Grant If the South had won - Grant's assessment

Andersonh1

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I clearly need to read Grant's memoirs at some point. He has an interesting point of view on the whole conflict.

https://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/2017/07/08/why-the-south-deserved-to-lose-the-civil-war/

I was especially struck by this passage, which comes as Grant, having taken Vicksburg, prepares for the battle of Chattanooga. which clearly shows Grant's confidence in the rightness of his cause. The defeat of the South, in Grant's mind, was the best thing that could possibly happen to it:

There was no time during the rebellion when I did not think, and often say, that the South was
more to be benefited by its defeat than the North. The latter had the people, the institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation. The former was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class. With the outside world at war with this institution, they could not have extended their territory. The labor of the country was not skilled, nor allowed to become so. The whites could not toil without becoming degraded, and those who did were denominated “poor white trash.” The system of labor would have soon exhausted the soil and left the people poor. The non-slaveholders would have left the country, and the small slaveholder must have sold out to his more fortunate neighbor. Soon the slaves would have outnumbered the masters, and, not being in sympathy with them, would have risen in their might and exterminated them. The war was expensive to the South as well as to the North, both in blood and treasure, but it was worth all it cost.
 
Vicksburg was much different than Chattanooga. Most all of these Analogies were Lower South.

By late 63 the North reframed the argument. Rid the Country of Slavery, worth the Blood etc. Different argument than what they used in 61-62, Union. Old Bait and Switch to the Moral Purpose.
 
Vicksburg was much different than Chattanooga. Most all of these Analogies were Lower South.

By late 63 the North reframed the argument. Rid the Country of Slavery, worth the Blood etc. Different argument than what they used in 61-62, Union. Old Bait and Switch to the Moral Purpose.
I think you mistake war aims with Grant's reflections about consequences.

It would be interesting if we could keep this on Grant and not lose this to another ride on the merry-go-round of Yankee perfidy and hypocrisy.
 
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Yeah, this is Grant in the last years of his life, reflecting on what he believed the outcome of the war would have been had the South won. He thinks the wealth would have dried up as the soil was exhausted, and the slave population would have revolted and slaughtered the whites in the end. It's a bleak scenario that he paints.
 
Don't change the fact that it is Propaganda. Abolitionists and others had no problem hoping Blacks would rise up against the White South. Carpetbaggrs pitted the Blacks again the White South during the Occupation. Grant ran a MO Plantation that had 18 Slaves. Maybe he was reflecting on his experiences.
 
Don't change the fact that it is Propaganda. Abolitionists and others had no problem hoping Blacks would rise up against the White South. Carpetbaggrs pitted the Blacks again the White South during the Occupation. Grant ran a MO Plantation that had 18 Slaves. Maybe he was reflecting on his experiences.
Grant only owned one slave his whole life and "Hardscrabble" can hardly be called a farm let alone a plantation.
 
Anderson's quotation is correct. Before Shiloh, Grant wanted a quick war, leading to rapid capture of the Southern territory and reconstruction with slavery modified, but given time to fade out.
After Shiloh, his views hardened, and he accepted Sherman's view that the South had to be conquered.
In this particular paragraph, he is reflecting his world view after having been abroad, which confirmed how isolated the Confederacy would have been. Other than France, there was no real support for the Confederacy.
He is also reflecting his private conversations with people like Abraham Lincoln, John Logan and others, which were based on experience, that it was a hard system for white people to compete with, and many would have sold out and moved north and west.
His own experience in Missouri was also a factor in this view. Missouri was also moving away from slavery in the 1850's.
 
After Shiloh, I think Grant saw the Civil War as a war of liberation for both southern whites and the slaves.
After Vicksburg, he was well aware of the peace feeling in Mississippi and most of the Southwest. Grenville Dodge's agents had a good deal of information about resistance to the Confederacy. He wanted the men who surrendered at Vicksburg to be within traveling distance of their homes. He wanted to strike quickly at Mobile, and liberate the Gulf coast counties.
 
Don't change the fact that it is Propaganda. Abolitionists and others had no problem hoping Blacks would rise up against the White South. Carpetbaggrs pitted the Blacks again the White South during the Occupation. Grant ran a MO Plantation that had 18 Slaves. Maybe he was reflecting on his experiences.
Once more, you're trying to make this something it's not.

For example, the Grant of 1861, who questioned the abolitionists, also said that if there was a slave uprising, he believed Union troops would help put it down.

As for your read on Reconstruction, that's another thread, and if folks want to talk about carpetbaggers and Reconstruction, please put it in a separate thread.

Note that you originally said that Grant's "analogies" were about the Deep South. Now you suggest that Grant was talking about his own experiences in Missouri, which is not exactly the Deep South.

In April 1861 Grant wrote:

In all this I can but see the doom of Slavery. The North do not want, nor will they want, to interfere with the institution. But they will refuse for all time to give it protection unless the South shall return soon to their allegiance, and then too this disturbance will give such an impetus to the production of their staple, cotton, in other parts of the world that they can never recover the controll of the market again for that comodity. This will reduce the value of negroes so much that they will never be worth fighting over again.
 
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In April 1861 Grant wrote:

In all this I can but see the doom of Slavery. The North do not want, nor will they want, to interfere with the institution. But they will refuse for all time to give it protection unless the South shall return soon to their allegiance, and then too this disturbance will give such an impetus to the production of their staple, cotton, in other parts of the world that they can never recover the controll of the market again for that comodity. This will reduce the value of negroes so much that they will never be worth fighting over again.
Sometimes that man just takes my breath away. He saw and understood so much. Just an incredible big-picture guy. He had so much objectivity that he could see things clear-eyed, without personal interest one way or the other clouding his vision of how things would play out.

Many writers have remarked on one of Grant's key attributes during the war being his unshakable, unquestioned faith in Union victory. I used to think that that really was "faith" in the sense of patriotism. Now I'm thinking maybe it was just that he could see, as easily as we can see that 2+2=4, that the North could only win; just a logical, inescapable fact.
 
I love the passage quoted above. I just finished his Memoirs, and it struck me how he would sum up things so profoundly, and then go right back to describing practical matters like troop movements or the landscape in the next. He was underrated as a thinker, for sure.
 
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