This question puzzled me too. I think the answer is that the North was fighting to preserve the Union, while the South was fighting to preserve slavery.
1: That's the kind of stupid. Many of those fighting on the Union side were fighting to destroy slavery, most notably, the black soldiers.
pee[ is a great pseud. Welcome stranger.
4: That's just a typo, not my alter-ego.
]33] would be a good pseud in a dystopian-nightmare unfogged.
I guess the way she phrased it is offensive -- "invading another country" ?
11: That's part of it. And while she recognized that was weird, she seemed to believe that nationalism was insufficient to explain the motivations of individual soldiers volunteering since nationalism as a force was much weaker in the 1860s.
Obviously, that explains too much. While some soldiers* were fighting against slavery, most were fighting to preserve their country. If love of country wasn't a reason to volunteer, why were there any volunteers for the Mexican-American War?
* The point about black soldiers especially holds, but during the early years of the war the North was emphatically not fighting to end slavery. Battle Cry of Freedom was very clear about this.
Not to say that there weren't individual abolitionists volunteering in the early years of the war, but it wasn't the reason the Union as an entity was fighting. I doubt they were ever in the majority (but I'm not an expert on this).
Weirdly, governments tend to get all fighty when break-away governments shell national forts.
11: Well, not offensive so much as begging the question. Sure, if the government and people of the US had believed the South was a separate country, it would have been odd to have invaded it. Given that the South had not been a separate country before 1861, and that there was all sorts of federal property, like Fort Sumter, larded throughout it, maybe not so odd.
Also "nationalism was weaker in the 19th century"? Really? I would not characterize that as a widely held belief.
I've been borrowing my FIL's car, and since he's a Wall St. type, the radio is often tuned to Bloomberg. McArdle has a ~60 second slot that I've heard a couple times. She's just as bad as in print- I forget what the topics even were but the analysis was just so simplistic and moronic in the "I'm just asking, of course- bet you never thought of this angle!" genre.
15: Yeah, there's a whole bag of worms there and I guess I could argue it but not well--at the very least in many places peoples' relationships to their states were radically different from a modern understanding because their states were radically different (think Germany, or what'd become the British Dominions). But her specific point (I don't feel like linking and I'm being too charitable as it is) was that Americans valued State over country. I'm willing to give some credence to that--for Southerners. State pride has always been weaker in the North.
"Bag of worms." You know, that famous idiom.
but during the early years of the war the North was emphatically not fighting to end slavery.
Bollox.
The Dutch Cookie probably has more important stuff to do.
Bollox.
This is where Velma pulls the mask off John Brown's Zombie Body and reveals that it was Lord Palmerston all along.
In conclusion, Lincoln was so right he should have had two state capitals named after him.
]33] would be a good pseud in a dystopian-nightmare unfogged.
Wait, this is the unfogged where Trump is president, right?
I'm just happy that McMegan has converted to Judaism. I think she will be very effective at countering that whole "smarter than everybody except maybe some Asians" stereotype.
I mean, I like it here and all, but if you can direct me to the other unfogged, I'm outta here.
direct me to the other unfogged
Is that the unfogged where Spock has a beard?
A truly amazing two-step, calling the South "another country" then defending that tendentiousness by gesturing at lower national identity (which says nothing at all about the South as such). Wouldn't it be a bunch of little countries then?
How about the alternate reality in which Andrew Jackson stayed President and prevented the Civil War?
27: It's the one where he doesn't have a beard.
30: In the McMegan/Trump alternate history, Jackson would've had, like, 30 goddam civil wars.
I mean, yeah, if you assume Andrew Jackson is an immortal who proclaims himself emperor of America and governs with an iron fist for decades, I guess I could see him being pretty good at keeping the rebellions down.
Andrew Jackson was actually very much in favor of invading the South to preserve the Union.
It's almost as if a big group of people can get angry and unified and worked up over an issue and have ideological inconsistencies about it. Must have been a weird 1800s thing.
Or as if slaveocrats were fine with aggressive federal intervention when they were in charge in DC.
Kevin Drum accidentally watched CNN: they were discussing the civil war.
Isn't it the case, by the way, that the Nullification Crisis was proximately about tariffs but ultimately about slavery? Radical SCans saying "if we have to along with federal authority even on laws we don't like, that's a slippery slope to abolition, so let's make a fuss now to set precedent".
http://dewitt.sanford.duke.edu/megan-mcardle-egan-visiting-professor-duke-university/
Oh how they do deserve one another.
Did she get married to become Mrs. McArdle-Egan?
She has been praised by New York Times columnist David Brooks
Arghhhh, it burns! There was a time when I knew not to follow Apostropher links out of self-protection.
Tbh, I always thought Duke was like a real university. Live and learn.
"At Duke, she will teach an opinion writing course, Op-Ed Persuasive Writing"
Syllabus to include exiting topics such as "Estimation: close enough to make a point but not close enough to be accurate" and "How to encourage violence while leaving room for plausible deniability"
All the rocks used to build the campus at Duke match. That always made me nervous.
40: To teach a course on persuasive op-ed writing... by counterexample, presumably?
34: So Trump, by being wrong about the basic facts of history, also managed to find one of the redeeming qualities of Andrew Jackson, a historical figure he admires generally for the wrong reasons. It's impressive.
I think Ta-Nehisi Coates (amongst others) has argued that while slavery might not have been the reason the North chose to contest the Civil War, it sure was *an enormous* part of why the North won. Freedmen were critical to the Union Army's strength. And of course, slavery was indubitably the reason the South seceded. No doubt about that. Here's the thing: even I, who only studied Am. Hist. in HS, learned about the importance of the Constitution being a one-way pact -- you can get in, but you can't get out. And all the reasons why that's the case (like: transfer payments, federal debts, and the list goes on and on). To expect that the Federal Government would allow some band of renegades to secede FOR WHATEVER REASON is just infantile. Heh, guess that goes along with McMegan's whole schtick, so it's in-character.
OK: I should note something. I'm pretty rabid in my belief that the slave regime in the South was immoral to its core. That anybody who defends it in any way .... well, not in my polite society. So I'd love to find out that the North (the Federal Govt) got into the Civil War b/c we (or even highly-placed people in positions of power) decided that slavery had to end. Thing is, I don't believe it. I -do- believe that Lincoln was against slavery, but he was willing to continue treading a fine line (no expansion, but no abolition as long as that was tenable. And then, once it was no longer tenable, he came out for abolition. Lots of people in government make decisions that they personally abhor, b/c they have to lead coalitions, lead nations. I'm OK with that.
But if somebody could point me at good scholarship that shows the Union got into the fight -explicitly- b/c of slavery, I'd love it.
"Freedmen were critical to the Union Army's strength."
I forgot to mention that in Coates' writing on this, he quotes contemporaneous accounts where Union pols/generals -state- that units comprised of freedmen were critical to Union victories and the success of the Union campaign. Or, at least, so I remember.
Perhaps also worth mentioning that if you let parts that don't agree with a policy break off, you don't just lose "the union," you lose any possible union. So it's not "preserve the union" in the sense of not letting the South break away, but "preserve the union" as in not descend into anarchy in North America. Anyway, slol gets it exactly right.
There could be agreement about how to split up the United States but it can't be, as soon as any elected body anywhere votes for it.
There can be commas but they can't be, without careful placement.
Even the United States government and troops (which I'm trying to say in preference to "Union" as of 1861 were effectively fighting against slavery in that they affirmatively believed the protection of slavery was an insufficient justification to break off.
Fuck the idea that McArdle continuing to attract attention is something to note or acknowledge.
Have there in fact been any wars anywhere in which one country has invaded another country in order to abolish slavery? There have been a few minor ones fought to free slaves, but that was more about countries looking after their own citizens who had been enslaved, not about ending the institution itself.
Cancel that, found one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_of_Lagos
Numerous, incidentally to other aims. The French in Malta, Boeatians in Messenia (contra Sparta) many cases in the Peleponessian War.
Reduction of Lagos
Vamos. Es una guerra de la cocina.
But if somebody could point me at good scholarship that shows the Union got into the fight -explicitly- b/c of slavery, I'd love it.
Any "good scholarship" presents the flow chart something like this:
1. The United States insists on national policies that will lead, inevitably but only in the long term, to the death of slavery.
2. The South recognizes this and secedes.
3. The Union goes to war to preserve a country in which the long-term demise of slavery is non-negotiable.
Was the Union going to war explicitly to end slavery? Certainly the Confederacy understood that the end of slavery wasn't incidental or accidental to the Union's purpose.
The United States had a choice: give in to the Slave Power or go to war, and knowingly chose war. To say that the North fought for some reason other than slavery seems incoherent.
But the Union didn't "go to war" in the sense that it didn't start the shooting. It isn't certain that there would have been a hot war except that the South didn't just secede, but decided to attack first.
Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.
64.last: Abe Lincoln was, at first, perfectly happy with a union where slavery was preserved in the south. So, was slavery perpetually possible in the lands where it existed in 1860? Some places (e.g. Virginia) depended upon continual expansion of slavery to fund their economy, but some other places (Deep South?) were probably sustainable.
But I think at this point we're mostly arguing semantics. An anti-slavery party gaining power was why the South chose to secede right then. And eventually--by 1863, I think?--it was reframed entirely as a war to end slavery. So I don't think the Union was explicitly against slavery the entire time, but it was by the end, and slavery was undoubtedly the cause of the war.
Perhaps also worth mentioning that if you let parts that don't agree with a policy break off, you don't just lose "the union," you lose any possible union.
I wonder when the Brexiteers are going to start publicly acknowledging they're negotiating with people who know this.
65: But what could a Confederacy dotted with Union forts and military look like without fighting? I suppose the US could just abandon the forts for an indemnity, but that's incredulous.
Perhaps also worth mentioning that if you let parts that don't agree with a policy break off, you don't just lose "the union," you lose any possible union. So it's not "preserve the union" in the sense of not letting the South break away, but "preserve the union" as in not descend into anarchy in North America.
So, if you grant that, can there ever be a justification for any part of the US (or any country?) to secede?
But what could a Confederacy dotted with Union forts and military look like without fighting?
The Reconstruction?
Both times Haiti invaded and annexed the Dominican Republic, they freed the slaves there. Not the only reason, maybe not even the main one, I'm not sure, but certainly a big one.
Err, I'm incredulous about that. And there'd be other issues to handle: who gets control of the southwestern territories? I can't imagine northeastern business interests would be happy about losing political control over a railway route to the west.
I suppose the US could just abandon the forts for an indemnity, but that's incredulous.
Why? This is pretty much what has happened in every other peaceful secession in history. Fixed assets like bases become the property of the successor state they're in; movable assets like ships get shared out by mutual agreement. In some cases, Country A sets up an arrangement where it keeps a base in Country B, again by mutual agreement (for example, UK basing rights in Cyprus).
Lincoln had said that he wasn't going to negotiate the forts away. I have no idea what would have happened if the South hadn't fired on Fort Sumter, but I think it is worth remembering that not only did the South secede to try to secure slavery, they also started the shooting about it.
I think it particularly important to remember this in light of the terminology used by Confederate apologists (e.g. The War o' Northern Aggression).
70: The Reconstruction, for all its failures, was notably lacking in any Confederacy as a political entity.
73: I think that ignores the particulars of the moment. I mean, gosh, if you can just do that any time you want to secede, why didn't we do it to get away from you guys? Peaceful secessions require both sides to be willing, and I think it's clear enough that people in the north did value the union. It also creates the problem, again, of a competitor for western expansion.
Yeah, I think a deal might have been done, if those damn South Carolinians hadn't been so obsessed with their superior manliness to the point of believing that they could get the forts etc for free with just a slight push.
76.2: agreed. But you asked "But what could a Confederacy dotted with Union forts and military look like without fighting?" And if you'd got a Confederacy without fighting, then the issue of it having lots of Union forts all over it would be solvable.
If it isn't clear, I totally think the Confederacy was evil and was formed to preserve slavery. They said so, very explicitly. I agree with 74, besides thinking that if Sumter hadn't happened something equivalent would have been invented. Possibly something minor that blows up--some gungho or drunk US soldier in a fort fires on the Confederates, they fire back, nobody can be quite sure what happened, both sides blame each other.
67.1: Stand very much to be corrected, but IIRC slavery wasn't sustainable anywhere save by westward movement*. The only way to make money on slaves was cotton; monocropped cotton exhausts the soil rapidly; without monocropping planters couldn't meet their debt service; so the cotton belt gradually moved west onto fresh soil, taking slavery with it. IIRC this process effectively extinguished slavery in Delaware and Maryland, and was well on it way in Virginia.
*Or southward. William Walker and other filibusters in the Caribbean were looking to start slave colonies.
Plenty of American forts and military units were taken over by the Confederacy without a shot being fired. The Confederacy was unwilling to wait or compromise to get the remaining few and started shelling.
79 I'm not going to read McMegan, but it does seem to me that you have an enthusiasm/mobilization problem if the origin of the war is too ambiguous, or actually due to northern aggression.
80: I sometimes wonder about that because slavery had already got as far as Texas. West of there, things get very dry. I'm wondering if 1860s technology could have moved cotton production further west regardless.
I'm waiting, by the way, for Trump to offhandedly say that the Afghanistan war could have been avoided, if someone with his superior negotiating skills had been in power.
I'm also waiting for someone in our useless press to ask Trump why he can't make the deal to end that war, as opposed to trying another surge that no one earth thinks will work.
83: Presumably not, and maybe something Walker & C were thinking about too.
80: I've heard arguments like that, but I don't know the economics well enough. Maybe it would lead to an economic collapse, including in the price of slaves, leading to an eventual recovery under a more sustainable system? But that's a guess--I'd rather believe it'd collapse completely the way it seemed like it was going to, pre-cotton gin, but by the '60s it had become so much more idological. And I wonder how that would have changed if slavery had existed until synthetic fertilizers were available, only a few decades later. Not that the actors involved could have know that.
82: She's not worth reading. I dunno, we're deep into the counterfactual, but I think recruits could still be rallied. There are times when shouting louder than everyone else that you're right, a la dear leader, does in fact work.
86.1: I don't know enough either. Gradual manumission and sharecropping, permanent stagnation until WWII? AFAIK that basically was what happened anyway.
Apart from the "gradual" and "manumission" parts.
Well, presumably the only reason that you had to monocrop to make slavery sustainable was that slaves were so expensive. So if the fields all get exhausted, all the slave owners go bankrupt, and others can snap up the plantations and slaves at knock-down prices and run them in a more sustainable way because they won't have the same massive debt service obligations.
51- The EU-Britain-Gibraltar situation will be interesting in this context.
89: They were expensive, and presumably the process you describe was happening in the older South; but the trend (locally at least) was toward no slavery, not a steady state.
The Confederacy was unwilling to wait or compromise to get the remaining few and started shelling.
Lincoln boxed the Confederacy in by sending a ship to resupply Sumter (which was actually low on supplies). He knew that Davis would either start shooting and look belligerent -- and maybe be blamed for starting the war -- or allow the ship to land and then look weak.
90: Indeed. And maybe other overseas territories too? How much does the Falklands get from the CAP, say?
89: Also, the price was high largely because fresh imports were banned; which IIRC was done at the Constitutional Convention as the best the abolitionists could get, with this very process in mind.
As I understand it Gibraltar residents voted overwhelmingly Remain (logically enough) but also want to stay as part of Britain but retain all the rights of being in the EU- ie they want an easy border crossing because otherwise they're literally stuck on an isolated rock. Kind of sounds like the rest of the Leave voters, actually- want to keep all the benefits with none of the consequences.
92: Right. It was a good strategy for Lincoln because it always looks better when the other guy starts the war and he knew the Confederacy was impatient, aggressive assholes.
89: I agree. It'd create a new ideological base to sustain it. Worst case scenario would be that the new owners would be northern corporations. There's no reason beside shareholder pressure that the railways couldn't own slaves, no?
93: A possible future where the Falklands leave the UK and then immediately join a within-EU Scotland for protection from Argentina would be pretty amazing. And appropriate, since they're pretty much a southern Orkneys. With landmines.
And then if the Confederacy had actually gotten independence they would have wanted new imports, which the British would have prevented; and Britain, being the biggest market for export and for capital, and presumably de facto colonial overlord, the rebs would have to have sucked it up. Which would have been grimly hilarious.
95: Wanting the status quo, and voting for it, doesn't sound too greedy to me. They'll have to make a choice, though, or have one made for them. Their bargaining position would be stronger if they toned down the nationalism and reminded everyone that most of them already speak Spanish.
How much does the Falklands get from the CAP, say?
None - the Falklands are an overseas territory which is not part of the EU. They get about €1m a year from the European Development Fund. http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/regions/overseas-countries-and-territories-octs/oct-eu-relations-detail_en
Gibraltar is different because although it's an overseas territory of the UK, it is also part of the EU.
98: I think Britain would have been happy enough to export to the Confederates.
From 40: [McMegan] authored the 2014 book The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success
This I believe.
101: Really? After maintaining the West Africa Squadron for decades? Keep in mind what Britain actually did about cotton during the war years: they just started growing it at scale in Egypt.
And appropriate, since they're pretty much a southern Orkneys. With landmines.
It is slightly infuriating that the reason the UK is having so much trouble keeping to its commitment under the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel mines is that one of the conditions is that you have to have no mines laid on your own territory, and of course the UK still does, a lot, because they were laid there during the occupation by Argentinians who
a) didn't map where they put them
b) have forgotten where they put them
c) won't help clear them and
d) won't pay for anyone else to clear them.
As a result the UK keeps having to beg for extensions to its grace period in order to have time to clear them all. This seems a little unfair.
99- Sure, given that the rest of the UK voted to screw them their current position makes sense because I don't imagine they'd vote to join Spain (nor would the UK let them). They aren't going to get special treatment any more than the rest of the UK. I don't see how the situation can be resolved unless they also vote to leave the UK and remain in the EU as part of a unified Ireland or Scotland or something.
Future countries:
1. Ireland
2. The Partnership of England and Wales
3. The United Kingdom of Scotland, Gibraltar, and the Falklands.
104: How long will it take for the sheep to find them all?
101: Except for the part where they were literally fighting wars against slavery, per the reduction of Lagos, above. Abolition was a real policy objective for Britain, over a long period. They didn't care enough to embargo antebellum American exports, obviously, but they did care enough to, for example, impose a commitment to abolition on the Portuguese when evacuating their government to Brazil in 1810, and again when recognizing Brazilian independence in 1822.
103: Given a real chance of producing a continental counter-balance to the United States, I think the British would have taken it.
Keep in mind that slavery was still legal in parts of the North during the war.
107: 1810 s/b 1807. Relevant treaty was 1810.
106: There's about 18,000 of them still there. IIRC they are being lifted by deminers from, as well as the UK, Zimbabwe and Lebanon (those guys having a lot of field experience with demining). At current rates they'll have lifted all the mines by 2047.
108/9: Sure, but I thought we were talking about the British allowing the Confederacy to have new slaves. The British spent a lot of capital on preventing new slaves being taken out of Africa. They may have supported the Confederacy in other ways, but not that one.
69
So, if you grant that, can there ever be a justification for any part of the US (or any country?) to secede?
Legally, technically? There's no legitimate process in the Constitution for secession. Creating that process is as simple as amending the Constitution. That's difficult but not impossible. It's been done about 27 times. (Can't be bothered to check right now and some people would count the first 10 as one instance of it.) Seceding without a legitimate process for it is by definition unjustified.
Ethically? I can imagine lots of situations that would justify secession. I'd say that in many cases justification for secession looks a lot like just war theory. Whether it's actually a good idea to secede, or likely to succeed, is another matter.
There isn't a version of Roomba for cleaning up minefields?
108: IDK. In the actual war, where the British actually had such a chance, AFAIK they did virtually nothing to help the Confederates. Further, had their been independence, I see no reason Britain wouldn't have imposed on the Confederacy the same terms they did on the Brazilians. The Confederacy would have been very much the weaker party at that table.
112: I thought you were talking about industrial imports, not imported slaves. I agree the British would have prevented that. I also don't think the South would have tried to import slaves for that reason.
They didn't care enough to embargo antebellum American exports, obviously
Well, not enough to go to war about it anyway. The US government had a fairly ineffectual squadron (or at least a ship) off the Slave Coast from 1820, on and off, to interdict slavers, but took the position that no one else was allowed to stop a US-flagged ship except them, otherwise it was an act of war.
Despite the amazingly high casualty rates (ships frequently returned from the posting with a largely-black crew, the original crewmen having died of fever), the West Africa Station was a popular posting, because you could make not only prize money off captured slave ships but also head money (£5 a time) off liberated slaves.
116: Right. Possibly I should have referred to slave imports as slave imports, not just imports. Anyway, the Confederacy would have found itself unable to save slavery anyway, and this would have been grimly hilarious.
115: The Confederacy was weaker than Britain, but much stronger than Brazil. It had 2 to 3 times the population and much more wealth.
118: I meant Britain didn't embargo slave-grown American cotton. Embargo is probably the wrong word. What's the verb of "tariff"?
There isn't a version of Roomba for cleaning up minefields?
Oh, there are several, but the Falklands is pretty harsh and uneven terrain, and human deminers are still the most reliable.
(I worked in a place with a lot of mines once. My sense of comfort in the maps indicating which areas were cleared was diminished noticeably when I was chatting to a clearance officer who let slip that their definition of "cleared" was "we are confident that at least 96% of the mines laid in this area have been removed".)
121: Boycott is the word. Except the word didn't exist until the 1880s.
122.2: Don't hire statisticians to do that kind of job.
121: well IIRC it didn't have to because the Confederacy did it itself with an export ban. And Britain just worked through its immense cotton stockpiles for the next few years and then switched to supplies from Egypt etc. (albeit at some increase in cost.)
124: I did remark to him that, if I had 25 rabid wolves in my living room, I would not feel very much happier if he were to tell me that he had definitely removed 24 of them, but his English was a bit shaky so he may not have followed my point.
125: The Union blockade picked up when that ban left off.
120: True; but the Confederacy also faced a vastly stronger threat to its independence (USA, as opposed to Portugal); and the CSA ruling class was (AFAIK) utterly dependent on exports to Britain. And there were other markets, but none could offer anything like the weight of Britain. In 1861 Germany and Meiji Japan didn't even exist, for instance.
The US government had a fairly ineffectual squadron (or at least a ship) off the Slave Coast from 1820, on and off, to interdict slavers, but took the position that no one else was allowed to stop a US-flagged ship except them, otherwise it was an act of war.
Interesting. Did the British government/navy actually honor this policy? Presumably it was effectively their choice.
The CSA was willing to buy a fuckton of guns.
125, 127: I think we're talking at cross-purposes. I mean that Britain imported slave-grown cotton from the USA before 1861, and the British abolition lobby evidently wasn't strong enough to do much about that.
re: 105.last
The United Republic of Scotland, London, Gibraltar, Northern Ireland, Cambridgeshire and the Thames Valley.*
* if we go by rough 'majority Remain' areas.
129: Interesting. Did the British government/navy actually honor this policy?
Pretty much all the time - it really would have been an act of war to do otherwise, and the US had demonstrated (in 1812) that it would happily go to war to protect its merchant shipping from search by the Royal Navy.
For example, the Royal Navy were allowed, under treaty, to stop US-flagged ships, but only if they were actually carrying slaves (hence chucking the slaves overboard to drown when being pursued). US slavers couldn't be stopped or captured when empty, even if they were equipped for slaving (irons etc) until 1862. There were similar treaties with other nations, but putting them in place took a long time.
Also slavers used to switch flags, and often carried several sets of papers claiming different nationalities.
100, btw, is deeply disappointing. Because, I'm all about the grim hilarity these days.
131: see here. http://ultimatehistoryproject.com/blood-stained-goods.html
Boycotts did happen, but abolitionist opinion was divided over whether it was an effective tactic. I notice that one of the groups favouring them was the British India Society, a loyalist precursor of the Indian National Congress.
131: Right. And I think there was a strong possibility the CSA could have continued to export cotton to the British under those same terms had the Union not fought/won the Civil War.
136: Right! And I see no reason Britain would have reversed decades of policy to allow the CSA to import new slaves, thus leaving the CSA in the same economic trap that doomed slavery in the first place! Grim! Hilarity!
Seems pretty unlikely that an independent Scotland would have a military capable of defending the Falklands.
Fortunately Argentina is a very long way away from having a military capable of attacking them.
How many immortal swordsmen do you really need to defend some islands?
138 Are the Blackwatch not enough? And the other Scottish regiments?
Galahad took quite a beating last time round.
141: alas, all merged and abolished now. Gone the Black Watch, the Argylls, the Seaforths, the Royals, the Highland Light Infantry, the Cameronians, the Fusiliers, the KOSB, the Gordons, the Cameron Highlanders. There's the Royal Regiment of Scotland (4 battalions), the Scots Guards (1 battalion) and the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards (1 light cavalry regiment).
To flog for the last time this horse of my own making, Britain didn't impose immediate abolition or anything drastic on Brazil. They imposed a commitment to eventual abolition, while suppressing slaving in Africa. Brazil didn't actually get round to abolition until 1888.
143 That was in 2006, wasn't it? That must have been a sorry day.
It's probably worth noting that "King Cotton" writ broadly (i.e. that Britain will have to help defend the Confederacy because it needed the cotton) is the stupidest economic theory until the ancestors of the Confederates went with "Mexico will pay for our wall."
If they lynch Trump's ancestors too I'm all for them.
143: it's a succession of amalgamations actually. A lot of the old Scottish regiments, like the Seaforths and the Cameronians and the HLI, went in the 60s (including the Cameronians, who, uniquely, refused amalgamation and preferred to disband). Then another lot went in the mid-90s, and another lot in 2006 as you say. The Argylls, the original Thin Red Line, fared worst: one day they were part of 16 Air Assault Brigade, the high-readiness tip-of-the-spear mob, along with the Paras; the next they had been cut back to a single company and reroled for ceremonial duties only. Ouch.
the ancestors of the Confederates went with "Mexico will pay for our wall."
Ivanka Trump plans to travel back through time and disguise herself as "Jefferson Davis" in order to make sure that the Confederacy wins this time. Ooh, sequel plot.
George Clooney plays Lincoln.
Quantum stuff is very indeterministic.
I am enjoying the shit out of this thread.
For hard-to-explain-briefly reasons, I have found myself having to swat down Lost Cause mythology with alarming frequency since moving to the UK (at least I expected it growing up in the south). It's a big pet hate of mine and so even though I have no special interest in Civil War era history, (I don't really love reading history at all) outrage has been a good motivator.
So it's a pleasure to be able to sit in on a conversation among a bunch of people who know/care more about the relevant history than I do and *aren't* a bunch of lost-cause assholes like the crowd I'd usually be talking to about this.
Please do explain, at whatever length is needful.
158 Given the OP shouldn't that be "Opinionated 2x4"?
Avoiding ""looking weak" turns out to be a pretty lame justification.
Speaking of which, is our current president getting more pathetic by the day, or is this an illusion?
160. Not an illusion. And I've never seen a weaker President that Trump, it amazes me still that any of his followers can see him as strong. Rubes and racists all of them.
I get his (orange-head's) emails every day. If you don't get outside information, I could see how they see him as strong.
Moi aussi.
I was pretty shocked by how well the Congressional Democrats came out in the budget negotiations, and Trump basically got nothing. I don't have a clear understanding of how exactly that happened.
168: My read on it is that Congressional Republicans finally realized that Trump doesn't have any leverage over them but Congressional Democrats do.
Yeah, I was thinking something along those lines but not able to articulate it. It certainly isn't what I expected to happen.
As for the longevity of slavery absent the Civil War, The Half Has Never Been Told argues fairly persuasively that slave productivity was increasing up until the Civil War. The happy narrative that is sometimes bandied about whereby the slave economy was simply less efficient than with a free economy seems to be naught but wishful thinking.
171: That book is a lot of wishful thinking too, though not all wrong. I can elaborate rather than just talk shit if I have to, but I'm going to bed soon
Yes, please do. I've seen that book and been intrigued but don't know much about it in detail.
Rising productivity in itself doesn't necessarily defeat the monocrop/debt problem (if I have that right). Regardless of productivity, buying slaves added a capital cost (so, debt service+slave upkeep) where free labor had only a running cost (wages).
But you have to look at the absolute costs too. Is debt service plus upkeep of slaves greater or less than free wages? (This assumes slave upkeep is less than free wages, but I think this must have been the case, otherwise there would have been no advantage to slavery at all.)
To go back to an earlier point, cotton cultivation is definitely possible in the river valleys of the Southwest, and it has been practiced in southern Arizona from prehistoric times up to the present ("Pima cotton" is well known as a premium variety to this day). But this type of cotton agriculture is very different from the type practiced in the Deep South, and it would not have necessarily benefited from the expansion of slavery further west.
Sven Beckert's book on cotton is supposed to be good.
176.1: Sure.
176.2: Maybe, but that's assuming homo economicus, where slaves were also very tied up with white status.
179.2: Indeed, but I'm not sure that's a bad assumption in this context. Slaveowners certainly tended to see their slaves as capital investments rather than people. I doubt they would have been willing to hold on to slavery if the economic calculus turned against it.
180 last: Yes; and that would be consistent with gradual extinction of slavery starting on the east coast.
I may at some point have contradicted myself; I contain multitudes.
178 aligns with what I've heard. I have the book but sort of took a break from reading about slavery in favor of The Diary of a Provincial Lady and so on.
On Baptist's book, I'll find links to the economic criticisms once I'm on a computer but one thing a lot of people hated and I thought was a strength was the governing metaphor about the ways enslaved bodies were rhetorically dismembered by metonymy that described them as numbers of head like cattle or hands and so on. I'd love to see a project tracking that sort of usage. On the other hand, his fictionalized historical vignettes where he tries to get into the mind of one of the enslaved people he's writing about seemed dehumanizing and offensive in the other direction. These people's stories are not powerful because Ed Baptist is projecting how great by modern standards they may have been. It's creepy enough that even if the book were better, I hope it would give professors pause in assigning it.
180: The number of children they had with slave mothers suggests they also saw them as consumer goods.