Victory in the US Civil War was due primarily to Sherman's March. We owe the late General Sherman a huge debt of gratitude. A true hero not only in war but in US history:
Sherman's March to the Sea - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman's_March_to_the_Sea)
Edward
Neshamah
02-03-2010, 11:18 AM
If the U.S. engaged in a scorched earth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_earth) policy in Afghanistan or Iraq, you would call it a war crime. Or was that your point?
~ Jessica
Victory in the US Civil War was due primarily to Sherman's March. We owe the late General Sherman a huge debt of gratitude. A true hero not only in war but in US history:
Sherman's March to the Sea - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman's_March_to_the_Sea)
Edward
Valley Oak
02-03-2010, 05:01 PM
What should have been done instead? If you were Lincoln and/or Sherman, what would you have done in their place?
You can take as long as you wish to answer.
Edward
If the U.S. engaged in a scorched earth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_earth) policy in Afghanistan or Iraq, you would call it a war crime. Or was that your point?
~ Jessica
Neshamah
02-04-2010, 05:33 AM
Lincoln used an elective war in order to expand executive power and curtail civil liberties. (Sound familiar?) Eventually he tried to justify it to Europe by claiming it was to free slaves (though his emancipation proclamation did not apply to the U.S., nor to any part of the South already controlled by U.S. forces.) Could he have won that elective war without letting his generals resort to atrocities? Maybe, maybe not, but that does not justify their use.
As for freeing slaves, it is not clear the war was a benefit. As an independent country, the Confederacy would have needed European allies, hence slavery would have to go. (It disappeared in the rest of the New World (at least officially) by the 1870s.) If the U.S. wanted to end slavery, they and Europe could have cut the South off economically rather than resort to war.
Instead, the newly 'free' were made the face of U.S. occupation and bore the brunt of reprisals thus poisoning race relations in the South for more than a century. Most former slaves ended up as sharecroppers which itself was slavery in all but name. In the meantime, Lincoln's successors gave us corporate personhood and a government that purchases votes by using public money to fund the industries that finance successful campaigns. It is the same government we have today. George Bush was a natural product.
But let's say the war was a benefit, that it did end or at least reduce oppression in the South; would that be considered justification today? The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq overturned oppressive regimes. Afghans and Iraqis are 'free' today. Iran has an oppressive regime. Would we be doing Iranians a favor by freeing them?
There is a lot of evil in the world, and Southern slaveowners are no exception. However, we are not going to bring an end to evil by killing people, or by killing more of them.
~ Jessica
Valley Oak
02-04-2010, 11:05 AM
There are people today that call the American Civil War the "War of Northern Aggression." Would you agree with that? Is that what you meant?
Edward
Lincoln used an elective war...
~ Jessica
LenInSebastopol
02-04-2010, 12:19 PM
I can concur with V.O. in theory: killing and burning everything as an army advances has a tendency to discourage, demoralize and does tend to have a tactical advantage. Not a good strategy, but it worked with the Native Americans as well as many other places it was utilized. Genghis Khan found it to be "good" and it's hard to argue with success. The fact that civilized people find it objectionable counts little when they are the losers.
I understand slavery would have withered away due to the industrial revolution as well as enculturation of Africans with the British-Americans that held them as slaves. The North did try to cut the cotton trade off with ships but simply drove up the price for cotton and caused Russia and other countries, like Afghanistan to enter the cotton market by growing it. Small world after all, eh?
"Mad" Miles
02-04-2010, 01:10 PM
Edward/V.O.,
I have to wonder about your motivation in asking provocative questions like this. The other one that comes to mind is your recent one about Northern Ireland.
They tend to relate to highly complex topics, which have long and difficult histories, and don't seem to have any direct connection to anything happening locally, nor are they "in the news" nationally or internationally. So what are you trying to do here?
I didn't answer your question about Ireland, because of my reasons just stated, but also because I wonder how a discussion on waccobb.net will have any influence over the actual issue? The recent news about the domestic scandal with the leader of the Protestant Unionists, and his potential resignation quite possibly destroying the power sharing deal that has been in the works for over a decade, is specific to Northern Ireland. Whatever anyone has to say about it here, what difference will it make there?
As for Sherman's March, again, what does that historical event have to do with anything going on in the world today? I did see on the History Channel a doc about it a week or so ago. I watched while flipping channels away from the commercials on whatever it was I was mainly watching. I noted the plight of ex-slaves who followed Sherman's forces, and were re-inslaved by the Confederate forces harrassing Sherman's men, and a massacre of a large number of those same African-Americans at a river crossing after they were left to the mercy of the Southerners by the Union forces.
Sherman was no friend to Black people, and his central role in the genocide of Native Americans after the Civil War is well documented.
The Civil War itself was a massive slaughter, on par with and presaging WWI, largely due to the disconnect between infantry tactics of the day, and the new weaponry (artillery, mini-ball ammunition in rifle muskets, and other developments) which made wholesale slaughter of massed infantry so much easier than it had been before. This development is well covered in our state Social Sciences curriculum approved textbooks, as well as in Ken Burns' "The Civil War".
As for calling it, "The War of Northern Aggression", everyone knows that is what Southern Americans (U.S.) who have never accepted the defeat of their ancestors by the forces of the industrialized north, call it.
While it was used in high school and college history classes that my mother took in Oklahoma in the thirties, which she marked as absurd at the time, it is not in popular usage today. So far as I know, I haven't hung out in Dixie for thirty-four years.
I didn't hear it in Junior High and High School in Huntsville, AL in the early seventies. If anyone had used the term, we would have laughed derisively at them. I've used it sardonically to refer to Southern revanchism, but it's not a phrase taken seriously.
So, why stir up controversies that have been dead and buried for decades, or that are local to another country where the trend, in spite of the long, bloody, contested history, is towards peace and reconciliation?
Just what are you trying to accomplish?
"Mad" Miles
:burngrnbounce:
Neshamah
02-04-2010, 02:30 PM
That is not a neutral term. I think civil war was used by both Northerners and Southerners at the time.
What I meant in my previous posts, (and what I thought you meant in your first one) was that war has consequences that usually far exceed any benefits.
~ Jessica
There are people today that call the American Civil War the "War of Northern Aggression." Would you agree with that? Is that what you meant?
Edward
Valley Oak
02-04-2010, 05:55 PM
Miles/Mad,
I start threads on topics that I'm interested in, whether it be French Existentialists during the 50s and 60s (Sartre, de Beauvoir, or Camus, not Kierkegaard and Nietzsche who founded Existentialism) or the legal system of the Roman Empire, which has contributed very significantly to our legal system in the U.S. as much or more so perhaps than English law.
I always thought that Wacco Talk was for general discussions over any range of issues or ideas, and debating about anything. I never understood that Wacco Talk was limited to local or current issues. I do understand that many other sections of the bulletin board are limited to local events occurring primarily in Sonoma County or relatively close by, such as the SF Bay Area.
Does that answer your curious question?
Edward
Edward/V.O.,
I have to wonder about your motivation in asking provocative questions like this. The other one that comes to mind is your recent one about Northern Ireland.