Would the American Civil War have ended differently if it started earlier?

[christos200]

Not really. It's true that the Greek revolutionaries created a new Greek to try to bridge the gap between modern demotic and the more classical versions of the language, but this Katharevousa was never that widely used and ceased to be the official language forty years ago. Modern spoken Greek still has some Katharevousa holdovers, but there's just not that much classicizing compared to "normal" demotic stuff.

And it's hardly as though demotic was unrecognizable and bore zero relationship to Byzantine or koine Greek. They were very much the same language - one that'd changed a lot, but, you know, that sort of thing tends to happen over the course of thousands of years.

This is 100% true. King Otto and some other more romantic Europeans or Greeks who studied in European universities created katharevousa, but this was not very used.

Demotic is not much different to the Ancient Greek. In fact, I can understand Ancient Greek. Not 100%, but the general meaning.

The same problem happened and in Greek history. The more romantic Europeans, along with those who studied in the West, considered that the Greeks were direct descendants of the Ancient Greeks and rejected the Byzantine Empire as a Dark Ages Theocracy, while the common people called themselves Romioi (Romans) and considered the Byzantine Emperor to be Greek. Konstantine Paparigopoulos bridged those two with his theory of three Hellenisms: The Ancient Hellenism, the Medieval Hellenism (Byzantine Empire) and the Modern Hellenism, which came to be adopted as the official foreign policy of Greece until 1922, according to which the Greeks should restore the Byzantine Empire.

Many Europeans who came to Greece during the revolution were expecting the Greeks to be all like Pericles or Aristotle and were very disappointed by how the Greeks were. So, when Otto came to power, he started to promote in culture the idea about Greece that the Europeans had, at the expense of the Byzantine Orthodox Traditional Culture. It was the idea of the Europeans that after so many years of "Barbaric" rule, we had become "Barbarized" and we would need to find again our true selves. So Greece had to be modeled after the Western European States, mainly the Germanic States, since at the period of the birth of the Greek State, Greece was ruled by Bavarians and in fact the Greek Army had more Germans than Greeks.

 

[Plotinus]

Moderator Action: Lord Baal and JEELEN, please knock it off. The discussion is not helped by line-by-line insults.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[Plotinus]

BTW on the modern/ancient Greek thing, my understanding is that the similarity between them is akin to the similarity between modern English and Chaucerian English. Perhaps one can also liken the situation to the similarity between Latin and Italian (especially in the Middle Ages, when Italian was more like Latin and Latin was more like Italian). Anyone who's studied even a little bit of ancient Greek (e.g. me, a very little bit) can recognise case endings in modern Greek, for example, though some have changed - e.g. the accusative has dropped the "n" at the end, and is used in place of the vocative as well.

The greatest differences between ancient and modern Greek seem to lie in pronunciation. Ancient Greek was pronounced very differently from modern Greek or indeed any modern European language. I remember when Civ V came out having an argument somewhere on these forums with a Greek person who was angry that they made Alexander the Great speak Greek like an American, not a Greek, when in fact they'd given him the scholarly reconstruction of Attic Greek pronunciation.

All of this is pretty impressive, though, given that Chaucer was only 600 years ago, whereas Alexander was some 2,300 years ago, and yet the language drift is comparable.

 

[Agent327]

Indeed. (I remember myself finding nothing at fault with the Greek pronunciation, but my knowledge of Greek is probably even smaller than yours; unfortunately, my the school I was enrolled at only offered Latin.)

Your misplaced sense of confidence is truly remarkable.

If someone can't even answer a simple question on his own field of expertise, I don't think my confidence is much misplaced.

 

[christos200]

Our schools offer both Ancient Greek and Latin.

 

[Plotinus]

My school had only Latin, but they stopped it the year before I would have had the option to take it. So I never learned either, though I managed to pick up some Latin many years later.

 

[Agent327]

Good for you.

Our schools offer both Ancient Greek and Latin.

Why the ?

 

[Tahuti]

Why the ?

Cato the Elder

 

[Antilogic]

Except that the Republican party did not exist earlier than the second-half of the 19th century...

I assume Dachs is referring to the Democratic-Republican Party.

Really? Outside of this forum I've seen them referred to as the Democratic-Republicans more often than not. Of course, discussion of the War of 1812 isn't exactly common in these parts.

The members of the Jeffersonian Republican party (I tend to use that form or Democratic-Republicans to avoid the obvious confusion with the later party of the same name) referred to themselves as Republicans until around the time of Madison's and Monroe's administrations, where they became known as the Democratic-Republican party or the Democrats/Dems for short. In the early years, being called a democrat was an insult and neither party wished to claim that mantle.

 

[Louis XXIV]

Fun fact: it's the British, not the Americans, who've been drifting away from 18th century English.

Well, I think it's more accurate to say both have been drifting. 18th Century English was somewhere in the middle so there's no point in either side saying that the other alone has changed.

The greatest differences between ancient and modern Greek seem to lie in pronunciation. Ancient Greek was pronounced very differently from modern Greek or indeed any modern European language. I remember when Civ V came out having an argument somewhere on these forums with a Greek person who was angry that they made Alexander the Great speak Greek like an American, not a Greek, when in fact they'd given him the scholarly reconstruction of Attic Greek pronunciation.

I understand Koine Greek to be a lot closer to modern pronunciation that Attic Greek (in Civ5, Alexander speaks Attic Greek). If that's the case, even that change hasn't been quite so dramatic. I guess the question shouldn't be comparing Ancient and Modern Greek to Chaucer's English and Modern English, though. I think the more interesting comparison is with Latin and Italian.

 

[Antilogic]

Back on topic:

If anyone wants a reasonable point of departure earlier than the 1860 election, why not the 1856 election? What if Fillmore draws more votes from Buchanan in the South and a few key Northern states to cause the election to be thrown to the House? Or if Fremont won the presidency outright by carrying Pennsylvania and either Illinois or Indiana?

 

[Cutlass]

Back on topic:

If anyone wants a reasonable point of departure earlier than the 1860 election, why not the 1856 election? What if Fillmore draws more votes from Buchanan in the South and a few key Northern states to cause the election to be thrown to the House? Or if Fremont won the presidency outright by carrying Pennsylvania and either Illinois or Indiana?

By that late date the North was just too much stronger than the South for any realistic war outcome to be different. Remember that the North had been filling up with white immigrants and industry for the previous 50 years at that point. And the South had been filling up with slaves and plantations. There's a very big difference in war fighting ability reflected in that.

 

[Dachs]

By that late date the North was just too much stronger than the South for any realistic war outcome to be different. Remember that the North had been filling up with white immigrants and industry for the previous 50 years at that point. And the South had been filling up with slaves and plantations. There's a very big difference in war fighting ability reflected in that.

Most of the historians I've read seem to think that the 1850s were in fact a time when the hypothetical military power of a southern secession was increasing relative to that of the North. Southern industry was a Thing at that time, too, and most of the expansions of places like the Tredegar Iron Works and the Selma facilities took pace during that decade. It's not unreasonable to say that the Civil War as it was historically fought saw the Confederacy roughly as powerful and successful as anyone could have had a reasonable right to suspect.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Most of the historians I've read seem to think that the 1850s were in fact a time when the hypothetical military power of a southern secession was increasing relative to that of the North. Southern industry was a Thing at that time, too, and most of the expansions of places like the Tredegar Iron Works and the Selma facilities took pace during that decade. It's not unreasonable to say that the Civil War as it was historically fought saw the Confederacy roughly as powerful and successful as anyone could have had a reasonable right to suspect.

So what you're saying is that the Civil War OTL happened at the acme of Confederate-state power? Before or after that time, it was weaker relative to the Union?

 

[Dachs]

Well, a big chunk of the reason the war was fought in the first place is because the planter class saw its influence starting to go south. In the 1850s, slave interests had controlled the Supreme Court and maintained parity with non-slave interests in Congress; going forward, this political calculus seemed increasingly unlikely as the North's population continued to surge. Efforts to offset this declining influence by attempting to enforce slave constitutions in all states to be formed out of the Western territories were a further recognition of this fact. In addition, economically, American cash crops had never been the truly dominant element of the economy that phrases like "King Cotton" would have one believe; corn and grain made up just as large a portion of the overall American agricultural sector as cotton did. And with the increasing cultivation of other cotton-growing areas in India and Egypt, even that source of economic power would be diminishing. One can't say that cash crop prices were declining; it was more that they'd hit an inflection point. It's debatable to what extent one can say that the Southern industry that did exist existed because of the profits from cash crops, and railroad tracklaying was at an even larger remove, but those two things still did to some extent rely on capital raised by plantation production.

In addition, the 1850s saw the growth of secessionist sentiment in a way that dramatically swelled the numbers of the Confederacy's probable supporters. In the 1820s, when South Carolina jumped, nobody else was willing to stick out their necks far enough to go along; the post-gag rule tensions, from the Mexican Cession to Bleeding Kansas and John Brown, radicalized anti-federal opinion and led to the slave states seceding virtually en bloc after Lincoln was elected.

In another sense, one can also reasonably say that the Confederacy's military in the American Civil War got about as lucky as one can have expected. That annus mirabilis in late 1862 - the one that prolonged the war by at least one year, maybe as many as three - was not down to some innate qualities of the Confederacy's armies. It was largely down to factors of chance and luck. Lee's repeated victories against more sizable forces relied on a truly remarkable run of stupidity among the commanders of the Army of the Potomac. At least three times between the Peninsula and Gettysburg, the Army of Northern Virginia was placed, by maneuver, into a trap from which it had virtually no chance of escaping; each time, Federal commanders insensibly drew off and allowed the Confederate troops the space and time to create the conditions for victory. I mentioned earlier in this thread how the Confederacy hung by a thread in the early summer of 1862. Yet, as though by magic, it hung on and survived another three years.

 

[caketastydelish]

The South still would've gotten their asses handed to them.

This. If I'm not mistaken, the population difference (in terms of percentage) was even more in the north's favor the earlier you go back as a general rule of thumb, because the Union territory had large cities first (not an absolute rule). Even as it was in 1861 when the south was developing more rapidly than ever (up to that point in time) they could not last against the sheer population advantage of the north. It's like playing chess with having less than half the pieces (that valuable ones, that is) of your opponent. It's technically possible to win. but that's not going to happen unless you are exceptionally good and your opponent barely knows how to play.

 

[JohannaK]

I need visit WH more often.

 

[ParkCungHee]

In another sense, one can also reasonably say that the Confederacy's military in the American Civil War got about as lucky as one can have expected. That annus mirabilis in late 1862 - the one that prolonged the war by at least one year, maybe as many as three - was not down to some innate qualities of the Confederacy's armies. It was largely down to factors of chance and luck. Lee's repeated victories against more sizable forces relied on a truly remarkable run of stupidity among the commanders of the Army of the Potomac. At least three times between the Peninsula and Gettysburg, the Army of Northern Virginia was placed, by maneuver, into a trap from which it had virtually no chance of escaping; each time, Federal commanders insensibly drew off and allowed the Confederate troops the space and time to create the conditions for victory. I mentioned earlier in this thread how the Confederacy hung by a thread in the early summer of 1862. Yet, as though by magic, it hung on and survived another three years.

It's fun to wonder how much Lost Cause ideology would have stuck around if the South had lost in 1962.

 

[Gucumatz]

So a question for you all - Do you all think had the South not seceded from the Union and instead waited 4 more years until the next presidential election and patched up democratic political differences that they could have thrown out Lincoln

Also - about the Whigs and their supporters in the border states - I have read some NC newspapers from the era talk about creating a Central Union among it and some other border states that would remain a part of the Union. If it weren't for Fort Sumter do you all think this theoretical central confederacy could have ever come to pass? The Whigs/Unionists were still incredibly powerful in some of the border states (and particularly here in NC) and I think its quite possible that the war may have ended much quicker if it weren't for troops remaining in Fort Sumter and the subsequent callups by Lincoln.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I think that if the South can't rid of Obama now they probably couldn't have gotten rid of Lincoln then, though that's just a wild guess.

I know NC was really reluctant to join the war and only did it (they were the last to join the CSA IIRC) because Virginia joined and they were completely landlocked by the rest of the CSA so had little choice. The western part of the state was against joining and nearly formed it's own state akin to Western Virginia. I think that the Union went a bit easier on NC when they invaded and occupied because it was the last to join but I'm not sure.

I think the Civil War would have happened without Fort Sumter but I do think it's realistic that there could have been some situations where NC stayed in the Union, possibly Virginia as well.