The Worst American Civil War Alternate History Cliche

Fiver

TheAstronomicon said:
Excluding that time a Union general decided it'd be a cool idea to burn an entire State to the ground.
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No Union general ever tried to burn any Confederate state to the ground.

As to burning cities:
August 21, 1863 - Confederate raiders attack Lawrence, Kansas, robbing the banks, burning most of the town to the ground, and killing every man and boy that they can.
July 30, 1864 - Confederate forces burn most of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania to the ground after failing to extort money from the city.
October 19, 1864 - Confederate raiders attempt to burn St Albans, Vermont to the ground after shooting civilians and robbing the banks.
November, 15, 1864 - Union troops burn Atlanta, Georgia two months after they ordered the civilian population to evacuate the city.
 

mudhead

Fiver said:
Lee rejected the idea of fighting on as guerillas, saying "...the men would be without rations and under no control of officers. They would be compelled to rob and steal in order to live. They would become mere bands of marauders, and the enemy’s cavalry would pursue them and overrun many sections they may never have occasion to visit. We would bring on a state of affairs it would take the country years to recover from."
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I've read elsewhere that it was Wade Hampton, not Alexander, who suggested the idea of guerilla warfare. Of course, they may both have. Lee's rejection of this was the best thing he ever did, not that that's saying much.
 

Incognitia

Fiver said:
How many centuries did Britain fight France before they allied with them? How many centuries did France fight with the German states before allying with Germany?
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Well, we were fighting France in 1815, and allied with them and the Turks in 1854, so a long generation. France fought the Germans in 1945 and were closely allied with them only a decade or so later.
That doesn't mean there are no hard feelings, but they do get pushed down by strategic logic.
 
StephenColbert27

StephenColbert27

Banned
TheAstronomicon said:
March to the Sea says hi.
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The destruction of civilian property during the March to the Sea is greatly exaggerated, mostly due to the victory of the Myth of the Lost Cause in postwar historiography and its subsequent reproduction in popular media, including Gone with the Wind. For a real atrocity, I would point you to Fort Pillow or Lawrence, Kansas, or even Ebenezer Creek, though the latter might be better classified as a tragedy than an atrocity. I'm in two minds about that.
 
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dandan_noodles

Incognitia said:
Well, we were fighting France in 1815, and allied with them and the Turks in 1854, so a long generation. France fought the Germans in 1945 and were closely allied with them only a decade or so later.
That doesn't mean there are no hard feelings, but they do get pushed down by strategic logic.
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How long did it take for the French to become allies with the Germans? No time at all, actually, since from the Early Modern period on, whenever France made war across the Rhine, they almost always had Germanic allied states with them; it wasn't until the German states united in 1870 that France's practice of allying with Bavaria, Saxony etc. became non operative.
 

TRH

dandan_noodles said:
How long did it take for the French to become allies with the Germans? No time at all, actually, since from the Early Modern period on, whenever France made war across the Rhine, they almost always had Germanic allied states with them; it wasn't until the German states united in 1870 that France's practice of allying with Bavaria, Saxony etc. became non operative.
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Considering I have trouble thinking of occasions France was invaded by Germans between Bouvines and the French Revolution, I think you need to reverse perspectives there. And Bismark's policies focusing on France above all else as a power to be balanced against show that a unified Germany took a good while to mend fences with the French.
 

galveston bay

Incognitia said:
Well, we were fighting France in 1815, and allied with them and the Turks in 1854, so a long generation. France fought the Germans in 1945 and were closely allied with them only a decade or so later.
That doesn't mean there are no hard feelings, but they do get pushed down by strategic logic.
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the West Germans allied with the French because in a very large part the Americans and British required it as a precondition of West Germany joining NATO

The East Germans did not however ally with the French until there was no longer an East Germany .. because of the Soviet Union

It isn't as though the Germans had any particular choices
 

NavesFerrata

James XI said:
Ummm...arguing for keeping slaves as a technical matter of law point or as part of a greater pushback against northern vindictiveness is still someone fundamentally supporting slavery. Like a Nazi general arguing that he ought to be able to keep the Jewish skin-lamp on a technicality after the war might have some legal or ethical basis on some level, but is obviously missing the much greater point and/or not understanding that it IS greater. I'm sure many slave owners would, in some hypothetical utopia have prefered to live without slaves, but it's less important to them then X, w/e X they cite. That's the corruption, the presence and precedence of X in so many of their minds. You don't have to be an overtly sadistic cartoon gleefully rubbing your hands at the idea of owning folk to be wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong by supporting slavery. You just need to support it for w/e reason.
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I was just pointing out that the quote wasn't what it is commonly cited as, to claim that Lee was anti-slavery. The point was that he could at best be characterized as ambivalent on the matter. Also, I can't find the lawsuit -- only lawsuit against the US Government that I can find under a European (as opposed to Korean) Lees in the postbellum part of the century name is United States v. Lee, a case filed by his son, and related to an attempt to obtain a writ of ejectment to remove the cemetery superintendent as a trespasser. Also, the Smithsonian (which I don't think would be terribly fond of Lee given its location in the capital city and its close relationship to the government) doesn't mention any lawsuit to this and I've never heard of such a lawsuit. The cliche that I would like to mention too, is that Union people were all pasteboard antislavery and pro-equality saints and the South was uniformly mustache-twirling villains who rubbed their hands in glee at the mere thought of enslaving blacks (Nor was sentiment, even among the political elites in the Lower South, uniformly in favor of immediate secession: one of my ancestors from Jefferson County, Georgia, voted against secession on both ballots, and so did the other delegate from the county!) There were Copperheads who were virulently pro-Southern in the North, Southern Unionists, who viewed secession as an illegal measure or a needless provocation to war, people who thought it not worth dying over, people who thought it was bad but were all too happy to make money off it (basically everyone in Britain in the cotton industry, who were more than happy to buy Southern cotton to feed their mills in great quantity), even people who thought the institution should be abolished but viewed it as important that it be done in a way that didn't completely disrupt the economy. The point is that there was more nuance than people think. (Just like there are more than two positions on every political issue). Even Lincoln, who viewed the institution as bad from an economic standpoint, and viewed it as the number one issue threatening the existence of the Union and viewed secession as an act of war, was willing to engage in indulging lower Northern audiences' distaste for blacks for political reasons, so even Lincoln, the man responsible for freeing the slaves, wasn't quite the saintly figure he got made over as after his assassination by John Wilkes Booth. (The NSA line eater will be eating this post for sure.)
 

Sheliak Lawyer

Banned
NavesFerrata said:
I was just pointing out that the quote wasn't what it is commonly cited as, to claim that Lee was anti-slavery. The point was that he could at best be characterized as ambivalent on the matter. Also, I can't find the lawsuit -- only lawsuit against the US Government that I can find under a European (as opposed to Korean) Lees in the postbellum part of the century name is United States v. Lee, a case filed by his son, and related to an attempt to obtain a writ of ejectment to remove the cemetery superintendent as a trespasser. Also, the Smithsonian (which I don't think would be terribly fond of Lee given its location in the capital city and its close relationship to the government) doesn't mention any lawsuit to this and I've never heard of such a lawsuit. The cliche that I would like to mention too, is that Union people were all pasteboard antislavery and pro-equality saints and the South was uniformly mustache-twirling villains who rubbed their hands in glee at the mere thought of enslaving blacks (Nor was sentiment, even among the political elites in the Lower South, uniformly in favor of immediate secession: one of my ancestors from Jefferson County, Georgia, voted against secession on both ballots, and so did the other delegate from the county!) There were Copperheads who were virulently pro-Southern in the North, Southern Unionists, who viewed secession as an illegal measure or a needless provocation to war, people who thought it not worth dying over, people who thought it was bad but were all too happy to make money off it (basically everyone in Britain in the cotton industry, who were more than happy to buy Southern cotton to feed their mills in great quantity), even people who thought the institution should be abolished but viewed it as important that it be done in a way that didn't completely disrupt the economy. The point is that there was more nuance than people think. (Just like there are more than two positions on every political issue). Even Lincoln, who viewed the institution as bad from an economic standpoint, and viewed it as the number one issue threatening the existence of the Union and viewed secession as an act of war, was willing to engage in indulging lower Northern audiences' distaste for blacks for political reasons, so even Lincoln, the man responsible for freeing the slaves, wasn't quite the saintly figure he got made over as after his assassination by John Wilkes Booth. (The NSA line eater will be eating this post for sure.)
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Speaking of Lincoln, the union and slavery do you think if Lincoln promised the south the right to own slaves in perpetuity the war could have been averted?
 

Fabius Maximus

Fiver said:
In 1807 a British ship attacked USS Chesapeake, killing and wounding several of her crew, seized four members of that crew and hung one of them.
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I'm sorry, but that's just ridiculous, and I couldn't let an egregious error like that pass without comment.

It's "hanged", not "hung". :biggrin:

EnglishCanuck said:
Personally I've always suspected you'd end up with a situation where even if slavery was "officially" abolished, the South would still hold the African American population in perpetual bondage. I picture it something like a mix of the Nazi ghettos and Russian serfdom where blacks would not be allowed to travel without papers, and technically they are the property of the state government with no ability to leave the state without explicit permission and they rent the land they own from white businessmen, and their wages are garnished to pay for housing and feeding them.
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I doubt making them the property of the state would mollify international opinion, although some sort of Jim Crow dialled up to 11 would be plausible.

Workable Goblin said:
Someone could very well emigrate to the United States, obtain American citizenship--which at the time meant renouncing the citizenship of any other foreign nation--and still be considered a British citizen by Britain.
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So was this bolded bit a recognised convention of international law at the time, or was it just a provision of US citizenship law?
 
Workable Goblin

Workable Goblin

Fabius Maximus said:
So was this bolded bit a recognised convention of international law at the time, or was it just a provision of US citizenship law?
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Dunno whether it was a recognized convention or anything; the idea of citizenship being something that you could apply to get (as a routine legal procedure, that is, rather than through express grant by legislative or executive power) was rather new, IIRC. The United States was quite clear you couldn't be a dual citizen until the mid-20th century, though. If you were American, you definitely were not anything else.

In any case, as Saproneth pointed out, it was irrelevant, since most British emigres would not have had sufficient residency time to be eligible to apply for citizenship.
 
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