krh1956 said:
Hi Ebeeby,
This summer my wife and I spent a week touring the battlefields of Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania ... a memorable trip.
Here's a link to an article my wife wrote for a British newspaper about the journey ...
http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/americas/fields-of-valour-ndash-where-blood-and-bullets-forged-a-mighty-nation-2337194.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Hi Gus,
I shall back away from controversy!
Keith
Keith - There is no controversy, The South Shall Rise Again!
A terrific piece you wrote. I am quite astonished at how much you know about the war. A few small corrections - if you will forgive me:
-Lincoln quite skillfully drew the South in to attacking the Federal Fort Sumter by rushing the US Navy there to re-supply it. This was wholly unnecessary and Lincoln could have withdrawn the forces there and waited to see how diplomatic negotiations would proceed - but he wanted war.
- Lincoln was not anti-slavery; quite the opposite. He was a Whig in everything but name and a protegee of Henry Clay. He only became an abolitionist late in the war when the North, losing badly, needed a new moral imperative for having invaded the South without congressional approval, destroying the US Constitution "in order to save it", having jailed thousands of northern dissenters, mainly journalists and elected representatives, and having killed more than 400,000 Americans
-Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves in the Southern States. It freed only slaves in Southern held territory of the Southern States. The Federals held Tennessee at that time for example but, quite specifically, no slaves were freed in Tennessee or any other Federal held territory
-The Shenandoah Valley was a prosperous rich Southern land until the North quite literally burned it to the ground. Not a structure was left standing or a field left unruined. Sheridan and Sherman's war of terror - perhaps the first such in Western history - was tacitly approved by Lincoln. It is unknown how many Southern civilians died as a result of this war of terror but it is estimated conservatively in the tens of thousands.
-The winners get to write the history and so they did. The myth of Lincoln saving the union - while destroying it - has been taught for more than 100 years in our government schools. The North was quite concerned about free black labor competing with white labor in the western territories.
It is quite likely that Americans would have dispensed with slavery peacefully - much as the rest of the world did- within 20 years of the date of Lincoln's initial aggression. The North, suffering a loss of trade with England and Europe to the South due to its high Tariff policies (a trademark of the "American System" of Henry Clay, the Whig Party and Lincoln) would have had to come around to the Southern view of free markets. The fact that the agrarian South paid 81% of these ridiculous tariffs was a large part of the secessionist movement. As the North came to see the folly of its protectionism and adjusted accordingly, the South likely would have re-joined the union. It was always understood that the Union was *voluntary*. The Founders of this country framed it that way as a check on Federal Power. The threat of secession was an *intentional* part of the balance of power. In fact, Northern States frequently threatened secession - Massachusetts perhaps most of all - but none were in invaded.
-Given these facts, the hypocrisy of the last sentence of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is quite galling to those of Southern heritage.
A concise summary of these facts can be found in DiLorenzo's, "The Real Lincoln", a finely written book.
