> The U.S. position meant that many slave ships from other countries falsely flew the American flag to avoid being seized by British anti-slaving patrols. ... The Atlantic slave trade was not ended until the U.S. Civil War, when American-built and -managed ships were prevented from operating.
It's OT, but one of the more insane coincidences I've come across in my life is that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day: July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
The Confederacy was never going to win outright, and they knew it. Their goal was to force a stalemate, allowing them to continue to exist as a separate country from the United States.
edit: and for the first few years, it looked like they might be able to do that.
The US war of independence is considered won, and the US didn't conquer England. I'm sure I have all sorts of wrong headed bias, but I never thought the Confederacy had any larger goal than independence? Why would it be a stalemate and not a victory for them if they were allowed to exist as a separate country?
I think it would have to be a military stalemate, and then a negotiated victory.
But it would be a very silly thing for the Union to give up, having a hostile country so close would be a recipe for disaster. It doesn’t seem like a real stalemate would be possible, in the sense that the North’s economy was so much bigger. Stalemate today? Keep building factories, keep up the blockade, check again tomorrow.
>allowing them to continue to exist as a separate country from the United States.
This inadvertently makes a point I like to make when discussing the US Civil War with those unfamiliar with it. The US didn't really have a civil war. It split into two separate countries and then had a regular war, where one country conquered the other.
I assume one that doesn’t involve breaking up to create a new country. Plenty of wars like that, like the English civil wars between different political factions[0].
But I’m still going to call it the US civil war. It’s what it’s called, even if it might not the fit the traditional definition.
I think the best example of a "true" civil war is probably the Chinese Civil War. I say that because it was fought across the entire geography, for a long time, where the belligerents were never sure who was friend and who was foe. The US civil war, relatively speaking, is pretty boring. When it started, everyone was already on "their" side of the line. So you didn't have kidnappings, murders, other horror show stuff that's common in civil wars throughout history.
In some ways, I think it continues to exist as a separate country within the United States. Every demographic map you look at, political, health, education etc. you can see it. And whenever I have visited some of those states, it almost feels like another country. They even speak a different language, or at times sounds like it.
The outcomes are primarily due to race, not the contours of the Confederacy. Nearly all of these “red state demographic maps” are isomorphic to the percentage of African Americans within a given state/county/city.
Right, and you know how when you visit another country, how the racial make up of that other country is often different. So, that sort of is the point I was making, it's like another country with in the U.S.
If you like alt history, Turtledove does this in one of his 4 or 5 "alternate Civil War" stories. Not the one with the time-traveling Appartheidists, nor the fantasy version where the slaves are all magic-less blond people. The other one. Well, one of the other ones.
In it, Lee manages a string of early victories, gets within striking distance of DC before Lincoln can flee, and takes it. The US capitulates. It's not a 1-in-a-billion thing, but it certainly does read like a 1-in-5,000 thing.
The industrial base was in the Northeast mostly, IIRC. NYC alone appears to have had a population around 1/4 of the entire Confederacy’s non-enslaved population. Quite a few guns were made in Springfield, MA. Capturing DC would just be the start of things.
Well DC is where the people leading the war effort were, so it had the potential to be very disruptive / demoralizing. Is the Union going to pause their war effort in order to elect a new set of representatives and a new president?
I don't know though. Maybe there was a plan to evacuate the capital which would've worked if push came to shove.
More specifically, if it demoralizes the leadership (Lincoln, and Congress), then they could surrender. Any Union generals still fighting after that are war criminals and the Union's leadership is obligated to stop them and put them on trial.
Or leadership could remain defiant, and they're little more than hostages. Disruptive to the war effort, but hardly the end of things.
The very notion of a "war crime" only arrived in the 20thC. More generally (as Wikipedia notes) the act amounts to perfidy, which isn't a crime anywhere I know about.
I don't know the etymology of the term, but claiming that the idea itself didn't exist until the 20th is absurd. I see no point in arguing with you anymore.
So that you can feel better, you're 100% absolutely right, and you won this argument with me and all future arguments because of your plainly superior intellect and bright, friendly personality. Game over. Goodbye.
> Didn't Lee get within striking distance of DC in real life?
Yes, twice, after the first and second battles of Bull Run.
There was also a cavalry raid by Early that crossed the Potomac upstream from DC and came down towards it from the northwest. Probably not a true threat to DC since Early didn't have enough troops, but it certainly threw a scare into the people there.
You have to define "win" here a little better. Especially in a war.
Win as in conquer the rest of the US? lol, no. That wasn't going to happen. The industrial base just wasn't there.
Win as in make it so costly to re-take the South that the rest of the US doesn't want to devote the resources? That was probably possible at certain points in the war.
The North was stronger on paper, but the South had better generals. A number of initial battles happened fairly close to Washington DC (remember DC is directly adjacent to Virginia, and Virginia was a Confederate state!), so things were touch-and-go early on. Furthermore, at the time of the split, there were still lots of officials in the US federal government who were sympathetic to the cause of the South. I don't believe the Confederacy had to worry as much about the loyalties of its officials. In any case, even after the immediate threat to DC was addressed, the Union wasn't making a lot of progress during the first years of the war, and there were a lot of people in the North who wanted to give up and let the Confederacy exist as an independent country.
The North's eventual win came at very high cost. In my opinion, we should memorialize Union soldiers more than we do. There was so much discussion of Confederate monuments the other year, but no one ever mentions the many Union monuments across the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Union_Civil_War_monume... A lot of people paid the ultimate price, fighting for the promise that "history will remember you for helping to end slavery!", and yet we don't remember them that much. It actually makes me rather upset to be honest.
Which Confederate General was actually better? The only decent one would be Lee.
No idea where this idea comes from, the idea that the loosing side in a war had better Generals. For the Wehrmacht it's the same. People tend to forget thatbthise Generals lost their battles, and the war, at the end.
No, I am saying that there os a narrative around Generals of the loosing side being "better" than those on the winning side. Which, more often than not, is just plain wrong.
Lee had a habit of couching orders as if they were suggestions or requests. The South's most effective general may have been Jackson. For the first half of the war, the Union's top general in the east was McClellan, who was useless.
[Edit] McClellan didn't fight in the west. And I spelled his name wrong.
[Edit 2] Lee overruled Longstreet, who wanted to flank the Union's right. Lee insisted on a frontal assault. That decision led directly to Picket's disastrous charge.
I don't understand why some generals are so averse to flanking actions. Is it because they are somehow considered cowardly, or "just not cricket"? Flanking actions are often decisive, and sometimes even the threat of a flanking action can critically disrupt enemy operations.
Not just McClellan, but also McDowell, Pope, Burnside, Hooker...all failures. (Meade at least gets credit for holding back the Confederacy at Gettysburg, but even there he failed to follow up the victory by pursuing Lee's army, instead allowing it to escape back across the Potomac.)
I suspect the losing side often ends up with “better looking” generals because they end up fighting defensively. If you lose long enough you end up in familiar terrain, with a sympathetic populace, and your supply lines get shorter!
Eventually the war gets truly hopeless. Without any feasible objectives to go for, the loser has incredible latitude to try and stay alive and inflict harm. Never any need to take a tactically disadvantageous battle for strategic reasons if there’s no strategic hope, after all!
> Which Confederate General was actually better? The only decent one would be Lee.
Not at all. Longstreet, Jackson, Forrest, Stuart, Early (and that's just off the top of my head)...all of them routinely outperformed their Union counterparts in individual battles and smaller engagements for the first couple of years of the war. Until Grant came into his own and was able to properly empower others like Sherman and Sheridan, the Union didn't really have any competent generals (although Meade does deserve recognition for holding the line at Gettysburg).
The reason the Union still won was, first, logistics--as the saying goes, battles can be won by generalship but wars are won by logistics, and the Union had superior logistics (for example, running rail lines on the fly to support its armies). And second, the fact that the Confederacy failed to follow up key victories: for example, after the first battle of Bull Run, Washington, DC was pretty much there for the taking, but the Confederacy never tried. I suppose one could put that down to generalship, but I think it's more a matter of overall policy as regards the goal of the war: the Confederates weren't trying to conquer the Union, they were just trying to be independent from it.
(Similar remarks could be made about the Wehrmacht generals: no, they didn't lose all their battles, they actually won quite a lot of them, but because of the insane overall leadership they were under, and because once the war became protracted they were at a disadvantage in logistics, they ended up losing the war.)
Generals play a role, sure (and that includes generals who don't play a battlefield role at all), but they also need proper support from their government. Much of the credit for the Union logistics effort has to go to Stanton, the Secretary of War. The Confederates had nobody even close in their government, and didn't really see the value of it until it was too late.
To make a story that covers whole libraries, logistics, supply chains and war industry, really short:
Government, during war time, sets the priorities and policies, industry put those policies in place. This results in output, guns, uniforms, tanks, horses, ammunition, boots, food, planes, ships...
How said output is used on the battlefields, and more importantly how it gets to said battlefields, is the Generals thing (including theirs staff, the general staff, high command...).
Also, the civil war was one of the first semi-indistrial wars. And those cannot be won without a proper industrial base, which the South never had. And no single person can change that.
OK. How about Braxton Bragg (Chattanooga), Pickett (less for Gettysburg than for his role in the Pig War), and John Bell Hood (marched his troops all the way to Nashville to be defeated by a numerically superior, well-rested, well-equipped force. (Well, the ones he lost attacking well-prepared positions in Franklin didn't make it to Nashville.)
I didn't claim that all of the Confederate generals were superior. I was simply pointing out that there were plenty of them that were, and that the defeat of the Confederacy was not primarily due to "their generals weren't as good".
I live a few blocks from one time they tried to hit DC later - the only time a U.S. President has come under enemy fire was when Lincoln came out to inspect the situation and some Confederate sharpshooters tried to hit him:
To your point about logistics and follow-up, they failed because Early had been pushing his troops too hard for too long. It’s hard for us to appreciate just how much effort travel was even in the early railroad era, where basic things like food decided battles. It also didn’t help that the troops decided to recuperate with some looted whiskey at the Blair mansion.
> ...and there were a lot of people in the North who wanted to give up and let the Confederacy exist as an independent country.
Just because something was done doesn't mean it was a great idea. There is an uncomfortable counterfactual to explore of whether it a better idea to let people split up and self govern. It is very much a history-written-by-winners moment to assume it is self evident that people have to be conquered for their own good.
A remarkable number of countries that weren't invaded by Union soldiers also gave up on slavery. It isn't economically feasible, anyone who tries to use it is going to get shredded by capitalists.
Fundamentalism can keep going without concern over what is tenable from a capitalist viewpoint. There is Russia, North Korea and Iran right now, to just name some prominent examples.
(Then there is the uncomfortable juxtaposition of the words "self govern" within a country that kept slaves. The slaves of course aren't counted as self governing.)
And we're also better off for the US not invading Russia, North Korea and Iran. That is what was so suspicious about the US Civil War, the US is traditionally fairly heedless of terrible things happening unless it smells an economic benefit from being involved.
The traditional tool for ending slavery has been prosperity. That worked pretty much everywhere it was tried - including North America. Armies are not a tool of creating prosperity, so it seems a bit suspicious that this was the best path in the Southern US. Obviously the States gets to sort itself out with no involvement from anyone else, but it is a very open question whether holding itself together was the best choice.
I'm not saying invade this or that. I'm saying, if the South had persisted as a state, it could very well have lived on way past its prime as a fundamentalist slave state.
> Does the North help enforce slavery in the split country scenario?
No, why would they? In fact being free of any legal obligation to enforce the fugitive slave laws (and the provision in the Constitution that they were based on) was one of the main arguments made by abolitionists who advocated for the North seceding from the Union.
> Does the confederacy happily let slaves escape across the border to freedom?
Considering that even with the fugitive slave laws in place, a large number of slaves escaped and were never returned, it would certainly seem like many more of them could have escaped if the North and South were separate countries. Of course the Confederates, or at least the slaveowning ones, wouldn't have been happy about it, but what would they do about it? Declare war on the North?
> You are also sort of writing off the intrinsic value of freeing 4 million people sooner than later.
Sooner than what? If we are going to talk about counterfactuals, how about this one: abolitionists in 1831 have not yet dialed up their rhetoric, and the bill that was in the Virginia state legislature in that year to establish gradual emancipation of the slaves passes (in our actual world, the bill failed because copies of William Lloyd Garrison's famous pamphlet arrived, calling the Constitution "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell" and advocating for Northern violence to free the slaves, and once the Virginia legislators read it, all support for the bill evaporated). Other Southern states gradually follow Virginia's lead. Result: by 1865, all of the slaves are freed without costing a single life or requiring a single shot to be fired.
We could also consider another counterfactual: what if the US had done what Britain did, and freed the slaves by buying their freedom from the slaveowners? Britain did that in 1838.
>A remarkable number of countries that weren't invaded by Union soldiers also gave up on slavery. It isn't economically feasible, anyone who tries to use it is going to get shredded by capitalists.
I'm actually not sure about this. Based on what I've read, many in the North had been saying for ages that slavery was going to go away on its own, and the war only happened when it became increasingly clear that that wasn't happening.
>Estimates of the number of enslaved people today range from around 38 million[1] to 49.6 million,[2][3][4] depending on the method used to form the estimate and the definition of slavery being used.[5]
I think it's true that slavery was holding the South back economically, but their "shredded by the capitalists" moment came when they were crushed by the North's superior industrial economy during the war. I don't know how else it was supposed to happen.
> The North's eventual win came at very high cost. In my opinion, we should memorialize Union soldiers more than we do. There was so much discussion of Confederate monuments the other year, but no one ever mentions the many Union monuments across the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Union_Civil_War_monume... A lot of people paid the ultimate price, fighting for the promise that "history will remember you for helping to end slavery!", and yet we don't remember them that much. It actually makes me rather upset to be honest.
I'm not from the US but I find it really ironic that even from the outside it appears the US culture views this phenomenon as normal: the losers (Confederates) highly priced the traditional values (just take a look at the personal position of general Lee), thus those values got denigrated because they got associated with racism, taking along the ability of the winners (Union) keep the memory and gratitude to those who gave their lives for. I actually live in a country torn by a civil war (disputed to this day!) and man, it is tragic. The wounds seem to never really heal, they just reopen along line where the scars used to be at the next big dilemma in society.
The North and the South had sort of different dispositions. The North grew out of New England and New York, the kernel is sort of Yankee values, and then expanded outwards.
I’m not sure what the South’s traditional values are, I mostly associate them with a sort of slow-paced agrarian society, but I’m not sure to what extent that’s just a modern invention.
Maybe if Europe had gone all in on supporting them with trade, refused to recognize the blockade, that sort of thing? But that’s a pretty big “what if?”
The Union had a much larger population, far more resources, and almost all of the divided nation's industrial production capacity. In most cases, it's factors like those that determine the eventual victor in a war (see WWI and WWII for good examples of this).
But the weaker party doesn't need to defeat the stronger one. They just need to make the cost of the war greater than the price the stronger side is willing to pay. That's how the USA won its independence from Britain, after all. Part of what made the price too high in that case was assistance from the French (it was the French navy, not Washington's army, that sealed the victory in Yorktown, for example).
The leadership of the Confederacy was well aware of this and had diplomats all across Europe seeking help for their cause. If they had succeeded, history might have taken a very different turn.
A good book about Union efforts to keep Britain and other European powers out of the war: Our Man in Charleston, by Christopher Dickey.
The British/US comparison seems a bit hard to line up, though.
The British Empire had a whole planet to keep an eye on, losing in NA was of course not what they wanted, but it wasn’t existential or anything. America was a far away colony for them, long way to go to hold on to, basically, a resource extraction colony.
The US was a lot more motivated to take the South back. It is a big border, right near our population centers, far too risky to have a hostile country there.
If, like, Wales had tried the same strategy as America, I bet they wouldn’t have beat the English.
A case can be made that if Great Britain had officially recognized the Confederacy as a separate country, they might have won the Civil War. Not all historians would agree with that, though.
I'd argue that this is the only way the Confederacy could have won. Otherwise, they would have just been ground down in any long-term attritional fight.
It was a real possibility: Abraham Lincoln was worried sick about this. He knew the Union didn't stand a chance against a fully focused Royal Navy.
They missed the events that made the United States a world power - the suppression of the Barbary pirates. There's an entertaining version of this as a YouTube video by Drachfinel.[1]
Up until the early 19th century, all the European sea powers, and the United States, were paying tribute to the Barbary pirates just to get into the Mediterranean Sea.
This was one of the largest expenses of the early U.S. Government. Then came the War of 1812, US vs Britain, which the US won. A side effect was that the US now had an effective, battle-hardened navy. Which was sent to Tripoli to deal with the problem.[2] Which it did.
The European sea powers hadn't been able to take down the Barbary pirates. When the US did, the US started to be taken seriously as a country able to project power. It also began the American style of warfare - build big hammer, use big hammer - which worked well up to Vietnam.
This is where the line "to the shores of Tripoli", in the USMC Hymn, comes from.
The American education system is extremely local. I learned in NYC that we didn’t win the war of 1812.
The local control of education is also why education is such a hot battleground for the culture wars; it doesn’t take many zealots to take control of a local school system with low turnout elections.
As an immigrant now settled in the US, I'm shocked at how little Americans know about geography, especially for a country that has the most global impact. Often been asked whether I've climbed Everest and how cold it must has been in Tibet for me.
To this day, frustratingly George Bush hasn't learned to pronounce Iraq well, at least the smallest respect to a plundered country.
As appalling as Bush’s actual actions toward Iraq were, his pronunciation of Iraq is a pretty common one for his generation of US English speakers. I suspect that if you looked at 20th-century editions of authoritative US English dictionaries or pronunciation guides, the /aɪˈɹæk/ pronunciation would often be listed there.
The “correct pronunciation” of a country’s name in a foreign language, is not necessarily the one that natives of that country use. Languages around the world have altered the pronunciation of a country’s name when borrowing that word.
You'd best be editing wikipedia (and its sources) real quick:
Following the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, European powers agreed upon the need to suppress the Barbary corsairs entirely. The threat was finally subdued by the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 and subsequent pacification by the French during the mid-to-late 19th century.
You have a blinkered view of the Barbary global threat - the British colonies were protected by Britain until the war of independance at which point the newly formed USofA had to fend for themselves and force their own treaty via the second Barbary War in 1815, but that didn't end or suppress the pirates .. that took the French hammer of 1830.
Not to mention what soperj already pointed out ... your take must be news to Anglo-Canadians.
It's not about the time period mentioned in the article, but I highly recommend the similarly-named "The Men Who Built America" documentary series. Really interesting (and inspiring) if you're interested in the industrial development of the US circa 1860-1930.
> How did a group of British colonies become a self-proclaimed protector of continents within half a century?
50 years are a long time if a country makes the right moves. Think of where China was in 1973 and where it is in 2023. The same applies to making the wrong moves and they are much easier to do. There are so many examples that I won't make any. Pick your favorite one.
Is that a counter example? I thought a counter example would refute the notion that 50 years is not a sufficiently long time frame for considerable change to occur.
Wish: Stories like these should be published during the weekend.
So that one can leisurely read, meander into the hyperlinks, watch a few related Ken Burns videos, and then ruminate even more by creating some Dall-E images.
Most of that time's history does not cover the incredible economic development that happened during that period, where US capita income leapfrogged that of Britain. Thousands of new patents were filed, new machines were created, and the foundation of the financial and industrial boom was created, the riches of which we still enjoy today.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] thread> The U.S. position meant that many slave ships from other countries falsely flew the American flag to avoid being seized by British anti-slaving patrols. ... The Atlantic slave trade was not ended until the U.S. Civil War, when American-built and -managed ships were prevented from operating.
But I might be completely wrong here.
edit: and for the first few years, it looked like they might be able to do that.
But it would be a very silly thing for the Union to give up, having a hostile country so close would be a recipe for disaster. It doesn’t seem like a real stalemate would be possible, in the sense that the North’s economy was so much bigger. Stalemate today? Keep building factories, keep up the blockade, check again tomorrow.
This inadvertently makes a point I like to make when discussing the US Civil War with those unfamiliar with it. The US didn't really have a civil war. It split into two separate countries and then had a regular war, where one country conquered the other.
But I’m still going to call it the US civil war. It’s what it’s called, even if it might not the fit the traditional definition.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War
In it, Lee manages a string of early victories, gets within striking distance of DC before Lincoln can flee, and takes it. The US capitulates. It's not a 1-in-a-billion thing, but it certainly does read like a 1-in-5,000 thing.
IIRC, there was a point at which everyone in DC was gloomy because they thought it would be captured.
The industrial base was in the Northeast mostly, IIRC. NYC alone appears to have had a population around 1/4 of the entire Confederacy’s non-enslaved population. Quite a few guns were made in Springfield, MA. Capturing DC would just be the start of things.
I don't know though. Maybe there was a plan to evacuate the capital which would've worked if push came to shove.
Or leadership could remain defiant, and they're little more than hostages. Disruptive to the war effort, but hardly the end of things.
So the leadership gets to decide whether to be war criminals, or to go prosecute those who refuse as ordinary (or extraordinary?) criminals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_(military)#False_sur...
The very notion of a "war crime" only arrived in the 20thC. More generally (as Wikipedia notes) the act amounts to perfidy, which isn't a crime anywhere I know about.
So that you can feel better, you're 100% absolutely right, and you won this argument with me and all future arguments because of your plainly superior intellect and bright, friendly personality. Game over. Goodbye.
Yes, twice, after the first and second battles of Bull Run.
There was also a cavalry raid by Early that crossed the Potomac upstream from DC and came down towards it from the northwest. Probably not a true threat to DC since Early didn't have enough troops, but it certainly threw a scare into the people there.
Win as in conquer the rest of the US? lol, no. That wasn't going to happen. The industrial base just wasn't there.
Win as in make it so costly to re-take the South that the rest of the US doesn't want to devote the resources? That was probably possible at certain points in the war.
The North's eventual win came at very high cost. In my opinion, we should memorialize Union soldiers more than we do. There was so much discussion of Confederate monuments the other year, but no one ever mentions the many Union monuments across the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Union_Civil_War_monume... A lot of people paid the ultimate price, fighting for the promise that "history will remember you for helping to end slavery!", and yet we don't remember them that much. It actually makes me rather upset to be honest.
No idea where this idea comes from, the idea that the loosing side in a war had better Generals. For the Wehrmacht it's the same. People tend to forget thatbthise Generals lost their battles, and the war, at the end.
Lee had a habit of couching orders as if they were suggestions or requests. The South's most effective general may have been Jackson. For the first half of the war, the Union's top general in the east was McClellan, who was useless.
[Edit] McClellan didn't fight in the west. And I spelled his name wrong.
[Edit 2] Lee overruled Longstreet, who wanted to flank the Union's right. Lee insisted on a frontal assault. That decision led directly to Picket's disastrous charge.
I don't understand why some generals are so averse to flanking actions. Is it because they are somehow considered cowardly, or "just not cricket"? Flanking actions are often decisive, and sometimes even the threat of a flanking action can critically disrupt enemy operations.
Eventually the war gets truly hopeless. Without any feasible objectives to go for, the loser has incredible latitude to try and stay alive and inflict harm. Never any need to take a tactically disadvantageous battle for strategic reasons if there’s no strategic hope, after all!
Not at all. Longstreet, Jackson, Forrest, Stuart, Early (and that's just off the top of my head)...all of them routinely outperformed their Union counterparts in individual battles and smaller engagements for the first couple of years of the war. Until Grant came into his own and was able to properly empower others like Sherman and Sheridan, the Union didn't really have any competent generals (although Meade does deserve recognition for holding the line at Gettysburg).
The reason the Union still won was, first, logistics--as the saying goes, battles can be won by generalship but wars are won by logistics, and the Union had superior logistics (for example, running rail lines on the fly to support its armies). And second, the fact that the Confederacy failed to follow up key victories: for example, after the first battle of Bull Run, Washington, DC was pretty much there for the taking, but the Confederacy never tried. I suppose one could put that down to generalship, but I think it's more a matter of overall policy as regards the goal of the war: the Confederates weren't trying to conquer the Union, they were just trying to be independent from it.
(Similar remarks could be made about the Wehrmacht generals: no, they didn't lose all their battles, they actually won quite a lot of them, but because of the insane overall leadership they were under, and because once the war became protracted they were at a disadvantage in logistics, they ended up losing the war.)
Government, during war time, sets the priorities and policies, industry put those policies in place. This results in output, guns, uniforms, tanks, horses, ammunition, boots, food, planes, ships...
How said output is used on the battlefields, and more importantly how it gets to said battlefields, is the Generals thing (including theirs staff, the general staff, high command...).
Also, the civil war was one of the first semi-indistrial wars. And those cannot be won without a proper industrial base, which the South never had. And no single person can change that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Stevens
To your point about logistics and follow-up, they failed because Early had been pushing his troops too hard for too long. It’s hard for us to appreciate just how much effort travel was even in the early railroad era, where basic things like food decided battles. It also didn’t help that the troops decided to recuperate with some looted whiskey at the Blair mansion.
Just because something was done doesn't mean it was a great idea. There is an uncomfortable counterfactual to explore of whether it a better idea to let people split up and self govern. It is very much a history-written-by-winners moment to assume it is self evident that people have to be conquered for their own good.
A remarkable number of countries that weren't invaded by Union soldiers also gave up on slavery. It isn't economically feasible, anyone who tries to use it is going to get shredded by capitalists.
(Then there is the uncomfortable juxtaposition of the words "self govern" within a country that kept slaves. The slaves of course aren't counted as self governing.)
The traditional tool for ending slavery has been prosperity. That worked pretty much everywhere it was tried - including North America. Armies are not a tool of creating prosperity, so it seems a bit suspicious that this was the best path in the Southern US. Obviously the States gets to sort itself out with no involvement from anyone else, but it is a very open question whether holding itself together was the best choice.
Does the confederacy happily let slaves escape across the border to freedom?
You are also sort of writing off the intrinsic value of freeing 4 million people sooner than later.
No, why would they? In fact being free of any legal obligation to enforce the fugitive slave laws (and the provision in the Constitution that they were based on) was one of the main arguments made by abolitionists who advocated for the North seceding from the Union.
> Does the confederacy happily let slaves escape across the border to freedom?
Considering that even with the fugitive slave laws in place, a large number of slaves escaped and were never returned, it would certainly seem like many more of them could have escaped if the North and South were separate countries. Of course the Confederates, or at least the slaveowning ones, wouldn't have been happy about it, but what would they do about it? Declare war on the North?
> You are also sort of writing off the intrinsic value of freeing 4 million people sooner than later.
Sooner than what? If we are going to talk about counterfactuals, how about this one: abolitionists in 1831 have not yet dialed up their rhetoric, and the bill that was in the Virginia state legislature in that year to establish gradual emancipation of the slaves passes (in our actual world, the bill failed because copies of William Lloyd Garrison's famous pamphlet arrived, calling the Constitution "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell" and advocating for Northern violence to free the slaves, and once the Virginia legislators read it, all support for the bill evaporated). Other Southern states gradually follow Virginia's lead. Result: by 1865, all of the slaves are freed without costing a single life or requiring a single shot to be fired.
We could also consider another counterfactual: what if the US had done what Britain did, and freed the slaves by buying their freedom from the slaveowners? Britain did that in 1838.
I do wonder why anyone thinks the war somehow ends if the North isn't helping enforce slavery.
I'm actually not sure about this. Based on what I've read, many in the North had been saying for ages that slavery was going to go away on its own, and the war only happened when it became increasingly clear that that wasn't happening.
>Estimates of the number of enslaved people today range from around 38 million[1] to 49.6 million,[2][3][4] depending on the method used to form the estimate and the definition of slavery being used.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century
I think it's true that slavery was holding the South back economically, but their "shredded by the capitalists" moment came when they were crushed by the North's superior industrial economy during the war. I don't know how else it was supposed to happen.
I'm not from the US but I find it really ironic that even from the outside it appears the US culture views this phenomenon as normal: the losers (Confederates) highly priced the traditional values (just take a look at the personal position of general Lee), thus those values got denigrated because they got associated with racism, taking along the ability of the winners (Union) keep the memory and gratitude to those who gave their lives for. I actually live in a country torn by a civil war (disputed to this day!) and man, it is tragic. The wounds seem to never really heal, they just reopen along line where the scars used to be at the next big dilemma in society.
The North and the South had sort of different dispositions. The North grew out of New England and New York, the kernel is sort of Yankee values, and then expanded outwards.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee
I’m not sure what the South’s traditional values are, I mostly associate them with a sort of slow-paced agrarian society, but I’m not sure to what extent that’s just a modern invention.
Maybe if Europe had gone all in on supporting them with trade, refused to recognize the blockade, that sort of thing? But that’s a pretty big “what if?”
But the weaker party doesn't need to defeat the stronger one. They just need to make the cost of the war greater than the price the stronger side is willing to pay. That's how the USA won its independence from Britain, after all. Part of what made the price too high in that case was assistance from the French (it was the French navy, not Washington's army, that sealed the victory in Yorktown, for example).
The leadership of the Confederacy was well aware of this and had diplomats all across Europe seeking help for their cause. If they had succeeded, history might have taken a very different turn.
A good book about Union efforts to keep Britain and other European powers out of the war: Our Man in Charleston, by Christopher Dickey.
The British Empire had a whole planet to keep an eye on, losing in NA was of course not what they wanted, but it wasn’t existential or anything. America was a far away colony for them, long way to go to hold on to, basically, a resource extraction colony.
The US was a lot more motivated to take the South back. It is a big border, right near our population centers, far too risky to have a hostile country there.
If, like, Wales had tried the same strategy as America, I bet they wouldn’t have beat the English.
It was a real possibility: Abraham Lincoln was worried sick about this. He knew the Union didn't stand a chance against a fully focused Royal Navy.
Up until the early 19th century, all the European sea powers, and the United States, were paying tribute to the Barbary pirates just to get into the Mediterranean Sea. This was one of the largest expenses of the early U.S. Government. Then came the War of 1812, US vs Britain, which the US won. A side effect was that the US now had an effective, battle-hardened navy. Which was sent to Tripoli to deal with the problem.[2] Which it did.
The European sea powers hadn't been able to take down the Barbary pirates. When the US did, the US started to be taken seriously as a country able to project power. It also began the American style of warfare - build big hammer, use big hammer - which worked well up to Vietnam.
This is where the line "to the shores of Tripoli", in the USMC Hymn, comes from.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSBmGaLt5OU
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Barbary_War
Never realized how bad the American education system really was. In what way did you win this war that you started?
The local control of education is also why education is such a hot battleground for the culture wars; it doesn’t take many zealots to take control of a local school system with low turnout elections.
To this day, frustratingly George Bush hasn't learned to pronounce Iraq well, at least the smallest respect to a plundered country.
The “correct pronunciation” of a country’s name in a foreign language, is not necessarily the one that natives of that country use. Languages around the world have altered the pronunciation of a country’s name when borrowing that word.
You have a blinkered view of the Barbary global threat - the British colonies were protected by Britain until the war of independance at which point the newly formed USofA had to fend for themselves and force their own treaty via the second Barbary War in 1815, but that didn't end or suppress the pirates .. that took the French hammer of 1830.
Not to mention what soperj already pointed out ... your take must be news to Anglo-Canadians.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV3DmWNCEaI&list=PL-_k1uJcDM...
50 years are a long time if a country makes the right moves. Think of where China was in 1973 and where it is in 2023. The same applies to making the wrong moves and they are much easier to do. There are so many examples that I won't make any. Pick your favorite one.
The type of sentence that reminds me of
> Cleopatra lived closer in time to the building of the first Pizza Hut than to the building of the pyramids
So that one can leisurely read, meander into the hyperlinks, watch a few related Ken Burns videos, and then ruminate even more by creating some Dall-E images.
Most of that time's history does not cover the incredible economic development that happened during that period, where US capita income leapfrogged that of Britain. Thousands of new patents were filed, new machines were created, and the foundation of the financial and industrial boom was created, the riches of which we still enjoy today.