Civil War History - Secession and PoliticsWas it Slavery, or was it States Rights? Perhaps it was the election of Lincoln? What were the real reasons for Southern Secession and what were the political issues in this time of war? Find your answers here in the Secession and Politics Disussion.
Lincoln has to placate the pro-slave unionists in the border states. So What?
So the Ep point was not that you cant own slaves, it was that you can own slaves if you take the new loyalty oath to the Union, but if you dont, you cant own slave propertry and i will take it from as soon as i can.
__________________ "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote."
Benjamin Franklin, 1759
all this from the poster who count get the right century slavery ended in or began in, and on a wide variety of other historical subject shows he has no grasp of those subjects but likes to through murky, slippery, oilly commments insgtead of argueing the facts.
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Every thing, Lincoln was compelled to do, to win the war would not be undone to secure peace. Lincoln's rock-bottom minimum requirement to end the war was Reunion And (not, either/or) the End of slavery.
It is illogical and unhistorical to believe that emancipation was not a war aim. [quote]
no one p[osted otherwise, i posted that the end to slavery became a war aim in 62 as means to secure mil victory, so either stop makeing up strawmen, or acytually read whats posted.
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In Lincoln's eyes, as political leader and Commander in Chief, slavery was the root cause of the War. The war and slavery were inseparable, To eliminate one, the other, also, had to be eliminated.
Except that Lincoln flat out said the oposiste of this as the reasoning behind the EP. |Stop makeing crap up and post facts.
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Slavery was America's pristine past and as I noted, the War, was a step 'away' from the past and a 'step' into the future; Without Slavery.
And without slavery, former slaves ate a lower diet and suffered more from disease worked longer hours for less pay than the instituition of slavery provided for them. Explotation did not end with slavery abolition, they just changed from labour lords of the South to Land lords of the north, and suffered greater harm therin.
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P.S. The past seen by the majority of northerners. was the past where slavery was safely penned up in the south on the road to extinction.
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yes it was, because they did not want the imorality of negros living among them as free or slave, hardly the US finst moment in history, as D Wilmopt and others made clear.
__________________ "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote."
Benjamin Franklin, 1759
"After the soldiers saw the effects of slavery first hand, however, and communicated their views to the "folks back home" it became not only possible but perhaps inevitable that the war became one to end slavery."
I believe that was only true perhaps to a point, say the first couple of years of the war. After that it was more like a bar room brawl - fighting for the sake of the fight and survival. I suspect far more soldiers than not, from the Union perspective, never lost sight of the goal of restoring or rather preserving the union. Slavery, like the slaves, weren't of paramount importance to the common soldier. Many among the scholars on this board don't agree with that. I've been wrong before, but I haven't given up on this notion.
Dont give up on that notion, it fits the evidence. Lincoln asked the JCCOTW to find out why the Union with more of everything was not winning, it asked a pannel of abolitionst who said slavery was holding up the souths ability to wage war, they asked the mil who said that slavery allowed the south to put more men with muskets in the field than otherwise because of slavery, so everyone who was asked came back with its slavery that allows the south to puinch beyond its material resources and to win this, in the time frame POTUS wanted ment ending slavery ability to prop up the south.
__________________ "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote."
Benjamin Franklin, 1759
"After the soldiers saw the effects of slavery first hand, however, and communicated their views to the "folks back home" it became not only possible but perhaps inevitable that the war became one to end slavery."
I believe that was only true perhaps to a point, say the first couple of years of the war. After that it was more like a bar room brawl - fighting for the sake of the fight and survival. I suspect far more soldiers than not, from the Union perspective, never lost sight of the goal of restoring or rather preserving the union. Slavery, like the slaves, weren't of paramount importance to the common soldier. Many among the scholars on this board don't agree with that. I've been wrong before, but I haven't given up on this notion.
I think we are saying the same thing. The objective of the Union soldier even after this point was to end the war and restore the Union, he just saw that the destruction of slavery was necessary for that end and therefore became anti-slavery whereas before he might have been either pro-slavery ar at least neutral on the issue.
__________________ "There must be more historians of the Civil War than there were generals figthing in it... Of the two groups, the historians are the more belligerent." David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered (1961)
I think we are saying the same thing. The objective of the Union soldier even after this point was to end the war and restore the Union, he just saw that the destruction of slavery was necessary for that end and therefore became anti-slavery whereas before he might have been either pro-slavery ar at least neutral on the issue.
I think the object of the Union soldier was to do as his STATE can commanded him to do; said state having sold out to the Union army, and become this willing instrument of forced consolidation!
Whatever else we might say, this was a novel reason to go to war, with anyone!
I imagine he was under great confusion here. From what I have read, the Negro Slave was a great distraction to him, and a nuisance as an art form. 20,000 or so deserted on the day the EP was read to them!
Beowulf: "20,000 or so deserted on the day the EP was read to them."
From the book, What This Cruel War Was Over, by Chandra Manning:
"The idea that Union troops reacted to the Emancipation Proclamation with fury, throwing down their arms by the regiment and plunging the Army into a morale crisis from which it never fully recovered, has proven both popular and tenacious, but it is based on a set of three assumptions rather than evidence.
The assumptions go like this.
First, since Union morale declined in the winter of 1862 and 1863, and since the preliminary EP arrived in the autumn of 1862, followed by the final proclamation in January 1863, the proclamation must have caused the dip in morale.
Second, since many Union soldiers held racist views, they must have objected to the proclamation.
Finally, since anti-war and anti-emancipation Democrats made gains in the 1862 state and Congressional elections, which were held hard on the heels of the preliminary proclamation, the election results amount to soldiers' repudiation of emancipation. None of these assumptions holds up under scrutiny...
...The spirits of the Army of the Potomac began to decline in the summer of 1862, when the Peninsula Campaign failed to take Richmond. Morale perked up in the wake of Antietam, but only temporarily. By November, when Richmond remained as firmly in Confederate hands as ever and the AOP seemed stuck in an everlasting rut, a Massachusetts soldier noticed, "I hear nothing but curses both loud and deep even from some of the best men, whom I left at Harrisons Landing full of faith and hope." An equally frustrated President Lincoln identified Gen. McClellan as the main obstacle to Union progress, and removed him from command of the AOP on Nov. 7. However necessary, McClellan's demotion cas a "gloom over [the] army", as one little Mac supporter put it, because many members remained loyal to the general...Tracing low Union morale like a troublesome river, many soldiers located its origins in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where the badly mismanaged December attack achieved nothing but appalling Union casualties. To John Babb, the mere fact of being "whiped, and that severely" at Fredericksburg would have been bad enough, but the humiliation and senselessness of sacrificing "ten thousand lives" all for nothing made it worse...
Furthermore, timing does not support a link between emancipation and demoralization. If soldiers' low spirits resulted from the preliminary or final Emancipation Proclamation, then morale should have dropped at the same time throughout the entire Union Army, right after one or the other of the proclamations. Instead, morale in the AOP slid in November and plunged most steeply in December, months after the preliminary proclamation but before the final proclamation. Meanwhile, morale in the West did not drop until February. Demoralization, in short, struck eastern and western armies at different times in response to local circumstances, not as a result of the emancipation, which troops everywhere had known was coming since September.
In fact, when the preliminary and final proclamations came, many soldiers regarded them less as unwelcome surprises than as evidence that a tardy federal government was finally catching up to what soldiers had know for more than a year."
That slavery was the root of the rebellion and had to go.
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
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Beowulf: "20,000 or so deserted on the day the EP was read to them."
From the book, What This Cruel War Was Over, by Chandra Manning:
Unionblue
Its easy to overcook the EP on desertions, since the time was up for a huge number of vols at that time etc, and many simply felt thay had done there bit and so on, but broadly speaking 20k is not that far off.
The Emancipation Proclamation had been published a short time before, and a large element of the army had taken sides against it, declaring that they would never have embarked in the war had they anticipated this action of the Government."(4) Likewise, Ida Tarbell stated, "Many and many a man deserted in the winter of 1862-63 because of the Emancipation Proclamation. The soldiers did not believe that the President had the right to issue it and they refused to fight. Lincoln knew, too, that the Copperhead agitation had reached the army, and that hundreds of them were being urged by parents and friends hostile to the Administration to desert."(5)
The Official Records substantiate these statements. General George McClellan wrote that "the States of the North are flooded with deserters and absentees. One corps of this army has 13,000 men present and 15,000 absent."(6) On 23 September 1862, General George Meade reported that over 8,000 men, including 250 officers, had deserted, noting that "this terrible and serious evil seems to pervade the whole body."(7) When General Hooker assumed command of the Army of the Potomac from General Ambrose Burnside, he found the number of deserters to be 2,922 commissioned officers and 81,964 non-commissioned officers and privates.(8) In his report to the Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War, Hooker stated, "At the time the army was turned over to me, desertions were at the rate of about two hundred a day. So anxious were parents, wives, brothers and sisters, to relieve their kindred, that they filled the express trains with packages of citizens' clothing to assist them in escaping from service."(9)
4. Hooker, quoted by G.F.R. Henderson, Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War (New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1902), Volume II, page 411.
5. Ida M. Tarbell, McClure's Magazine, January 1893, page 165.
6. George McClellan, Official Records: Armies, Volume XIX, part II, page 365.
7. George Meade, op. cit., page 348.
8. Henderson, Stonewall Jackson, Volume II, page 411.
9. Hooker, quoted by Henderson, ibid.
__________________ "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote."
Benjamin Franklin, 1759
It remains that 20,000 desertions cannot convincingly be pinned to the Emancipation Proclamation. How many deserted from the Western Armies?
ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
Its easy to overcook the EP on desertions, since the time was up for a huge number of vols at that time etc, and many simply felt thay had done there bit and so on, but broadly speaking 20k is not that far off.
The Emancipation Proclamation had been published a short time before, and a large element of the army had taken sides against it, declaring that they would never have embarked in the war had they anticipated this action of the Government."(4) Likewise, Ida Tarbell stated, "Many and many a man deserted in the winter of 1862-63 because of the Emancipation Proclamation. The soldiers did not believe that the President had the right to issue it and they refused to fight. Lincoln knew, too, that the Copperhead agitation had reached the army, and that hundreds of them were being urged by parents and friends hostile to the Administration to desert."(5)
The Official Records substantiate these statements. General George McClellan wrote that "the States of the North are flooded with deserters and absentees. One corps of this army has 13,000 men present and 15,000 absent."(6) On 23 September 1862, General George Meade reported that over 8,000 men, including 250 officers, had deserted, noting that "this terrible and serious evil seems to pervade the whole body."(7) When General Hooker assumed command of the Army of the Potomac from General Ambrose Burnside, he found the number of deserters to be 2,922 commissioned officers and 81,964 non-commissioned officers and privates.(8) In his report to the Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War, Hooker stated, "At the time the army was turned over to me, desertions were at the rate of about two hundred a day. So anxious were parents, wives, brothers and sisters, to relieve their kindred, that they filled the express trains with packages of citizens' clothing to assist them in escaping from service."(9)
4. Hooker, quoted by G.F.R. Henderson, Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War (New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1902), Volume II, page 411.
5. Ida M. Tarbell, McClure's Magazine, January 1893, page 165.
6. George McClellan, Official Records: Armies, Volume XIX, part II, page 365.
7. George Meade, op. cit., page 348.
8. Henderson, Stonewall Jackson, Volume II, page 411.
9. Hooker, quoted by Henderson, ibid.
It is easy to overlook the number of desertions because I can find no evidence of soldiers doing so in such vast numbers over the annoncement of the EP.
We see figures from the Generals, but do they attach the reason for the desertions for the EP? Or are they simply reporting the number of desertions taking place in their commands? What were the primary reasons for union soldiers deserting? For that matter, for the Confederate soldiers? And who is Ida M. Tarbell and what evidence did he base his observation on?
A direct link is needed and I have seen and read evidence that the soldiers in the field were in direct contrast to the families and friends at home who advocated they desert over the EP or to desert their friends during time of war. They were mainly angry at such suggestions and refuted such in letters home to them.
In short, the army was far ahead of the federal government and the civilian population that the time for emancipation had come. Did all the soldiers agree with it? No. And though I see numbers bandied about, I can see no direct connection to the oft advanced theory that vast numbers deserted over the EP.
Are we also to consider that the considerable amounts of Confederate desertions during the same time periods refelect their dispair over the EP being issued? Without direct evidence linking the numbers to a reason, of course not.
Like Manning has said, it is mainly based on assumptions, not evidence.
I'll wait until it is provided before I make up my mind.
After all, I have seen DiLorenzo claim in his book that 200,000 union soldiers deserted because of the EP. And yet, when one checks the sources, the number he mentions is for ALL desertions that took place during the entire Civil War. Consider me gun shy when people throw out numbers without any sources.
Sincerely,
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
It remains that 20,000 desertions cannot convincingly be pinned to the Emancipation Proclamation. How many deserted from the Western Armies?
ole
close to 10%, of all US field forces, acording to the fileds sytrength returns, but then you have to show why so many deserted at that time, the hisghest desertion incidence in the war in terms of numbers doing it, the common asumption, by Mcperson and others befopre him, was the EP.
__________________ "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote."
Benjamin Franklin, 1759
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