"What can we all learn from the Confederacy?" Topic

It seems like posters will go on about the rights of the CSA and their just grievances, cultural differences from the rest of the nation etc and throw around "whataboutisms" ad nauseum.

However, we never seem to address the good things the CSA stood for or why their organization and behavior is worth admiration or emulation.

doc has pointed out, quite rightfully, that I am not an ACW authority. Thus, I thought I would open a discussion for people to point out what I cant seem to fathom, what exactly about the CSA was constructive, positive, well thought out or logical. There must be something magical about those 4 short years for some posters to go to mat to justify its existence.

Again, Im not talking about their right to secede or states rights or any of that procedural stuff; rather I am asking what it is that the CSA did and accomplished that makes them so meritorious?

Six year presidential term with no second term.

Line item veto.

Some good songs.

They gave us an entire Wargaming period! You can't so ACW without the "C"

Not to try and secede when the Other Guys have most of the industrial base, navy, and a larger population.

Some nice flags.

Confederate commanders gave some good 'lessons' on the art of war.

The Confederacy also demonstrated that treason doesn't pay.

A submarine!

"The Confederacy also demonstrated that treason doesn't pay".

The success of the USA when seceding from Britain seems to contradict that theory.

July 4th is considered by some to be Treason Day.

Good point Thresher! Happy New Year from a treasonous rebel Yank!

I don't think they offer much of anything on the positive. If you study some of Jackson's campaigns they're impressive and informative. Economy and government were a disaster. Tried too much to emulate the Articles of Confederation which failed miserably.

They did indirectly give us West Virginia…still not sure if that comes down on the pro or con side…

The futility of trying to turn back the clock. At the cost of great death and devastation.)

They provided us with the ultimate example of the danger of poor losers in a democracy. When they didn't get what they wanted in the election of 1860, the South picked up its ball and went home, leading to secession and the war. Some Americans still haven't learned from this lesson.

The Old South was to a large extent a feudal society, with the associated strengths and weaknesses. It was undemocratic, avoiding or minimizing many of democracy's associated strengths and weaknesses. (See DeTocqueville's DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA for a full discussion; he predicted thirty years early that war would occur and that the southern aristocracy would lose to the stronger system.) It was paternalistic, and planters were demonstrably correct in arguing that their slaves were better off materially than northern factory workers; see TIME ON THE CROSS. (Remember that slaves were cared for from birth to death, and seldom worked in the fields before puberty, in contrast to factory child labor. No pensions or social security in the north. Elderly slaves were "uncle" and maintained. Note I am saying MATERIAL terms; think of it as a decently-run prison, if you like. No pretense to equality, or freedom, but a sense of mutual obligations. Gone With the Wind now, and good riddance, but it had enough virtues that many would die to defend it.

The North's BATTLEHYMN appeals to high moral virtues; Dixie is a song about home.

It's poetry, not prose:

"It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world's roaring rim."

… William Faulkner
From his book: Intruder in the Dust, 1948.

"This is the last, this is the last, Hurry, hurry, this is the last, Drink the wine before yours is spilled, Kiss the sweetheart before you're killed, She will be loving, and she will grieve, And wear your heart on her golden sleeve And marry your friend when he gets his leave. It does not matter that you are still The corn unground by the watermill, The stones grind till they get their will. Pluck the flower that hands can pluck, Touch the walls of your house for luck, Eat of the fat and drink the sweet, There is little savor in dead men's meat. It does not matter that you once knew Future and past and a different you, That went by when the wind first blew. There is no future, there is no past, There is only this hour and it goes fast, Hurry, hurry, this is the last, This is the last, This is the last."

Benet, Stephen. John Brown's Body . Aegitas. Kindle Edition.

The success of the USA when seceding from Britain seems to contradict that theory.

The thirteen British colonies were not an integral part of Great Britain, but colonies of. Therefore, they didn't secede, but revolted as the perception was that the British government broke the social contract between governed and those who govern. The Founders were children of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. The two situations and the circumstances surrounding the two events were completely different.

The states that seceded had the presumption to assume that if their legislatures all passed bills and the governors signed them that the respective states had the authority to secede under their understanding of what was a legitimate exercise of representative democracy akin to the same authority exercised in 1776. Whether it was a good idea, moral or just didn't matter to them, but instead hinged on their belief in what democracy was all about. It's telling that one huge region of the country believed this and that the remaining union states from the original 13 no longer believed this premise to be true. I think the southern states believed that the right to secded was inalienable and not something to be defined by a constitution, laws, or courts. If you think about it having 13 separate legislatures decide to leave the union via their legal governmental processes was a much larger exercise of representative democracy than the Contiental Congress's actions to secede from the Crown. Of course, Lincoln feared this and prevented its occurrence in Maryland by locking up legislators without habeas corpus.

In any case, its all in the past, but as a southern boy of 14 I know of what Faulkner writes.

Kevin, sorry, but no. The colonies were an integral part of the British empire, and prayed for the king even as they were shooting his soldiers. Their fight, for more than a year, was for their rights AS BRITISH CITIZENS. It was a civil war within the empire (and within the colonies) and as close a parallel to the US Civil War as two unique historical events ever can be. And not all the colonies rebelled or seceded; Canada resisted the demand to be the fourteenth. You don't want to confront or wrestle with the similarities because your sympathies are with the secession in 1776 and against it in 1861. That's fine; mine are as well. But you really cannot justify George W and condemn Bobby Lee, not on any consistent basis.

Nothing positive.

As noted above, don't pick a fight with an enemy who has more people, more guns and at least as much if not more determination

Oh – and who will never let anyone else ally with you – further to the American Revolution thing, the French did provide more than a little aid to the rebellion

What conceivable reasons could there be to admire or emulate whiny losers, whose own unbridled bigotry was the one thing that got them into a fight they couldn't win to begin with?

Same for Reich 3.0 and other similar folks in history, up and including the present day.

I find the entire premise to be off base. There's a huge amount of distance between people not thinking the South were the spawn of Satan who got what they deserved and actively supporting or deifying them.

I'm a born and raised Northern Boy from a state that never had slavery and takes pride in the thousands of men (and one bald eagle) we sent to fight and die to end the practice of Slavery and recombine the Union. However, I have never once hated the South or saw them as dirty traitors.

They believed in their cause- be it freedom, or the denial of freedom for a whole group of human beings, or pride in their homes, or just plain spite enough to fight for it…and lost. That's not some lost cause myth or fantasy- that's just the fact. They got their butts kicked and that was that. My side, and the one I believe to be the right side, won. Slavery ended, there were post war troubles and carpetbaggers and Jim Crow to settle, and equality to create that we still wrestle with, but after a horrible war where brother fought brother, the nation came back together and found a way to move on.

Had they won, the history books might be different, but they didn't, and thankfully history marched on.

Until a bunch of fools and es who weren't there, didn't fight or die or lose someone in their immediate family in that terrible war all decided over 150 years later that we should open old wounds and lay on the salt.

Au Pas,

You crack me up. I got what you were doing there. +1!

"The Confederacy also demonstrated that treason doesn't pay".

The success of the USA when seceding from Britain seems to contradict that theory.

"Treason doth never prosper,
What's the reason?
For if it prosper,
None dare call it Treason."

I would say we learned that when compromise fails on both sides and individual and group hate dominates the conversation, war and death are the inevitable outcome.

+1 Tgerritsen.

OK, so no one has anything to say about what the Confederacy got right? Any advances in economy, diplomacy, philosophy, law, government that we can say they executed well or that we should admire and copy?

Any lasting social or physical structures? No?

A submarine!

I thought the first submarine was in 1776?

link

Aside from cool flags, songs and the line item veto, is there any positive creation to remember the Confederacy for?

I find the entire premise to be off base. There's a huge amount of distance between people not thinking the South were the spawn of Satan who got what they deserved and actively supporting or deifying them.

It's off-base to ask what the Confederacy got right? You can either support them or not; but what did they do that you would emulate or admire and do you admire the way in which they did it?

You are demanding a lot from a four-years-in- a bloody war society. A better question would be what the South got right.

The War of the Revolution was not a civil war, but a rebellions. Parliament did not allow the colonists their full rights as British subjects and that was a main part of the problems the American colonists had with Great Britain.

There were 'civil' wars between rebels and loyalists in the Hudson Valley and the South, but that was between colonists, and many of the grudges that brought on the fighting were personal and had little or nothing to do with Great Britain.

Two governments each claiming legitimacy over the same territory, and drawing widespread support from the same population, sure sounds like civil war to me. If not, what is your definition of a cw?

Oh, and remind me again the title of the Official Records? of the WAR OF THE REBELLION. The Rebels were a civil war, and the Continentals were a rebellion?

You are not using terms with any consistency.

Civil War: 'a war between citizens of the same country'

Rebellion: 'an act of violent or open resistance to an established government or ruler'

Colony:

(1): 'a country or area under the full or partial political control of another country, typically a distant one, and occupied by settlers from that country'

(2): 'all the foreign countries or areas formerly under British political control'

(3): 'a group of people living in a colony, consisting of the original settlers and their descendants and successors'

Southerners had the same rights and privileges as northerners of westerners in 1860.

The American colonists in 1775 did not have the same rights as Englishmen. For example, they had no representation in Parliament, and therefore no voice in the government of the mother country.

The differences between a rebellion and a civil war may be subtle, but they make the two quite different.

Winners write the history, but we already know that.

You are demanding a lot from a four-years-in- a bloody war society. A better question would be what the South got right.

You cant find any substantive positivity in the CSA? No enduring wisdom or good?

I notice you are quoting all sorts of side stuff in an effort to derail the thread, throwing "whataboutisms" around and generally arguing over "procedure". All of these things are done with aplomb on countless other TMP threads.

It seems members will make value judgments about the CSA's right to exist, their multiple grievances, be heroes and consume our public spaces as monumental history but no one seems willing to point out exactly what they accomplished or whether they went about it with wisdom or talent?

Really, nothing?

No one has a book, even an antique one, that can wax nostalgic about the elegant efficiency and planning that went into the Confederacy? Even a lost cause author's book from circa 1900?

"rather I am asking what it is that the CSA did and accomplished that makes them so meritorious?"

They opened our eyes up to the first examples of "How the Federal Govt. will make war upon it's own people to protect it's power base and just how far they will go to ensure that that power base isn't threatened by people who no longer wish to follow it."

But we didn't learn the lesson….

When a foreign power invades your homeland, you band together with your neighbors and fight.

My guess is that when folks from north of the Mason Dixon line started showing up in the wrong color uniforms and with weird accents, that's how most people of the time understood it. Probably why its referred to as the War of Northern Aggression by some.

People today decry slavery, and rightfully so. But I think a lot of them fail to realize that pre-1800's dang near everyone was in the slave trade. So I guess another lesson learned is that social structures die hard.

They opened our eyes up to the first examples of "How the Federal Govt. will make war upon it's own people to protect it's power base and just how far they will go to ensure that that power base isn't threatened by people who no longer wish to follow it."

Who 'made war' upon whom? Seems to me it was South Carolina, one of the seceding states, that opened the ball at Fort Sumter.

One of the 'excuses' for the Confederacy is the idea that it was a war of 'northern aggression' which is nonsense.

Stryderg, yes: "Because you are here."

Murphy. yes. That the south was wrong about slavery does not make the north right about other matters.

"This is Virginia's ILIAD, but Troy was taken nevertheless."

As to a book, see Vandiver's THEIR TATTERED FLAGS: THE EPIC OF THE CONFEDERACY. Chapter one is titled, iirc, "The South, the poor South."

A feudal society that had minimal industry created a war production system out of nothing. No Confederate army lost because of lack of ammunition. What had been an open field in 1861 became one of the world's largest factories in 1865. They understood that their pre-industrial culture was fragile and the very act of defending it would destroy it -- and in the end, too late, were prepared to give up slavery to win independence. The white south achieved something very close to full mobilization. Yes, there are some admirable things there.

Ploughshares into Swords: Josiah Gorgas and Confederate Ordnance (Volume 36) (Williams-Ford Texas A&M University Military History Series) Hardcover – September 1, 1994
by Frank E. Vandiver (Author)
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Begun in the late 1940s, before Vandiver enrolled in the doctoral program at Tulane University, research for this book started with his interviewing the Confederate ordnance chief's daughters and included perusal of Gorgas's 1857-1877 journals.

Gorgas is credited with creating, in the Confederacy's ordnance department, "success beyond expectation." With the South having far less capacity to produce arms than the North and with communications from the field severely hampered throughout the war, the former West Pointer nevertheless was responsible for the fact that, as some have argued, the South kept the war alive as long as it did.

Supplying the South with firearms was such a problem in the beginning that pikes and lances had been ordered to arm troops. Lead shortages were chronically low, and at one point in 1863 a bureau circular restricted cartridge issues to three per man per month. But supplies never dried up completely, and Gorgas kept his eye on the situation in every theater.

As Vandiver wrote, "one of the greatest testimonials to the efficient manner in which Gorgas had organized the bureau is the performance of his field officers during the last hectic days before the surrender of the Army of the Tennessee." Vandiver adds that "the main reason why the bureau managed to go on functioning was that Gorgas had given so much authority to the lower echelons." President Jefferson Davis rewarded Gorgas with a promotion to brigadier general in November 1864. "[W]ith Sherman ravaging the industrial heart of the shrinking Confederacy, Gorgas had done all he could to make his bureau weather the hurricane," Vandiver wrote, adding, "He thought he had succeeded, and he was almost right."

In its review of the 1952 edition, the Southwest Review remarked that "the story of the munitions supply of the C.S.A. is the authentic miracle of military history." The Journal of Southern History stated that "Dr. Vandiver, with the use of much unpublished manuscript material has here made a valuable contribution to Confederate history."

Both the Revolution and the Civil war were REVOLUTIONARY triangular struggles, with rival governments competing for control of the same civilian population. Neither war had (many or significant) combatants outside the authority of some government -- a requirement for rebellion.

I think the initial question posed is rather silly and pointless. We will never know what kind of civilization might have come out the South had it been given a chance to endure. I certainly do not agree that a catastrophic war was the only means to end slavery. It is quite plausible to think that slavery in the South could come to a end in more wholesome manner. Certainly, the Reconstruction approach of simply declaring slaves free but without any real resources was not a wholesome way of starting a new integrated future. Compare this approach to how Russia emancipated their serfs.

Who 'made war' upon whom? Seems to me it was South Carolina, one of the seceding states, that opened the ball at Fort Sumter.

The USA attempted to sustain its hold on a fort in the center of the South's most important port. That is certainly not a friendly act on the part of the North. I do agree though that patience and self control on the part of South Carolina and the CSA might have proved a wiser course of action. In April of 1861 Lincoln was in a very difficult political situation. The attack on Fort Sumter was a godsend to him in mobilizing the North for war.

Fort Sumter was federal property regardless of who controlled the port.

I don't see any reason to suspect that the Civil War was a 'revolutionary' struggle in the same what that the American Revolution was.

Southern states seceded in order to maintain their wealth, most of which was invested in slaves.

Ah, Kevin, it must be comforting to understand a supremely complex event with such simple clarity.

Have you read John Shy's classic essay on the Revolutionary War as a revolutionary struggle? The triangularity of it is the thing. Both AWI and ACW were wars between different parts of the same systems. each claiming legitimacy and drawing resources from the same population.

During the American involvement in Vietnam some books came out trying to equate the American Revolution with the Vietnam War. I failed to see the logic in that argument as the two were not even close to being equal.

I have read Shy and am not impressed.

Books on the subject that are much better are:

-A Revolutionary People At War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783 by Charles Royster.

-The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Baylyn.

And for the War of the Rebellion again see McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. His views on slavery and the south are right on the money, including southern attempts to reinstate the slave trade.

The Founders were attempting to 'invent' something new as to independence and a new form of government, as well as getting rid of monarchy. There was also an attempt to abolish slavery.

The Southerners wanted to maintain an immoral institution, which they refrained from calling it slavery, and maintain the wealth of the south in a relatively small number of people.

Ninety percent of the wealth in the south was controlled by ten percent of the population. That ten percent were then those that controlled the southern government.

I think the initial question posed is rather silly and pointless. We will never know what kind of civilization might have come out the South had it been given a chance to endure.

It's everyone else's fault the CSA collapsed?

Apparently you haven't got an answer for anything lasting, well thought out, admirable that the Confederacy produced?

Interestingly, in that same short amount of time, Lincoln has managed to individually produce many admirable documents, laws, principles etc.

There must be something amazing that they created for some to mindlessly throw everyone and everything else under the bus in an effort to justify the CSA's legality; to the point where they hope against hope by misunderstanding the Constitution and carefully cut and paste which facts support their point of view. That's a lot of effort for a regime that didnt really produce anything of lasting value.

It's evocative of someone who viscerally identifies with the subject but cant really tell us why. I would say it's a case of "If loving the CSA is wrong, I don't want to be right" but in this case, the speaker cant even bring themselves to admit that loving it is wrong.

In any case, there is something collectively pathological about fighting to justify their actions, and then desire to erect statues to them as heroes or role models all while ignoring everything they actually did.

It's even more curious when someone suggests that the CSA is their heritage. One might ask, why that heritage, and heritage of what exactly?