Recent content by jmc247

No Germany is not going to unconditionally surrender if nuked. Not with a-bombs in any event. You could get a negotiated surrender of some sort, but unconditional requires something more.

You can decide. Though not quite valid it made for many a political cartoon.

I should have broadened out my comment he wouldn’t have just fought to the last man, he was giving out swords to ten year olds.

It depends on what you are looking for. The political virtuoso who would try to make a complicated set of diplomatic and political maneuvers and back down when needed? That is not Davis. He was the military man who would never back down from a challenge and would try to fight to the last man...

No shortage of their leadership including their President and VP thought secession was an insanely bad idea and said so at the time, but they also believed it to be Constitutional. The South didn’t like concentrated power and states like GA had barely more regard for the Davis then they had...

The ordinary person in the North and South heavily divided up the founders on what their views on state vs federal power happened to be. Jefferson and Madison were broadly considered the men on the right side of the state vs federal power issue in the South. The real state centered folks liked...

These posts assume a loss. The U.S. could have won in NAM by focusing on a very small COIN footprint while not messing up South Vietnamese politics or going big from the air on the North and mining the harbors like we did during Linebacker.

The use of black troops in various roles was steadily growing throughout the war North and South. The Proclamation facilitated what was already starting. Take it away and slavery still dies though probably on a more staggered time frame meaning the states are probably allowed to draft their own...

The ideology that blacks were inferior therefore acceptable to be slaves and incapable of higher order thinking was central to the Cotton State fire eaters. That view was really not universally shared including by many pro-slavery southerners and certainly not the gadual emancipationists. "We...

They were about 10% of the workforce in Virginia factories before the war. The biggest hinderance eliminating slavery in 1831 and probably still in the northern South after would be this matter. “But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go...

That wasn't interpreted by the CSA Congress when it existed to impede state level decisions on slavery related matters. It does mean that in order to ban slavery at the federal level an amendment is needed which means that a supermajority of states already will have to have banned it.

This is an almost impossible to answer question because everything depends on how it comes about and also what you mean by liberalize. The most plausible way for them to not lose is for Washington to let the Cotton States go in which case it’s half a CSA and also not likely to centralize easily...

Well you have Davis’ letters to the fire eaters of SC from November 1860 to look back on for guidance on how he viewed it. First that they should not seek independence unless all the planting states which he tended to include KY and Missouri in that were all in agreement which they weren’t...

What developed at mainstream southern nationalist thought evolved over time yes. The biggest leaps came after the North started winning the favor of the black population of the South with the EP and other goodies. My sense of southerners is they did not widely believe the North would actually...

Most in Richmond did not think SC was in the right in January of 1861. Even many of those who believed in the state compact theory felt the constitutional compact had not yet been sufficiently breeched to justify SC’s actions. But, most also felt there was a diplomatic solution to be had and...