The Civil War

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Just a reminder for anyone who cares, the remaster of Ken Burns documentary series on the Civil war is now available to stream for free on PBS.org

You really can't have a full understanding of this country unless you understand the civil war and how it transpired. It's a long series but it's really worth it guys.

Scrum, I have seen you mention a few times how it was a needless war that shouldn't have happened. My question to you is what would you have had Lincoln do? Do you suggest that we should have let the south secede from the union and break up the country? What other choice did he have?

[Scrumhalf]

Yeah, I read about the remastered HD version. Havent seen it yet.

OK, to get to your question....

I didn't mean that Lincoln should not have fought the war. What I meant was that the leaders of the South should never have committed treason and tried to split the country apart. It was for the most abhorrent of reasons - to maintain the right to own other humans. Once they did that, war was inevitable. The war should never have been fought because the South should never have done what they did.

The blame lies entirely with the leaders of the Confederacy. The current trend by some to treat the secession of the South as some admirable enterprise is absolutely ludicrous. They were the biggest traitors this country has ever seen. The right thing finally happened and they got streamrolled. But the North let them off the hook too easy after the War. With the Klan and the Jim Crow laws, the South gradually put together the institutions of discrimination that led to the worse terrorism that this country has ever seen. It is hard to imagine that this stuff got taken apart finally during the Civil Rights movement barely 70-75 years ago.

[Bouncer]

I was hoping you would say that. I thought by calling it "a war that shouldn't have happened" that you were implying both sides acted foolishly to start the War which was the case for WW1 but certainly not the Civil War.

Props to the Confederates though. They may have made some really bad choices to start the War itself but once the war started they had some pretty amazing leadership in terms of Military Generals. Lee and Jackson were a few of the greatest military minds of all time. That is the reason the War lasted as long as it did. The north had vastly superior numbers and production ability but no General worth a damn for the first few years of the War. US Grant finally stepped up to the plate and took care of things for the North but by then it was already a war everyone was sick of so the victory was a bit hollow.

The political heads of the Confederacy on the other hand were a bunch of simple jacks. If they had only looked at the northern capability for production of goods and materials they would have understood they never had any real chance. The south lost as much from starvation and poverty as they did on the battlefield.

Fun Fact: New York state alone had more production capability in terms of the ability to make war then the entire South. The political leaders of the Confederacy were some of the dumbest fucks of all time. They are god damn lucky they had the Generals they had.

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Also, it's important to note that the Civil War did not start over the freedom of the slaves so to speak. We had no plans to take away the slaves from their owners in the South.

What pissed the South off was the differences between federal and state powers. The federal government said any future states (western states) that were not yet part of the Union would never be allowed to have slaves. The South thought this should be a state decision and not a federal one.

This was seen as a threat to the Southern Way of life and they eventually seceded because of it.

Lincoln never went into this War with the goal of making slaves in the south free. For him it was simply about keeping the union together. It was only after many years of war that he made the decision of emancipation as a chess move so to speak. He knew that by doing so the British and French would have to back the north and could not be seen as "against freedom". It gave the war a whole new boost for the north. Suddenly it was a war of freedom VS slavery.

People like to think that Lincoln was this angel from above that freed the slave but really his decisions were more based on strategy to win a political and military war. Emancipation was used first and foremost as a strategy by Lincoln to end the war. It just so happened that it was also the right and moral thing to do. He made many public statements that are well documented that went along the lines of.. "my goal is to save the union, not free the slaves, if by freeing the slaves it saves the union then so be it." This is an important part of history that people don't seem to understand.