James links to an interesting Substack article on how the British caused the American Civil War, and adds his own thoughts on the matter. The original article is long, because it covers a lot of territory, and James also links to some of his thoughts on the general matter at the time of the 2020 elections. It will take you a bit of time to get through all of them, yet I think you will find it valuable. And his comments today are brief, so grab those first. We oversimplify for memory storage, keeping details hazier in the background (from which we may or may not be able to retrieve them) and when we rebuild the memory for purpose of thinking about it or talking about it, it gets rebuilt with some pieces left out and new ones put in. In this case, I had many moments of thinking yeah, I knew that followed by ...so why had I forgotten it? Likely, it gummed up my nice simple categories by being too darn complicated. Even our own memories sometimes carry the warning TL;DR.
My late uncle that I am named for had disdain for conservatives and also for Southerners. He saw a continuity between the Civil War, the failure of Reconstruction, and our current political situation. He was of the opinion that when the southern states seceded, we should have let them. Good riddance to bad rubbish. When we were having the discussion two decades ago I rather dimly remembered that there was some danger of the country breaking up even further and thus becoming more vulnerable to the European powers, and said so. I had learned that somewhere long ago. The War Between The States is a matter of serious hobby for some Americans 16 decades later, and still has the power to affect personal and cultural definition even now, particularly in the South. My younger brother was a Civil War buff starting in fifth grade, but I was never much interested.
I did remember that the language used by the North at the time was about preserving the Union, and keeping the Republic intact, somewhat more than it was about slavery. (Preserving their own way of life, which included slavery, was more central to Southern motivations. Several states mentioned it specifically in their articles of secession. And nobody likes being told what to do by others, even when they are wrong. We can always distract ourselves by looking for ways in which they don't have the right to do it, and focus on that instead.) I mentioned this danger to my uncle, though without much supporting evidence, but he dismissed this out of hand. "No one was going to invade America." I did keep it in mind, however, and collected information supporting my POV. But not with any seriousness, which is why it remained fragmentary. I have mentioned it very few times on the blog, though I was fascinated by the Olmstead books. Even those I seldom mentioned.
Well hmm, the article that James links to has quite a bit of evidence that things just short of that were very likely, and actual invasion not out of the question. As talk of secession grows again, a similar caution may be in order. China and Europe would both feel more comfortable with a few smaller Americas, and not for reasons that are to our advantage.
Notice that the song - the word "freedom"- was used by both sides of the conflict. We're all pretty damned sure, aren't we? That word just gets used to mean anything we want. If you think of "Me and Bobby McGee," you hear a song extolling the virtues of being free, unattached, going where'er thou wouldst - yet it also includes the deeply ambivalent sentiment "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Words that lose meaning become loose cannons.
5 comments:
Your Supreme Court just destroyed any possibility of a Union, with its recent ruling that companies can sue Unions for losses uncured in any dispute.
As I see it we are coming down to a world wide fight between fascism and communism.
I have been a mild commie all my life, so I have already picked a side.
Lincoln, in his letter to Horace Greeley, succinctly expressed that he was interested in preserving the Union and would do so even if it meant freeing no slaves at all. Historians like to note that he wrote that letter, however, having already drafted the Emancipation Proclamation. Still, even that only freed some slaves -- the ones in the Confederacy, not the ones in the border states.
Still, I don't entirely agree. Greeley represented himself as speaking for twenty million Americans who were worried about the issue. I don't know if he was speaking the truth or anything like it, but I do know this: I have a book collecting the poetry of the Civil War, separated by North and South. The Southern poetry is all heroic, much of it Arthurian or Classical, formal and beautiful. The Northern poetry is mostly apocalyptic, Evangelical, much in the style of the Battle Hymn of the Republic: lightning and God's Wrath, destruction of the sinful, liberation of the suffering.
Whatever the elites in Washington thought the war was about, their army thought it was about freedom for the slaves. I think grand strategically the elites probably were more concerned about control of the Mississippi River and its major port, and to a lesser degree about maintaining power and control. That isn't what motivated the people who signed up to fight for them, though. They thought they were the red hand of God Himself; and maybe they were.
I have great agreement, but I think motives for starting a war and continuing a war change over time. In the North, slavery grew as a motive. I also think the motives shaded from Virginia to Mississippi, and from New Hampshire to Illinois.
But my main point was that I keep forgetting how international this war was, and how much that mattered. I can't balme others. It's me.
Excellent observations.
In the 1850s there would having been living memory of 1812, and a generation which experienced the Mexican wars of the early 1800s, as well as ongoing conflict with Native Tribes so it's not hard to believe there were concerns about both prolonged and expanded warfare on the American continent, and what that would mean for a continent splintered into multiple entities. The previous century or more in Europe wouldn't have provided much evidence that conflict would be avoided, either.
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