Is the US destined to go to war with an Independent CSA

I imagine it did! Meanwhile the Plantation Owner was sipping mint julips making sure he always had over 20 slaves.

Not always. The Conscription Act exempted a few other occupations which experienced a sudden wartime boom, such as pharmacists, teachers, state officials, militia officers......for all its flaws the Confederate conscription system really was better than its Union opposite number. Though again what was good for the CS Army was far from good for the Confederate political system......
 

MAlexMatt

Banned
The founders of the Confederacy were talking of rolling back universal manhood suffrage and objected to it as far too democratic to their liking. They did not even accept all whites as equally granted rights in their brave new world, they were never going to allow for say, distribution of land that would favor increasingly squeezed small farmers, and even in the first seven CS states secession started with coercive, blatant voter fraud.

Some planters in the antebellum period even mused about simply enslaving the lower class whites!

Talk is cheap. Not to mention that you're playing loose and fast with your sets of people here. Who do you mean, specifically, when you say 'The Founders'? Who do you mean when you say 'they' in the next sentence?

Because somebody somewhere holds an extreme position does not mean it's a Fact of History that it Absolutely Must Happen.



Incidents such as murdering a man, burning his corpse, and dragging it through the streets by his genitals cost them any sympathy whatsoever, as do the lynchings and murderings of completely innocent people like orphanages. They initiated this and were stoked up to do it by the Copperheads, the CS government in contrast was initiator of all violence in its own territory against its own dissidents. They weren't angry over the same damn thing, Southerners were angry over having to have everything taken from them by a CS government that went out of its way to conciliate planters even at the interest of the CS government itself, US rioters were simply displeased at the prospect that blacks might at some future points have equal rights and serve alongside them.

So it's OK that the Union was conscripting people and they were wrong to object because some of them did bad things, too?

I see how it is.
 
Some planters in the antebellum period even mused about simply enslaving the lower class whites!

Talk is cheap. Not to mention that you're playing loose and fast with your sets of people here. Who do you mean, specifically, when you say 'The Founders'? Who do you mean when you say 'they' in the next sentence?

Because somebody somewhere holds an extreme position does not mean it's a Fact of History that it Absolutely Must Happen.

This is actually not the extreme position by Confederate standards. *That* is the Fitzhugh "slavery is just as good for lazy, shiftless poor whites as it is for the lazy, shiftless blacks" position. The *mundane* position of the Davis-Lee crowd was for a political system that reversed universal manhood suffrage for a more narrowly property-defined suffrage. The Founders of the Confederacy means exactly what it says: the men in Montgomery who established the Confederate States of America. It's not a complex sentence or one with a trick built into it.

So it's OK that the Union was conscripting people and they were wrong to object because some of them did bad things, too?

I see how it is.

The Union had rule of law and the ability to vote for anti-conscription politicians by duly-elected, politically legitimate means, though those peace Democrats were busy plotting with Confederates who wanted to set *up* internal civil wars in the North over this. The utter failure of those attempts shows which of the two sides had the real commitment to law and order and which of the two was the bunch of clumsy factionalized thugs whose chief qualification for enduring power was the best trigger-finger. Conscription for either side was not the problem, the problem was when anti-draft sentiment was met with massed gunfire, which happened all of once in the United States but repeatedly all over the Confederacy, to the point that the draft was causing multiple civil wars all over the Confederacy. Conscription in itself doesn't really alter either side's moral claims because both sides did it.

And incidentally, I do rate the CSA higher than the USA in terms of their draft's efficiency and actual military utility, the Union draft was a laughable comedy of errors, misjudgments, and the most triumphant example of the Lincoln Administration's How Not To Do X guide.
 

MAlexMatt

Banned
This is actually not the extreme position by Confederate standards. *That* is the Fitzhugh "slavery is just as good for lazy, shiftless poor whites as it is for the lazy, shiftless blacks" position. The *mundane* position of the Davis-Lee crowd was for a political system that reversed universal manhood suffrage for a more narrowly property-defined suffrage. The Founders of the Confederacy means exactly what it says: the men in Montgomery who established the Confederate States of America. It's not a complex sentence or one with a trick built into it.

So you're saying that every single man who attended the First Provisional Congress was in support of this?

Or are you still being lazy with your set-labels and it was really some proportion of these men?

The Union had rule of law and the ability to vote for anti-conscription politicians by duly-elected, politically legitimate means, though those peace Democrats were busy plotting with Confederates who wanted to set *up* internal civil wars in the North over this. The utter failure of those attempts shows which of the two sides had the real commitment to law and order and which of the two was the bunch of clumsy factionalized thugs whose chief qualification for enduring power was the best trigger-finger. Conscription for either side was not the problem, the problem was when anti-draft sentiment was met with massed gunfire, which happened all of once in the United States but repeatedly all over the Confederacy, to the point that the draft was causing multiple civil wars all over the Confederacy. Conscription in itself doesn't really alter either side's moral claims because both sides did it.

So you're willing to admit that conscription was a moral evil in both nations? That people opposing conscription on one side were just as right to do so as the people doing so on the other?
 
So you're saying that every single man who attended the First Provisional Congress was in support of this?

Or are you still being lazy with your set-labels and it was really some proportion of these men?

Honestly, I don't see why this is such a big deal for you. It's like it's a perfect unwillingness to admit that in different times different concepts were viewed differently. The people opposing it weren't unanimous, per se. There were some Confederate nationalists who were just fine with universal manhood suffrage....who spent the war playing with their slaves on their plantations and never heard a shot fired in anger while the poor people died in carload lots. The assembly in Montgomery of delegates of the seven states that created the Provisional Confederate Government was the furthest thing imaginable from representative of a Confederate *nation* and the four states dragged in in the spring of 1861 never really had any kind of unified Confederate sentiment as it was, hence why all four of them had the most well-known miniature Civil Wars and we have now West Virginia out of what was northwestern Virginia. The people who made up the Confederate government were not very nice people, and almost none of them qualify for democratic politicians.

So you're willing to admit that conscription was a moral evil in both nations? That people opposing conscription on one side were just as right to do so as the people doing so on the other?

No, I'm willing to say that conscription was a moral necessity in both *sides*, one of which was a nation and the other of which was well-organized rebellion. There was no Confederate nation.
 
So you're saying that every single man who attended the First Provisional Congress was in support of this?

MAlexMatt

Sadly, it is our own OTL American history that vindicates the idea of the White ruling classes desiring the enslavement of the Poor White working classes. You have only to look at the history of the systematic development of the chain-gang prison system throughout the post-ACW South. While initially concentrated on the newly freed Blacks, the various state and county authorities, once they saw the $$$ to be made in putting the chain gangs to forced labor, were only too happy to include rounding up Whites for such nefarious crimes as "vagrancy" and "being disrespectful to a police officer".:mad:

I can easily see such a system developing in a CSA Triumphant ATL. Of course, it wouldn't be CALLED White Slavery, but considering the lack of oversight OTL over these organizations, don't be surprised when these felonious vagrants:rolleyes: wind up seeing their 30-60-90 day "sentences" stretching out for years and years.:mad:
 
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MAlexMatt

Banned
Honestly, I don't see why this is such a big deal for you.

Because it matters. If we're going to have an actual debate here, instead of me asserting I'm right and you asserting you're right and both us talking past each other, we have to be willing to offer actual evidence for our claims. You claimed that some portion of the Provisional Congress for the first few states to leave the Union was in favor of removing universal suffrage. I need to know what proportion, and what their actual chances of seeing that through would be. After all, I don't think a single Confederate State would have listened if the Confederate Congress (which, by the way, was a different body from the Provisional Congress) tried to tell them how to handle suffrage.

You need to be able to demonstrate that people of this kind of opinion were in a large enough majority to be able to capture legislative control of each of the individual Confederate states. In order to even begin doing that, you need to be able to show that they made up even just a majority in the Provisional Congress itself.

Your whole argument rests of a bed of evidence that is paper thin. Beef it up or admit you are just basing the whole thing on supposition.

It's like it's a perfect unwillingness to admit that in different times different concepts were viewed differently.

Look man, the facts are the facts. Reality cannot contradict itself. We can see things in different ways, but that's an artifact of our flawed, limited perspectives, not any variation out in the universe itself. Put up or shut up, stop trying to dodge.

The people opposing it weren't unanimous, per se. There were some Confederate nationalists who were just fine with universal manhood suffrage....who spent the war playing with their slaves on their plantations and never heard a shot fired in anger while the poor people died in carload lots. The assembly in Montgomery of delegates of the seven states that created the Provisional Confederate Government was the furthest thing imaginable from representative of a Confederate *nation* and the four states dragged in in the spring of 1861 never really had any kind of unified Confederate sentiment as it was, hence why all four of them had the most well-known miniature Civil Wars and we have now West Virginia out of what was northwestern Virginia. The people who made up the Confederate government were not very nice people, and almost none of them qualify for democratic politicians.

You need to learn to concentrate here. They 'weren't unanimous'? How do you know this? What did each faction number? When you speak of the people who were comfortable with universal suffrage sitting home on their plantations, who are you talking about?

You run on generalizations. Generalizations aren't facts, they're an order of magnitude removed from facts. They're facts viewed through a badly designed telescope from ten miles away.

I want facts. If you want to prove your argument you need more than just generalizations.

No, I'm willing to say that conscription was a moral necessity in both *sides*, one of which was a nation and the other of which was well-organized rebellion. There was no Confederate nation.

You're actually right. The Confederacy was made up of the whole or part of at least three different nations.

What made conscription a moral necessity?
 

MAlexMatt

Banned
MAlexMatt

Sadly, it is our own OTL American history that vindicates the idea of the White ruling classes desiring the enslavement of the Poor White working classes. You have only to look at the history of the systematic development of the chain-gang prison system throughout the post-ACW South. While initially concentrated on the newly freed Blacks, the various state and county authories, once they saw the $$$ to be made in putting the chain gangs to forced labor, were only too happy to include rounding up Whites for such nefarious crimes as "vagrancy" and "being disrespectful to a police officer".:mad:

I can easily see such a system developing in a CSA Triumphant ATL. Of course, it wouldn't be CALLED White Slavery, but considering the lack of oversight OTL over these organizations, don't be surprised when these felonious vagrants:rolleyes: wind up seeing their 30-60-90 day "sentences" stretching out for years and years.:mad:

Can you recognize the difference between your own ability to imagine something and the historical necessity of it happening?
 

Spengler

Banned
Matt notice how he used history to back up what he is saying. As oppose to what could be best described as naive speculation.

Also Snake is using historical fact to support what he is saying as well.
 

MAlexMatt

Banned
Matt notice how he used history to back up what he is saying. As oppose to what could be best described as naive speculation.

Actually, naive speculation is more or less exactly what I'd call what he did.

What he's doing is committing a non sequitor fallacy. His conclusion doesn't logically follow from his premises. It's just that, with the rest of his biases, the little tid-bit he did use was enough to meet his own subjective sense of certainty. Subjective certainty, however, is not objective proof. Without sharing his biases, I have absolutely no logical reason to agree with him.
 
Can you recognize the difference between your own ability to imagine something (1) and the historical necessity of it happening? (2)

OK...:confused: I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to define your terms a little bit better.

1) Imagine something that actually happened OTL??

2) Historical necessity? Where? In OTL or in the CSA Triumphant ATL? If the former, I am quite certain you are not arguing for the "historical necessity" of years long incarcerations of 12 year old boys (Black) for the crime of being disrespectful of a White Man. If the latter, the "historical necessity" would be (and OTL was) based on the greed of the planter class, not simple economics.
 
OK...:confused: I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to define your terms a little bit better.

1) Imagine something that actually happened OTL??

2) Historical necessity? Where? In OTL or in the CSA Triumphant ATL? If the former, I am quite certain you are not arguing for the "historical necessity" of years long incarcerations of 12 year old boys (Black) for the crime of being disrespectful of a White Man. If the latter, the "historical necessity" would be (and OTL was) based on the greed of the planter class, not simple economics.

To be fair greed and simple economics often overlap.
 

MAlexMatt

Banned
OK...:confused: I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to define your terms a little bit better.

1) Imagine something that actually happened OTL??

2) Historical necessity? Where? In OTL or in the CSA Triumphant ATL? If the former, I am quite certain you are not arguing for the "historical necessity" of years long incarcerations of 12 year old boys (Black) for the crime of being disrespectful of a White Man. If the latter, the "historical necessity" would be (and OTL was) based on the greed of the planter class, not simple economics.

I figured you were arguing that the appearance of chain labor gangs in the post-bellum period IOTL supported Snake's assertion that there was wide-spread enough antipathy to lower class whites in what would be, ITTL, Confederate society that universal white male suffrage would be reversed.

If that is, in fact, not what you were arguing, I retract my objection.
 
MAlexMatt, I'm not sure exactly why this all matters to you. Aren't you the person who made a big deal about how over the years following independence, conservatives pushed back against the liberal ideals (If not practical reality, as OTL showed), and said it was one of the worst aspects of American history.

Isn't the CSA just those tendencies amplified?
 

MAlexMatt

Banned
MAlexMatt, I'm not sure exactly why this all matters to you. Aren't you the person who made a big deal about how over the years following independence, conservatives pushed back against the liberal ideals (If not practical reality, as OTL showed), and said it was one of the worst aspects of American history.

Isn't the CSA just those tendencies amplified?

Can't somebody argue for historical accuracy without being emotionally involved in the subject of debate?
 
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