The reality is of course far subtler and more interesting than that!
    • bradneuberg 5y ago
      I highly recommend Eric Foners book The Second Founding on the Reconstruction period.
  • mhink 5y ago
    Well, for what it's worth, "Battle Cry of Freedom" is only the sixth volume in the Oxford History of the United States. The following volume, "The Republic for Which It Stands" by Richard White, covers the 30-year period following the war.
  • dylan604 5y ago
    It's not like it was different from pretty much any modern post-war fuckups. Exit strategies never make it past any paper they were ever written. It's not like after hostilities the feelings, beliefs, etc of people on either side have suddenly changed. In fact, I would venture a guess that they feel even stronger. This is why I feel like the people were told to wipe out every man, woman, and child in stories from biblical times. If you're going to do it, do it. Otherwise, people are left with sentiments that will fester and eventually boil over again. However, even in the biblical stories, that doesn't happen, and the two sides are bitter ever since. Regardless, the only winning move (to any war) is not to play.
    • lacker 5y ago
      Otherwise, people are left with sentiments that will fester and eventually boil over again. This does seem to very often be the pattern, which makes it pretty surprising to me in retrospect how smoothly Germany and Japan have adapted to the post-World-War-2 international order. They aren't completely nonexistent, but German Nazi groups and Japanese imperialist groups certainly have not dominated the post-war political scene, and democracy seems pretty firmly entrenched in both those countries. So, perhaps you don't need to wipe out every man, woman, and child a la Deuteronomy, and there is some sort of post-war intervention that can be successful in creating a lasting peace. I don't have a much stronger conclusion than "sometimes it is possible", though.
      • dylan604 5y ago
        Don't forget about time. Those small groups become larger groups with time. WWII hasn't been that long ago relatively speaking. Since the Civil War, it seems, there has been enough time for certain ideas to have grown to a large enough numbers of people that we are where we are today. This is sounding dangerously close to me supporting wiping out entire swaths of people, which I'm absolutely not. It's understanding the reasonings for those that do isn't so illogical. It just doesn't sit well with anyone that feels differently.
      • krapp 5y ago
        >Germany and Japan have adapted to the post-World-War-2 international order. They aren't completely nonexistent, but German Nazi groups and Japanese imperialist groups certainly have not dominated the post-war political scene, and democracy seems pretty firmly entrenched in both those countries. Germany and Japan no longer romanticize and idolize revolutionary violence and nationalism, whereas the US very much still does in the mythology that its built around gun culture and the Founding Fathers - in no small part because the US suffered relatively little for its part in World War 2, and never actually learned the lessons the rest of the world did.
  • bradford 5y ago
    Totally agree. I'm convinced that the failure of reconstruction explains the current state of US politics, perhaps better than an analysis of the civil war itself. The author mentions that: "Southerners adopted beliefs that justified slavery as a moral good, such as the view that slavery benefited slaves because it offered them a better life than they would otherwise have as freed people." The law was changed, but this belief was still held by the defeated southerner ruling class, who began using weasel tactics as a method of enforcement (example: Jim Crowe). These tactics were initially fought by federal power, but the political will to carry on this fight faded over time. I fret to think of the US that could have been, had this fight been given the attention it deserved.
• greenie_beans 5y ago
  Nice summary! Next read ‘Forever Free’ by Eric Foner to learn about Reconstruction. Those two books should be required reading in American high school history classes.
  • binarynate 5y ago
    Thank you! I'll take you up on that recommendation. "Battle Cry of Freedom" ends abruptly at the close of the war, and I was just thinking last night that the next book I read should be on reconstruction.
    • throwawayciv651 5y ago
      In addition to that, "Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality" by Richard Kluger is a really good read.
  • sixstringtheory 5y ago
    Adding this to my list as well, interested to read some of Foner’s work. I already had Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 by W.E.B. Du Bois on my to-read list, if anyone has read either/both I’d be interested to hear a comparison.
  • dangerlibrary 5y ago
    Follow it up with "The Color of Law" by Richard Rothstein to understand how the decisions made during Reconstruction impacted the 20th and 21st centuries.
• brightstep 5y ago
  One nuance this summary misses is that there was a serious hesitancy among Northern politicians to seriously address the slavery issue. While many believed it was abominable, they didn't step up to stop it because it would shake up the status quo which by and large benefited them.
  • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    True, the status quo benefited them. But also, when the status quo did get shaken up, it resulted in half a million dead. A leader with any foresight would hesitate to open that particular Pandora's Box.
    • brightstep 5y ago
      That's true, and there may have been fewer casualties if such a leader had stepped up sooner
      • kaesar14 5y ago
        Correct, and don't discount the generations of men and women born into bondage because of the inability of northern leaders to step up sooner. It's a little insulting to suggest the half million soldiers dead are the cost of the Civil War, when it's also the millions who suffered from the existence of the institution of slavery.
      • mywittyname 5y ago
        Or the USA would cease to exist. The fact that this issue needed to be settled by a brutal war puts into perspective just how difficult of a problem this was to solve. If this issue was tackled earlier, it's very possible that the country would have split into two factions, which would then compete with one another during westward expansion, triggering a conflict that would turn out to be much more devastating.
    • pdonis 5y ago
      The most interesting case to compare with in this regard is Britain, which freed its slaves with essentially zero cost in lives--by paying off the slave owners. I'm not sure that could ever have been on the table in the US given the position abolitionists took, but it's interesting to wonder how things might have gone if it had been.
• mikestew 5y ago
  cities like Indianapolis and the ability for all Hoosiers to live freely without the fear of what lies on the other side of the Ohio River. Whoo, boy, someone needs to go read about Indianapolis and its relation to the Ku Klux Klan. What a black person needed to fear up until at least the 1980s was firmly north of the Ohio river (the Indiana side). Need gas? Stop somewhere other than Martinsville (to the south) or Elwood (to the north). I grew up in Indiana, and it was no bastion of civil rights. In fact, one of the motivating factors to moving the hell out of there was when the county prosecutor for Indianapolis' county said that a car full of black young men was probable cause for a traffic stop (Stephen Goldsmith, circa 1990 or so). The day after our wedding in the early 90s, it took a little longer to get out of Indianapolis for our honeymoon because there was a KKK rally downtown clogging up the works. (Granted, it was probably half dozen pathetic old men in Halloween costumes, but still...) So let's not glamorize Indiana as this safe haven for black folks. Maybe it is now, 25 years after we moved (EDIT: ya know, my classmates still live there, so no, it probably isn't), but within my lifetime it has been anything but.
  • dexwiz 5y ago
    Born in Indiana, and at one point something like 40% of adult men belonged to the Klan (in the 20s-30s). The state government was controlled by the Klan. In rural areas, the Klan is still very active. Indianapolis has a large Black population, but suffers oppression via systematic racist to this day.
  • binarynate 5y ago
    Thanks for your perspective on this. I sometimes see mentions of the KKK's presence in Indianapolis (what comes to mind is the city government in the 1920's), but I haven't yet pulled on that thread to learn more like I should. I especially didn't know about the continuing issues into the 80s and 90s. It sounds like there's much more to the picture that I should learn about.
  • mbg721 5y ago
    Many residents of northern states despised the black population that they absorbed after the Civil War ended. It was essentially an economic refugee crisis for the working class there. The Cincinnati area was full of what amounted to German-Catholic draft-dodgers (from the 1848 wars) who helped slaves across the Ohio River because they were just as marginalized and figured they had nothing to lose by doing what their religion demanded.
• daenz 5y ago
  I've seen people make the argument that the Constitution is inherently corrupted because it was written by white slave owners, and that it doesn't represent all people because there was a time when it didn't represent all people (slaves). It's obviously horrible that slavery happened, but what would add insult to injury would be to throw out a brilliant set of ideas because the flawed human founders didn't follow them in totality.
  • rayiner 5y ago
    Attacking the Framers for their hypocrisy this is really backwards when you think about it. Slavery is one of the oldest institutions in human society. The Bible and Quran also describe slavery without condemning it as fundamentally evil. Opposition to being an enslaved group was, of course, universal, but that didn't necessarily give rise to an opposition to slavery as a practice. The Old Testament describes God punishing Egypt for enslaving the Jews, but doesn't condemn the practice subsequently. What's notable about European Christians, including the Founders, isn't that they practiced slavery, but that they recognized that it was categorically evil (not just evil in particular applications). The Founders laid the intellectual and legal framework for eliminating slavery in America, and ultimately world-wide, through American influence. For example, I'm not sure the Muslim world would have eliminate slavery even by today without Western pressure: https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/international/world-cup-2022-qatar-s-workers-slaves-building-mausoleums-stadiums-modern-slavery-kafala-a7980816.html https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/international/w.... Criticizing the "hypocrites" who only took the first steps towards dismantling an institution that they inherited from antiquity is odd.
    • syki 5y ago
      Do you have evidence that all of the founders thought slavery was categorically evil? I doubt this very much but could be wrong. Apparently they thought forming a more cohesive federal system was more important than abolishing slavery. As to what you wrote about the Quran and the Bible. From my perspective that provides convincing evidence that the supreme entity described in those books does not provide a reasonable example of “good”.
• seneca 5y ago
  Having spent significant time in the South, but not being from there, I have conflicting feelings about the civil war. The divide that existed then is a permutation of what bitterly divides the US now. People outside the South seem to despise southern people and their values more than ever, and the south is no closer to sharing their values. I often wonder if we would have been better off fighting the war to free existing slaves, embargoing further slave trade, and just leaving the Confederacy alone as its own country. (With apologies for responding more to the theme than to the article itself, which is a nice summary.)
  • kaesar14 5y ago
    What notion of the Confederacy exists outside of the institution of Slavery? It's so core to the DNA of the founding of the Confederacy that it almost seems nonsensical to suggest waging a war to free existing slaves, when that would've led to the same outcome of the total dissolution of the Confederacy.
    • seneca 5y ago
      Yes, perhaps so. I suppose what I mean to say is that it seems misguided, in hindsight, to treat preserving the Union as some ultimate good. 150 years later, and all we have is two groups that seem to bitterly hate each other still and a dysfunctional government incapable of reconciling the two different value systems. The Confederacy may well have dissolved, as you said, but the rest of the Union would be left a whole lot more coherent and ideologically unified. To wildly over simplify it, it strikes me as a bit like going to extraordinary lengths to save a marriage to a spouse you hate.
      • cmh89 5y ago
        The "split" isn't north vs south though, nor is it based on slavery or the Mason-Dixon line. Our government is dysfunctional because the main structure of government was created before the industrial revolution. The writers of the constitution couldn't envision just how little of the population would be engaged in an agrarian lifestyle. The US government is broken because all three branches are, at least some of the time, minority rule. The actual split in America is largely those areas that are economically advanced and those that are not. Places that support conservative candidates tend to be poor, mostly uneducated, and religious while the opposite is true for liberal candidates. Voters in Atlanta have more in common with New York City than they do voters in Lumber City. I'll also point out that there isn't much hate for rural people in the cities. You have at best indifference. The hate is very much one sided.
• rayiner 5y ago
  Great analysis, and also, contrary to popular belief, reflects what I learned in history class in school in my red state in the 1990s.
  • binarynate 5y ago
    Thank you!
• Biologist123 5y ago
  A question: in Britain slave-owners were compensated by the state when slavery was abolished. Many think slavery would not have ended without this, as egregious as it seems. Whilst it was expensive - the tax payer has only in the last 10 years paid down the debt - it arguably averted violence through the transition. May I ask anyone more knowledgeable than myself why this approach - ie payment of compensation - was not considered in the US at the time?
  • netizen-936824 5y ago
    • cafard 5y ago
      I doubt that Lincoln regarded it as morally satisfactory. But considering the human and financial costs of the war, he thought it a good idea.
    • CapitalistCartr 5y ago
      Three-quarters of a million people died to do it our way. I still can't stomach the idea of paying.
      • stirfish 5y ago
        As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.
    • s1artibartfast 5y ago
      Consider that the alternative also included conscripting men to fight and die for the cause, and that runaway soldiers could be shot
  • cafard 5y ago
    There are several letters from Lincoln on the subject, calculating the cost of compensated emancipation v. the cost of one day or one month of the war. My recollection is that he couldn't get the border-state legislatures to go for it.
• Aidevah 5y ago
  One important aspect about the war was the sheer disparity in both manpower and industry between the two sides: 21 million in the union vs 9 million in the confederate, 3.5 million (!) of which are slaves. It really is a wonder that the CSA held out for so long. Christopher Caldwell mentioned that the war somewhat resembles the British Empire crushing a colonial subject in this regard.
  • digisign 5y ago
    It takes quite a while to mobilize an army across a continent on horse and wagon. Not to mention several of the Union generals were incompetent and had to be removed after they failed to deliver.
  • cafard 5y ago
    The CSA had the military advantage of operating almost always on its own territory. This had considerable benefits in intelligence-gathering. It also had advantages in shorter supply lines, until the Federal troops got over inhibitions about taking whatever was lying around.
• deeg 5y ago
  That's a decent summary of the role of slavery in the war and I would only nitpick a few things. That said, it sounds like the author might have come to those (correct) conclusions by reading a single book. This can be dangerous and I would caution everyone to read a couple of books on contentious topics just to make sure they're getting a rounded view. (And that introduces the danger of both-sides-ism, which is its own problem. It ain't always easy.)
• mixmastamyk 5y ago
  I’ve wondered recently if the US civil war really needed to happen and if the states and world would be better off if it hadn’t. We are taught it was necessary as kids but after learning more I’m not so sure. First, slavery was abolished by the late 1800s across the Americas and elsewhere. It was going to happen regardless. Brasil was by far the largest slave state, a fact few US folks realize. Other countries didn’t need a war to end it. Then there’s the death toll. Next, too much concentration of power after WWII leading to today’s war machine looking around for things to do. The US was founded on a Union, but a Union you can’t leave is really a prison. Today’s polarization is also supported by having a larger country with different views pulling in different directions. Smaller countries seem to get in less trouble.
  • Clubber 5y ago
    >I’ve wondered recently if the US civil war really needed to happen and if the states and world would be better off if it hadn’t. We are taught so as kids but learning more I’m not so sure. It certainly would have been better if it didn't happen, 720K lives and countless fortunes and the decimation of 1/2 the land mass. Reconstruction was pretty horrible for ex-slaves as well. Of course slaves suffer being slaves for longer if there was no war. No one would ever know how long it would have taken to end slavery without the war, but I doubt it would exist today if things had continued without it. >Today’s polarization is also supported by having a larger country with different views pulling in different directions. I'm convinced today's polarization is a lot of theatre intended to divide. I analog it to crowds cheering different WWE wrestlers during the match, only to have the wrestlers have a beer together after the show.
    • digisign 5y ago
      > I'm convinced today's polarization is a lot of theatre intended to divide Media definitely contributes, however this was an argument noted during the writing of the Declaration of Independence. It is real.
• jimmyvalmer 5y ago
  My reading of McPherson suggested Lee's victories during the Seven Days Battles led to Lincoln's resolve to free the slaves. Up until that point, the North was hoping to quickly force the South into submission with their institutions largely intact. But Lee's unexpected success raised the stakes into an all-or-nothing ragnarok in which the South, along with slavery, had to be annihilated.
• Atlas667 5y ago
  A materialist take on this is also that advances in technology made slavery a useless institution towards maximizing the interests of capitalists and that permitted its withering away. Slavery was a market for people in themselves, but the proletariat is a market for their labor power. Labor power is superfluous in form. This change in institutions brought about by the possibilities of technological advancements kept the rates of profit up and made slavery null in advanced countries. Similar to serfdom.
• bknight1983 5y ago
  Highly recommend reading “Confederates in the Attic” by Tony Horwitz. It gave a better view of the South’s psyche around the Civil War