Alternative History: Post Alternative Theories Here

@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

I'm not ascribing guilt to you. You need to understand the use of the verb to partake. I'm not saying that you are an apologist, i'm just pointing out that the argument you are advancing happens, coincidentally, to be an argument of the apologists.

Actually, it was an argument made by people at the time. Indeed, the Republican Party advocated closing off the territories to the expansion of slavery because of the popular notion that, if slavery were limited to the southern states, it would die off on its own. And many southerners suspected as much themselves. That's why the expansion of slavery into the territories was such a hot issue at the time, as evidenced by controversies over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision, among others.

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@joefromchicago,

Yes, and it has been an argument of the apologists ever since. It can only work, though, if it inferentially assumes that war was levied on the South in an effort to end slavery. That goes right out the window as soon as one even casually consults the historical record.

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@Setanta,

I don't see how the two arguments are connected. Whether or not slavery was a doomed institution has little to do with whether or not the war was fought over the slavery issue. The one is an economic question, the other is a political one.

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Those who refer to the war as the War of Northern Aggression claim that the war was unnecessarily waged against the South by the Federal government. The claim is that the war was unnecessary since the institution of slavery was doomed, anyway. I'm not making this up, it's something i've heard from southerners all my life, including the many years that i lived in the Old South. I'm not claiming that it makes sense, just that it is an argument used by apologists, and that it depends on an inferential assertion that the war was foisted on an innocent and unoffending South by a rapacious and tyrranical North.

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@Setanta,

I've never heard anyone make that argument, and I doubt that any serious historian would make it. But then that's an argument about whether the war was necessary, not about why it occurred, so it still answers a different question.

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Well, Joe, perhaps you'll recall that this thread is not about serious historians--or had you forgotten that already?

I don't know what question it is to which you refer. Initially, i simply pointed out to Thomas that the claim that the institution of slavery was doomed was a part of the story according to some apologists.

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While looking around the interweb this afternoon at various loony claims about the war and its origins, i came across what might be the looniest i've yet seen. HOW AND WHY ABRAHAM LINCOLN STARTED THE WAR OF NORTHERN AGGRESSION TO PROTECT HIS OWN POLITICAL CAREER Within this rather bizarre discursus is the following claim;

Quote:

There were two factors about the Republican campaign in the election of 1860 which disturbed the Southerners so badly that Southern states subsequently seceded. First was the Republican-party platform for 1860.
Basically, the Northern capitalists wanted the U.S. government to tax (only) the South deeply, to finance the industrialization of the North, and the necessary transportation-net to support that. In those days, there was no income tax. The federal government received most of its revenue from tariffs (taxes) on imported goods. The Southern states imported from England most of the manufactured goods they used, thus paid most of the taxes to support the federal government. (The Northerners imported very little.)

I am bemused.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

Well, Joe, perhaps you'll recall that this thread is not about serious historians--or had you forgotten that already?

I have no idea what this thread is about any more.

Setanta wrote:

I don't know what question it is to which you refer. Initially, i simply pointed out to Thomas that the claim that the institution of slavery was doomed was a part of the story according to some apologists.

No, not quite. As one example of the type of counterfactual that historians pose, Thomas cited the notion that slavery would have died out even without the Civil War. In response, you said that his example "partook" of the kind of argument made by southern apologists, who claim that the war wasn't necessary, and then went on to say that the war was all about preserving the union rather than about slavery. But that response missed the mark so completely that you might as well have said that Thomas was wrong and, as proof, offered your recipe for three-bean salad. Thomas, after all, wasn't interested in whether the war was necessary or who started it or why. Evidently you are, but just because Thomas's counterfactual is espoused by others for different purposes doesn't mean that you didn't thoroughly miss the point of his post -- not to mention that you then got all butt-hurt about it when he brought that to your attenion. And the truly ironic thing is that you actually agreed with the premise of Thomas's counterfactual that slavery was a dying institution.

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@joefromchicago,

Well, thank you for your recipe for three bean salad. My comment about what some apologists allege was not my main response, it was an observation. I had pointed out that projections of casualties for the invasion of Japan were reasonable, but that B-52s in Belgium in 1815 is not reasonable. So he then said: How about the claim that it wouldn't have mattered if the South had won the Civil warm, because slavery was on its way out of American history anyway? It seems like a valid, if debatable, claim a historian might make.

I did indeed respond that slavery was already a failed institution, and that was my response to what you are pleased to call his "counterfactual," but which he did not offer in those terms (see my quote of him above, which can be found in the relevant post). In subsequent responses to Thomas, i pointed out that it was already on "life support," and that one of its values (perhaps its greatest value) to the South was political, in the form of the benefit derived from the three-fifths compromise.

However, my comment about apologists did not either state or imply that the war was about preserving the union. You're very confused (a not unusual circumstance), i suspect from my having quoted to Thomas the statement by Lincoln which he had rather botched, probably by repeating it from an unreliable memory. My remark was not that the war was about preserving the Union (although that was what Lincoln always said), but that apologists using the doomed institution of slavery dodge marry that to a claim that they were the victims of northern aggression, which is false given that the South started the war.

I didn't miss the point of what he was proposing, i responded to it directly by pointing out that the institution was already a failure, it wasn't dying, it was dead, and i made that response before mentioning that some apologists use the claim in a silly argument they make.

I didn't get "butt-burned" (never heard that one, is that current among your acquaintance?)--Thomas got riled up because he thought i was accusing him of something which he later characterized as guilt by association. Not so.

You can be very entertaining, though, Joe.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

The problem i see in your understanding here is that the question of whether or not the states could secede had not been resolved by the time that those states took military action against the Federal government.

Why is that a problem with my thinking? You are the one who said that the offense of the South wasn't secession, it was the confederacy.

Look, I agree with you that the constitutional issue of secession was unsettled in 1861. Reasonable jurists could have argued it both ways back then. They could have forged a constitutional case for the Confederacy by pointing out that under the US constitution, the process of secession was neither given to the federal government nor prohibited to the states. Therefore, under the Tenth Amendment, that power belonged to the seceding states. Having rightfully seceded, those states were no longer bound by the US constitution; they were thus free to form the confederacy. On the opposite side of the issue, a 1861 jurist could have made a valid case that secession was rebellion, and that the US government had the rightful constitutional power to quash rebellions.

But a case you can not make is that secession was constitutional but a confederation of seceding states was not. That case is just illogical.

Setanta wrote:

The effect of their loss of the war was to make the tenth amendment a dead letter.

That's not a constitutional argument, just a might-makes-right argument. I don't see why it should have any persuasive power.

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@joefromchicago,

joefromchicago wrote:

No, not quite. As one example of the type of counterfactual that historians pose, Thomas cited the notion that slavery would have died out even without the Civil War.

It was also an example of how an alternative-history novel approaches the same question. In this example, a deus-ex-machina event loads the dice ridiculously in favor of the confederacy. Then the story proceeds along otherwise plausible lines. And, lo and behold, slavery still loses in the end.

It doesn't matter, for purposes of my point, that the premise of the counterfactual may be false. Other historians could intelligently claim that the Henry Fords of America might well have sustained a slave economy by manning their assembly lines with the children of cotton-field slaves. And other novelists might well write alternate-history books to make the same point.

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@wandeljw,

It would appear that history making can be quite the tricky business one way and another.

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@Thomas,

I haven't made a case that secession was constitutional and forming a confederacy was not--if you are asserting that i made such a case, i'd ask you to quote the post in which i did so. I haven't either stated or opined that secession was constitutional. I recognize the force of your argument--i agree that anyone asserting that secession is constitution could not then logically claim that confederation was not, in any case in which the confederation was formed by states which had seceded.

I didn't offer the observation that the tenth amendment has become a dead letter as a constitutional argument. Certainly it's a might makes right argument. Those sorts of arguments have obtained throughtout history. The persuasive power resides in the accomplished fact. The rebellious American colonies argued that they could not be taxed without representation--Parliament argued that they were virtually represented (the exact term which was used). Had the English prevailed over us by armed force, their argument would have been an accomplished fact. They did not, however, and the American argument was established by force of arms. That sort of thing happens all the time. After the Second World War, we tried Germans and Japanese as war crimials--mostly because we could. Robert McNamara, before he died, said that Curtis LeMay had said to him that if we lost the war (against Japan) that they would be tried as war criminals for the systematic fire-bombing of Japanese cities.

Might makes right has applied throughout human history, for what ever taint of injustice may be alleged against it. In making that observation, i'm not making a value judgment, i'm not making a moral judgment--i'm just making an observation.

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@laughoutlood,

It's not so much the making of history, although that can be fraught with peril. It's the recording of history, and the interpretation of the significance of historical events. Even when the boys haven't got busy distorting or lying about the historical record, it's a mine field.

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@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

Other historians could intelligently claim that the Henry Fords of America might well have sustained a slave economy by manning their assembly lines with the children of cotton-field slaves. And other novelists might well write alternate-history books to make the same point.

Perhaps Ford might have sustained a slave economy with his assembly lines, but a more forceful argument could be made that he would not have enjoyed the same success. He designed and built cars he could sell to his employees, and then paved parking lots at all of his plants--and it made automobiles a fact of life for the working class, and not just toys of the moneyed classes. He could hardly have accomplished the same end with slave labor--although one might argue that he could have sold cars to the non-slave working class, although then one could reasonably suggest that he'd have had no inspiration to build the Model T.

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@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

Then the story proceeds along otherwise plausible lines. And, lo and behold, slavery still loses in the end.

I don't know that i agree with that. For example, the silly scenario of Confederate and Federal forces working together to extirpate the time travelling Boers i find implausible.

I also doubt that a good case could be made that Lee would have been opposed to the continuation of slavery. Leaving aside how adamantly his contemporaries in the South would have been opposed to the abolition of slavery, i not only don't know of any evidence that Lee was opposed to slavery, i think a case can be made that he had no problem with the institution of slavery. It would take a rather intricate explanation of why i say that, though. But such an explanation would lead to a letter he wrote to one of his sons (Rooney Lee?) about the firm line he needed to take with his slaves, and commenting specifically about a slave who had a tendency to run away. Lee advised his son that severe punishment was the best resort--hardly the position one would expect of even a secret emancipist.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

I haven't made a case that secession was constitutional and forming a confederacy was not--if you are asserting that i made such a case, i'd ask you to quote the post in which i did so.

Earlier, Setanta wrote:

I have not, by the way, said that secession was an offense. Forming the Confederacy was the offense.

Source

To which I replied: You can't make a case against the confederacy without making a case against the secession. Or, if the generic "you" is too personal: One cannot make a case against the confederacy without making a case against the secession first.

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@Thomas,

Sorry to burst in but I think Set has been unambiguously consistent on the point of secession. I plotzed a clip from a brief note from a previous discussion wherein IONUS had been makinh misreps about the Civil War and (I believe it was set) who mentioned article 1 sec 10 of the US Constitution:

Quote:

... No state shall enter into any treaty , alliance, or confederation ...

The FORMATION of the Confederacy was the illegality (not necessarily the secession). The issue of the legality of secession was what the war settled once and for all.

Pwerhaps that clarification will help you out Thomas.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

Thomas wrote:
Then the story proceeds along otherwise plausible lines. And, lo and behold, slavery still loses in the end.

I don't know that i agree with that. For example, the silly scenario of Confederate and Federal forces working together to extirpate the time travelling Boers i find implausible.

I also doubt that a good case could be made that Lee would have been opposed to the continuation of slavery.

I agree that's implausible---but no more implausible than the chestnut about young George Washington and the apple tree. This fairy tale was once peddled as history as well. (I wouldn't be surprised to still find it in a history schoolbook here and there. Though admittedly I haven't checked.)

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

Pwerhaps that clarification will help you out Thomas.

Not really. I understood his point back when he made it himself. I just disagree with his logic. If secession itself was constitutional---and Setanta's quote leaves open the possibility that it was---the US constitution would no longer have applied to the states that had seceded. Hence, the seceding states would have been free to form a confederacy. To conclude that the confederacy was unconstitutional, you have to believe the secession was unconstitutional.

Farmerman wrote:

The issue of the legality of secession was what the war settled once and for all.

No it didn't. Wars settle who has the power. They don't settle what's legal. Government enforce illegal policies all the time. Just because the force is successful, that doesn't make them legal.

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