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EvanSchenck posted:He is obviously representing that if everybody is responsible, than nobody is responsible and we shouldn't even bother to discuss it because it is not "useful." This makes no sense, because some people have more power and influence over what happens in the world than others do. An American citizen who has paid taxes is a little morally culpable for the Iraq War, whereas somebody who served in the Bush administration is a lot culpable. I'm not saying that nobody is responsible, I'm saying that it's ridiculous to apportion blame in exact quantities if that blame is entirely theoretical and won't ever be punished. Especially if said bad behavior occurred in a completely different temporal and societal context from now. All it does is stroke the blamer's ego for being on the correct side of an entirely insubstantial debate. This is the sort of reasoning that fuels vapid anti-corporatist leftist pudbeating. GM of 70 years ago, you are convicted of precisely .411 Rumsfelds of blame, for manufacturing trucks in Nazi Germany. Your punishment is that we will say bad things about you in our newsletter. Good work everyone, we're really setting the historical record straight today. EDIT: And I'm still sticking to the original topic, which is that GM can't really be blamed for taking advantage of a societal shift towards automobiles. At that point capitalism and the social system which supports it are to blame, not any of the organisms that thrive in that economic ecosystem. boner confessor fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Dec 14, 2013 |
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Dec 14, 2013 21:29
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VitalSigns posted:I don't see how the janitor is culpable. It's on an infinitesimal scale, and again, I don't think this blame apportioning is that useful, like I said. I'm not sure why you chose just that part of my post to respond to, because it really wasn't the important bit. It may be true that Big Evil is the only company to work for in town, but it's not generally true. But again, the amount of 'blame' is tiny, and I don't actually want anything to happen because of that, so it's really, really not a very important part of what I'm saying. This was the more significant part: quote:What I'm more saying is "Nearly everything in our legal system, or culture, and our society says that exploiting people and resources and distributing harm to the commons is perfectly okay behavior, at worst a 'necessary evil'."
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Dec 14, 2013 21:59
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Obdicut posted:It's on an infinitesimal scale, and again, I don't think this blame apportioning is that useful, like I said. I'm not sure why you chose just that part of my post to respond to, because it really wasn't the important bit. It may be true that Big Evil is the only company to work for in town, but it's not generally true. But again, the amount of 'blame' is tiny, and I don't actually want anything to happen because of that, so it's really, really not a very important part of what I'm saying. This was the more significant part: I picked that part because I agreed with the rest of it  I just wanted to know what you meant about the janitor having blame and how that helps address the problem, but if you don't want anything to happen because of it and it was more of "he's part of society and should do what he can to change it" then I'm okay with that.
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Dec 14, 2013 22:06
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VitalSigns posted:I picked that part because I agreed with the rest of it Yeah, basically. Of course if it's the only job in town there's basically no blame at all, but if you choose to work at a place with bad practices rather than at another place with less bad practices, that is still a moral and ethical choice to me. I also disagree that decision-making is the key point here. There are plenty of scientists who work for big tobacco who don't ever actually exercise decision-making capability, but they still obviously bear responsibility for what they do. Hell, I'd even say a scientist choosing to go into something trivial versus meaningful has some 'blame' to them, too.
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Dec 14, 2013 22:23
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Popular Thug Drink posted:I'm not saying that nobody is responsible, I'm saying that it's ridiculous to apportion blame in exact quantities Who said anything about exact quantities? You're just introducing a nonsense concept so you can pretend the whole exercise is stupid. In a lot of cases it's actually fairly easy to identify who did what thing and why, and to assess that ethically or morally. This requires thinking qualitatively, but then again human beings experience the world in terms of qualities. quote:if that blame is entirely theoretical and won't ever be punished. Especially if said bad behavior occurred in a completely different temporal and societal context from now. All it does is stroke the blamer's ego for being on the correct side of an entirely insubstantial debate. This is the sort of reasoning that fuels vapid anti-corporatist leftist pudbeating. I can sort of see how thinking cynically in this way would make you feel real clever, but if you're going to make this kind of argument why bother posting on these forums at all? It's a choice between FYAD bullshit and vapid pudbeating, and clearly you've found your way to D&D, which is the thudding heart of vapid pudbeating. Personally, I'm well aware that this doesn't lead to anything, but I enjoy thinking about things and to know how things happen in the world in the same way as some people like jigsaw puzzles. If you believe that the world is essentially meaningless and there's no point in knowing or discussing things as insignificant as "how do bad things happen that harm millions/billions of human beings" then I guess I congratulate you on your transcendent philosophy, and you make a great point. Who cares about literally anything? Why am I not living off the grid in a shack in Montana? quote:Good work everyone, we're really setting the historical record straight today. If you were talking mainly about the historical record of 70 years ago, then why did you relate it by analogy to the Iraq War, which happened 10 years ago and is actually a painfully easy case for identifying malicious parties and apportioning blame?
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Dec 15, 2013 07:07
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It's an interesting quirk of Marxism that's become stuck in popular consciousness that capitalists are *supposed* to be evil, so they shouldn't be judged for it (evil being, as it were, their social function). It's "don't hate the player, hate the game" except in a lot of situations hating the game has just gone out of it. If you take the game for granted, it should be perfectly acceptable to hate especially terrible players. This post brought to you by Terrible Analogies, inc.
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Dec 15, 2013 16:47
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I think one of the big points there is that capitalism and capitalists aren't inherently evil but acting in an exploitive, evil manner is inherently more profitable than being good. As in, forcing workers to sell their labor for much less than it's worth, taking the profits, and laughing to the bank is more profitable then setting up medical benefits, paying really well, and creating pension funds. Well, in the short term, anyway...it leads to other problems with social unrest and the like but that's separate in its way. Capitalism, primarily, is focused on profit THIS quarter. The best thing is whatever makes the most money right now, all the time, no matter what. It doesn't matter if that means working 5,000 people to death and poisoning 5,000 more by dumping something toxic in the river. If it makes money you do it. Investors, looking for maximum profit, will give their money to those most willing to do heinous things in the name of profit. It leads to a feedback loop, as it were. The most profit comes from exploitation. This profit gets reinvested, which leads to more exploitation and more profit.
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Dec 15, 2013 19:56
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Capitalism, primarily, is focused on profit THIS quarter. I think you're touching more on the evils of pubically traded corporations than capitalism in general. Trading a company's future value on an open market creates some real negative unintended consequences that are less likely in a privately owned company.
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Dec 15, 2013 20:32
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Krispy Kareem posted:I think you're touching more on the evils of pubically traded corporations than capitalism in general. Trading a company's future value on an open market creates some real negative unintended consequences that are less likely in a privately owned company. Kind of my point, really. The people most likely to become the most wealthy are the ones willing to invest their money in dirty schemes or labor exploitation. The wealthier can make more investments. There's an old saying; "Behind every great fortune is a great crime."
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Dec 15, 2013 20:38
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Kind of my point, really. The people most likely to become the most wealthy are the ones willing to invest their money in dirty schemes or labor exploitation. The wealthier can make more investments. There's an old saying; "Behind every great fortune is a great crime." Eh, that's more a damning of capitalism in general rather than being preoccupied with short term results. There are plenty of people who make money without exploitation. Of course that all depends on your definition of exploitation. One of Haiti's main exports are t-shirts, which is economical for corporations because of the low wages demanded by Haitians. Are Haynes and Fruit of the Loom exploiting poor people or are they putting money into an economy when no one else would? In China wages are rising enough that multinationals are moving manufacturing elsewhere. Can corporations be blamed for exploiting the Chinese by taking away jobs while at the same time exploiting Central Americans for providing those same jobs?
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Dec 15, 2013 21:58
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I guess you could term it 'corporatism', which is more similar to what we have at present anyway. Ray Ginger wrote a really good book called "Altgeld's America" that was ostensibly about Chicago history in the later 19th Century. But what it touched on was the move away from small-r republicanism of craftsman and tenant farmers and towards the corporate structures that dominates today. Private companies are pretty small in terms of revenue when compared to public anyway, after Cargill and Koch there's a pretty big drop off.
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Dec 16, 2013 04:45
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Krispy Kareem posted:Eh, that's more a damning of capitalism in general rather than being preoccupied with short term results. There are plenty of people who make money without exploitation. Of course that all depends on your definition of exploitation. One of Haiti's main exports are t-shirts, which is economical for corporations because of the low wages demanded by Haitians. Are Haynes and Fruit of the Loom exploiting poor people or are they putting money into an economy when no one else would? They're exploiting poor people because a few locally benefit greatly and collude with the corporation to keep those wages low even in the face of worker demand for collective action ad union organization.
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Dec 16, 2013 05:19
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Civil War question. I recall in a recent thread (I think one of the GOP Rebuilding Civil War derails) that someone claimed that the Confederacy might have broken up had they secured independence, as a couple of states were planning to strike out on their own once the war was settled. Am I just misremembering, and if not, does anyone have source documents? Thanks!
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Dec 16, 2013 05:32
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Venusian Weasel posted:Civil War question. I recall in a recent thread (I think one of the GOP Rebuilding Civil War derails) that someone claimed that the Confederacy might have broken up had they secured independence, as a couple of states were planning to strike out on their own once the war was settled. Am I just misremembering, and if not, does anyone have source documents? Thanks! I don't know of any documents but I do know that the Confederate government was incredibly dysfunctional and if they didn't centralize power like the Constitutional Convention did they would probably be some states that would want independence.
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Dec 16, 2013 05:36
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There was an incident in North Carolina in 1844 where the incumbent governor faced a very serious election threat from a peace candidate who promised to end the war, including negotiating separately from the Confederacy if necessary. Holden, the peace candidate, was initially strongly favored, even in the Confederate army, but the incumbent Zebulon Vance was able to secure victory by making speeches all across the state foretelling the demise of the South's racial hierarchy and the danger of freed slaves if Holden won (which has some rather telling implications for analyzing how much secession was about maintaining slavery and white supremacy rather than genuine Confederate nationalism).
Rogue0071 fucked around with this message at 06:47 on Dec 16, 2013 |
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Dec 16, 2013 06:45
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computer parts posted:I don't know of any documents but I do know that the Confederate government was incredibly dysfunctional and if they didn't centralize power like the Constitutional Convention did they would probably be some states that would want independence. I was just about to say, Oh boy! An already hyper dysfunctional decentralized confederation with a lovely single-export agrarian slave-based economy, extreme class and near total racial divide with a propensity for secession wants to shatter itself further. What could possibly go right.
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Dec 16, 2013 09:12
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Ron Jeremy posted:They're exploiting poor people because a few locally benefit greatly and collude with the corporation to keep those wages low even in the face of worker demand for collective action ad union organization. Lower wages->lower prices->lower wages-> in a race to the bottom. China may rise as corporations root jobs in China, but capitalism will force a service sector that races to the bottom. The whole world can then be engaged in a race to the bottom. When you're super wealthy no one is holding a gun to your head to make you exploit people. Capitalism may cannibalize on the worker, but capitalism doesn't have a mind to choose with. It's like trying to not hold a rapist culpable because patriarchial society objectifies women. Do people have no agency?
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Dec 16, 2013 09:41
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Negative Entropy posted:Yep. Look by trying to blame anyone, you're just engaging in vapid pudbeating. Unlike this post telling you you're wasting your time, which is not vapid pudbeating at all.
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Dec 16, 2013 09:57
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Krispy Kareem posted:Eh, that's more a damning of capitalism in general rather than being preoccupied with short term results. There are plenty of people who make money without exploitation. Of course that all depends on your definition of exploitation. One of Haiti's main exports are t-shirts, which is economical for corporations because of the low wages demanded by Haitians. Are Haynes and Fruit of the Loom exploiting poor people or are they putting money into an economy when no one else would? One of the things about capitalism is that it ultimately works on incentives. Corporations are soulless machines that do whatever is most profitable. If policy is put in place making cleaning up your messes and making sure your wages are fair profitable then that's what they'll do. I think, however, that having heavy manufacturing in poorer parts of the nation and exporting the product to the richer parts is actually pretty terrible for all sides. We're seeing this in America right now, actually. The shift of manufacturing jobs out of America has shoved jobs away which has impoverished many Americans and left us with a lost generation with a pile of debt and nowhere to go. Meanwhile the increased poverty means that fewer people are even able to BUY the goods being imported. Meanwhile, as was said, collusion and corruption in other places, as well as some totalitarian regimes or nations with few to no labor laws, leads to places where people are quite literally forced to work for less than a living wage. There are some industries that literally use slavery. Chocolate has become notorious for this, as the main export regions of Africa for chocolate have been caught literally using child labor to produce Hershey bars. It's the most profitable thing to do so companies are willing to do it. Individual people just flat out can't get all the information on where their stuff comes from so the businesses in question just kind of fail to mention it or actively hide it. A lot of Americans also just don't really care, it isn't MY problem. I just want cheap clothes and chocolate. You see this in the food industry even when there IS stuff produced in America. Thanks to the heavy subsidies of corn production it's cheapest and most profitable to produce a bunch of unhealthy garbage with little to no nutrients based entirely on corn. That's what is cheapest to buy so Americans, wanting cheap food, buy it up like mad. Once again, it factors into a feedback loop; the very rich are using tricks available only to them to exploit the very poor and cause wealth to further concentrate upwards. Much if it is centered in government economic policy. A shift in policy would lead to a shift in what companies do.
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Dec 16, 2013 10:25
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Venusian Weasel posted:Civil War question. I recall in a recent thread (I think one of the GOP Rebuilding Civil War derails) that someone claimed that the Confederacy might have broken up had they secured independence, as a couple of states were planning to strike out on their own once the war was settled. Am I just misremembering, and if not, does anyone have source documents? Thanks! I don't know about official plots, schemes, or documents, but there's no way a Confederacy founded on the principles of nullification and secession could possibly have held itself together for an extended period of time. The Articles of Confederation failed in large part because the Continental Congress had no power to do things like compel representatives to attend sessions or force states to fund the government; it had no option but to ask nicely for these things, and once the Revolutionary War was over, too many of the states were perfectly happy to tell the federal government "gently caress you, we're not paying taxes to you". While in theory, the Confederacy's Constitution was far more similar to the US Constitution than to the Articles of Confederation and would have imposed a similarly strong government, in practice the states had found it acceptable to ignore laws they didn't like or even leave the country if they felt like it under the US Constitution and there's no reason they wouldn't eventually have done the same thing in the Confederacy.
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Dec 16, 2013 15:22
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So, hilariously, the CSA civil war that might have followed would have actually been because of States Rights.
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Dec 16, 2013 18:26
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silvergoose posted:So, hilariously, the CSA civil war that might have followed would have actually been because of States Rights. Unlikely. The constituent states of the CSA formed several distinct economic blocs and were a deeply classist society. William C Davis wrote a great book about the internal problems of the CSA, Look Away!: A History of the CSA. While it's a tad southern-sympathetic to my tastes, it does a good job of examining all the problems which the CSA experienced during the war and would have, counterfactually, maybe experience afterwards. A series of further secessions was very, very unlikely. The slave states knew that to preserve slavery they had to hang together. But a series of constitutional crises about the payment of war debts, consolidation of currencies, regulation of exports and imports, etc would probably have followed. The subsequent history of the CSA would have been less disintegration and more simple internal instability and ruin.
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Dec 16, 2013 23:25
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BrotherAdso posted:A series of further secessions was very, very unlikely. The slave states knew that to preserve slavery they had to hang together. But a series of constitutional crises about the payment of war debts, consolidation of currencies, regulation of exports and imports, etc would probably have followed. The subsequent history of the CSA would have been less disintegration and more simple internal instability and ruin. Maybe not right away but I'm pretty sure there would have been another secession down the road if for no other reason than Texas being, you know, Texas. Maybe I'm wrong but I've felt like, even after the Civil War was lost, Texas still clung to the idea that it was a separate entity in spirit if not in jurisdiction.
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Dec 17, 2013 13:26
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Don't the Turtledove novels involve the South having a populist revolution and instituting some sort of agrarian socialism?
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Dec 17, 2013 13:44
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icantfindaname posted:Don't the Turtledove novels involve the South having a populist revolution and instituting some sort of agrarian socialism? I don't recall the agrarian socialism part, but there was a revolt, yes. The black population went up in open revolt in the middle of the WWI analogue and formed a Marxist Congaree Socialist Republic along the Black Belt. This would later form the basis for the Southerner Hitler analogue's Mein Kampf - blaming the CSA's loss of the Great War to them.
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Dec 17, 2013 13:55
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icantfindaname posted:Don't the Turtledove novels involve the South having a populist revolution and instituting some sort of agrarian socialism? It was populist in the sense that it was an uprising by part the black population against their oppressors. If I recall, it didn't involve any whites - even poor sharecroppers with little different from black people at the time aside from their race. It goes from that to seemingly being an analogue to the French Resistance (to the South's Nazi Germany) after the rebellion proper was crushed, at the expense of the South's ability to win the WWI equivalent in the books. The real mindbender in the series is that Lincoln's loss of the civil war and fictional president Blaine's loss of the 'Second Mexican War' turned the US' public off to the GOP for good, leaving the Democrats on the right and no-poo poo actual Socialists on the left. A main character is elected as a socialist congressperson from New York and later marries a Socialist representative from the Dakotas who becomes president. Al Smith is also a notable Socialist. FDR is still a Democrat and is still in a wheelchair. Custer doesn't die at Little Big Horn and is a famous general in WWI due to his usage of  The series is basically about as feasible as such a premise could get once you ignore the fact that the South probably still would have lost the Civil War, a victory at Antietam for them only would have just forestalled the inevitable. Lincoln would likely have suffered consequences to his popularity in the short term but the South was destined to lose that war. Their only advantage was in quality of command and the average soldier. Attrition took one hell of a toll, and the US was able to absorb incredible losses of men and materiel due to heavy industrialization and population superiority. I'm not convinced foreign powers were this close to recognizing and supporting the CSA at the time and a loss at Antietam (after their performance to that point) pissed that away.
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Dec 17, 2013 15:00
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The Entire Universe posted:I'm not convinced foreign powers were this close to recognizing and supporting the CSA at the time and a loss at Antietam (after their performance to that point) pissed that away. They1 absolutely weren't. France wasn't about to do anything unless Britain was on board, and Palmerston was dead set on keeping Britain on the sidelines, and Victoria was on board with that position. There was a fair amount of sympathy for the CSA within the population of the English northwest, but general popular opinion was that as the scrappy underdog, the CSA should be supported, but only if they gave up slavery. So it was never going to happen. The only scenario where you'd see foreign intervention is the scenario where the CSA has already won, in which case it doesn't make any difference. 1Britain and France being the powers capable of meaningfully intervening. Neither Austria, Prussia, nor Russia had the sort of force projection necessary to make any difference anyway, but even then the Germans had their own issues to sort out at the time, and Russia was very pro-Union anyway. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Dec 18, 2013 |
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Dec 18, 2013 00:24
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:They1 absolutely weren't. France wasn't about to do anything unless Britain was on board, and Palmerston was dead set on keeping Britain on the sidelines, and Victoria was on board with that position. There was a fair amount of sympathy for the CSA within the population of the English northwest, but general popular opinion was that as the scrappy underdog, the CSA should be supported, but only if they gave up slavery. So it was never going to happen. I am pretty sure the British working class as a whole was completely for the Union, especially in Liverpool/Manchester. There might have been some sympathy within the aristocracy, but it was completely unworkable either way. In addition, the Union was going to give up even after a disaster defeat and the CSA had a very limited ability to capitalize on it. It would have dragged the war longer but the Union would still have blockaded the ports and have held New Orleans. Also, there really wasn't any real way for the South to survive long after the war unless the British and French were going to loan the money out of the goodness of their hearts.
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Dec 18, 2013 00:36
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If I remember correctly, tarriffs and government infrastructure spending were straight up barred in the Confederate constitution. Coupled with the South's declining market share/price of cotton, that economy would'nt have survived to the 20th century
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Dec 18, 2013 04:03
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Most of the British people hated slavery more than they perceived any benefit. "World On Fire" is a pretty good book that goes into the competing actions of the CSA and USA in the UK during the 1860's to curry favor with the ruling and merchant classes during the war.
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Dec 18, 2013 04:44
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menino posted:Most of the British people hated slavery more than they perceived any benefit. "World On Fire" is a pretty good book that goes into the competing actions of the CSA and USA in the UK during the 1860's to curry favor with the ruling and merchant classes during the war. Didn't they basically go "gently caress you hillbillies, there's this place called Egypt and they have plenty of cotton, laterzzz" to the rebels in respect to the notion that the Southern cotton industry was worth saving slavery for?
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Dec 18, 2013 05:00
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The Entire Universe posted:Didn't they basically go "gently caress you hillbillies, there's this place called Egypt and they have plenty of cotton, laterzzz" to the rebels in respect to the notion that the Southern cotton industry was worth saving slavery for? The union blockade had something to do with that.
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Dec 18, 2013 05:27
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The Entire Universe posted:Didn't they basically go "gently caress you hillbillies, there's this place called Egypt and they have plenty of cotton, laterzzz" to the rebels in respect to the notion that the Southern cotton industry was worth saving slavery for? No, there were a fair number of people who suddenly found themselves out of work (by like 62-63, because the textile mills had actually stockpiled tons of cotton anyway), and sympathized with the underdog that was the CSA. Probably many from the working class, but still enough people to make a stink about it. Plus a decent number of people who conspired to help confederate emmisaries outfit ships like the CSS Alabama. Ron Jeremy posted:The union blockade had something to do with that. Another factor in the public perception is that the biggest reason why the cotton stopped flowing so suddenly in '61 is that the CSA embargoed themselves. They assumed that by holding back all the cotton, they could extort Europe into helping them. But because the European mills already had so much stockpiled anyway (to protect against this very sort of supply collapse) it didn't really matter at first, and then they arranged new sources after a few years.
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Dec 18, 2013 05:33
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It's somewhat strange that the South had been whining about secession for decades yet when they actually managed to secede they governed themselves in a very poor fashion that indicates that there wasn't a lot of planning done over those decades. I understand that sectarianism and slavery didn't jump to the fore in American politics until the K-N Act, but I would imagine that as the 1850s went on and some in the South started to think that they could go on their own after the Panic of 1857, some Southerners must have drawn up plans on how to secede and how to fight against the North. For those Southerners who were planning secession pre-1860, how detailed were their plans and how much attention did they receive from Southern politicians?
America Inc. fucked around with this message at 08:09 on Dec 18, 2013 |
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Dec 18, 2013 08:00
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People also tend to overlook the fact that exports of grain and flour from Union states made up a pretty important chunk of the UK's food supply. Another somewhat smaller proportion came from British North America (i.e. proto-Canada), which London considered a write-off in the event of hostilities with the Union. Losing those imports wouldn't have triggered famine by any means, but shortages would certainly have ensued. Britain might restore the flow of Southern cotton only to lose Canada and see the lower classes lose their poo poo over the price of bread.
Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 08:50 on Dec 18, 2013 |
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Dec 18, 2013 08:19
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The British didn't consider Canada a write-off until after the Civil War when the Union had a standing, professional army like the nations of Europe did. That being said Canadians were overwhelmingly sympathetic towards the Union and if the British had tried to force them into a war on the side of the Confederacy they might have just let themselves be taken by the Union.
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Dec 18, 2013 08:57
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Negative Entropy posted:It's somewhat strange that the South had been whining about secession for decades yet when they actually managed to secede they governed themselves in a very poor fashion that indicates that there wasn't a lot of planning done over those decades. I understand that sectarianism and slavery didn't jump to the fore in American politics until the K-N Act, but I would imagine that as the 1850s went on and some in the South started to think that they could go on their own after the Panic of 1857, some Southerners must have drawn up plans on how to secede and how to fight against the North. For those Southerners who were planning secession pre-1860, how detailed were their plans and how much attention did they receive from Southern politicians? It was pretty much a case of "well we believe it will work so it just will," much like contemporary conservatism. The plan was basically to just kind of let poo poo happen.
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Dec 18, 2013 12:58
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Negative Entropy posted:It's somewhat strange that the South had been whining about secession for decades yet when they actually managed to secede they governed themselves in a very poor fashion that indicates that there wasn't a lot of planning done over those decades. I understand that sectarianism and slavery didn't jump to the fore in American politics until the K-N Act, but I would imagine that as the 1850s went on and some in the South started to think that they could go on their own after the Panic of 1857, some Southerners must have drawn up plans on how to secede and how to fight against the North. For those Southerners who were planning secession pre-1860, how detailed were their plans and how much attention did they receive from Southern politicians? Also, in the secession of 1860/1 the confederate states deliberately rushed in, knowing full well they hadn't had time to plan. Many of the hardest core secessionists remembered quite well the events of 1850, when South Carolina was demanding to secede in the face of the Wilmot Provisio (banning slavery in the Mexican Cession). Secessionist cliques had formed up (in more than just South Carolina I believe), but they decided to wait it out and see what the compromise being worked out in Congress would look like. Eventually the fervor passed, the Compromise of 1850 became a thing, and the hardcore secessionists weren't happy. When 1860 came around, they were determined to get the ball rolling this time around, and see what the future brought. As for actual plans to fight the North, most Southerners never expected the North to fight. The view of Yankees was that they were a bunch of effeminate city clerks, and would be both unwilling and unable to fight the trained elites (military officers being primarily southern) and country boys of the South. Of course the North had just as many country boys, and the war turned out to be much more industrial than any war that had come before it, but the thinking was that the South was basically going to be free to go it's own way and start carving out their own empire in the Caribbean. That said, there were a number of Southerners who predicted that the North would indeed fight; I believe Lee was among them.
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Dec 18, 2013 17:35
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PittTheElder posted:That said, there were a number of Southerners who predicted that the North would indeed fight; I believe Lee was among them. Yeah. Lee knew the Union would fight and saw Secession as an inevitably tragic mistake. He was recruited to head both the US and CS armies, and an interesting and plausible counterfactual is if he had stayed with the Union. Lee vs. Johnston at Manassas and on the Peninsula could have ended in a much shorter war.
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Dec 18, 2013 17:52
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| # ? Jun 11, 2024 03:23 |
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PittTheElder posted:As for actual plans to fight the North, most Southerners never expected the North to fight. The view of Yankees was that they were a bunch of effeminate city clerks, and would be both unwilling and unable to fight the trained elites (military officers being primarily southern) and country boys of the South. Of course the North had just as many country boys, and the war turned out to be much more industrial than any war that had come before it, but the thinking was that the South was basically going to be free to go it's own way and start carving out their own empire in the Caribbean. That said, there were a number of Southerners who predicted that the North would indeed fight; I believe Lee was among them. And maybe more?
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Dec 18, 2013 21:35
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