How does civilization survive w.o. the "Sublime".

[Mike OTDP]

As for the Rebellion, thank you for making my point for me. The Confederacy was an evil state, based on evil, dedicated to preserving evil, led by a class of very evil men. In the course of their evil, they forever discredited by association many otherwise good and vital principles in American political thought so they are now lost (to our great and lasting harm). Well Done!

Not evil. Foolish. The political leadership of the Confederacy displayed a complete lack of strategic acumen. Rooted substantially in a creamy romanticism. Any sensible leader would have let the legal arguments play out (it being generally conceded that the Cotton States would win), and not give Lincoln a causus belli by firing on Fort Sumter.

[randy]

Not evil. Foolish.

But their foolishness, in part, served to defend the absolute evil of human slavery. No matter how many other causes and legal justifications they had for their actions, not abolishing that "peculiar institution" invalidated any claim they had to being other than barbarians.

My use of the term barbarian is not hyperbole. I consider human societies to be either civilized or barbarian. No society that allows human slavery is civilized. Of course my by standards, no country actually ruled by a King, Emperor, Communism, Fascism military dictatorship, or theocracy is civilized either, so I have a much narrower view of how long civilized societies have existed than most. And yes, I believe that the US did not even start becoming a civilized nation until 1865.

[HTRN]

Not evil. Foolish. The political leadership of the Confederacy displayed a complete lack of strategic acumen. Rooted substantially in a creamy romanticism. Any sensible leader would have let the legal arguments play out (it being generally conceded that the Cotton States would win), and not give Lincoln a causus belli by firing on Fort Sumter.

It ultimately was about Political influence, money, and the expansion of Slavery in the west. Because of States rights, even Lincoln couldn't remove slavery in the south, and admitted as such. HOWEVER, he could and did ban slavery in all federal territories, and make conditions that for in order to join the Union as a state, they would forever ban slavery. As these states joined, they would effectively grant more and more political power to the then matched powerbloc of antislavery states in the North. In short, they saw the writing on the wall. They weren't worried about Lincoln, but 50 years down the road. What they were betting on was cotton(and interestingly enough, it was Eli Whitney, who made cotton a valuable cash crop with his cotton gin, that caused the huge expansion of slavery in the South) At the time, Something like 2/3rds of the Cotton in the world came from the Southern United States. They basically drowned their competition in cotton. The idea behind the Civil war was that they would hold out long enough to gain recognition from Britain, through the heavy influence of the rich mill owners on GB's parliment, to recognize the South as an independent nation, and not a province in rebellion. Unfortunately, they suffered from bad timing - a slump in demand at the time, and warehouses stuffed with cotton(because of the cheap price) let the mill owners ride out the embargo, at least until they could get cotton going in a British holding, namely Egypt. The Cotton was more expensive to grow their than what they got from the South, but that was handled by marketing as superior "Egyptian Cotton", and thus more expensive, which still carries on to this day, despite the fact that alot of socalled "Egyptian Cotton" today isn't from Egypt.

[MiddleAgedKen]

I suspect that the "Egyptian cotton" referred to above is Extra Long Staple (ELS) cotton. ELS varieties produce significantly longer fibers than more conventional picker varieties (and waaaay longer than the dryland "stripper cotton" grown in much of TX and OK cotton country), giving it superior spinning qualities and thus fetching a premium price. For example, when average cotton prices were at $.70/lb a few years back, ELS cotton such as "Pima" and related varieties grown in AZ and CA were fetching about a buck twenty a pound.

It's been a while since I followed cotton closely, though. An interesting little world, with a language all its own.

[Greg]

As for the Rebellion, thank you for making my point for me. The Confederacy was an evil state, based on evil, dedicated to preserving evil, led by a class of very evil men. In the course of their evil, they forever discredited by association many otherwise good and vital principles in American political thought so they are now lost (to our great and lasting harm). Well Done!

Not evil. Foolish. The political leadership of the Confederacy displayed a complete lack of strategic acumen. Rooted substantially in a creamy romanticism. Any sensible leader would have let the legal arguments play out (it being generally conceded that the Cotton States would win), and not give Lincoln a causus belli by firing on Fort Sumter.

You seem to think I'm calling them evil for seceding. Not in the least. It was everything else they did that was vile and evil. I've been trying to dig up some references and failing (getting senile) but one name I could come up with was George Fitzhugh. Makes for good reading. I'll come back to him.

Prewar, the rich planter wanna-be-aristocrats controlled the South nearly completely. They dominated local gov't, packing the state legislatures and also made up the Federal representative delegations. They also controlled, by some coincidence, all the wealth. The system was run explicitly by them, for them. It was good for them, but horrible for everyone else. It left the entire South (excepting the lucky planters) economically and culturally backward. And they knew it- and as usual to justify such a situation, the planters concocted and sold a body of lies to justify the situation. Reading some of this apologia is very educational (see George Fitzhugh).

The lies were fairly pitiful in themselves, but they were steeped in some lovely Romantic bullshit. There seemed to be two main threads, neither convincing on it's own and mutually contradictory to boot.

First was that the system of plantation slavery was good because it generated enormous wealth that was good for all, even the entire Union. Some export figures for foreign cotton sales and such tended to be tossed around. But when you realize that virtually all Southern capital was tied up in slaves and land, the argument falls apart for anyone who can do math, is aware of ROI and opportunity cost.

The other was that plantation owners should be allowed to do what they liked due to their inherent moral superiority, which they earned by virtue of, essentially (get this!) running a welfare state. Yes, the cradle-to-grave welfare state that wealthy Southerners ran for millions of slaves, at great personal and financial sacrifice to themselves, was sufficiently noble to justify the whole enterprise. To quote George Fitzhugh "The situation of the North is abnormal and anomalous. Capital exercises a more perfect compulsion over free laborers than human master over slaves; for free laborers must at all times work or starve, and slaves are supported whether they work or not."

So yes, the system is good because it generates enormous wealth, but it's also good because the slave owners personally sacrifice financially to provide such generous cradle-to-grave care for their slaves. Yep.

An additional thread was that the system of slavery provided sufficient leisure for the planter class to be ennobled by their freedom from having to do anything for themselves (except regularly bend over that one hot piece who works in the kitchen, of course) so as to become essentially Platonic philosopher-kings. Well if there's anything the 20th Century has taught us, it's that the only just place for would-be philosopher-kings is face down at the bottom of a hole with bullets in the back of their heads (turnabout is fair play).

IMO it's really no accident that the apologia for slavery sounds EXACTLY like the bloviations of modern limousine liberals. If you actually look at what they said, and study the system they ran, it's really pretty starkly obvious. Everything, from opposing capitalism because the 'right people' don't win (but making arguments for their system of wealth creation based on fraudulent math, just like Green Energy), to assumed moral superiority based on "compassion" for their inferiors (welfare really *is* just like slave-owning, in more ways than one).

This was an entire class of Nancy Pelosi, in charge of half our country. Their system made the worst aspects of Latin America look pretty good by comparison. No, not foolish. Fucking evil.

[MiddleAgedKen]

Can't argue much with what Greg says above. I found a book (much of it available on Google Books) contending that contrabands and free blacks were taken by the Army of Northern Virginia during the Gettysburg campaign. The book is Virginia's Civil War, and the relevant passage is in a chapter contributed by David G. Smith included in the book, beginning on p. 137.

I'm going to see whether I can get a copy via interlibrary loan, to get a fuller picture of the claims. Makes it awfully tough to evaluate the Confederacy independent of the Slave Power, though.

[Mike OTDP]

Greg, I'll partly agree with you about the planter class...but only in part. The planter class behaved very much like feudal lords - including noblesse oblige. One of the claims they made that hit the industrial Northeast hard was that their slaves were better cared for than factory workers. Nobody in his right mind would want to be a slave, but they weren't calling factory workers "wage slaves" for nothing.

You can accuse the planter class of poor strategy (and I will, they are Case Study #2 in Democrat Party Strategic Failures), but not of cowardice. They backed up their words with front-line combat.

The modern Left behaves like feudal lords - without noblesse oblige. They are eager for privilege, but duty is a concept that escapes them. Northeners and Southeners would join in condemning them.