Truly, an insightful man who lost the SHIT out of the primaries.

If I recall, wasn't the only reason the Civil War lasted so long was because Lincoln hired a bunch of Generals who were to scared to actually fight? Then he fired them like a year or so into the war and hired competent people and it was all downhill for the South?

Sherman's scorched earth policy helped a bit.

Not only that, Gravid. That damning little line of Rhett's contains another truth critical to understanding the war. They were certainly arrogant, and may have had cotton, but only because they had slaves. A lot of them. Something like 90% of the souths wealth was tied up in the slaves themselves and their work product. When the North suggested abolition what it meant in practical terms for white southerners was a complete destruction of their wealth and business. Imagine, for lack of a better analogy, if the UN decides that oil is too dangerous to use for the planet and orders Saudi Arabia to stop pumping the stuff out of the ground.

So in light of that fact, it's clear why the South went to war.

Most white southerners didn't benefit from slavery, though. There's a reason blacks typically have English surnames, and it's because the plantation owners were wealthy English American aristocrats. Working-class southern whites (my people) tended to be of Scottish, Irish, German, and Swedish ancestry, and they simply didn't own slaves or have any financial interest in slavery. Many of them actually competed with slaves for work or were indentured servants.

MM - you're correct; General McClellan, in charge of the Army of the Potomac, was a pretty good peacetime commander (teaching men to march and so forth), but come actual war people wondered whether he was merely incompetent or batting for the South. In 1864 he ran as a Democrat against Lincoln, which may or may not prove that he was trying to undermine Lincoln all along.

Now Ben Grierson, though ... I'll let the War Nerd talk about him:

http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-ben-grierson-actual-hero/

@Void : no different than today. A very few Americans directly benefit from the oil industry, but the nation as a whole will go to war anywhere on the planet to protect the industry's interests. Come to think of it, a good many of the soldiers doing the fighting come from your neck of the woods. Some things really don't change, eh?

The southern states seceded because Lincoln was elected, whom they regarded as an abolitionist. Lincoln didn't really want to end slavery, but he was willing to go to war to preserve the Union. Emancipation was a byproduct of the war. So, by seceding, the South themselves brought about the destruction of slavery.

I say the South could even have pulled off secession and made it stick, just by remaining nonviolent; it's only when the South shot at Union soldiers at Fort Sumter that Lincoln went about putting down this secessionist nonsense.

Note that it wasn't just about getting Lincoln motivated; Congress too had to be willing to send troops, and (northern) public opinion had to be at least a little on Lincoln's side too. Without Fort Sumter, it's extremely unlikely that Congress or the public would have favored sending troops, and sooner or later some sort of formal division between the USA and the CSA would have been inevitable. But leave it to the Southern dumbfucks to start a fight they totally didn't need to at Fort Sumter, and prompt the whole shooting match.

About Lincoln: I think he would have liked to have ended slavery; the question is whether he would have used the office of the Presidency to do so. It's unfortunately become fashionable to doubt Lincoln's basic opposition to slavery just because ending slavery wasn't his highest priority (preserving the Union ranked higher).

Sherman was one of the smartest Americans to ever live.

I could make a joke here about how he's reviled by half the nation, but I respect my American brothers too much to do that.

*dubstep kicks in*

Imagine a nation populated entirely by Christian Weston Chandler, in other words.

Fully agreed. I understand the need for historians to recognize how attitudes and mores shift over time, but the 1860s are not so far removed from us that people back then get a complete pass. People knew slavery was wrong; as you point out, there's plenty of documentation to prove it.

The South became a confederacy because they didn't want a strong central government of their own (seeing President Lincoln, and by proxy the US govt, as the big bad boogeyman come to take their slaves away), but that decision also weakened them collectively. In fact, the 13 original states had tried running themselves as a confederation immediately after the revolution for similar reasons, and it was a fucking mess; taxes couldn't be collected, every state was printing its own currency, and uprisings like the Whiskey Rebellion were causing chaos everywhere. Eventually they had to reconvene and labor to re-establish the United States with a stronger central authority by drafting and eventually ratifying the Constitution as we know it, all in the name of Getting Shit Done.

Nowadays every shitheel punidt with an axe to grind wants to just pretend the years between 1783 and 1789 never happened.

SMA: you're name must mean smack my ass because of how dumb you are

this is how american happened ok step 1 justice

that happened

step 2 liberty oh wait a liberal like you wouldnt get that lol

step 3 was the statue of liberty

step 5 was white people freeing the slaves from ??????

step 6 obama steals all of our freedoms so he can take them for himself and becomes the freest man of all time

step 7 teenage mutant ninja turtles alleviate the aforementioned problem by going back in time to hit obama with brooms

SMA is correct that the Confederate states didn't want a strong central government, or at least they used to bitch about Jefferson Davis being a tyrant for trying to wield the powers of a wartime president of the CSA.

What they were looking for, arguably, was a CSA that had all the power to do all the things they wanted, but didn't do any the unpleasant things that were necessary. Sounds familiar.