"Disunion": EXCELLENT NYTimes blog commemorating the American Civil War

[.Shane.]

Disunion

Have any of you been reading this phenomenal collection of work?

If you're unfamiliar, its a blog at the NY Times to commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the American Civil War. Every day they have an article (and sometimes more than 1) on various CW topics. The topics range from the obscure (William Webb, a kind of proto-labor union organizer who as a slave) to the familiar (Davis and Lincoln).

One string of posts is tracing Lincoln's path as he went from Springfield to Washington DC.

Each post has a blurb at the end about the author, as well.

I'm posting this in OT because there's such an interest in the subject and so often it informs other discussion we have here, that I thought it would be a good place for those interested to read and post any thoughts they had on the subject... or any questions.

I'll refresh and link to any that are particularly good... although to be honest, I've pretty much enjoyed them all to date.


For your consideration:
*Please ask all the questions you like, BUT it would be more interesting if you use one of the articles from the blog as a starting point. In other words read through them and see if anything piques your interest.
*That said, any reasonable question will be entertained (exception noted below)
*This thread is not here to re-hash the long over-argued discussion of what the Civil War was fought over (of what the Civil War was fought over). If you absolutely MUST bring it up here, only do so if you are replying to a Disunion blog post. If we do go down the road of those who think the CW some how isn't primarily about slavery, if it goes more than a reply or two, it'll be shaved off.... there are plenty of existing threads you can look up on that matter.

 

[.Shane.]

Saving this space in case I have to put up additional information for potential derailment.

 

[useless]

Some nice reading, but undoubtedly this thread will degenerate into "Oh but war wasn't about slavery" apologetics.

 

[Cutlass]

Some interesting stuff here

 

[Miles Teg]

That's an awesome blog.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer for the Atlantic, also has a lot of pretty cool pieces on the Civil War.

 

[GamezRule]

Nice blog.

 

[emzie]

This is a really fascinating way to view the civil war. Thanks for sharing Shane. Glad to start reading it now with only 14 pages of missed posts, not a hundred.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

The "5 myths" link you posted is interesting, in claiming that slavery was stronger than ever and not likely to go away on its own, since that is not what I have heard elsewhere. What are your thoughts on that?

 

[Cutlass]

An institution more or less like slavery persisted into 20th century. If it didn't have all the hallmarks of slavery, it certainly was less than a free people. That being the case, why would real slavery have ended sooner?

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

Sure, but was sharecropping/Jim Crow in any way influenced by the result of the Civil War?

 

[Cutlass]

Wouldn't you say that they are a substitute for literal slavery that fell within the law? And if an economic model can be sustained on something which is near onto slavery, then why would slavery fail of it's own accord? Remember that the slave owners had the property consideration, not to mention the social consideration since slave owning was their identity, to keep things as they were even past the point in which it was no longer economically viable.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

I don't know if Shane is following this thread, but what is the consensus on Buchanan's presidency? What could/should he have done differently in the crisis?

 

[Cutlass]

Buchanan varied between sticking his head in the sand and hoping the problem went away muddled his way through making things worse. One thing I read recently is that he helped significantly to make certain that the slavery issue could not be resolved in any manner short of war.

 

[emzie]

I don't know if Shane is following this thread, but what is the consensus on Buchanan's presidency? What could/should he have done differently in the crisis?

Even his apologists acknowledge his Presidency was a dismal failure. They'll nod to his belief in democracy and his conviction in compromise, both attributes that could have made him a fine President at another time, but not in 1860. Though, I think this important, the blog makes the point that a strong-willed politician could not have been elected to a national office at that time. So if Buchanan was a failure due to his belief in democracy / compromise, it was a direct result of being elected to uphold those virtues.

That said, he really did do a miserable job.

 

[Cutlass]

I was reading recently though that it was not compromise that Buchanan worked at. By staking everything on the Dread Scott Supreme Court derision, compromise became impossible. Dread Scott essentially said that slavery was legal everywhere. And the Northern states would not enforce that so long as the Western states were compelled to accept slavery. So compromise was dead in the water.

 

[.Shane.]

The "5 myths" link you posted is interesting, in claiming that slavery was stronger than ever and not likely to go away on its own, since that is not what I have heard elsewhere. What are your thoughts on that?

I don't know if Shane is following this thread, but what is the consensus on Buchanan's presidency? What could/should he have done differently in the crisis?

He means that because cotton had become THE dominant crop (50% of national exports by 1860, more or less) and that slave values had risen dramatically with no source to add them other than natural increase (here's a quickly googled link, I'm working quickly here ).

Plus, the South of 1860, I think it can be argued, was much more racist in terms of attitude toward blacks, than it was in 1800. Essentially, as they became more dependent on slavery for the whole of the economy, the cognitive dissonance required them to reduce blacks to an even more animalistic caricature over time.

Buchanan was a joke and a great example that experience does not guarantee good results. Coming into the office he had more experience than, arguably, almost any of his predecessors, but he was a northern apologists for Southern, slave-holding Democrats and, essentially, did their bidding and avoided the overall issue of slavery as much as he could.

 

[.Shane.]

BTW, I read the blog almost every day.

This one on the shared dependence, North and South, on slavery, was really good.

What’s strange is that these ties were hardly secret at the time. The North’s investment in slavery had been a favorite polemical theme for abolitionists and proslavery ideologues alike. During the Missouri statehood debate in 1820, Southern Congressmen catalogued the Rhode Island fleet that delivered African slaves to South Carolina. Opponents of protective tariffs denounced the transfer of Southern wealth into Northern pockets, and planters regularly lamented their dependence on New England manufacturers. As one Alabama polemicist wrote at the end of the 1840s, “our slaves are clothed with Northern manufactured goods, have Northern hats and shoes, work with Northern hoes, ploughs, and other implements, are chastised with Northern made whips, and are working for Northern more than Southern profit.”

....

No group supported such compromises more than the merchants and bankers of New York City. The early months of 1861 brought unprecedented volatility to the city’s financial markets, with stocks rising and falling on rumors swirling around Virginia’s secession debate. A delegation of 30 New York businessmen traveled to Washington at the end of January with a petition for compromise with the signatures of some 40,000 merchants, clerks and scriveners.

...

By that time, however, many of the same Northern business leaders who had earlier argued for concessions to the South now rallied to the Union cause. Prominent merchants in New York, along with Mayor Fernando Wood, abandoned their own secessionist fantasies of a no-tariff “free city” at the mouth of the Hudson and instead raised funds to mobilize the Union army. Some realized that war was now the only way to bring the South back into the Union, and that to let the Confederacy go would have allowed Southerners to default on the $125 million they still owed New York firms.

Don't agree w/ everything in there, but an interesting, challenging read.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

Yea, I am finally caught up on all of the articles.

 

[.Shane.]

Nice little essay here. A lot of our discussions on the CW here get around to the question of "if only ~25% of Southerners owned slaves then why did all those poor white guys die defending the Confederacy? This short essay addresses that question.

But if slavery motivated the leaders — almost all of them slave-owners — where did that leave the vast majority of Southerners, the men who owned no slaves but filled the ranks of the Confederate army? For them, the answer was less about the slave economy or states’ rights than the perceived threat that abolition posed to their very identity as white men.

Very short, as I noted, but a good insight. To me, this is 6 of one, half dozen of the other. They were defending their society and their status.

 

[Thoughtful Thug]

Men go to war for all kinds of reasons — glory, money, peer pressure — and that was clearly true in the Civil War South. Yet the speeches, newspapers and writings from the time indicate that white masculine identity mattered a great deal, particularly for those Southerners who had little else that guaranteed their social status. As long as slaves were legally below them, they were secure. The belief that Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party would end that distinction drove them to a near panic — a fear that secession leaders were all too happy to exploit. Those who did not support the cause of separation, secession leaders said, would themselves become slaves. “On the fourth of March, 1861,” explained one Georgia orator in reference to Lincoln’s inauguration, “we are either slaves in the Union or freemen out of it.” For the new Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, the question was “will you be slaves or will you be independent?

Well that is a lot of research to find all the articles of speeches from newspapers and writings that existed at that era to the CW.

Love this one:

Or, as one South Carolina clergyman put it, submission to Republican rule meant that “abolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.”

Ouch! Very good fear-mongering even though it took over a hundred years for that to ever happen.