The Benevolence of the Manifest Destiny

[thea_447]

Concerning something written to me: Thea,

And all of the above equates to the causes of the American Civil War in what way?

Unionblue

May I change this perhaps and ask you something. In your post #48: What does this have to do with the WBTS?

[johan_steele]

Bill, Iraq was known as Persia and when I looked for the mentioned city the map showed as part of Iraq and I didn't think to correct myself. I have read and reread my posts on this thread trying to see the mortal insult I threw at you. If the word Iraq... enough. I've explained myself. None was intended. I'll be ****ed if I'll beg forgiveness for a slight that was not intended. An explanation was given, If you are going to refuse to accept it and call me a liar then do so and get it over with.

Frankly, I don't know a hell of a lot about Manifest Destiny and was hoping to get a little objective info.

I really don't see the need to justify my statement by listing every atrocity commited by German, Russian, French, British & other European powers during the 18th & 19th Century the list is not a short one. When I looked to British issues that compared to Manifest Destiny I found references specifically to the Opium War, the 1857 Indian "Problem," (both actions whice were contemperary issues to the ACW) The Zulu & Boer Wars I knew some of and was also suprosed at the similarities to Manifest Destiny. The Palestinian issues of the early 20th were completely new to me as were the British actions throughout Asia of the time. I was suprised at the similarities and differences to the ACW and Manifest Detiny. W/ the French... the list is Long, really long. THe Russians and their eastward expansion was less than nice. And so on and so forth. Frankly, I see myself being blasted again for attacking you and your country.

As I said Manifest Destiy is certainly a policy/theory w/ International implications. I know fully well that the argument that "everybody else is doing it; so I can as well" holds no water. What it does do is show that there was precedent and as England and France of the 19th Century were often looked to as an example... I can see the significance. Upon more reading I do see a bit of a correlation between the CW & Manifest Destiny... but I see it as a National more than regional issue. I see it as neither a Northern or Southern issue but more of a Washington DC issue; which does not automatically mean Northern.

Calicoboy... Fallujah was in no way put to the sword. I've had the opportunity to take the time to talk to people who were there. I'm more inclined to believe them than the boobs on TV who believe the only good news is bad news. I will confidently say that US and other Allied troops DID NOT indiscriminitly kill men, women and children. As to the Enola Gay, I know three men who were on transports waiting for the inevitable invasion of Japan; I don't believe any competant military historian has ever thought that would have been anything but a bloodbath. W/out the A Bombs millions of Japanese and Allied troops would have fallen.

[johan_steele]

THea, I believe it was a direct response to the post immedietly prior.

[unionblue]

Thea,

My post #48 was in reply to calicoboy's post prior to that.

My post to you was in reply to your post prior to that.

Unionblue

[dawna]

Despite the actions of abolitionists, due to Northern racism life was far from perfect for free blacks. Even weatlthy blacks were prohibited from living in white neighbourhoods due to the white man's fear of declining property value. The horrific living conditions in cities such as Boston, New York, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia, often led to disease and death. An 1846 Philadelphia study indicated that most poor black infants died shortly after birth.

Free blacks in Northern cities such as the above mentioned were often refused rooms in hotels, service in restaurants, and admission into theatres. Blacks were denied the right to vote, the right to testify in court, were often denied access to public transportation, and educational and employment opportunities were severely limited.

From 1820 - 1850, black churches, homes, and schools were ransacked and burned during riots in major cities throughout the North, forcing many blacks to flee to Canada. It has been mentioned several times on these Boards that thousands of blacks lived 'free' throughout the North, but I am hard pressed to understand how the above can possibly be perceived as living in anything but invisible shackles.

By 1862, the Illinois Central Railroad carried several carloads of negroes (Southern slaves freed by Union troops) to Chicago on a daily basis, but the white population of Illinois was outraged and demanded that political leaders put a stop to black migration. When local officials finally convicted six negroes of living in violation (Carthage, Illinois) of the states' black laws and sold them to the highest bidders, black migration quickly ceased.

Illinois in the Civil War (Victor Hicken) and The Black Civil War Soldier (E.A. Miller, Jr.):

Some of the African American men remaining in Illinois proved eager to volunteer for the Union army, but Illinois militia made no provision for black enlistment. Many abolitionists supported blacks’ cause, but not even the Prairie State’s initial burst of patriotism was enough to find a place for African American soldiers. Most white northerners believed that blacks were unintelligent and prone to cowardice, and hence would make poor soldiers. Others believed that the war would wrap up quickly, making blacks unnecessary participants.

Changes in federal policy began to clear the way for black participation in the struggle. President Lincoln, intent upon a war for Union alone, had originally instructed officers to return slaves to their owners. But the Confiscation Act of March, 1862 prohibited these returns. As freed slaves began to enter Union lines as “contraband,” northern officers and politicians began to discuss their ability to work in support of Union forces, digging trenches, driving horses, and cooking meals. By July of 1862 Congress had authorized the president “to receive into the service of the United States, for the purpose of constructing intrenchments, or performing camp duty, or any other labor…. Persons of African descent.” The law provided that African American laborers be paid ten dollars a month, three dollars of which might pay for clothing, as compared to a white private’s monthly wage of thirteen dollars, plus a clothing allowance of three dollars and fifty cents.

As the war developed from a struggle to preserve the Union into a larger conflict to destroy slavery, federal officials came to accept the use of black troops. Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, first announced in the fall of 1862 and enacted on January 1, 1863, finally enabled black soldiers to form their own military regiments. White social customs dictated that these units be segregated. Indeed, Lincoln himself continued to press the colonization of freed slaves in Africa as a solution to the question of their future disposition in the United States. Nevertheless, African Americans saw their chance to serve.

Many whites feared that arming black soldiers threatened the nation’s system of white supremacy. While army labor did not diverge significantly from blacks’ usual roles as laborers and servants, military service elevated blacks in two important ways. First, many whites simply feared that armed African Americans might turn upon the whites that had treated them so poorly. This anxiety remained a fixture in the slaveholding South, particularly in regions in which slave populations greatly outnumbered white. But northern whites also flinched at the prospect of arming black men.

As significantly, military service elevated African Americans to a visible equality with whites. Just as the war marked a rite of passage for white men, an opportunity to prove their courage, it also provided blacks with an opportunity to disprove popular white stereotypes. The Chicago Tribune, a Republican standard, appealed to these motives when it urged black men to set right “the slanders that have annulled their race and to prove in their own persons, as their brethren have elsewhere done, that beneath black skin rest great qualifications now needed by the Republic to defend itself…” Joseph Stanley, a black man from Chicago, read the Tribune’s recruiting message, but wrote that the state had no right to ask for African Americans’ military service as long as its black codes remained on the books.

The Twenty-ninth U.S. Colored Infantry made up the first unit of Illinois African Americans to take the field. Recruited from across the state, with a number of Missourians and others mixed in, the unit departed Chicago in April of 1863, bound for Baltimore. One observer’s account reveals the state of racial attitudes in Illinois at the time. The “gallant regiment of black and Blue boys” was accompanied “by a vast throng of especial admirers, including a large number of females of African descent of all shades presenting a practical result of the theory and practice of miscegination.”

The Twenty-ninth joined General Grant’s Army of the Potomac just as the general took up his protracted and bloody assault on the Confederate homeland. Where his predecessors had invariably withdrawn after a battle marked by heavy losses, Grant pressed forward. In early May of 1864 the battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania had cost Grant thirty thousand casualties and made him eager for replacements. Thus Illinois’ inexperienced black troops took the field in the middle of the war’s deadliest chapter.

Many of the white troops they met had never seen black soldiers before. One white soldier reported his reaction: “As I looked at them, my soul was troubled and I would gladly have seen them marched back to Washington. Can we not fight our own battles, without calling on these humble hewers of wood and drawers of water, to be bayonetted by the unsparing Southerners? We do not trust them in battle…. They have been put to guard the trains and have repulsed one or two little cavalry attacks in a creditable manner; but God help them if the gray-backed infantry attack them!” While this account reveals the depth of white racism prevalent in the ranks at this time, it also provides a telling, if unintentional account, of the great respect, and even fear, this soldier accorded his Confederate opponents.

If the 'costs' of the Civil War were of roughly the same magnitude as 'compensated emancipation,' it seems that going to war made as much sense as buying out Southern slaveholders. The only way the North could ensure that slavey did not expand into the West was to force the South to stay in the Union, and this could only be accomplished through an aggressive invasion of Virginia; the North could then claim that they were 'forced into military action by the South's attack on Fort Sumter.'

The above is a little off topic (but does correspond to 'money') with respect to racism throughout the United States at the time of the Civil War, but an additional 'musing,' nonetheless.

Dawna

"I have dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind." ~Emily Bronte~

[bill_torrens]

Shane,

Against my better judgment I was attempting to build bridges with you by explaining how you managed to cause offence.

In view of your reply I suggest that we stay well clear of each other on the boards from now on.

[sgtcsa]

Bill,
Did you receive my correspondence? I thank you, and the answer was, of course, in the affirmative. Only too happy to.

[unionblue]

Dawna,

Compensated emancipation was offered not once, but a few times during the war, and a form of comensated emancipation was offered way before the Civil War, but turned down on each occassion.

And yes, it would have been much cheaper in money and lives if it had been seriously considered.

Unionblue

[unionblue]

From the book, Road to Disunion, by William W. Freehling:

Chapter 20, Anti-Annexation as Manifest Destiny, page 355-356.

"...The reasons why the Lone Star State was admitted to the Union, unlike the consequences, may seem to have little to do with slavery politics. Texans who originally migrated from the United States, as the historical legend has it, delightedly reannexed their destiny to the United States. United States citizens espousing a Manifest Destiny to spread American democracy over the hemisphere, as the story continues, happily invited Texas republicans to share democratic Union. Why elaborately explain so natural a marriage?

Because this natural attraction formula ignores natural forces splitting the two republics apart. Immediately before annexation, both major American parties remained frozen in their decade-long position that Texas was not worth foreign war or sectional combat. In 1843, the American establishment's opposition to annexation drove Texas leaders towards an alternate Manifest Destiny: an English-protected independent republic.

This manifest drift away from annexation initially alarmed only one tiny southern faction, composed of a few stymied States' Rights Whigs and fewer disgruntled Democrats. Members of the annexation clique fed each other rumors that English leaders would trade protection of Texas's independence for emancipation of the Lone Star Republic's slaves. These southern alarmists controlled the presidency. They dominated nothing else. An accident of death had pulled President John Tyler of Virginia into the White House. Tyler's accents of extremism had pushed away popular support. His 'Accidency's' latest extremism, his conception of English interference with Texas slavery, seemed at first to most Americans a wild idea, a demagogue's nonsense. Yet this isolate resident of the White House with his far-out nightmare about England precipitated a stream of events which reversed Texas's and the United States' movement away from each other. The resulting national disasters, fully as destructive as national political idols had predicted, illuminate why the American political establishment had desperately sought to block a despised President's notion of Manifest Destiny. Still, Tyler prevailed.

Faced with this bizarre phenomenon, fine historical intelligences have echoed contemporary charges that John Tyler's supporters cynically used irresponsible propaganda to spread an absurdity. This thesis, with its emphasis on a minority's manipulation of majority opinion, at least rejects the notion that some euphoria about Manifest Destiny transfixed the American majority. But the argument that propaganda yielded otherwise needless disaster also represents a last stand of the Revisionist theory that unscrupulous politicans created an unnatural civil war.

No aspect of Revisionism more demands revising. Nothing was unnatural about President Tyler's and his southern advisors' far-from-cynical beliefs about Englishmen's far-from-fictional speculations about securing the far-from-preposterous object of an independent, emancipated Texas Republic. Rather, this apprehension represented a recurrent nightmare among southern extremists, who ever worried that the southern mainstream would neither notice nor combat Anglo-American silent drift towards antislavery. Nor was anything unnatural about these slaveholding extremists' successful pressure on Souther Democrats, and thus on the National Democratic Party, to pass a law shoring up the Peculiar Institution at its exposed fringes. That was the outcome as usual in slavery politics, whether the incident involved gag rules or Texas or fugitives or Kansas. The annexation of Texas was indeed one of the most understandable pre-Civil War events, so long as one understands that unpopular initiators were not paranoids or demagogues or provokers of weird happenings. Rather the President and his main diplomatic lieutenants were coherent ideologues who used established patterns of slavery politics to secure the latest dubiously democratic consolidation of the Slavepower."

Unionblue

[ole]

Originally Posted by bill_torrens

Shane,

Against my better judgment I was attempting to build bridges with you by explaining how you managed to cause offence.

In view of your reply I suggest that we stay well clear of each other on the boards from now on.

I have yet to determine how Shane's post caused such a stir. He pointed out that European actions during the same period were no different. He mentioned precedent (with which I disagree, as domination and dominion are human traits and not necessarily limited to European and New World actions). With your exception, he explained what he meant (which I got the first time). And he explained again.

Somewhere in your mind he crossed a line which only you can define. I've spent personal time with Shane and can enthusiastically state that I haven't found that "mean bone" that you are objecting to. He speaks his mind. Apparently, occasionally, some of it unintentionally crosses someone else's line.

Do, please, give some thought to your dictum and rejoin the debate. As we say on this side of the pond, no harm, no foul.