Official "Did the Confederacy Have a Chance to Win the American Civil War?" Thread
- Thread starter Anaxagoras
- Start date
Mexico at this time is basically a French puppet state. Napoleon III was actually eager to support the Confederacy, given that he (correctly, in my mind) viewed and independent CSA as means of distracting the U.S. from his attempts to peop up the Mexican Empire.
jahenders
Banned
Good points, but a few thoughts:
1) You're right that the Union had unengaged forces. However, if Union morale was more thoroughly broken, the whole force could potentially have panicked and broke, therefore allowing Johnston (this might all but assume he lives) to rout an enemy that might not be able to rally before they're driven back to (nearly) the river with huge loss. You could potentially have a situation where the Union remnants (protected by gunboats) have to retreat across the river at night. If Buell arrives to encounter a shamble of a union force and Rebs in strength across the river, I'm not sure he's going to rush to cross.
2) True, Meade was not an idiot, but he was new to independent command and if the Rebs seized the high ground he'd certainly face pressure to drive them off. He might make some attempts and then, convinced that he was oh so close to breaking Lee, might keep trying.
3) True, as it played out the correlation of forces was strongly in the North's favor at that time, but I'm assuming a big loss at Shiloh and someone other than Grant in charge leading up to Vicksburg.
1) You're right that the Union had unengaged forces. However, if Union morale was more thoroughly broken, the whole force could potentially have panicked and broke, therefore allowing Johnston (this might all but assume he lives) to rout an enemy that might not be able to rally before they're driven back to (nearly) the river with huge loss. You could potentially have a situation where the Union remnants (protected by gunboats) have to retreat across the river at night. If Buell arrives to encounter a shamble of a union force and Rebs in strength across the river, I'm not sure he's going to rush to cross.
2) True, Meade was not an idiot, but he was new to independent command and if the Rebs seized the high ground he'd certainly face pressure to drive them off. He might make some attempts and then, convinced that he was oh so close to breaking Lee, might keep trying.
3) True, as it played out the correlation of forces was strongly in the North's favor at that time, but I'm assuming a big loss at Shiloh and someone other than Grant in charge leading up to Vicksburg.
Thanks for the info... I've long had an interest in the TX war of independence, never knew that about the US forces so close to hand. 2000 of them would indeed be significant. And yet, I wouldn't write off the Mexican chances of stomping Houston. One of those Mexican generals was Urrea, who, from what I've read, was likely the best battlefield commander of both sides. His force was pretty experienced too, and he defeated small Texan forces in 4 different places IIRC. The only thing I'm not sure about is just where he was at the time of San Jacinto (close enough to order those 2500 Mexican soldiers to attack? Not close enough?). As for the powder and shot captured... might not have been the boon it seems. When you read about the war, you read over and over about how the Texans disliked Mexican gunpowder (which, due to corruption, was heavy with charcoal and not all that great a propellant). Travis' letters talk constantly about the lack of 'good powder' (ie, made by the Texans themselves). The food/logistics problem might be a problem, but I think they'd have enough for a decisive battle against Houston; afterwards, it might really be a problem...
I've no real objection to 'locals', it just seems kinda odd.Especially when you notice that all the big names in the war (Houston, Crockett, Travis, Bowie) were foreign born.
I suppose all this is getting way OT, but I always enjoy discussions about the TX war of independence...
speaking of the US Army, I have seen it implied that some of Houston's army were US Army 'deserters' who may have been sent to assist. I have never seen this confirmed, but it does go along with the fact that Houston, Gaines and Jackson all knew each other and Gaines and Houston were proteges of Jackson
Anaxagoras
Banned
But what if we are talking about alternate history, where the situation might have been different?
But what if we are talking about alternate history, where the situation might have been different?
But what if we are talking about alternate history, where the situation might have been different?
NamelesStatistic
Banned
What hurts the Confederacy most to me isn't any sort of battlefield insufficiency as much as its utterly ignorant, arrogant and just plain wrong foreign policy approach. Every major per-conception the Confederate leadership and political class had seemed to be completely wrong, from the disposition of the Union, the much vaunted King Cotton, the view of the European Powers, to the very nature of the world economy. They were so far off base in their beliefs of the world and the place of the Confederacy in it that their actions resulting from these preconceptions appear to be little more than insane troll logic with hindsight. I have posted this quote before on other threads but I think it bears reading by everyone interested by this topic because it shows just how massively out of touch with reality much of the Confederate leadership was and really explains the reasoning behind some of the nonsensical economic and foreign policy blunders by the CSA during the war. The following quote is an excerpt from a speech made to the US Senate in 1858 by the Senator from South Carolina James H. Hammond (who interesting was later discovered to be an incestuous pedophile, and who also later had a school named after him in 1966):
As I am disposed to see this question settled as soon as possible, and am perfectly willing to have a final and conclusive settlement now, after what the Senator from New York [William Seward] has said, I think it not improper that I should attempt to bring the North and South face to face, and see what resources each of us might have in the contingency of separate organizations.
If we never acquire another foot of territory for the South, look at her. Eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles. As large as Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia and Spain. Is not that territory enough to make an empire that shall rule the world? With the finest soil, the most delightful climate, whose staple productions none of those great countries can grow, we have three thousand miles of continental sea-shore line so indented with bays and crowded with islands, that, when their shore lines are added, we have twelve thousand miles. Through the heart of our country runs the great Mississippi, the father of waters, into whose bosom are poured thirty-six thousand miles of tributary rivers; and beyond we have the desert prairie wastes to protect us in our rear. Can you hem in such a territory as that? You talk of putting up a wall of fire around eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles so situated! How absurd.
But, in this territory lies the great valley of the Mississippi, now the real, and soon to be the acknowledged seat of the empire of the world. The sway of that valley will be as great as ever the Nile knew in the earlier ages of mankind. We own the most of it. The most valuable part of it belongs to us now; and although those who have settled above us are now opposed to us, another generation will tell a different tale. They are ours by all the laws of nature; slave-labor will go over every foot of this great valley where it will be found profitable to use it, and some of those who may not use it are soon to be united with us by such ties as will make us one and inseparable. The iron horse will soon be clattering over the sunny plains of the South to bear the products of its upper tributaries of the valley to our Atlantic ports, as it now does through the ice-bound North. And there is the great Mississippi, a bond of union made by Nature herself. She will maintain it forever.
On this fine territory we have a population four times as large as that with which these colonies separated from the mother country, and a hundred, I might say a thousand fold stronger. Our population is now sixty per cent greater than that of the whole United States when we entered into the second war of independence. It is as large as the whole population of the United States was ten years after the conclusion of that war, and our own exports are three times as great as those of the whole United States then. Upon our muster-rolls we have a million of men. In a defensive war, upon an emergency, every one of them would be available. At any time, the South can raise, equip, and maintain in the field, a larger army than any Power of the earth can send against her, and an army of soldiers–men brought up on horseback, with guns in their hands. If we take the North, even when the two large States of Kansas and Minnesota shall be admitted, her territory will be one hundred thousand square miles less than ours. I do not speak of California and Oregon; there is no antagonism between the South and those countries, and never will be. The population of the North is fifty per cent greater than ours. I have nothing to say in disparagement either of the soil of the North, or the people of the North, who are a brave and energetic race, full of intellect. But they produce no great staple that the South does not produce; while we produce two or three, and these the very greatest, that she can never produce. As to her men, I may be allowed to say, they have never proved themselves to be superior to those of the South, either in the field or in the Senate.
But the strength of a nation depends in a great measure upon its wealth, and the wealth of a nation, like that of a man, is to be estimated by its surplus production. You may go to your trashy census books, full of falsehoods and nonsense–they tell you, for example, that in the State of Tennessee, the whole number of house-servants is not equal to that of those in my own house, and such things as that. You may estimate what is made throughout the country from these census books, but it is no matter how much is made if it is all consumed. If a man possess millions of dollars and consumes his income, is he rich? Is he competent to embark in any new enterprises? Can he long build ships or railroads? And could a people in that condition build ships and roads or go to war without a fatal strain on capital? All the enterprises of peace and war depend upon the surplus productions of a people. They may be happy, they may be comfortable, they may enjoy themselves in consuming what they make; but they are not rich, they are not strong. It appears, by going to the reports of the Secretary of the Treasury, which are authentic, that last year the United States exported in round numbers $279,000,000 worth of domestic produce, excluding gold and foreign merchandise re-exported. Of this amount $158,000,000 worth is the clear produce of the South; articles that are not and cannot be made at the North. There are then $80,000,000 worth of exports of products of the forest, provisions and breadstuffs. If we assume that the South made but one third of these, and I think that is a low calculation, our exports were $185,000,000, leaving to the North less than $95,000,000.
In addition to this, we sent to the North $30,000,000 worth of cotton, which is not counted in the exports. We sent to her $7 or $8,000,000 worth of tobacco, which is not counted in the exports. We sent naval stores, lumber, rice, and many other minor articles. There is no doubt that we sent to the North $40,000,000 in addition; but suppose the amount to be $35,000,000, it will give us a surplus production of $220,000,000. But the recorded exports of the South now are greater than the whole exports of the United States in any year before 1856. They are greater than the whole average exports of the United States for the last twelve years, including the two extraordinary years of 1856 and 1857. They are nearly double the amount of the average exports of the twelve preceding years. If I am right in my calculations as to $220,000,000 of surplus produce, there is not a nation on the face of the earth, with any numerous population, that can compete with us in produce per capita. It amounts to $16.66 per head, supposing that we have twelve millions of people. England with all her accumulated wealth, with her concentrated and educated energy, makes but sixteen and a half dollars of surplus production per head. I have not made a calculation as to the North, with her $95,000,000 surplus; admitting that she exports as much as we do, with her eighteen millions of population it would be but little over twelve dollars a head. But she cannot export to us and abroad exceeding ten dollars a head against our sixteen dollars. I know well enough that the North sends to the South a vast amount of the productions of her industry. I take it for granted that she, at least, pays us in that way for the thirty or forty million dollars worth of cotton and other articles we send her. I am willing to admit that she sends us considerably more; but to bring her up to our amount of surplus production– to bring her up to $220,000,000 a year, the South must take from her $125,000,000; and this, in addition to our share of the consumption of the $330,000,000 worth introduced into the country from abroad, and paid for chiefly by our own exports. The thing is absurd; it is impossible; it can never appear anywhere but in a book of statistics, or a Congress speech.
With an export of $220,000,000 under the present tariff, the South organized separately would have $40,000,000 of revenue. With one-fourth the present tariff, she would have a revenue with the present tariff adequate to all her wants, for the South would never go to war; she would never need an army or a navy, beyond a few garrisons on the frontiers and a few revenue cutters. It is commerce that breeds war. It is manufactures that require to be hawked about the world, and that give rise to navies and commerce. But we have nothing to do but to take off restrictions on foreign merchandise and open our ports, and the whole world will come to us to trade. They will be too glad to bring and carry us, and we never shall dream of a war. Why the South has never yet had a just cause of war except with the North. Every time she has drawn her sword it has been on the point of honor, and that point of honor has been mainly loyalty to her sister colonies and sister States, who have ever since plundered and calumniated her.
But if there were no other reason why we should never have war, would any sane nation make war on cotton? Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war on us we could bring the whole world to our feet. The South is perfectly competent to go on, one, two, or three years without planting a seed of cotton. I believe that if she was to plant but half her cotton, for three years to come, it would be an immense advantage to her. I am not so sure but that after three years’ entire abstinence she would come out stronger than ever she was before, and better prepared to enter afresh upon her great career of enterprise. What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? I will not stop to depict what every one can imagine, but this is certain: England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king. Until lately the Bank of England was king; but she tried to put her screws as usual, the fall before last, upon the cotton crop, and was utterly vanquished. The last power has been conquered. Who can doubt, that has looked at recent events, that cotton is supreme? When the abuse of credit had destroyed credit and annihilated confidence; when thousands of the strongest commercial houses in the world were coming down, and hundreds of millions of dollars of supposed property evaporating in thin air; when you came to a dead lock, and revolutions were threatened, what brought you up? Fortunately for you it was the commencement of the cotton season, and we have poured in upon you one million six hundred thousand bales of cotton just at the crisis to save you from destruction. That cotton, but for the bursting of your speculative bubbles in the North, which produced the whole of this convulsion, would have brought us $100,000,000. We have sold it for $65,000,000 and saved you. Thirty-five million dollars we, the slaveholders of the South, have put into the charity box for your magnificent financiers, your “cotton lords,” your “merchant princes.”
But, sir, the greatest strength of the South arises from the harmony of her political and social institutions. This harmony gives her a frame of society, the best in the world, and an extent of political freedom, combined with entire security, such as no other people ever enjoyed upon the face of the earth. Society precedes government; creates it, and ought to control it; but as far as we can look back in historic times we find the case different; for government is no sooner created than it becomes too strong for society, and shapes and moulds, as well as controls it. In later centuries the progress of civilization and of intelligence has made the divergence so great as to produce civil wars and revolutions; and it is nothing now but the want of harmony between governments and societies which occasions all the uneasiness and trouble and terror that we see abroad. It was this that brought on the American Revolution. We threw off a Government not adapted to our social system, and made one for ourselves. The question is, how far have we succeeded? The South, so far as that is concerned, is satisfied, harmonious, and prosperous, but demands to be let alone.
In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves. We found them slaves by the common “consent of mankind,” which, according to Cicero, “lex naturae est.” The highest proof of what is Nature’s law. We are old-fashioned at the South yet; slave is a word discarded now by “ears polite;” I will not characterize that class at the North by that term; but you have it; it is there; it is everywhere; it is eternal.
The Senator from New York [William Seward] said yesterday that the whole world had abolished slavery. Aye, the name, but not the thing; all the powers of the earth cannot abolish that. God only can do it when he repeals the fiat, “the poor ye always have with you;” for the man who lives by daily labor, and scarcely lives at that, and who has to put out his labor in the market, and take the best he can get for it; in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and “operatives,” as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people, and not too much employment either. Yours are hired by the day, not care for, and scantily compensated, which may be proved in the most painful manner, at any hour in any street of your large towns. Why, you meet more beggars in one day, in any single street of the city of New York, than you would meet in a lifetime in the whole South. We do not think that whites should be slaves either by law or necessity. Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves. None of that race on the whole face of the globe can be compared with the slaves of the South. They are happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations. Yours are white, of your own race; you are brothers of one blood. They are your equals in natural endowment of intellect, and they feel galled by their degradation. Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositaries [sic] of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than “an army with banners,” and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided, not as they have mistakenly attempted to initiate such proceedings by meeting in parks, with arms in their hands, but by the quiet process of the ballot-box. You have been making war upon us to our very hearthstones. How would you like for us to send lecturers and agitators North, to teach these people this, to aid in combining, and to lead them?…
Transient and temporary causes have thus far been your preservation. The great West has been open to your surplus population, and your hordes of semi-barbarian immigrants, who are crowding in year by year. They make a great movement, and you call it progress. Whither? It is progress; but it is progress toward Vigilance Committees. The South have sustained you in great measure. You are our factors. You fetch and carry for us. One hundred and fifty million dollars of our money passes annually through your hands. Much of it sticks; all of it assists to keep your machinery together and in motion. Suppose we were to discharge you; suppose we were to take our business out of your hands;–we should consign you to anarchy and poverty. You complain of the rule of the South; that has been another cause that has preserved you. We have kept the Government conservative to the great purposes of the Constitution. We have placed it, and kept it, upon the Constitution; and that has been the cause of your peace and prosperity. The Senator from New York says that that is about to be at an end; that you intend to take the Government from us; that it will pass from our hands into yours. Perhaps what he says is true; it may be; but do not forget–it can never be forgotten–it is written on the brightest page of human history–that we, the slaveholders of the South, took our country in her infancy, and, after ruling her for sixty out of the seventy years of her existence, we surrendered her to you without a stain upon her honor, boundless in prosperity, incalculable in her strength, the wonder and admiration of the world. Time will show what you will make of her; but no time can diminish our glory or your responsibility.
SOURCE: Reprinted in Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond, of South Carolina (New York: John F. Trow & Co., 1866), pages 311-322.
PS i voted: "It technically had a chance, like there is a chance of flipping heads ten times in a row" because you can never discount some random fluke happening and in the end even a broke clock is right twice a day.
As I am disposed to see this question settled as soon as possible, and am perfectly willing to have a final and conclusive settlement now, after what the Senator from New York [William Seward] has said, I think it not improper that I should attempt to bring the North and South face to face, and see what resources each of us might have in the contingency of separate organizations.
If we never acquire another foot of territory for the South, look at her. Eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles. As large as Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia and Spain. Is not that territory enough to make an empire that shall rule the world? With the finest soil, the most delightful climate, whose staple productions none of those great countries can grow, we have three thousand miles of continental sea-shore line so indented with bays and crowded with islands, that, when their shore lines are added, we have twelve thousand miles. Through the heart of our country runs the great Mississippi, the father of waters, into whose bosom are poured thirty-six thousand miles of tributary rivers; and beyond we have the desert prairie wastes to protect us in our rear. Can you hem in such a territory as that? You talk of putting up a wall of fire around eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles so situated! How absurd.
But, in this territory lies the great valley of the Mississippi, now the real, and soon to be the acknowledged seat of the empire of the world. The sway of that valley will be as great as ever the Nile knew in the earlier ages of mankind. We own the most of it. The most valuable part of it belongs to us now; and although those who have settled above us are now opposed to us, another generation will tell a different tale. They are ours by all the laws of nature; slave-labor will go over every foot of this great valley where it will be found profitable to use it, and some of those who may not use it are soon to be united with us by such ties as will make us one and inseparable. The iron horse will soon be clattering over the sunny plains of the South to bear the products of its upper tributaries of the valley to our Atlantic ports, as it now does through the ice-bound North. And there is the great Mississippi, a bond of union made by Nature herself. She will maintain it forever.
On this fine territory we have a population four times as large as that with which these colonies separated from the mother country, and a hundred, I might say a thousand fold stronger. Our population is now sixty per cent greater than that of the whole United States when we entered into the second war of independence. It is as large as the whole population of the United States was ten years after the conclusion of that war, and our own exports are three times as great as those of the whole United States then. Upon our muster-rolls we have a million of men. In a defensive war, upon an emergency, every one of them would be available. At any time, the South can raise, equip, and maintain in the field, a larger army than any Power of the earth can send against her, and an army of soldiers–men brought up on horseback, with guns in their hands. If we take the North, even when the two large States of Kansas and Minnesota shall be admitted, her territory will be one hundred thousand square miles less than ours. I do not speak of California and Oregon; there is no antagonism between the South and those countries, and never will be. The population of the North is fifty per cent greater than ours. I have nothing to say in disparagement either of the soil of the North, or the people of the North, who are a brave and energetic race, full of intellect. But they produce no great staple that the South does not produce; while we produce two or three, and these the very greatest, that she can never produce. As to her men, I may be allowed to say, they have never proved themselves to be superior to those of the South, either in the field or in the Senate.
But the strength of a nation depends in a great measure upon its wealth, and the wealth of a nation, like that of a man, is to be estimated by its surplus production. You may go to your trashy census books, full of falsehoods and nonsense–they tell you, for example, that in the State of Tennessee, the whole number of house-servants is not equal to that of those in my own house, and such things as that. You may estimate what is made throughout the country from these census books, but it is no matter how much is made if it is all consumed. If a man possess millions of dollars and consumes his income, is he rich? Is he competent to embark in any new enterprises? Can he long build ships or railroads? And could a people in that condition build ships and roads or go to war without a fatal strain on capital? All the enterprises of peace and war depend upon the surplus productions of a people. They may be happy, they may be comfortable, they may enjoy themselves in consuming what they make; but they are not rich, they are not strong. It appears, by going to the reports of the Secretary of the Treasury, which are authentic, that last year the United States exported in round numbers $279,000,000 worth of domestic produce, excluding gold and foreign merchandise re-exported. Of this amount $158,000,000 worth is the clear produce of the South; articles that are not and cannot be made at the North. There are then $80,000,000 worth of exports of products of the forest, provisions and breadstuffs. If we assume that the South made but one third of these, and I think that is a low calculation, our exports were $185,000,000, leaving to the North less than $95,000,000.
In addition to this, we sent to the North $30,000,000 worth of cotton, which is not counted in the exports. We sent to her $7 or $8,000,000 worth of tobacco, which is not counted in the exports. We sent naval stores, lumber, rice, and many other minor articles. There is no doubt that we sent to the North $40,000,000 in addition; but suppose the amount to be $35,000,000, it will give us a surplus production of $220,000,000. But the recorded exports of the South now are greater than the whole exports of the United States in any year before 1856. They are greater than the whole average exports of the United States for the last twelve years, including the two extraordinary years of 1856 and 1857. They are nearly double the amount of the average exports of the twelve preceding years. If I am right in my calculations as to $220,000,000 of surplus produce, there is not a nation on the face of the earth, with any numerous population, that can compete with us in produce per capita. It amounts to $16.66 per head, supposing that we have twelve millions of people. England with all her accumulated wealth, with her concentrated and educated energy, makes but sixteen and a half dollars of surplus production per head. I have not made a calculation as to the North, with her $95,000,000 surplus; admitting that she exports as much as we do, with her eighteen millions of population it would be but little over twelve dollars a head. But she cannot export to us and abroad exceeding ten dollars a head against our sixteen dollars. I know well enough that the North sends to the South a vast amount of the productions of her industry. I take it for granted that she, at least, pays us in that way for the thirty or forty million dollars worth of cotton and other articles we send her. I am willing to admit that she sends us considerably more; but to bring her up to our amount of surplus production– to bring her up to $220,000,000 a year, the South must take from her $125,000,000; and this, in addition to our share of the consumption of the $330,000,000 worth introduced into the country from abroad, and paid for chiefly by our own exports. The thing is absurd; it is impossible; it can never appear anywhere but in a book of statistics, or a Congress speech.
With an export of $220,000,000 under the present tariff, the South organized separately would have $40,000,000 of revenue. With one-fourth the present tariff, she would have a revenue with the present tariff adequate to all her wants, for the South would never go to war; she would never need an army or a navy, beyond a few garrisons on the frontiers and a few revenue cutters. It is commerce that breeds war. It is manufactures that require to be hawked about the world, and that give rise to navies and commerce. But we have nothing to do but to take off restrictions on foreign merchandise and open our ports, and the whole world will come to us to trade. They will be too glad to bring and carry us, and we never shall dream of a war. Why the South has never yet had a just cause of war except with the North. Every time she has drawn her sword it has been on the point of honor, and that point of honor has been mainly loyalty to her sister colonies and sister States, who have ever since plundered and calumniated her.
But if there were no other reason why we should never have war, would any sane nation make war on cotton? Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war on us we could bring the whole world to our feet. The South is perfectly competent to go on, one, two, or three years without planting a seed of cotton. I believe that if she was to plant but half her cotton, for three years to come, it would be an immense advantage to her. I am not so sure but that after three years’ entire abstinence she would come out stronger than ever she was before, and better prepared to enter afresh upon her great career of enterprise. What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? I will not stop to depict what every one can imagine, but this is certain: England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king. Until lately the Bank of England was king; but she tried to put her screws as usual, the fall before last, upon the cotton crop, and was utterly vanquished. The last power has been conquered. Who can doubt, that has looked at recent events, that cotton is supreme? When the abuse of credit had destroyed credit and annihilated confidence; when thousands of the strongest commercial houses in the world were coming down, and hundreds of millions of dollars of supposed property evaporating in thin air; when you came to a dead lock, and revolutions were threatened, what brought you up? Fortunately for you it was the commencement of the cotton season, and we have poured in upon you one million six hundred thousand bales of cotton just at the crisis to save you from destruction. That cotton, but for the bursting of your speculative bubbles in the North, which produced the whole of this convulsion, would have brought us $100,000,000. We have sold it for $65,000,000 and saved you. Thirty-five million dollars we, the slaveholders of the South, have put into the charity box for your magnificent financiers, your “cotton lords,” your “merchant princes.”
But, sir, the greatest strength of the South arises from the harmony of her political and social institutions. This harmony gives her a frame of society, the best in the world, and an extent of political freedom, combined with entire security, such as no other people ever enjoyed upon the face of the earth. Society precedes government; creates it, and ought to control it; but as far as we can look back in historic times we find the case different; for government is no sooner created than it becomes too strong for society, and shapes and moulds, as well as controls it. In later centuries the progress of civilization and of intelligence has made the divergence so great as to produce civil wars and revolutions; and it is nothing now but the want of harmony between governments and societies which occasions all the uneasiness and trouble and terror that we see abroad. It was this that brought on the American Revolution. We threw off a Government not adapted to our social system, and made one for ourselves. The question is, how far have we succeeded? The South, so far as that is concerned, is satisfied, harmonious, and prosperous, but demands to be let alone.
In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves. We found them slaves by the common “consent of mankind,” which, according to Cicero, “lex naturae est.” The highest proof of what is Nature’s law. We are old-fashioned at the South yet; slave is a word discarded now by “ears polite;” I will not characterize that class at the North by that term; but you have it; it is there; it is everywhere; it is eternal.
The Senator from New York [William Seward] said yesterday that the whole world had abolished slavery. Aye, the name, but not the thing; all the powers of the earth cannot abolish that. God only can do it when he repeals the fiat, “the poor ye always have with you;” for the man who lives by daily labor, and scarcely lives at that, and who has to put out his labor in the market, and take the best he can get for it; in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and “operatives,” as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people, and not too much employment either. Yours are hired by the day, not care for, and scantily compensated, which may be proved in the most painful manner, at any hour in any street of your large towns. Why, you meet more beggars in one day, in any single street of the city of New York, than you would meet in a lifetime in the whole South. We do not think that whites should be slaves either by law or necessity. Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves. None of that race on the whole face of the globe can be compared with the slaves of the South. They are happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations. Yours are white, of your own race; you are brothers of one blood. They are your equals in natural endowment of intellect, and they feel galled by their degradation. Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositaries [sic] of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than “an army with banners,” and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided, not as they have mistakenly attempted to initiate such proceedings by meeting in parks, with arms in their hands, but by the quiet process of the ballot-box. You have been making war upon us to our very hearthstones. How would you like for us to send lecturers and agitators North, to teach these people this, to aid in combining, and to lead them?…
Transient and temporary causes have thus far been your preservation. The great West has been open to your surplus population, and your hordes of semi-barbarian immigrants, who are crowding in year by year. They make a great movement, and you call it progress. Whither? It is progress; but it is progress toward Vigilance Committees. The South have sustained you in great measure. You are our factors. You fetch and carry for us. One hundred and fifty million dollars of our money passes annually through your hands. Much of it sticks; all of it assists to keep your machinery together and in motion. Suppose we were to discharge you; suppose we were to take our business out of your hands;–we should consign you to anarchy and poverty. You complain of the rule of the South; that has been another cause that has preserved you. We have kept the Government conservative to the great purposes of the Constitution. We have placed it, and kept it, upon the Constitution; and that has been the cause of your peace and prosperity. The Senator from New York says that that is about to be at an end; that you intend to take the Government from us; that it will pass from our hands into yours. Perhaps what he says is true; it may be; but do not forget–it can never be forgotten–it is written on the brightest page of human history–that we, the slaveholders of the South, took our country in her infancy, and, after ruling her for sixty out of the seventy years of her existence, we surrendered her to you without a stain upon her honor, boundless in prosperity, incalculable in her strength, the wonder and admiration of the world. Time will show what you will make of her; but no time can diminish our glory or your responsibility.
SOURCE: Reprinted in Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond, of South Carolina (New York: John F. Trow & Co., 1866), pages 311-322.
PS i voted: "It technically had a chance, like there is a chance of flipping heads ten times in a row" because you can never discount some random fluke happening and in the end even a broke clock is right twice a day.
All you've been doing for this entire thread essentially is trying to poke holes in Tfsmith's arguments.
While he can be an obnoxious bastard, you are currently being worse by your (in)actions. If you actually formed a good scenario for this thread, then you would have a greater chance of not being shut down him. A very teeny slightly greater chance, but it would be more helpful than kicking a dead horse that is immune to being kicked and annoying the rest of us.
(And this applies to you too, RodentRevolution)
Now that there is a great speech. Just goes to show you how utterly wrong most of the Southern elite were about their place in the world and their beloved "peculiar institution"!
Though I gotta say, it figures this guy was from South Carolina. Too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum indeed!
NamelesStatistic
Banned
Ya, I really think people underestimate how much of a handicap these bluntly wrong preconceptions hurt the Confederate war effort. When your country's decision makers are so far off base in their evaluation of their own country, their opponent and even the other neutral powers in the world it is bound to lead to some crippling foreign and domestic policy choices, regardless of results on the battlefield which it did in OTL. Before all the suggestions of TL changes involving Lee doing something different or Stonewall Jackson surviving, the Confederacy needs to enter the Civil War with a firm, accurate understanding of its own disposition and capabilities and that of the other main actors on the world stage. Until there is a TL that fixes these issues the South will continue to be its own worst enemy and just make a string of decisions that cripple its own ability to fight a war (the most glaringly obvious being their over-valuation of cotton leading to their self-imposed cotton embargo, but there are many more) because the leaders simply have a false view of the situation they are in. Furthermore, the South's material and manpower deficits vis a vis the Union means it simply cant blunder its way to victory based on shear force, but hs to use its limited resources (both military, economic and diplomatic) more efficiently then its opponent and it simply cant do this if the Confederacy's decision makers are tasked with making their decisions based on a faulty understanding.
tenthring
Banned
Any leadership smart enough to evaluate the situation accurately wouldn't have started the war in the first place.
There seem to have been a couple of points where politics could have gained the CSA victory, in my mind centered around the various US elections which were influenced (at least seemingly) by major US victories - 1864 in particular seems to have been seen as more likely lost than won by Lincoln until Atlantas fall, and MacClellan had proved to lack the moral courage necessary in the head of a country engaged in modern war.
However, such things are also by degrees. If Atlantas fall is delayed past voting time, it cannot be put off forever and it's fall puts the US in a very strong position, possibly one even the young Napoleon can't screw up. Trent depends on GB getting involved in a war with no possible upside simply for a matter of bruised pride - however you see Victorian politicians, they did at least understand how to count cost vs benefits. Longstreet flanking Meade at Gettysburg simply turns it into another defeat for the AotP - if the Union didn't give up after Chancellorsville or Fredricksburg then a defeat by a raiding Lee is unlikely to do it (Meade in this situation likely plays Cuncator to Grants Scipio). And on and on.
As such, each PoD on its own needs things to flow exactly right for the CSA. Their war wasn't unwinnable - unlike Sealion where so much has to be changed, that is so obvious as to invite counter by the defending side, that one cannot conceive of a victorious situation - but it needs enough to go right that success is highly unlikely. So much so that any victorious CSA TL should prepare to be able to answer how such a run of unlikely probabilities comes together.
However, such things are also by degrees. If Atlantas fall is delayed past voting time, it cannot be put off forever and it's fall puts the US in a very strong position, possibly one even the young Napoleon can't screw up. Trent depends on GB getting involved in a war with no possible upside simply for a matter of bruised pride - however you see Victorian politicians, they did at least understand how to count cost vs benefits. Longstreet flanking Meade at Gettysburg simply turns it into another defeat for the AotP - if the Union didn't give up after Chancellorsville or Fredricksburg then a defeat by a raiding Lee is unlikely to do it (Meade in this situation likely plays Cuncator to Grants Scipio). And on and on.
As such, each PoD on its own needs things to flow exactly right for the CSA. Their war wasn't unwinnable - unlike Sealion where so much has to be changed, that is so obvious as to invite counter by the defending side, that one cannot conceive of a victorious situation - but it needs enough to go right that success is highly unlikely. So much so that any victorious CSA TL should prepare to be able to answer how such a run of unlikely probabilities comes together.
NamelesStatistic
Banned
Drawing the UK into the war in direct aid of the Confederacy is pretty improbable (this scenario has been done to death on threads here) and even if they were drawn into a gun fight it would probably be in the form of a naval blockade and some raids on US port cities rather than large British armies marching overland to invade from Canada. However the UK in OTL came relatively close to recognizing the CSA and offering to mediate peace between it and the Union. This may not have helped the Confederacy on the ground put the public recognition of the CSA by the UK (and likely France) and a following offer to negotiate a peace would have had a major effect on the war. It would have signaled that in the eyes of the strongest powers of Europe, that the Confederacy had been successful on the field in preserving their sovereignty and that in their minds, the war in America had gone on long enough. It would also have given legal backing to the South's claim of independence. The ultimate effect of this diplomatic action on the ACW is unclear (at least to me) but it would undoubtedly have strengthened the Southern cause and hurt the Union if it had occurred. Here again though is an example of how a distorted Confederate world view heavily undercut their own position. Because the Confederates believed that Britain would quickly be forced to intervene on their behalf shortly after war was declared due to their reliance on Southern Cotton (see the the Hammond quote for more details) they really didn't put much effort into establishing and building relations with the UK, initially sending very unqualified people, who were chosen based on their political connections rather than their diplomatic skill to London to argue their case to the UK (rather ineffectively in OTL). Indeed the Confederacy didn't even really have a well thought out plan to try and gain British or European support diplomatically, nor did they initially devote much effort to the venture simply assuming that the cumulative effects of the cotton embargo and the expected Southern victories on the field would do the diplomatic work for them. The Union on the other hand took a very active role in European diplomacy, vigorously promoting its case in England and using accomplished diplomats to both charm and threaten the Europeans away from recognition of the South. When crises like Trent arose, Lincoln and his top politicians dealt with them skillfully and prudently in way that preserved Union honour and avoided war with Europe (I am always found it quite amusing when in response to Trent the UK dispatched 11 000 soldiers to Canada, the US offered to let them disembark in Maine and be transported by US Railroads to Canada. This offer was obviously rebuffed.).
In short, another example of poor (delusional) Confederate politics squandering one of their best chances to help their cause. To reiterate first and foremost, before Confederate shells fall on Fort Sumter, there needs to be a POD fixing the gross political and economic miscalculation made by the Southern leadership or they simply will never have more than a puncher's chance in the ACW regardless of Lee, Jackson or anyone else on the battlefield.
In short, another example of poor (delusional) Confederate politics squandering one of their best chances to help their cause. To reiterate first and foremost, before Confederate shells fall on Fort Sumter, there needs to be a POD fixing the gross political and economic miscalculation made by the Southern leadership or they simply will never have more than a puncher's chance in the ACW regardless of Lee, Jackson or anyone else on the battlefield.
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Saphroneth
Banned
The problem is that Mr. Smith tends to come into every dashed thread about this topic and insist that whatever's being discussed is impossible because it didn't happen.
Anyway, to provide an example of a situation that could lead to peace, here's one - the Peninsular Campaign goes completely balls-sideways and leads to the loss of the Army of the Potomac to surrender. That's a shock to the system all right!
Yeah, James Hammond was one deluded, evil, child-raping guy.
And none of what I just said about him is false.
Saphroneth
Banned
I am curious about something, though. His actual statistics, the ones about the South's economy - were they false?
Not sure of how high up it went, but I think it's pretty much a fact that the local US commanders on the scene 'looked the other way' when soldiers wanted to desert and go to Texas...
TBH I'm surprised that with all the cartoonishly evil people running around in the antebellum South you didn't get very many at the top levels of the Confederate government.
Plenty of less than stellar decision makers true, but very few of the out and out evil stripe.
I would be willing to bet money on that. The same thing happened in Mexico from 65-67 when Union troops and their weapons managed to 'mysteriously' find their way into the arms of President Juarez's army.
Anaxagoras
Banned
What's often missed is that even British diplomatic recognition, without any active military intervention, might by itself be enough to cause a Confederate victory, for fiscal and political reasons.