Some thoughts on the 150th anniversary of the victory. I hadn’t realized that there was even a controversy about whose fault the loss was. I’d always thought it was clear that it was ultimately Lee’s responsibility — he ordered the charge — though having better information from Stuart might have resulted in different decisions on his part. I think that, after his previous string of victories, he’d grown overconfident, and was overcome with hubris.
Also, a bonus link to libertarian perspectives on the war. I’ve always thought that the tragedy of the war was that states rights were so damaged because the southern states chose to use them to defend slavery.
[Update a few minutes later]
How not to remember Gettysburg:
What, one must say, led this prolific best-selling writer to think anyone concerned with the meaning of Gettysburg would give a damn about where she and her husband slept when they were overnight guests at the White House? I was waiting to hear her say that, unlike others, she didn’t have to pay for the honor. And anyone who read her Dartmouth commencement address already knew this story.
As a historian, Kearns Goodwin should know that history is the means by which we, as a people, learn about our country’s past — how our ancestors took risks and measures that made the United States the hope of the world and created the great republic in which we now live and breathe as free men and women. Instead, Kearns Goodwin used the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the most important battle held on our own land to talk about herself, and the would-be greatness of the contemporary liberals she holds in esteem.
No less than what I would have expected.
I was under the impression that Longstreet was totally aware of how foolish it was to order Pickett’s Charge. That he told Lee that in as blunt a manner as respect would allow.
Longstreet’s notion was to bypass the strong point and head straight for DC which would force the Union OFF their strong position, where they could be crushed. A fine example of Maneuver Warfare thinking.
But notwithstanding Longstreet’s point of view, Lee’s blood was up and he thought his guys could do it. As the stragglers came back Lee supposedly met them on his horse and told them it was all his fault.
And it was.
Well, Longstreet certainly said so, years after the war. But then, he was defending himself against various spurious charges thrown at him by Jubal Early and Lee’s insufferable staff aides, Walter Taylor and Charles Marshall, and sadly, he was known to gild the lily in his defense.
But Longstreet’s claim was that he wanted to place his corps in a defensive position and compel the Union forces to re-enact Fredericksburg, which had made a strong impression upon him of the value of a strong defensive position held by veteran troops.
I love Pickett’s response….
“I always thought the Yankees had something to do with it.”
At the end of the day, the Confederates had neither the resources nor the organization to achieve military victory, they had about as good of a chance as the Imperial Japanese in 1940.
The Union fought as 20 states under a unified command, organized as one large economy, and being able to raise immigrant volunteers from all of europe to fight slavers.
The Confederacy fought as a loose confederation of independent states, with little ability to raise taxes or funds, with little ability to gain volunteers from Europe or South America, with a hostile slave population held down by the whip and gun, ready to potentially defect or revolt. While Lee and the ANV fought brilliantly, the Union was able to raise replacement troops and equipment, while the south fought with what they had stolen from Federal Arsenals at the start of the war.
The Union was fighting to preserve the union and was able to bring the fire and sword to all of the confederate states while the Confederacy was fighting for a political armistice, and never had the ability to carry the war north.
I suppose Lee and the ANV could have on a good day, smashed the AoP, and invested DC, and maybe even gone as far north as Baltimore, but could they have seized Philadelphia and Pittsburgh? Could they have burned Newark, Cleveland and Detroit?
I was debating Doris Kearns Goodwins speech elsewhere and the progressive warriors were miffed that anyone could complain about it, and one chimed in “How dare she not call it the ‘War of Northern Aggression!” So I replied:
“Well it clearly was a war of naked Northern Aggression. The South was minding its own business and the North sought to topple an established way of life and reorder Southern society and institutions. After the South broke free of Northern dominance through illegitimate elections, the North claimed they were trying to re-unify the nation, and free the South from oppression and antiquated cultural norms. The South sought foreign allies and support, something much on the mind of President Johnson, especially with the French having withdrawn their forces after the disastrous battle of Dien Bin Phu, and…
Oh wait, Dorris Kearns Goodwin’s keynote address was talking about the wrong war in the wrong century. I did have a Chinese language teacher who swapped “eighteen” and “nineteen” when she learned the English words for numbers. That made her account of Chinese and world history pretty interesting, to say the least. Perhaps Dorris is getting the early touches of senility and suffers from the same confusion.
You can bet that Shelby Foote didn’t think the Battle of Vicksburg or Memphis was about food stamps, Vietnam, and gay marriage.”
The ONLY history that ever matters to Liberals, hand-wringers and Progs is their OWN. They see every situation from the stand point of,
.
“…if it weren’t for ME, the world would go to ruin, yesterday!”
.
.
Arrogance is their byword, motto and motivation.
Longstreet was not mistaken in his apprehension of the strength of the defense in that era. As long as Sherman used maneuver (Liddell-Hart’s ‘horns of a dilemma’)to lever his opponents out of their positions he succeeded. The couple of times he thought he could get away with a frontal coup de main Johnston and company handed his @$$ to him. Fortunately for Lincoln’s re-election hopes WT was a fast learner. Maneuver warfare with foot infantry. Too bad Kitchener didn’t pay attention.
The advantage to the defense that the rifle-musket provided at the time of the ACW is a… fraught and debatable one. I direct your attention to the debate between McWhiney & Jamieson and Hess on the one hand and Nosworthy and Griffith on the other. The last time I dug into the subject I think I found myself mostly aligning with Nosworthy in that shock tactics were still of value even in the late war, and that fire tactics were oversold and preferred by commanders and men who had become risk-adverse. I think I concluded that maybe Hess is the last word on the subject? That the late-war maneuver-and-entrench tactical system was a pragmatic adaptation of Mahanist doctrine adapted to the American-democratic sensitivity to combat losses, and not necessarily a reflection in an actual, objective change in the ratio of offensive to defensive advantage?
I’ve been visiting transterrestrial too infrequently of late. I have to say, sadly, that the economy’s dampening of what was a few years ago a bursting newspace industry has discouraged me quite a bit. But anyway, I want to raise a point concerning the Civil War. I’m reacting to the description of Pickett’s charge as a ‘victory’.
I grew up in the Northeast, and so naturally the Confederacy was nothing but a racist startup representing the inherently backwards south. I have recently reconsidered, not so much the Confederacy, but the tragedy of the war foremost, and perhaps also that of the Union victory.
Rather than rehash all the old arguments, I’ll focus on just a couple points.
First: the Union, or rather Lincoln, or rather the nationalists and industrialists he represented, had no cause in defeating slavery. As Lincoln stated, he would go to war over tariffs. My understanding is, as evidence by Lincoln’s offer of a 13th amendment institutionalizing and protecting slavery nationally (among other things), that the war itself was an effort to enforce nationalist policy upon the country.
To explain what I mean I’ll be crude: nationalist policy means an unprecedented, unintended, unjust leveraging of federal power against the states to support crony businessmen through regulations, subsidies, and even military policy overseas. The people of the states never ratified or sustained Hamilton’s imperial federalism, and this is essentially what Lincoln was supporting. Unlike Jackson, he was the type willing to go to war over the issue on behalf of his New York benefactors.
The South, while obviously concerned about preserving the institution of slavery – their source of economic power, and that thing which united them politically – seemed to have formed their Confederacy in reaction to Lincoln’s overtures towards war. He proved them right when they claimed that the North would be willing to use federal violence to impose a top-down federalism that they had not agreed to. For me, Virginia best represents this. Virginia remained in the Union after much of the Confederacy had formed. It wasn’t until Lincoln summoned an unprecedented military force (for the times) with the explicit threat of using it to enforce federal will that Virginia saw justice on the other side of the fight.
That Lincoln suspended Habeaus Corpus is much more than a mere complaint against his tenure. He and his political benefactors leveraged every tool they could manage. They (including the Todd family) owned most of the press in the north. Troops smashed dissenting presses. Legislators on every level were silenced by federal troops of all things. The first draft was instituted, spawning massive Tahrir like riots which had to be suppressed militarily. While the North was united in their factional hatred for the South, the war and Lincoln were hugely unpopular. Many abolitionists were strongly opposed to the war.
Lincoln himself was a glorified railroad lobbyist, and his administration was characterized by patronage and corruption.
I think of Obama, and how history might record how magnanimous he was – repeating all the myths from his 2008 campaign, treating his pattern of denial and shifting blame as if it was a mark of great statesmanship. The deem and pass of Obamacare, the extended of implementing it past elections, this may someday be treated as if it was the Republicans’ fault.
I can’t help but see parallels with how Lincoln is treated by our history. Except his policies killed 600,000 Americans and fundamentally perverted the Union. Roosevelt, Wilson, FDR, LBJ – it all goes back to the transformation of government that Lincoln imposed through military conquest domestically.
Slavery was a tragedy of our past, but I don’t understand how we can overcome progressivism without rethinking the Civil War and what it did to this country – beyond the issue of slavery.
My concern isn’t that Lincoln took mere drastic measures, but that he fundamentally transformed America. Not by superficially abolishing slavery, but by overthrowing what was won in 1776 and subverting the states to a King George on the Potomac. I can’t understand why this substantial change is just overlooked, or even wholly praised by conservatives.
The most damning part of all was that any honest survey of the era would conclude that Lincoln was the aggressor. Not only did he want the nationalist system, not only was he willing to overturn the Constitution to get it, but he went out of his way to start an open conflict.
The fact is that nullification and secession were big parts of American political thought at the time. Many northern states had wanted to secede, in fact they came up with the concept.
People argue that if Lincoln hadn’t ended slavery then, it would have persisted to this day. I think that’s probably ridiculous, seeing as how legally institutionalized black slavery in industrial nations ended peacefully almost universally by the 20th century.
I instead would argue that if Lincoln hadn’t undertaken to bring 600,000 Americans to their deaths then and there in 1861, we may have seen an American political landscape much more dynamic, much more prone to localism, much more conducive to eventual liberty than what we did under the Bismarckian system Lincoln set into motion.
In any event, I don’t want to start an undesirable conversation on your blog, but I feel like these points are never made. And they seem so relevant. Can we manage to snake in and around the issue of slavery and talk about fundamental political transformations in America?
In the final analysis, the Union victory at Gettysberg seems like it was final defeat for the idea that peoples and states possess any meaningful amount of sovereignty and independence.
Our rights are only those which the federal system permits, dare I say grants, us. It’s internal divisions, courts, and parties notwithstanding.
I take it you haven’t read “The Impending Crisis”
The South was only for states rights when those rights worked in their favor. Why else the fugitive slave act? Why else not wanting new states to determine their own destiny as free or slave?
Lincoln was not a threat to the slavery institution where it was already established.
While the South might have, as a few proposed and speculated, spread to new territories in the Caribbean, this was unlikely. The Confederacy did in fact highly regard ‘states rights’ and Davis’ efforts to emulate Lincoln’s tyrannical efforts to wage war (conscription, suspense of habeus corpus etc.) were widely criticized by a fairly disunited south. I can’t imagine them organizing huge colonizing efforts and gaining new territories like the Union did.
By withdrawing, they gave up the fugitive slave act and the Western territories. Yes, their preferred policy was preserving slavery at all costs. But they never proposed war to achieve this end. Separating from the compact was a non-violent act, by many estimates, and by some opinions of the era fairly non-controversial. I understand many in the North wished them well.
It was Lincoln who insisted the issue was something he’d go to war over, he raised the militias, he resupplied fort sumter, he refused to see any delegates from seceded states for any reason, and he refused to have any negotiation on federal properties in the South.
It’s clear that Lincoln’s stance was union or war and death and conquest. The South’s stance was that remaining in the union was leading to too much political strife so the most reasonable course was a separation. Ignoring the issue of slavery – because it was a non-issue since you are correct Lincoln was not a threat to slavery – who is more guilty here?
I should like to imagine that this separation would be very temporary, as federal upstarts trying to exercise too much power would face the secession of Western states, or New England states, or what-have-you. If secession was a firmly established tradition, there could be no federal tyranny. And so long as that was a firmly established facts, the states might have found reason for more harmony.
And like Brazil and everywhere else, it seem Southern slavery would have peacefully ended.
But instead we have 600,000 dead and a federal leviathan. Alas, I have taken over this thread so I’ll cool it off. But really, I haven’t faced an informed argument which can reasonably shake me of my deep Lincoln skepticism.
Remember that the Southern Democrat convention announced that not only would the South secede if Lincoln was elected, they would also secede if any non-Southern (read: non-slaveowning) Democrat was elected. They tried to strongarm the whole nation over their pet psychosis (and cheating electoral advantage, the 3/5ths Compromise) and their bluff was called.
Also remember that if the South hadn’t fired upon American flag military ships and American military installations- a causus belli in any generation – they would’ve stood a good chance of separating peacefully. If the Civil War was the death of state’s rights, it was a suicide: the Glorious South, no matter how badly revisionists want to rewrite the history books, was basically just a national-level version of one of those faceplant videos on Youtube.
Final note: that unprovoked act of war the South committed, that meant there could be no going back? Yeah, it happened while Buchanan was President. Lincoln hadn’t even made Washington yet.
How is withdrawing from political union a strongarm? Did the South owe the North something in the great American social contract? By seceding the South rendered the 3/5ths clause certainly meaningless to the remaining Union.
This is the problem with the way history treats this era. South Carolina never intended to invade the North and impose a political system upon it. By complaining that 1) their slavery rights were being infringed and 2) federal law wasn’t effective in defending southern interests among northern states all they were saying was that they didn’t have a reason to remain in the Union. This wasn’t a list of grievances or call for war, just a rationale concerning the political utility of secession for South Carolina.
Anyway, Lincoln was inaugurated March 4, delegates from the South were sent March 31 to negotiate payment for the forts, Lincoln insisted he would never use force on the South – but he demanded all forts remain, and that those forts would continue to collect federal tariffs – and anyway he refused to meet with the delegation. And the firing on Fort Sumter was in April as Lincoln ordered a resupply.
Basically, Republicans felt that the constitution meant to subordinate all the nation to New York’s central economic planning, and the south being tied to slavery rejected this. Lincoln’s election – purely regional – was proof to the South that they were entirely powerless in the Union, but that they were still subject to it. The Union was understood to be a voluntary compact between sovereign states.
Right or wrong, the South wasn’t strong-arming anyone. The Union was no longer a beneficial compact to them, they withdrew their consent to preserve their socioeconomic and political institutions. It’s not anarchy, these were sovereign states in a federation, who gained independence as sovereign states from Great Britain according to a clearly articulated justification in the Declaration of Independence. Yes, their institution of greatest import was slavery. But again, that wasn’t the North’s reason for war until they needed a second wind a few years on.
Look at FDR. Or Obama. As long as you win the election, it doesn’t matter – stuff the court, deem and pass – there’s no recourse. We have to obey. If only parts of the nation could have raised the collective middle finger to FDR, that would have put the New Deal in its place. But Lincoln killed that – what was ultimately THE core premise of the revolutionary war – independence.
I’ve thought for some time that the main reason the southern states seceded was that their leaders sensed that they were losing political power in the Union. The Southern states were already a minority in the House of Representatives, and as it was unlikely that any new slave states would be admitted, they were starting to be a minority in the Senate. Lincoln was the first president in some time who was not either from the South of sympathetic to it.
The concern about slavery was a large part of it, but the Southern leadership feared their whole way of life was disappearing.
Lincoln was born in Kentucky and raised in Southern Illinois. He married a southerner child of privelige and a daughter of slavers.
Lincoln ideologically despised slavery but was willing to work the politics of it.
It was a pity the southerners decided to start an unwinnable war. Because while the politics of the congress was sliding against them, they could have struck a better deal in DC then they were going get in battle.
Yes, that is the main reason. The union became a detriment to their domestic institutions, while offering nothing in return. Though opinions ALWAYS differed, the South ratified the constitution explicitly as a voluntary compact.
It’s only because Lincoln made secession a matter of war and conquest that today we associate secession with treason and warmongering.
Secession was never meant to be an act of aggression. However, as dcguy states, it may have been more pragmatic for the South to sit and take it since they pretty well knew the North would go to war over it (well Davis and Houston, having worked with Northern bureaucrats, did, the commoners being more naive). And frankly I don’t sympathize with the South’s reasons at all. But understanding that the issues leading to war had nothing to do with an explicit attempt to end slavery, I have to sympathize with the loss of any counterbalance to federal leviathan.
“It broke the aura of invincibility that had gathered around Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, and inflicted enormous losses on the Confederates”
While the press wrote extensively about the battles in the east, the real action was in the west. Grant fought brilliantly, reducing vicksburg, forcing the mississippi, sundering the confederacy, slashing their resource and trade river
and opening the ability to attack along a broad front.
Gettysburg got lots of press, but it was New Orleans, Vicksburg, Shiloh, Henry, Donelson where Grant shattered the Confederacy and ended the Confederates.
But did the South really start the war? Would they have achieved a peaceful separation, minus 600,000 deaths, had they only not fired on a fort? Oh, and it wasn’t the south that did it. It was South Carolina. The remaining states were not culpable, so that means they should be invaded for coming to South Carolina’s defense? Is this Westeros, is this a bar fight?
The argument that the south started it by firing on a fort is the most sophomoric concerning this whole era. The south repeated attempted to purchase the fort, or even negotiate a treaty concerning forts. They were ignored because – I’m sorry South Carolina was ignored – the Republican concern was preserving federal power.
You speak of the Southern withdrawal as a sinful act. Looking back past 600,000 graves, it sure does. But at the time a threat to withdraw from the union was fairly non-controversial and practiced in North and South. There was no reason for a peaceful separation to lead to war. It was Lincoln’s raising of the militia that was shocking and unprecedented, and in fact why Virginia and Arkansas finally withdrew from the Union.
Or was Lincoln’s promise to go to war over tariffs, and his follow through what started the war? Clearly, the original intention of the North had nothing to do with ending slavery. The South practiced the very American notion of separation from political arrangements not consented to (obviously the slaves didn’t consent, but that wasn’t an argument the Republicans were quite making at the time, they argued that the separation itself was illegitimate). Why would Lincoln wage a brutal war over this, what was he losing? Did he predict Naziism or Soviet Communism, and felt a united North America was absolutely necessary for the defense of freedom? Did he really believe his own conspiracy theories of the slave power? In his Gettysburg address, was he referring to the abolition of slavery in government of, by and for the people? No! He was a believer in the American system of central economic planning. Southern commerce taxed to build transcontinental railroads to bolster Northern industry. It was for the common good! The South was a thorn in that plan because it had its own – modern progressives would call it ‘atomistic’ – economic situation and didn’t need to fund federal railroads and support northern industry.
The issue isn’t a defense of the Confederacy. It’s pointing out that the political principle of consent was defeated by Lincoln in the most devastating way. The federal government will grant you the privilege to certain civil liberties, while its judges and majorities permit it. This crony corporatist, imperial, pure democracy – whichever way you look at it – was not what was ratified by the states when they signed on to the compact.
This is my concern and I haven’t heard a compelling, informed argument to the contrary. It’s not what virtues were possessed by the Confederacy, it was the transformation of the American political union wrought by the blood of Americans on the part of Lincoln.
And did someone praise Lincoln for his involvement in the war? I believe his micro-management was rather a bane, if I’m not mistaken.