was the civil war worth it essay

Outside the Beltway

Was the American Civil War Worth It?

Yes, it ended slavery. But at a huge cost.

James Joyner · Thursday, June 20, 2013 · 113 comments

Tony Horwitz, The Atlantic (“ 150 Years of Misunderstanding the Civil War “):

The Civil War today is generally seen as a necessary and ennobling sacrifice, redeemed by the liberation of four million slaves. But cracks in this consensus are appearing with growing frequency, for example in studies like  America Aflame , by historian David Goldfield. Goldfield states on the first page that the war was “America’s greatest failure.” He goes on to impeach politicians, extremists, and the influence of evangelical Christianity for polarizing the nation to the point where compromise or reasoned debate became impossible. Unlike the revisionists of old, Goldfield sees slavery as the bedrock of the Southern cause and abolition as the war’s great achievement. But he argues that white supremacy was so entrenched, North and South, that war and Reconstruction could never deliver true racial justice to freed slaves, who soon became subject to economic peonage, Black Codes, Jim Crow, and rampant lynching. Nor did the war knit the nation back together. Instead, the South became a stagnant backwater, a resentful region that lagged and resisted the nation’s progress. It would take a century and the Civil Rights struggle for blacks to achieve legal equality, and for the South to emerge from poverty and isolation. “Emancipation and reunion, the two great results of this war, were badly compromised,” Goldfield says. Given these equivocal gains, and the immense toll in blood and treasure, he asks: “Was the war worth it? No. […] Soldiers in the 1860s didn’t wear dog tags, the burial site of most was unknown, and casualty records were sketchy and often lost. Those tallying the dead in the late 19 th  century relied on estimates and assumptions to arrive at a figure of 618,000, a toll that seemed etched in stone until just a few years ago. But J. David Hacker, a demographic historian, has used sophisticated analysis of census records to revise the toll upward by 20%, to an estimated 750,000, a figure that has won wide acceptance from Civil War scholars. If correct, the Civil War claimed more lives than all other American wars combined , and the increase in population since 1860 means that a comparable war today would cost 7.5 million lives . This horrific toll doesn’t include the more than half million soldiers who were wounded and often permanently disabled by amputation, lingering disease, psychological trauma and other afflictions.

Consider that the United States is today considering intervening in someone else’s civil war because 90,000 people have been killed in two years of fighting. We lost more than eight times that number fighting our own. (Syria’s population at the outset of war was roughly 21 million; America’s, 31 million.)

On the other side of the ledger is the hastened demise of slavery, which surely would have persisted for some time to come otherwise.

Most historians believe that without the Civil War, slavery would have endured for decades, possibly generations. Though emancipation was a byproduct of the war, not its aim, and white Americans clearly failed during Reconstruction to protect and guarantee the rights of freed slaves, the post-war amendments enshrined the promise of full citizenship and equality in the Constitution for later generations to fulfill.

“Generations” seems a bit much; it ended elsewhere in the civilized world much faster than that and the United States ceased to be an agrarian economy within decades. Presumably, an independent South, cut off from the manufacturing of the North, would have been forced to industrialize even more quickly.

Though Confederate armies surrendered in 1865, white Southerners fought on by other means, wearing down a war-weary North that was ambivalent about if not hostile to black equality. Looking backwards, and hitting the pause button at the Gettysburg Address or the passage of the 13 th amendment, we see a “good” and successful war for freedom. If we focus instead on the run-up to war, when Lincoln pledged to not interfere with slavery in the South, or pan out to include the 1870s, when the nation abandoned Reconstruction, the story of the Civil War isn’t quite so uplifting. But that also is an arbitrary and insufficient frame. In 1963, a century after Gettysburg, Martin Luther King Jr. invoked Lincoln’s words and the legacy of the Civil War in calling on the nation to pay its “promissory note” to black Americans, which it finally did, in part, by passing Civil Rights legislation that affirmed and enforced the amendments of the 1860s. In some respects, the struggle for racial justice, and for national cohesion, continues still.

No doubt. The question, ultimately, is whether anything is worth that kind of slaughter. The only other war in which Americans participated with a cause comparably just was the Second World War, in which we lost 418,500 dead.  The Soviets lost some 22 million.

About James Joyner

Instead, the South became a stagnant backwater,

Became a stagnant backwater? It was ever thus. It would be far more accurate to say that the South remained a stagnant backwater — which was, pretty much, just like the white Southerners liked it.

It’s a mistake to assume that economics alone would have led to an end of slavery. Fifty years after the end of the war the south was still agricultural, still raising cotton and using stoop labor. The degree of rabid animosity toward African-Americans in the South means rational responses to economic stimuli are unlikely to dominate. People who castrate and lynch other human beings over skin color are not always economic realists.

Also, the US was still expanding into new states. We’re assuming we (the rump USA) would have been able to take and hold those new territories. This in fact is what the war was about, not an end to slavery, but plans to expand it into new territories, including even plans to push further into Mexico and the Caribbean.

We’re also assuming that only the South would wish to secede. Why not the West at some point? Why not New England? Indissolubility was vital to the survival of the US.

So, yeah, basically a facile exercise in alternative history from an author who presumably needed to make a buck (and no condemnation from me) and recycled earlier research to do so.

I don’t know if it was “worth it” but I have come to see it as an inevitable conflict. I just plain don’t see any way around it. No alternative scenario seems plausible to me. Lincoln and others proposed gradual, compensated emancipation. That plan went precisely nowhere in the Border & Southern states – slaveholders wanted none of it (that sort of thing did work in many Northern states, though that was likely due to the very small number of slaves). Meanwhile, Firebreathers were not only talking secession but also they were planning takeovers of various Carribean countries. Even in a “let them go” scenario, I see war between the North and South (over Western territories, most likely). There had been multiple compromises before the war finally broke out, and each time the compromises only held for a time. Douglas thought that having territories vote on whether to be free or slave was a great compromise (I have no doubt it was well-intentioned – hell, it sounds smart at first) and look what happened: Bleeding Kansas.

It’s entirely true that the aftermath of the war is a huge letdown, so you can’t just say “yay!” and be done. Despite freeing the slaves and promising them something like equality, this was denied for roughly a century afterwards, to greater or lesser degrees around the country but always to some extent (even after the 60s, if you consider the impact of Red Lining).

So of course it wasn’t “worth it”! It would’ve been much, much better if the slavocrats had been willing to accept gradual, compensated emacipation, and if White Americans in general had accepted the idea of “Negro Equality” without violence. But come on! That’s a pipe dream.

I wonder how things would have turned out if Lincoln had not been assassinated.

I think a summer review of Ta-Nehisi Coate’s and Chauncey DeVega’s writings on the Civil War, slavery, Reconstruction and white privilege would be in order here.

@ Mr. Prosser :

Coates has an excellent blog post up in response to this very article, in fact. Definitely worth people’s time, IMO.

“Generations” seems a bit much; it ended elsewhere in the civilized world much faster than that and the United States had long ceased to be an agrarian economy within decades.

One generation is about 30 years. You don’t think slavery could have lasted in the South until the 20th century? I wouldn’t be so sure about that — after all, they managed to keep a lot of de facto if not de jure slavery going until well into the 1960s. And, if you look at the school to prison pipeline that still exists in the South for lots of young black kids, possibly well beyond that.

Of my great-great-grandfathers, to the best of my knowledge three served in the Union Army. None, fortunately for me, lost their lives in the conflict although one of my great-great-grandfathers, who served with an Illinois regiment from 1863 through the end of the war, probably had his life cut short by it.

Yes, it was worth it, not just for bringing an end to slavery but for preserving the Union and establishing the primacy of the federal government.

The Confederacy was founded on the preservation and expansion of slavery.

Are we really so stupid that if the Confederacy had built a couple factories, that they wouldn’t have used slave labor in them too?

Actually, two posts now. The 2nd one deals with compensated emancipation specifically.

I’m not sure that the question “Was the American Civil War Worth It?” is really the right question for historians to ask.

The correct question should be “Was the American Civil War Preventable?” Well, without delving into some long alternate history speculation about what might have been the one conclusion that one reaches after reading the history of the United States from the Founding to the eve of war itself is that the answer to that question is “probably not.”

Presumably, and independent South, cut off from the manufacturing of the North, would have been forced to industrialize even more quickly.

It’s always fun to play counterfactual, but I’m not so sure this is an easy presumption. After the war, the New South Prophets did their very best to bring industrialization to the agrarian South. They failed. Poor white farmers rejected industrialization in favor of agrarian populism. If the South had been independent from the North, on what evidence could anyone base an assumption that the South would embrace industrialization more quickly? One could argue that necessity trumps tradition, but even as the South was trying to integrate back into the Union, they rejected northern industrialization in favor of agrarian tradition – even when New South Prophets like Henry Grady brought his message of industrialization along with white supremacy, it was still rejected.

Was the slaughter worth it? Yes. The South needed a good ass-whippin’. And parts of it still do.

@ Timothy Watson :

There were tinkering around with slaves in factories by the time of the war, in fact (IIRC, Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, VA used slaves, just to name one factory). They had been using them on railroads for some time. The whole “slaves are only useful in farming” thing is silly.

@ Doug Mataconis :

My thoughts as well. The question is basically pointless. How the hell can you say any war was worth it? You can say a war had to be fought, given the facts on the ground at the time (e.g. when the Germans invaded Poland, and so forth). But worth it? WWII was a human catastrophy. It also had to be fought…

One way to look at the question is, “If the political and military leaders, both of the South and North, had estimated in advance of the conflict that it would cost 750,000 lives, would they have proceeded anyway?”

(That perspective reminds me of Donald Rumsfeld kicking the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, to the curb before the Iraq invasion because Shinseki told him that beating Iraq’s army would not be difficult, but that the occupation would require two times the number of troops Bush & Rumsfeld wanted to use. So they ignored Shinseki and did what they wanted. Shinseki was right, surprise.)

But of course, neither side thought the war would last long at all. Even Lincoln called for volunteers for only 90 days’ service at first.

James McPherson, probably the greatest living historian of the war, wrote in Battle Cry of Freedom that slavery was the necessary but not sufficient cause of the war, that the South would not have seceded solely over slavery, but that absent slavery the South would never have tried to secede over the other issues combined. I am not so sure – South Carolina’s secession enactment makes it clear it was seceding because of slavery, pure and simple.

Nonetheless, had the South never seceded or having done so begun the war, I agree that slavery in the South had no future. It simply was becoming to expensive to maintain as an institution, especially as industrial capacity and capability increased.

Horwitz seems to blame “evangelical Christians” for “polarizing the nation,” but doesn’t seem to get that evangelical Christian is a recent term of description that cannot be very cleanly applied to any religious denomination either North or South. Christian fundamentalism had not even been formulated yet and what we call today social justice was a very prominent feature of most any American denomination. The strongest voices thereof were ardently anti-slavery. Is this what Horwitz means by “polarizing?”

So, not having seen the whole work of course, I would perhaps fault Horwitz for failing to recognize the vigorous anti-slavery positions of many American denominations, especially the Methodists (prewar, the largest denomination in America), who had always denounced slavery. And these voices need to be weighed when thinking about when slavery would have ended in the South without the war being fought. Diminishing economic advantage of slavery coupled with threats of righteous judgment by God (taken quite seriously by Christians back then, not so much now) would have made powerful incentive to abandon the practice sooner rather than later.

My own guess is that slavery would have dwindled away in practice, if not in law, by 1900 and perhaps somewhat earlier. But granting citizen rights to blacks would not necessarily have followed and their condition would have been little improved (well, that was true during Reconstruction, too).

So, was three-quarter million dead, thousands of square miles devastated, cities burned, hundred of thousands crippled, worth it to end slavery in 1865 rather than (say) 1900? It is imponderable, perhaps (I had ancestors who on both sides).

Perhaps it is best left to Lincoln in his second inaugural address,

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

But Americans don’t believe any more that God’s judgments are worked through the events of history.

Reconstruction was too soft.

The slaves were freed into poverty, and the wealthy white plantation owners were allowed to keep their fortunes that were built on slave labor — we did nothing to replace the upper class in the south who caused all the problems in the first place.

But, the war was a significant step in the right direction.

@ Rob in CT :

Lots of other totalitarian systems have used slaves in factories, including Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Hell, China and North Korea still do it.

“i’ve been where you are now and I know just how you feel. It’s entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of every one of you a hope and desire that some day you can use the skill you have acquired here.

Suppress it! You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I’ve been through two wars and I know. I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is Hell!”

— William T. Sherman, speaking in 1879

From one of the quotes in your post:

Goldfield states on the first page that the war was “America’s greatest failure.”

Every war is a failure. Human beings are not potatoes and attempting to rank wars based on casualty count is treating them as though they were. Let’s not lose track of that. There’s no such thing as a good war. There are, however, such things as bad peaces.

@ Rafer Janders :

Indeed. Apparently slavery made sense well into the 20th century, depending on circumstances.

The economic argument fails as does so much STEMfolk thinking because it begins with the proposition, “Suppose we exclude human nature?” People enjoy lording it over other people. That has never changed. People enjoy treating other people like crap — viz the entire history of modern American conservatism.

@ michael reynolds :

People enjoy lording it over other people. That has never changed.

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently…..We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.” — George Orwell, “1984.”

@ Rob in CT : Agreed on TNC’s reactions. Both are must reads.

But, for the TLDR crowd, TNC FTW :

TNC: It should always be remembered that America did not “go to war” in 1860. America was attacked in 1860 by a formidable rebel faction seeking to protect the expansion of slavery. That faction did not simply want slavery to continue in America; they dreamed of a tropical empire of slavery encompassing Cuba, Nicaragua, and perhaps the whole of South America. This faction was not only explicitly pro-slavery but explicitly anti-democratic. The newly declared Confederacy attacked America not because it was being persecuted, but because it was unable to win a democratic election. […] We are united in our hatred of war and our abhorrence of violence. But a hatred of war is not enough, and when employed to conjure away history, it is a cynical vanity which posits that one is, somehow, in possession of a prophetic insight and supernatural morality which evaded our forefathers. It is all fine to speak of how history “should have been.” It takes something more to ask why it wasn’t, and then to confront what it actually was.

Speaking as an African American, I’m sure the war was worth it. Harry Turledove wrote a whole alternate history in which the South won, with the help of Britain and France.

It had the USA and the CSA fighting three more wars in the next 80 years, with USA finally prevailing. I think such wars would have been quite likely, as well as other secession attempts.

It would have been better if the USA had figured out to work out a peaceful emancipation plan, a la the British Empire. But hey, the South wanted no compromise and eventually, war came.

There are more people in slavery today, economic, social, and otherwise than prior to the Civil War. Yay War! (sarcasm for those who can’t think)

We could hardly have done worse by letting the South go.

Given that following the Civil War: (1) America lapsed into 100 years of apartheid, segregation and Jim Crow laws; (2) the South came to dominate 20th century congressional politics, and; (3) we did not have the political will to tear down most of our discriminatory laws until the mid 20th century – I’d say it’s hard to conclude that, apart from legally abolishing slavery, the Civil War was worth it.

On it’s own the South might have gone the way of South Africa, where eventually the oppressive system of apartheid and racism would have fallen. As it was we fought the war to preserve the Union, and we still had oppressive racism for another 100 years after the war.

I have difficulty accepting “are things which happened 100 years before I was born ‘worth it'” as a framing.

We don’t have any idea what we’d have thought in say 1859, having been raised in [pick your location, race, religion].

(My ancestors didn’t immigrate until 1885 anyway. They only briefly stopped in the Dakota Territories before deciding that Vancouver Canada might be nicer.)

It’s a mistake to assume that economics alone would have led to an end of slavery. Fifty years after the end of the war the south was still agricultural, still raising cotton and using stoop labor.

By the way, Southern Landowners loved slavery so much that many of them emigrated to Latin America, where slavery was still legal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americana,_S%C3%A3o_Paulo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederados

@ al-Ameda :

On it’s own the South might have gone the way of South Africa, where eventually the oppressive system of apartheid and racism would have fallen. As it was we fought the war to preserve the Union, and we still had oppressive racism for another 100 years after the war.

Two points…

1. Things have not been particularly rosie for black south african’s post apartheid either. It’s going to take a while to see if “going the long way” will pay dividends for them in the future.

2. This entire line of thought seems pretty similiar to Jenos’ claim that “if only the Supreme Court hadn’t ruled on Abortion it wouldn’t be a big issue now” — which is, in itself, pretty similar to a conservative law scholar who once suggested in a lecture I attended that “if only the Supreme Court hadn’t ruled on Segregation it wouldn’t be a big issue now.”

Ya know…. Right about now I can hear a black man in Atlanta, GA saying, “Yes.” I can hear a black woman in Durham, NC saying, “YES!” I hear another black man in Montgomery, AL saying, “GODDAMN YES!” A black woman in New Orleans, LA saying “PRAISE THE LORD, YES !!!!

I also hear a black man in Washington DC calmly saying, “What the fwck…. Were you dropped on your head as a baby?”

we did not have the political will to tear down most of our discriminatory laws until the mid 20th century –

I might be wrong, but my impression is that segregation was a constant in the British colonies while miscegenation was much more common in the Spanish, Portuguese and French colonies. In Brazil slavery was a bigger and much horrible institution, but you don´t see White leaders fearing that Blacks would revolt and kill everyone. It´s easier to spot Indians with Portuguese sounding surnames than British surnames, for instance.

@ Donald Sensing : Iwould give you a dozen thumbs up for that if I could.

Without the US Civil War, it is doubtful the 13th & 14th Amendments would have been ratified, and the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision would not have been overturned. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision made segregation legal, and black folks were de facto second class citizens. The Jim Crow laws were designed to ensure this status legally, and without the “separate but equal” ruling, government enforced segregation would not have occurred.

The shame of the Plessy decision is shared by all the US states. It was not restricted to the Southern states.

The post-war occupation needed to last much longer, but the US does not like doing occupations. Reconstruction should have lasted at least two generations, but it was always going to be messy. A post-WW2 level occupation was necessary, but the geographical area was substantial.

Cotton, sugar cane, and rice fields were never going to be turned into factories. Until the mechanical harvester, cotton picking was done manually, and this was not until the 1950’s. It is highly unlikely that the South would have ended slavery prior to this, and without it being illegal, it would probably still be around.

The big problem here is using your 20th/21st century, American, upbringing and outlook and applying it to *any* problem outside your time.

Unless you have a time machine handy, all it is, is an opportunity to preen on the advancement of your age and the wisdom of your parents.

Do you want to make normative statements, back in time? Tear it up. “Tell them” what they should have done. (In that framework, I think the right moment to jump in would have been around 1775. Just give them all free iPads, and buy all slaves free with that.)

Or, make it a profit deal, and get into the alternative history business.

@ michael reynolds : People enjoy lording it over other people. That has never changed. People enjoy treating other people like crap — viz the entire history of modern American conservatism.

So you are saying the Democrats are modern American conservatism?

You know, the Democrats who supported slavery as opposed to the Republican party that was formed to promote abolition? Or Lincoln, the first Republican President.

Or perhaps the Democrats who controlled Jim Crow South? Or the Democrats who watered down the 1957 Civil Rights act supported by Republican President Eisenhower? Or the segregation imposed on the federal employees by Democrat Woodrow Wilson?

Perhaps you should read up on your history…

Let me think about it . . .

You know, the Democrats who supported slavery as opposed to the Republican party that was formed to promote abolition?

You know, as much as you want to pretend that the unpleasant parts of history are a Tabula rasa, 1968 still happened and you own it. We liberals weren’t always Democrats, but you were always racist.

@ al-Ameda : “(2) the South came to dominate 20th century congressional politics, and; (3) we did not have the political will to tear down most of our discriminatory laws until the mid 20th century”

You do know that the post-CW South was absolutely controlled by the Democrat party until well more than 100 years after the war ended. yes? You do know that Jim Crow was emplaced and enforced by Democrat politicians, yes?

Just sayin’ . . .

@ Matt Bernius :

1. Things have not been particularly rosie for black south african’s post apartheid either. It’s going to take a while to see if “going the long way” will pay dividends for them in the future.

I did not intend to imply that post-apartheid South Africa is a bucolic paradise. Nor would I characterize post-Civil Rights Mississippi or Alabama are free of serious racial problems. What I was saying is that we fought the Civil War only to put racial justice on hold for 100 years, which seems to me to beg the question “Was the Civil War Worth It?”

2. This entire line of thought seems pretty similiar to Jenos’ claim that “if only the Supreme Court hadn’t ruled on Abortion it wouldn’t be a big issue now” — which is, in itself, pretty similar to a conservative law scholar who once suggested in a lecture I attended that “if only the Supreme Court hadn’t ruled on Segregation it wouldn’t be a big issue now.”

I did not say that letting the South go would clear the decks of toxic issues. Obviously, if the South had gone its own way we would have faced a different set of problems as a nation, one of which being how do we deal with a significant “Slave” Nation on our border, and the other being just how aggressively the “Slave” South would have pursued acquisition of nearby territories.

Or perhaps the Democrats who controlled Jim Crow South? Or the Democrats who watered down the 1957 Civil Rights act supported by Republican President Eisenhower? Or the segregation imposed on the federal employees by Democrat Woodrow Wilson? Perhaps you should read up on your history…

Or perhaps you can read up on the history of electoral politics post-passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act? You know, the part where Republicans ran one successful presidential campaign after another for 40 years, based on race resentment of Southern White voters. This effort even had a catchy name, “Southern Strategy.” Unfortunately, modern Republican racial politics didn’t end in 1963.

For the record, Woodrow Wilson is one of my LEAST favorite presidents; he was extremely racist, even by the standards of the day.

@ JKB : You mean the modern Republicans that routinely attack Lincoln, who signed the first income tax into law? Or the ones that don’t consider Eisenhower, the person who warned about the military-industrial complex, to be a Republican?

You’re such a tedious sub-species of ignoramus. You’re just a pathetic old racist wheeling out the same bullsh!t we’ve all seen a thousand times since the first redneck thought to say, “I’m not a racist, but…”

Can’t you at least gin up something new? Come on, man, it’s boring.

@ Donald Sensing :

You do know that there is no “Democrat Party” in America, yes? You do know that with passage of the Civil Rights Act many Southern Democrats left the Democratic Party (unlike the “Democrat Party,” it actually exists) and became Republicans, right?

Just feel sorry for anyone who thinks “Democrat Party” is a solid hit.

First off, you might have noticed the word “conservatism,” not “Democratic.”

Secondly, the southern Democrats eventually became Dixiecrats, and handed the election to Nixon when they chose to support George Wallace, an open segregationist. The Dixiecrats have since become the intellectual and cultural identity of the Republican Party.

Finally, judging by their actions and words, the aristocratic elite of the South would have never relinquished slavery. This is the dark half of southern exceptionalism.

As it was we fought the war to preserve the Union, and we still had oppressive racism for another 100 years after the war.

As bad as oppressive racism is, slavery is a thousand times worse.

It’s such a stupid question. Once the Southern traitors started the war by firing on a US Army fort, what was America supposed to do? Let them get away with armed insurrection? Any government that did that wouldn’t be around very long.

Given what we know of the emotional maturity level of conservatives, they would have kept slavery running for decades after it was no longer profitable for them — just because it pissed off liberals.

Not much to add after some really fine comments above. I do think had Lincoln simply allowed secession, we’d have ended up at war with the Confederacy at some point anyway, as both sides vied for the lands and resources of westward expansion. We could have seen the Colorado War, or the War of the Nebraska Territory. I can imagine Union outposts in the New Mexico Territory, trying to keep Texas from invading California.

And I agree with those who say slavery would have continued for a long time. Slaves can work in factories as well as in fields. What incentive would the Confederacy have to end it?

OK, well, that didn’t last long.

You do know that Jim Crow was embraced whole heartedly by the GOP in 1968? You can beat us up for all of our repudiated sins as much as you like. Just know that we will beat you up for all the sins your party embraced after we repudiated them.

One of the problems was that the so called “Reconstruction” was a well planned takeover of the south by an international financial organization that sent down corrupt northern opportunists (carpetbaggers)that kept the south in subjugation. It took the south close to a hundred years to recover. The south could have won that war if that Sherman had not come down here tearing up everyone’s farms, homes, and businesses. Sherman was a great general, but he had no call to carry on like that. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” (J. Boaz)

People who castrate and lynch other human beings over skin color are not always economic realists.

I love good writing.

“The south could have won that war if that Sherman had not come down here tearing up everyone’s farms, homes, and businesses.”

Umm, no. By the time of Sherman’s March to the Sea (which started after he took Atlanta in September 1864, and ended when he reached Savannah in December 1864), the war was effectively over.

The south could have won that war if that Sherman had not come down here tearing up everyone’s farms, homes, and businesses.

No. The South lagged industrially and logistically (railroads, etc). It simply didn’t have the military materiel infrastructure to fight that war to a winning outcome.

Sherman may have sped things up a bit, by destroying what degree of production infrastructure the South was able to develop in Georgia, but the South lost the Civil War at Shiloh and Vicksburg. Once those two happened, the outcome was a given IMO.

The war effectively ended on November 30, 1864, with the Battle of Franklin, outside of Nashville. 9,200 men died or were horribly injured (2,500 Union and 6,700 Confederate casualties) in only five hours of fighting. More men died in those five hours than in the nineteen hours of fighting in the D-Day battle in World War II. One third of the Confederate infantry was lost in Franklin and it has been said that Franklin paved the road to Appomattox and “dug the grave of the Confederacy”.

If you’re interested in the Battle of Franklin, I highly recommend reading The Widow of the South, by Robert Hicks. The novel is set at Carnton Plantation, the home of the largest private military cemetery in the country, with almost 1,500 Confederate soldiers buried on the grounds.

The economic argument fails as does so much STEMfolk thinking because it begins with the proposition, “Suppose we exclude human nature?” People enjoy lording it over other people. That has never changed. People enjoy treating other people like crap — viz the entire history of modern American conservatism.

Not sure excluding human nature is particularly STEMfolk thinking. STEM enterprises are almost always team enterprises, and the recognition of human nature is a huge part of them. One of the main criteria for hiring new engineers, for instance, is their ability to work well as a team (trust me on this, I’ve been responsible for hiring quite a few). As I said in an earlier post, you can write a novel by yourself. No one can design, let alone build, any significant engineering product without a team. Human nature, as we say, a given in engineering and other STEM fields. Its why science profs tend to treat their grad students better than most other fields (ask around if you doubt this) – they know they need to create a team atmosphere to get results in the lab, since science research is team based, whereas a lot of other research is much more individualistic.

The exception is math, which like writing and art, still has individuals working alone making major contributions. But that’s research mathematicians, and they tend not to be particularly involved in military decisions (as in whether to fight a war or not, as opposed to the trajectory of a projectile fired in such a war).

In fact, I don’t think many STEM folks are involved in the declaration of wars – its typically lawyers, business folk, and economists making those decisions. Carter is the only President I can think of who’s background was STEM.

@ Moderate Mom :

Interesting premise, in that Franklin (and more to the point Nashville, which happened shortly thereafter) did decimate the Army of Tennessee, but Vicksburg (and to a lesser extent Gettybsurg, which happened a day earlier) spelled the end of the Confederacy’s ability to finance itself and cut it off almost entirely from resupply originating from Texas and Arkansas.

The Confederacy was heavily dependent on debt financing, mostly obtained from Europe, in order to continue to prosecute the war. Europe did so because it needed raw materials from the South in order to feed its industrial sector.

While it had already been depressed to an extent prior to Gettysburg/Vicksburg, post those two battles the market for Confederate war bonds pretty much ceased to exist. European bankers had at that point made the determination that the South was going to lose the war and stopped buying its bonds. Once the external funding stopped, the defeat of the South was an inevitable conclusion IMO.

Excellent defense of the STEMfolk and you make some compelling (because they’re true) points.

But STEMfolk love systems, rules and logic as well, which often leads them to misunderestimate the sheer stubborn stupidity, or alternately the sheer romantic irrationality, of humans. For example, for a long time engineers thought personal computers were tools, so they built them square and dull and tool-like. They are of course tools. But they are also, as STEMmies Steve Jobs and Jony Ive realized, fashion statements, emblems of status, objets d’art and toys.

Rational folk, like STEM types, will tend to believe that because a thing makes sense (slavery is inefficient) that people will sort of automatically default to the reasonable position. But people aren’t reasonable. People will shoot you in the face for fun, or jump in front of a train to save a stranger’s life. People are unpredictable, and unpredictable is not something engineers love. We have about ten thousand years of recorded history and it is not a story about people doing sensible things.

Of course the Civil War was worth it. It was necessary on a number of levels, and in my mind really delineated the beginnings of the modern era from the previous era of America’s childhood. Yankee racism and white liberal condescension continues to hold blacks and other minorities down today in many ways, so while I know all you northerners and westerners like to hold yourselves out as somehow more enlightened than we Southerners, your understanding of our history, our evolving identity, and our race-relations are truly lacking and you really are doing nothing more than throwing stones in glass houses.

My ancestors fought for the Confederacy, and it always chafes to hear the Rafer Janders out there refer to them as traitors. I will never accept that. I see them as the ultimate patriots, truly willing to live out Jefferson’s adage about the “blood of patriots and tyrants” and willing to put their lives on the lives to defend their home states of Alabama and Mississippi.

That being said, while the idea of the Confederacy carries with it a lot of romance to many of us Southerners, anyone with any education in the South rejects the apologist lie that the war had nothing to do with slavery. Similarly, my yeoman farmer ancestors, while they fought for something they believed in, were in my belief fighting for an elitist oligarchy that really didn’t have the interests of non-slaveholders in mind.

Other unfortunate events followed and continued to stymie progress: Lincoln’s assassination, the boondoggle of Reconstruction, and a solid century in which elite conservative and liberal whites from North and South came together in a veritable gentleman’s agreement to perpetuate a system which economically oppressed the poor of all colors and focused a particularly brutal campaign of terror and intimidation against blacks.

So the short answer might be that the Civil War hardly solved any problems, other than moving slavery from the plantation to the tenant farm, but in the long run it was absolutely necessary and, indeed, was a critical part of our “free” country coming to terms with one of its greatest shames, a process which still requires our efforts today.

That´s more complicated. In Brazil free labor would prove to be more economically efficient than slave labor. That does not mean that people that owned slaves would automatically free them to replace them with free labor.

@ aFloridian :

Yankee racism and white liberal condescension continues to hold blacks and other minorities down today in many ways, so while I know all you northerners and westerners like to hold yourselves out as somehow more enlightened than we Southerners, your understanding of our history, our evolving identity, and our race-relations are truly lacking and you really are doing nothing more than throwing stones in glass houses.

Yes, Lincoln made a big mistake when he did not let the South go.

@ PogueMahone : It wasn’t purely an economic proposition. Here in South Carolina the Industrial Revolution is relatively recent (except for textile manufacturing). Wealthy Southerners before 1861 preferred to reinvest their wealth in more land and more slaves rather than in factories or railroads.

@ Doug Mataconis : He said it more than once. One quotation from 1884 or thereabouts, IIRC: “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have never fired a shot or heard the shrieks of the wounded who can cry out for more bloodshed and devastation. War is hell.”

@ al-Ameda : I agree. Wilson even reversed some halting first steps that TR and Taft put into place.

@ Tyrell : The South could have won the war if Lee hadn’t disregarded Longstreet’s advice and decided to fight it out at Gettysburg.

@ Andre Kenji : By the time of the American Civil War, the question of slavery had long ceased to have anything to do with economics.

(Off-topic question–how are things down your way? I’ve been seeing news about huge protests all over Brazil.)

@ Donald Sensing : Yes. If they were told, they would have seceded anyway. And they were told.

Let me tell you what is coming. After the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives, you may win Southern independence if God be not against you, but I doubt it. I tell you that, while I believe with you in the doctrine of states rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche; and what I fear is, they will overwhelm the South – Sam Houston

My ancestors fought for the Confederacy, and it always chafes to hear the Rafer Janders out there refer to them as traitors.

Traitors don’t like being called traitors, of course. It doesn’t change the fact that they were. They engaged in armed insurrection against the government of the United States of America. They killed soldiers of the United States Army and the United States Navy. They shot at the Stars and Stripes. If that doesn’t make them traitors, then the word has no meaning.

I will never accept that.

Again, it doesn’t matter. People don’t want to believe terrible things about their families, but that doesn’t change objective fact.

@ PD Shaw : “Let me think about it . . .”

The answer is yes.

“The night they drove old dixie down” was written by Robbie Robertson & Levon Helm, and first recorded by The Band. Joan Baez did a cover of it. Do you not understand how a writers credit works?

So you don’t know history OR music. Well, today’s GOP has a place for you.

@ SC_Birdflyte :

The South could have won the war if Lee hadn’t disregarded Longstreet’s advice and decided to fight it out at Gettysburg.

No, the South would have lost anyway. A Gettysburg was inevitable (Lee’s hubris made it so), it just didn’t have to happen at Gettysburg. Lee had been winning all the battles while losing the war for quite some time by the middle of 1863. Their losses were simply unsustainable. They did not have the men nor the munitions to beat the North. Grant knew this and it was exactly this advantage the North had that Grant pressed in battle after battle. They called him a butcher for the losses of his troops, but he knew he could afford them. Lee could not.

I agree that STEM folk tend to like systems (even exceptionally creative ones like Jobs or Feynman); the belief that the universe is ordered is often what keeps even the best going through the inevitable failures (Einstein spent a lot of time going through false leads before he came up with General Relativity, and then spent a lot of time without any results going for a unified theory).

And you’re (unfortunately) correct that there is a real tendency among STEM folks to think that just explaining a reasonable solution is enough to get people to follow it. But there’s also a countervailing cynical tendency (there’s a reason that ‘Dilbert’ is so popular among STEM folk), and actually a surprising (or not) number of extremely irrational STEM people … my experience is that the system (science, engineering etc) is what is rational, most STEM individuals are as unsensible as everyone else. As a writer you probably mainly see STEM people when they’re representing a company or university (and on their most reasonable behavior); working as an engineer you see the day to day irrationalities. The system tends to filter out the irrational noise (my amazing perpetual motion machine involving squirrels and acorns doesn’t make it to the news, nor do my somewhat crazy alternative theories for Einsteins’ Relativity), but the noise is still there, you just don’t hear it externally.

As an aside, this is the thing creationists never seem to understand – finding a few biologists or physicists who think the world is only 6000 years old doesn’t mean much, you can probably find STEM Phd’s who think the world is flat. Its the overall filtering by the community that provides the rationality and meaningful testing; individually we’re as flakey as any other group.

But as I said, I’m not sure that the belief in rationality among STEM folks that you point out has much influence in discussions of war, civil or otherwise, because its rare for people with STEM backgrounds to make decisions on that level. The decision to start the Civil War (and I think it would have been great if slavery could have been ended without it, but I doubt it would have happened, making the Civil War worth it in the end) wasn’t made by STEM people. Nor were many other major wars (and off hand I can’t think of any that was). Part of that is a result of what I said earlier – while technology plays a huge role in our world, the contribution of any individual scientist or engineer (with a very few exceptions like Einstein or Planck) tends to be small – most of us are replaceable in a way a great artist or writer isn’t (its both our strength and our weakness). The influence of technology doesn’t imply influence of technologists.

Grant executed what Sam Houston warned of: an avalanche.

Agreed with those who point to Vicksburg as pivotal. I’ll throw in the (fairly early) capture of New Orleans, and the general strength of the Union Navy.

As for European assistance, the CSA’s hope was predicated on the idea that Britain and France (especially Britain) would get so desperate for Southern cotton that they’d intervene. As it turned out, there were countervailing factors. For one thing, Britain had become somewhat dependent on Northern grain. For another, they figured out they could grow lots of cotton in India. Finally, it turned out that, while the textile workers in the North of England were not happy about unemployment, they loathed slavery and the lordly airs of the Southern psuedo aristocracy even more. This meant ginning up political support in the UK for intervention was harder than the CSA supposed. They did get some covert (wink wink) help. But no more. That was a death sentence. On their own, they couldn’t possibly beat the Union.

Yes, things absolutely could have been worse. Slavery could have persisted for another century, for instance. Jim Crow was a terrible thing. But it pales in comparison to slavery. There were four million slaves in 1860, and the trajectory was a bit like a hockey stick. The number and value of slaves was skyrocketting. This was not a system on the wane.

And again, I don’t see the USA & CSA managing to be peaceful for long. They’d have been in competition over who got to f*ck over the remaining Native Americans from the git go.

“We shoulda let them go” is a lazy, selfish answer. Why selfish? Because the fantasy is that if we (not really we, but the Union of 1860) had let them go, we wouldn’t have to deal with those crazy Southerners today. Nevermind the human suffering that would have been involved, the distinct possibility that the Union would have cracked up further (having accepted the idea of secession in response to a lost election as valid), and so on. It’s all about wanting to have your cake (21st century USA in all its glory) and eat it too (excise the modern GOP’s power base).

Also, too: there are millions of liberals in the modern day American South. What are they, chopped liver? When you wish the South removed from the nation, what are you wishing for them, eh?

One hundred + years and it still attracts discussion, debate, fussing, opinions, books, and tv programs. This is a major influence on the psyche, culture, and politics. I wonder how the social studies teachers are handling this today. I had a soc teacher in the 7th grade that was a Civil War buff. We spent the year studying all the battles and generals. That guy knew his stuff and we hung on every word and could not get enough. He had been to all of the battlefields and could describe them by heart. We begged for his account of Pickett’s Charge: it made all of us want to be there. He also had two uniforms that he would wear: southern and northern. He also brought in authentic sabres and rifles. Today he would probably be arrested. We actually learned and we scavenged the library for every thing we could find about the Civil War. My favorite generals were Stonewall Jackson and Burnside. The schools now adays probably barely mention it. Too afraid of offending someone someone or worrying about being politically correct.. Too bad: the students could really learn something.

Upon reflection, I shouldn’t have said liberals (that’s true, but besides the point). What I should have said are “people who would clearly be harmed by Conservative policies.” Many of whom are not liberals, of course. The general point stands. A desire to “let go” of certain regions of the US is the political equivalent of “screw you, I’ve got mine.” No.

As for European assistance, the CSA’s hope was predicated on the idea that Britain and France (especially Britain) would get so desperate for Southern cotton that they’d intervene.

This raises a great point re the treason issue – the South actively tried to persuade Britain and France to declare war on the United States of America. If colluding with your country’s rivals to attack your country is not treason, then what is?

If colluding with your country’s rivals to attack your country is not treason, then what is?

To be fair, France provided assistance to American colonists during the Revolutionary War. Since the colonists won, they never had to face charges of treason.

@ Rob in CT : @ al-Ameda :

While I agree with you about the South, I can understand al-Ameda’s sentiment. It would be lot easier to govern the USA in a rational way without the heirs of the Confederacy trying to drag us back into the past. I am struck by the parallels between Lincoln and Obama. Lincoln too was a centrist who was willing to compromise with Southern-based conservatives who were passionately concerned with preserving institutions and a way of life that were unjust and outdated. The difference was that in Lincoln’s case the Southerners decided on armed revolt against the system , rather than to fight within the system.

The schools now adays probably barely mention it. Too afraid of offending someone someone or worrying about being politically correct.. Too bad: the students could really learn something.

Interesting. By “interesting,” I mean complete horseshit, of course, but interesting horseshit nonetheless.

Five years ago I was a student teacher in a history classroom. For the four prior years before that I was an aide in countless high schools (a lot of work for ultimately deciding to never go into teaching), and fascinatingly every one of those schools spent massive amount of time on the civil war.

But it’s fun to make up facts, so please don’t let me stop you.

By the time of the American Civil War, the question of slavery had long ceased to have anything to do with economics.

In some sense, it was. Slave labor competed with free labor, and the White Working class had no reasons to support slaves. And people that spent money buying and keeping slaves would lose capital when slave was abolished.

It´s true that unlike the elites in the South America, Southern elites were pretty uncomfortable with the presence of Blacks, and there was also the matter of political balance, that would be changed if Blacks could manage to vote.

But in some sense it was still about economics.

While I agree that it would make governance today (and indeed would have for the entirety of the 20th century as well) a tad less complicated without all of those Southern bombthrowers determined to create chaos until they get their way, I don’t think we had any realistic choice but to preserve the Union by forcing the South to remain.

Lincoln’s greatest mistake, in hindsight, was to not have vigorously worked the party to prevent Johnson’s nomination as its VP candidate. His gutting of Reconstruction and leniency towards the South IMO set the stage for the following hundred years of economic stagnation and deplorable human rights violations under Jim Crow. Lincoln, in retrospect, should have vigorously supported Hamlin continuing as VP. It would have changed our history for the better.

@ OzarkHillbilly : Grant didn’t take command overall until 1864. At the time of Gettyburg, as you no doubt remember, he was otherwise occupied at Vicksburg. The South really couldn’t hope to win a military victory by July 1863, but a victory at Gettysburg might have been the last straw for Lincoln’s ability to persevere in the struggle.

(Off-topic question–how are things down your way? I’ve been seeing news about huge protests all over Brazil.)

1-) The Brazilian Media is heavily promoting these demonstrations, including Globo(That was supported by the Military Regime and that has an unhealthy concentration of the media market) and Record(A TV station that´s owned by an Evangelical Chuch).

There are several instances of vandalism and violence coming from the demonstrators. Kinda, it´s not like people fighting the police, but people destroying windows of public buildings.

2-) There was a banner on one of these demonstrations that read “I don´t have a Party. My country is my party”. I immediatelly thought: “ What is this s***? Did they hire John McCain to write these slogans? “.

There is a lack of message and leadership in these demonstrations.

While I agree with you about the South, I can understand al-Ameda’s sentiment

Sure, so do I. Part of the reason I rail against it is that I know how seductive it is.

The South really couldn’t hope to win a military victory by July 1863, but a victory at Gettysburg might have been the last straw for Lincoln’s ability to persevere in the struggle.

The South still had a chance to win politically till the fall of Atlanta in September 1864. That was when the Lost Cause was truly lost. This thread is like the Alternate History Forum is all the time. The number one topic there is the American Civil War-was it worth it, could it have been avoided, could the South have won, what would happen if the South won. I predict that next year this time we will be discussing the number two topic-World War One( was it worth it, could it have been avoided, etc.)

but a victory at Gettysburg might have been the last straw for Lincoln’s ability to persevere in the struggle.

On that one I’ll have to disagree. Even if the South had somehow been able to have won Gettysburg, it still would have come at a cost of materiel and personnel that it could no longer afford to sustain. The North’s losses, while severe, weren’t nearly the body blow to its overall ability to continue to prosecute the war that Gettysburg represented to the South.

Public opinion in the North remained very much in support of continuing the war leading up to Gettysburg. I don’t think that a Union loss there would have torpedoed that support, certainly not enough to have been a political concern for Lincoln going into the election cycle in 1864. He would have pushed on.

@ Andre Kenji :

Perhaps. But I still think it’s correct to say slavery would have persisted for a long time despite economic factors, because it was much more than a purely economics-oriented institution.

@ HarvardLaw92 :

“Lincoln’s greatest mistake, in hindsight, was to not have vigorously worked the party to prevent Johnson’s nomination as its VP candidate.”

Putting Johnson on the ticket was Lincoln’s idea, not the party’s. The party would have preferred someone like Ben Butler, who supported the more radical positions against slaveholders. Lincoln at the time of the nominating convention felt he needed a more conciliatory VP nominee to show he was willing to accept reasonable peace terms, rather than prolong the war to destroy Southern society.

“Public opinion in the North remained very much in support of continuing the war leading up to Gettysburg. I don’t think that a Union loss there would have torpedoed that support, certainly not enough to have been a political concern for Lincoln going into the election cycle in 1864. He would have pushed on.”

Given that there were anti-war riots in New York City immediately after the victory at Gettysburg, I don’t think this is correct.

@ Neil Hudelson : James W. Loewen has written that in the South the history curiculum in public schools is often purposely arranged so that the Civil War is at the end of the school year, which means that its often not reached. He claims that this is by design.

Grant didn’t take command overall until 1864. At the time of Gettyburg, as you no doubt remember, he was otherwise occupied at Vicksburg.

Correct. He was pounding Vicksburg into dust, starving the population into submission. It was these tactics that won the day at Vicksburg and these tactics that ensured the South’s defeat once he took over the Army of the Potomac.

Ahhhh, I see your point. The politics of another loss could well have destroyed the Lincoln Presidency. I have to disagree to some extent though.

#1: Lee could not ever have won at Gettysburg. Longstreet knew it. That is why he argued for withdrawal. Pickett’s Charge was suicidal. That Lee could not see that was due entirely to his hubris. For so many years he had asked his soldiers to perform almost superhuman feats, and time and again, they did. Lee had begun to think they could do anything he asked of them. In the end tho, they were simply men.

#2: It is hard (in some ways) to call Gettysburg a victory for the North. At best, I would call it a draw. The North had the Army of Virginia on the verge of defeat and retreating but Meade let them go. The losses on both sides were about equal, but again, the North could afford it, the South could not.

#3: Gettysburg had very little political effect for Lincoln. It was the fall of Atlanta that ensured his reelection.

If you are going to bring up Joan Baez, you might want to do a little reading about her life (and learn how to spell her name).

Baez is an icon of the civil rights movement. She was often called on to take MLK’s place in marches and demonstrations when he was in jail, overbooked, or otherwise unavailable. Granted, her celebrity shielded her to some extent, but she marched into some dangerous places without hesitation. She also worked tirelessly against the war in Viet Nam, and did not cut out when the cops showed up to arrest people.

If anyone lived and breathed the liberal ideals of the sixties, it was Baez. She could have spent the decade kicking it in Laurel Canyon, Woodstock, and the Village, but she chose to be on the front lines.

On a side note, I waited on her in a club I worked at many years ago, she was very pleasant and had a nice smile.

@ OzarkHillbilly : Several years ago one of the big name Brit military historians, I think Keegan, observed that every century seems to produce one great military leader. That unfortunately for the US, in the 20th century it was Vo Nguyen Giap. But the nineteenth century produced two giants, Grant and Lee. And that of the two, Grant was the better general because he had a plan for winning the war and Lee did not.

@ gVOR08 : While Lee may have been more creative, Grant was more successful. But Grant certainly had the better hand: the Union was richer, had the manufacturing facilities, and had a larger population and a steady stream of immigrants to use as cannon fodder. Lee essentially had to convince the Union that the price of victory was too high but that was difficult when the fighting was almost exclusively in Confederate territory.

@ JKB : In 1964, after an epic struggle, the Liberal Northern Democrats finally stopped kowtowing to you Bourbon Confederates, who then promptly started leaving the Democratic Party and Movement Conservatism drew them into the Republican Party where Goldwater won five of the original 7 secession states: LA, Miss., Ala., GA, and South Carolina (to small for a Republic, to large for an insane asylum).

I don’t think the question whether “a war is worth it” makes much sense. Given the interests involved and the long term threat to its ascendancy that the planter class viewed the expanding, free soil North, they had basically decided it was rule or leave by 1861. When you read the stories of the young men and women who died, whether in1861-65, or in Afghanistan 2001-2013, the whole thing is immeasurably sad.

However, if a war had an outcome that left a better world, or the possibility of a better world, the American Civil War met that test. As the “The Last Invasion” documents, Lee’s Army received vital logistic support from close to 20,000 African American men and women slaves, held to their tasks and masters by the threat of death and/or torture. Further, Lee’s Army kidnapped for slavery every Black man or woman they ran across in Pennsylvania and Western Maryland, whether born free or escaped.

In my opinion, if no initial Civil War had been fought, or if the South had won its independence as a “Slave Republic,” in 1862, 63, or 64, the the two states would have been mortal enemies and friction, particularly the friction over escaped slaves, western territories, and expanding slavery into Mexico and the Caribbean, would have led to future wars between the CSA and USA.

@ sherparick :

In my opinion, if no initial Civil War had been fought, or if the South had won its independence as a “Slave Republic,” in 1862, 63, or 64, the the two states would have been mortal enemies and friction, particularly the friction over escaped slaves, western territories, and expanding slavery into Mexico and the Caribbean, would have led to future wars between the CSA and USA.

That would be my opinion as well. There is no such thing as a massive slave system that can exist where there is free territory for slaves to flee to. Two things could have occurred: (a) slaves fleeing to the North, creating border conflicts and perhaps encouraging further import of slaves from Africa, creating naval conflicts with the British. Or Northern accommodation of slavery by which Northerners sent blacks back south (free or escaped) to maintain a white Republic based upon free labor/free soil ideology.

@ Moosebreath :

@HarvardLaw92: “Public opinion in the North remained very much in support of continuing the war leading up to Gettysburg. I don’t think that a Union loss there would have torpedoed that support, certainly not enough to have been a political concern for Lincoln going into the election cycle in 1864. He would have pushed on.”

Given that there were anti-war riots in New York City immediately after the victory at Gettysburg, I don’t think this is correct.

New York City was a center of copperhead anti-war opinion, so I don’t know that it’s really correct to believe that New York City was a strong indicator of Northern opinion as a whole. Also, those riots were at least as much in opposition to the draft as the war.

Seriously, without a tame Supreme Court to provide decisions like Dred Scott and the political power to push through the Fugitive Slave law, what would the CSA have done about slave escapees? Railed and railed at the perfidious Yankees, and quite probably end up fighting them (in defense of their Property Rights, dontchaknow).

Throw in compeition over land in the West, trade issues, international relations (including with territories to the South that CSA Firebreathers wanted to take over via “Fillibustering”)… how does it not come to war?

@ Rob in CT : Not war, war s . Multiple wars over years. Everything from border skirmishes to full-on frontier battles and invasions of Union California.

Eventually there would have been a full-scale war between the two nations, but decades later, perhaps with World War 1 weaponry.

Imagine the battle of Gettysburg with mustard gas.

“New York City was a center of copperhead anti-war opinion, so I don’t know that it’s really correct to believe that New York City was a strong indicator of Northern opinion as a whole.”

Considering that I was responding to a statement that said that popular opinion in the North was “very much in support of continuing the war”, pointing out that the largest city was a center of anti-war activity is not much of a response. I could also point out the huge losses in the 1862 election, where the Democrats gained 28 seats (out of 185).

“Also, those riots were at least as much in opposition to the draft as the war.”

Funny, how the opposition to the draft fell off as the tide of the war turned.

@ Rob in CT : I am reminded of something Jefferson said about the importance of acquiring the Louisiana territory, he said whomever possess New Orleans is “our natural and habitual enemy.” It was the one spot, due to its importance for inland trade routes. While rail and canals may have been reducing its importance by the 1860s, its still possible that issues of trade not directly involving slavery would have also sparked armed conflicts.

@ James Joyner :

@gVOR08: While Lee may have been more creative, Grant was more successful. But Grant certainly had the better hand: the Union was richer, had the manufacturing facilities, and had a larger population and a steady stream of immigrants to use as cannon fodder. Lee essentially had to convince the Union that the price of victory was too high but that was difficult when the fighting was almost exclusively in Confederate territory.

There was always the hope the British would step in on the Confederate side. While unlikely they could have gotten enough public support for waging a ground war, the British Navy could have snapped the Union blockade of Southern ports in very short order, and with public support for that “limited” engagement. The textile industry really liked that cotton, and gaining a huge ally in the Western hemisphere on the other side of the Yankees from Canada summons a tempting dream of regaining much that had been lost.

Here again, slavery doomed the South. Very unpopular among the British people. Had the South freed their slaves as Lee and some others suggested, the South would be an independent country. It was key to both Lincolns ability to wage the war and British inability to help them.

A slave nation abutting a non-slave nation and competing wildly to spread west would have, IMO, proved an impossible situation to be managed peacefully, barring utter capitulation of one or the other.

I love how I get all the thumbs down because I won’t badmouth the South like you elitist liberals, even though my analysis of history can’t be that different from yours. How many of the people commenting above are actually (self-loathing) Southerners? I get the sense we are underrepresented on here. Oh, wait, that’s an opening for a comment about how we can’t read. Oops. Curse my public school education.

IMO more comments are almost always good. I never thumbs down other than spammers and obvious escapees from str0mfnord. Urge others to refrain from same.

Traitors don’t like being called traitors, of course. It doesn’t change the fact that they were. They engaged in armed insurrection against the government of the United States of America. They killed soldiers of the United States Army and the United States Navy. They shot at the Stars and Stripes. If that doesn’t make them traitors, then the word has no meaning.

Well, I could go into some nitpicking argument about how they were fighting for their own country after it had declare independence, but I still maintain my original belief, and make a distinction between Southerners taking up arms and fighting their former countrymen on the battlefield and a a real traitor, like, say, Robert Hanssen, who was passing secrets to another country in betrayal of his own. The Revolutionaries were traitors to the old kingdom, but patriots to the new, so I could adopt that argument too.

Again, it doesn’t matter. People don’t want to believe terrible things about their families, but that doesn’t change objective fact.

Well, even if I accepted that they were traitors, I wouldn’t be ashamed of my own ancestors who fought in that conflict. They had interesting stories and noble lives of civic and religious involvement after the war, following their honorable service in the Confederacy. My research suggests that no one had slaves or even lived in major slave agriculture areas (i.e., they were from northern Mississippi and northern Alabama) but I do know of some major slaveholders I’m directly descended from around the time of the American Revolution. I’m not ashamed of them, but I’m certainly not proud either. Besides, when you get that far back, half of OTBs commenters could have the same relative.

I love how I get all the thumbs down because I won’t badmouth the South like you elitist liberals, even though my analysis of history can’t be that different from yours.

And I love how conservatives claim to be constantly victimized by so-called “elitist liberals.”

@ aFloridian : The reason the word “traitor” is so important is that as long as the Confederacy is coated with the warm patina of “honorable gentlemen fighting for a noble cause” then it remains a threat to the American ideal.

We can be polite, but honesty demands that we look at the Confederacy as it really was; it stood, at its very root, in steadfast opposition to any and all of the principles that we as Americans hold.

They were traitors- they betrayed the princples of freedom and democracy and the equality of all people. They refused to abide by the outcome of a fair election, and took up arms to destroy the American nation.

This is the cold truth, and the more apologists try to struggle against it, the more we have to repeat it.

@ Liberty60 : If you’d read my earlier comments, you’d see I am no apologist for the Lost Cause, as romantic and tempting as that “warm patina” can be. I am, I suppose, a defender of the poor men who fought in that war, just as much heroes and victims as the poor today, alternatively pitied and demonized.

@ al-Ameda : Give me a break. This website is crawling with elitist liberals that show the same urge to pigeonhole people into cute little categories as most Limbaugh-conservatives. My sense is that most of us here are professionals with advanced post-secondary education and often a lot of money./ That’s pretty much who the “elite” in this country is made of, so yeah, most of you are liberal, most of you are elite, hence “elitist liberal.”

I’m not a conservative. I’m a Moderate/ nominal Republican also influenced by certain concepts in libertarianism. Hell, I voted Obama. Not everybody who disagrees with you is a Tea Bagging Glenn Beck nutjob you know…

@ Surreal American : You’ll do well to remember we signed a secret treaty with Britain to end the Revolutionary War which weakened the French peace position. It may have been the aiding of the cause of Liberty or the taxes imposed upon its citizens from two wars fought in or for America that led to the extreme economic hardships in France that led to the Revolution there. However, post-Louisiana Purchase and founding of the new French state by the time of the American Civil War, America and France were no longer allies in the sense that persuaded France to join the American cause during the Revolution. That is why the CSA thought Cotton Diplomacy would propel both France and England to join their cause to end the Union Blockade of the South. @ aFloridian : Defending poor traitors who were duped into fighting for the rights of the wealthy oligarchy that sought to perpetuate slavery, does not make these soldiers not traitors. Again Secession of the CSA could have happened without the attack on Fort Sumter. Had the Democrats won the election of 1860 would armed insurrection had occurred? Likely not, this was a traitorous event precipitated by the loss of an election. Had the democratic process worked for these people they would have been more than content to stay in the Union and toe the line of the federal government. However, when they took up arms to kill United States soldiers they became traitors, and slave holder or not they were wrong. The thing that differentiates them from the British traitors that founded our country was that they chose to fight for the opposite of liberty, and honorable men or not, that is not an honorable cause.

My sense is that most of us here are professionals with advanced post-secondary education and often a lot of money./ That’s pretty much who the “elite” in this country is made of, so yeah, most of you are liberal, most of you are elite, hence “elitist liberal.”

Give me a break. You know full well the difference between being in an elite (the top 10% of income earners, or having attended elite or prestigious colleges and universities) and being an elitist (or pejoratively, “elitist liberal”).

@aFloridian:

Because one is in an elite demographic by way of income, education, or both does not necessarily mean that they are an elitist. Are you ignorant of this fact, or are you just throwing out an emotionally charged buzzword in a rather bogus debate tactic?

I love how I get all the thumbs down because I won’t badmouth the South like you elitist liberals

WTF is this nonsense?

Badmouthing the Confederate States of America != badmouthing The South. Unless you’re of the opinion that The South is essentially the CSA, and I for one don’t subsribe to that line of thinking.

“Was the American Civil War worth it?”

As of 10:15 or so on the morning of June 25, 2013, apparently not.

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Was the Civil War necessary? A thought 150 years later

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Was the Civil War unnecessary? Contributor Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute asks this in a column posted on Sept. 19 at Forbes.com . Sept. 19 was a couple of days after the 151 th anniversary of the bloodiest battle in U.S. history, at Antietam.

Bandow quotes North Carolina historian David Goldfield, who writes in “America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation” that slavery existed in a number of nations, but all of them except the United States and Haiti ended it peacefully. Part of the reason, he writes, is that people in those countries didn’t moralize the question as much as the Americans, who had just gone through a religious revival. Other countries treated it more as a practical problem to be solved.

I recently read a book that made the same point: Thomas Fleming’s “A Disease of the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War.” Fleming argues that each side had a “disease of the mind” that made it unnecessarily intransigent. For the South, the “disease” was fear of a race war, and belief that that’s what the Northern abolitionists really wanted. For the North the “disease” was the thinking of the abolitionists, who cultivated hatred of “the Slave Power” and willingness to fight it to the death.

Fleming’s argument is that there was a peaceful way out: that slaveowners could be compensated and the slaves released. That was the way it was done in some of the Caribbean colonies, apparently. You can argue that that way was wrong, because slave owners didn’t deserve any payment, it was the slaves who deserved payment, and morally you’d make a lot of sense. But paying the slaveowners, he argues, could have prevented 600,000 people from dying in the war.

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It’s a thing to think about. We tend to present the Civil War as a simple contest between right and wrong, and we put ourselves on the side of right. And I believe that if they were going to have a fight, it was best that the Union won. Still—did they have to have a fight?

I have my own bit to add to this. I have been reading Civil War newspapers from Washington Territory as part of a project for the Museum of History and Industry. The Civil War wasn’t fought here, but the political arguments were made here between Republicans and Democrats of various stripes (mostly not secessionists) and you can get a feeling for both sides. And the feeling I get is that the Republican side —Lincoln’s side — was the more shrill.

I recall reading one newspaper editor at war’s end calling for Jeff Davis, Robert  E. Lee and all high Confederate army officers to be hanged. The pro-Lincoln side was loose with the words, “treason” and “traitor.”Lincoln wanted to be magnanimous toward the South, but many on his side didn’t. The Democrat papers here were more openly racist, in an off-hand, totally not-worried way that is a bit shocking to modern sensibilities, but I didn’t catch them talking about stringing people up.

150 Years of Misunderstanding the Civil War

As the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg approaches, it's time for America to question the popular account of a war that tore apart the nation.

In early July, on the 150 th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, pilgrims will crowd Little Round Top and the High Water Mark of Pickett's Charge. But venture beyond these famous shrines to battlefield valor and you'll find quiet sites like Iverson's Pits, which recall the inglorious reality of Civil War combat.

On July 1 st , 1863, Alfred Iverson ordered his brigade of North Carolinians across an open field. The soldiers marched in tight formation until Union riflemen suddenly rose from behind a stone wall and opened fire. Five hundred rebels fell dead or wounded "on a line as straight as a dress parade," Iverson reported. "They nobly fought and died without a man running to the rear. No greater gallantry and heroism has been displayed during this war."

Soldiers told a different story: of being "sprayed by the brains" of men shot in front of them, or hugging the ground and waving white kerchiefs. One survivor informed the mother of a comrade that her son was "shot between the Eye and ear" while huddled in a muddy swale. Of others in their ruined unit he wrote: "left arm was cut off, I think he will die... his left thigh hit and it was cut off." An artilleryman described one row of 79 North Carolinians executed by a single volley, their dead feet perfectly aligned. "Great God! When will this horrid war stop?" he wrote. The living rolled the dead into shallow trenches--hence the name "Iverson's Pits," now a grassy expanse more visited by ghost-hunters than battlefield tourists.

This and other scenes of unromantic slaughter aren't likely to get much notice during the Gettysburg sesquicentennial, the high water mark of Civil War remembrance. Instead, we'll hear a lot about Joshua Chamberlain's heroism and Lincoln's hallowing of the Union dead.

It's hard to argue with the Gettysburg Address. But in recent years, historians have rubbed much of the luster from the Civil War and questioned its sanctification. Should we consecrate a war that killed and maimed over a million Americans? Or should we question, as many have in recent conflicts, whether this was really a war of necessity that justified its appalling costs?

"We've decided the Civil War is a 'good war' because it destroyed slavery," says Fitzhugh Brundage, a historian at the University of North Carolina. "I think it's an indictment of 19 th century Americans that they had to slaughter each other to do that."

Similar reservations were voiced by an earlier generation of historians known as revisionists. From the 1920s to 40s, they argued that the war was not an inevitable clash over irreconcilable issues. Rather, it was a "needless" bloodbath, the fault of "blundering" statesmen and "pious cranks," mainly abolitionists. Some revisionists, haunted by World War I, cast all war as irrational, even "psychopathic."

World War II undercut this anti-war stance. Nazism was an evil that had to be fought. So, too, was slavery, which revisionists--many of them white Southerners--had cast as a relatively benign institution, and dismissed it as a genuine source of sectional conflict. Historians who came of age during the Civil Rights Movement placed slavery and emancipation at the center of the Civil War. This trend is now reflected in textbooks and popular culture. The Civil War today is generally seen as a necessary and ennobling sacrifice, redeemed by the liberation of four million slaves.

But cracks in this consensus are appearing with growing frequency, for example in studies like America Aflame , by historian David Goldfield. Goldfield states on the first page that the war was "America's greatest failure." He goes on to impeach politicians, extremists, and the influence of evangelical Christianity for polarizing the nation to the point where compromise or reasoned debate became impossible.

Unlike the revisionists of old, Goldfield sees slavery as the bedrock of the Southern cause and abolition as the war's great achievement. But he argues that white supremacy was so entrenched, North and South, that war and Reconstruction could never deliver true racial justice to freed slaves, who soon became subject to economic peonage, Black Codes, Jim Crow, and rampant lynching.

Few contemporary scholars go as far as Goldfield, but others are challenging key tenets of the current orthodoxy. Gary Gallagher, a leading Civil War historian at the University of Virginia, argues that the long-reigning emphasis on slavery and liberation distorts our understanding of the war and of how Americans thought in the 1860s. "There's an Appomattox syndrome--we look at Northern victory and emancipation and read the evidence backward," Gallagher says.

Very few Northerners went to war seeking or anticipating the destruction of slavery. They fought for Union, and the Emancipation Proclamation was a means to that end: a desperate measure to undermine the South and save a democratic nation that Lincoln called "the last best, hope of earth."

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Gallagher also feels that hindsight has dimmed recognition of how close the Confederacy came to achieving its aims. "For the South, a tie was as good as a win," he says. It needed to inflict enough pain to convince a divided Northern public that defeating the South wasn't worth the cost. This nearly happened at several points, when rebel armies won repeated battles in 1862 and 1863. As late as the summer of 1864, staggering casualties and the stalling of Union armies brought a collapse in Northern morale, cries for a negotiated peace, and the expectation that anti-war (and anti-black) Democrats would take the White House. The fall of Atlanta that September narrowly saved Lincoln and sealed the South's eventual surrender.

Allen Guelzo, director of Civil War studies at Gettysburg College, adds the Pennsylvania battle to the roster of near-misses for the South. In his new book, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion , he identifies points when Lee's army came within minutes of breaking the Union line. If it had, he believes the already demoralized Army of the Potomac "would have gone to pieces." With a victorious Southern army on the loose, threatening Northern cities, "it would have been game over for the Union."

Imagining these and other scenarios isn't simply an exercise in "what if" history, or the fulfillment of Confederate fantasy fiction. It raises the very real possibility that many thousands of Americans might have died only to entrench secession and slavery. Given this risk, and the fact that Americans at the time couldn't see the future, Andrew Delbanco wonders if we ourselves would have regarded the defeat of the South as worth pursuing at any price. "Vindicated causes are easy to endorse," he observes in The Abolitionist Imagination.

Recent scholarship has also cast new light on the scale and horror of the nation's sacrifice. Soldiers in the 1860s didn't wear dog tags, the burial site of most was unknown, and casualty records were sketchy and often lost. Those tallying the dead in the late 19 th century relied on estimates and assumptions to arrive at a figure of 618,000, a toll that seemed etched in stone until just a few years ago.

But J. David Hacker, a demographic historian, has used sophisticated analysis of census records to revise the toll upward by 20%, to an estimated 750,000, a figure that has won wide acceptance from Civil War scholars. If correct, the Civil War claimed more lives than all other American wars combined, and the increase in population since 1860 means that a comparable war today would cost 7.5 million lives.

This horrific toll doesn't include the more than half million soldiers who were wounded and often permanently disabled by amputation, lingering disease, psychological trauma and other afflictions. Veterans themselves rarely dwelled on this suffering, at least in their writing. "They walled off the horror and mangling and tended to emphasize the nobility of sacrifice," says Allen Guelzo. So did many historians, who cited the numbing totals of dead and wounded but rarely delved into the carnage or its societal impact.

That's changed dramatically with pioneering studies such as Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering , a 2008 examination of "the work of death" in the Civil War: killing, dying, burying, mourning, counting. "Civil War history has traditionally had a masculine view," says Faust, now president of Harvard, "it's all about generals and statesmen and glory." From reading the letters of women during the war, though, she sensed the depth of Americans' fear, grief, and despair. Writing her book amid "the daily drumbeat of loss" in coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan, Faust's focus on the horrors of this earlier war was reinforced.

"When we go to war, we ought to understand the costs," she says. "Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to forget that. Americans went into the Civil War imagining glorious battle, not gruesome disease and dismemberment."

Disease, in fact, killed roughly twice as many soldiers as did combat; dysentery and diarrhea alone killed over 44,000 Union soldiers, more than ten times the Northern dead at Gettysburg. Amputations were so routine, Faust notes, that soldiers and hospital workers frequently described severed limbs stacked "like cord wood," or heaps of feet, legs and arms being hauled off in carts, as if from "a human slaughterhouse." In an era before germ theory, surgeons' unclean saws and hands became vectors for infection that killed a quarter or more of the 60,000 or so men who underwent amputation.

Other historians have exposed the savagery and extent of the war that raged far from the front lines, including guerrilla attacks, massacres of Indians, extra-judicial executions and atrocities against civilians, some 50,000 of whom may have died as a result of the conflict. "There's a violence within and around the Civil War that doesn't fit the conventional, heroic narrative,' says Fitzhugh Brundage, whose research includes torture during the war. "When you incorporate these elements, the war looks less like a conflict over lofty principles and more like a cross-societal bloodletting."

In other words, it looks rather like ongoing wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, which have influenced today's scholars and also their students. Brundage sees a growing number of returning veterans in his classes at the University of North Carolina, and new interest in previously neglected aspects of the Civil War era, such as military occupation, codes of justice, and the role of militias and insurgents.

More broadly, he senses an opening to question the limits of war as a force for good. Just as the fight against Nazism buttressed a moral vision of the Civil War, so too have the last decade's conflicts given us a fresh and cautionary viewpoint. "We should be chastened by our inability to control war and its consequences," Brundage says. "So much of the violence in the Civil War is laundered or sanctified by emancipation, but that result was by no means inevitable."

It's very hard, however, to see how emancipation might have been achieved by means other than war. The last century's revisionists thought the war was avoidable because they didn't regard slavery as a defining issue or evil. Almost no one suggests that today. The evidence is overwhelming that slavery was the "cornerstone" of the Southern cause, as the Confederacy's vice-president stated, and the source of almost every aspect of sectional division.

Slaveholders also resisted any infringement of their right to human property. Lincoln, among many others, advocated the gradual and compensated emancipation of slaves. This had been done in the British West Indies, and would later end slavery in Brazil and Cuba. In theory it could have worked here. Economists have calculated that the cost of the Civil War, estimated at over $10 billion in 1860 dollars, would have been more than enough to buy the freedom of every slave, purchase them land, and even pay reparations. But Lincoln's proposals for compensated emancipation fell on deaf ears, even in wartime Delaware, which was behind Union lines and clung to only 2,000 slaves, about 1.5% of the state's population.

Nor is there much credible evidence that the South's "peculiar institution" would have peacefully waned on its own. Slave-grown cotton was booming in 1860, and slaves in non-cotton states like Virginia were being sold to Deep South planters at record prices, or put to work on railroads and in factories. "Slavery was a virus that could attach itself to other forms," says historian Edward Ayers, president of the University of Richmond. "It was stronger than it had ever been and was growing stronger."

Most historians believe that without the Civil War, slavery would have endured for decades, possibly generations. Though emancipation was a byproduct of the war, not its aim, and white Americans clearly failed during Reconstruction to protect and guarantee the rights of freed slaves, the post-war amendments enshrined the promise of full citizenship and equality in the Constitution for later generations to fulfill.

What this suggests is that the 150 th anniversary of the Civil War is too narrow a lens through which to view the conflict. We are commemorating the four years of combat that began in 1861 and ended with Union victory in 1865. But Iraq and Afghanistan remind us, yet again, that the aftermath of war matters as much as its initial outcome. Though Confederate armies surrendered in 1865, white Southerners fought on by other means, wearing down a war-weary North that was ambivalent about if not hostile to black equality. Looking backwards, and hitting the pause button at the Gettysburg Address or the passage of the 13 th amendment, we see a "good" and successful war for freedom. If we focus instead on the run-up to war, when Lincoln pledged to not interfere with slavery in the South, or pan out to include the 1870s, when the nation abandoned Reconstruction, the story of the Civil War isn't quite so uplifting.

But that also is an arbitrary and insufficient frame. In 1963, a century after Gettysburg, Martin Luther King Jr. invoked Lincoln's words and the legacy of the Civil War in calling on the nation to pay its "promissory note" to black Americans, which it finally did, in part, by passing Civil Rights legislation that affirmed and enforced the amendments of the 1860s. In some respects, the struggle for racial justice, and for national cohesion, continues still.

From the distance of 150 years, Lincoln's transcendent vision at Gettysburg of a "new birth of freedom" seems premature. But he himself acknowledged the limits of remembrance. Rather than simply consecrate the dead with words, he said, it is for "us the living" to rededicate ourselves to the unfinished work of the Civil War.

A Brief Overview of the American Civil War

The Civil War is the central event in America's historical consciousness. While the Revolution of 1776-1783 created the United States, the Civil War of 1861-1865 determined what kind of nation it would be. The war resolved two fundamental questions left unresolved by the revolution: whether the United States was to be a dissolvable confederation of sovereign states or an indivisible nation with a sovereign national government; and whether this nation, born of a declaration that all men were created with an equal right to liberty, would continue to exist as the largest slaveholding country in the world.

Northern victory in the war preserved the United States as one nation and ended the institution of slavery that had divided the country from its beginning. But these achievements came at the cost of 625,000 lives--nearly as many American soldiers as died in all the other wars in which this country has fought combined. The American Civil War was the largest and most destructive conflict in the Western world between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the onset of World War I in 1914.

The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states. When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the deep South seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. The incoming Lincoln administration and most of the Northern people refused to recognize the legitimacy of secession. They feared that it would discredit democracy and create a fatal precedent that would eventually fragment the no-longer United States into several small, squabbling countries.

The event that triggered war came at Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay on April 12, 1861. Claiming this United States fort as their own, the Confederate army on that day opened fire on the federal garrison and forced it to lower the American flag in surrender. Lincoln called out the militia to suppress this "insurrection." Four more slave states seceded and joined the Confederacy. By the end of 1861 nearly a million armed men confronted each other along a line stretching 1200 miles from Virginia to Missouri. Several battles had already taken place--near Manassas Junction in Virginia, in the mountains of western Virginia where Union victories paved the way for creation of the new state of West Virginia, at Wilson's Creek in Missouri, at Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, and at Port Royal in South Carolina where the Union navy established a base for a blockade to shut off the Confederacy's access to the outside world.

But the real fighting began in 1862. Huge battles like Shiloh in Tennessee, Gaines' Mill , Second Manassas , and Fredericksburg in Virginia, and Antietam in Maryland foreshadowed even bigger campaigns and battles in subsequent years, from Gettysburg in Pennsylvania to Vicksburg on the Mississippi to Chickamauga and Atlanta in Georgia. By 1864 the original Northern goal of a limited war to restore the Union had given way to a new strategy of "total war" to destroy the Old South and its basic institution of slavery and to give the restored Union a "new birth of freedom," as President Lincoln put it in his address at Gettysburg to dedicate a cemetery for Union soldiers killed in the battle there.

For three long years, from 1862 to 1865, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia staved off invasions and attacks by the Union Army of the Potomac commanded by a series of ineffective generals until Ulysses S. Grant came to Virginia from the Western theater to become general in chief of all Union armies in 1864. After bloody battles at places with names like The Wilderness , Spotsylvania , Cold Harbor , and Petersburg , Grant finally brought Lee to bay at Appomattox in April 1865. In the meantime Union armies and river fleets in the theater of war comprising the slave states west of the Appalachian Mountain chain won a long series of victories over Confederate armies commanded by hapless or unlucky Confederate generals. In 1864-1865 General William Tecumseh Sherman led his army deep into the Confederate heartland of Georgia and South Carolina, destroying their economic infrastructure while General George Thomas virtually destroyed the Confederacy's Army of Tennessee at the battle of Nashville . By the spring of 1865 all the principal Confederate armies surrendered, and when Union cavalry captured the fleeing Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Georgia on May 10, 1865, resistance collapsed and the war ended. The long, painful process of rebuilding a united nation free of slavery began.

Learn More:  This Day in the Civil War

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Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation and Freedom

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Civil War, 1861-1865

Jonathan Karp, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, PhD Candidate, American Studies

The story of the Civil War is often told as a triumph of freedom over slavery, using little more than a timeline of battles and a thin pile of legislation as plot points. Among those acts and skirmishes, addresses and battles, the Emancipation Proclamation is key: with a stroke of Abraham Lincoln’s pen, the story goes, slaves were freed and the goodness of the United States was confirmed. This narrative implies a kind of clarity that is not present in the historical record. What did emancipation actually mean? What did freedom mean? How would ideas of citizenship accommodate Black subjects? The everyday impact of these words—the way they might be lived in everyday life—were the subject of intense debates and investigations, which marshalled emerging scientific discourses and a rapidly expanding bureaucratic state. All the while, Black people kept emancipating themselves, showing by their very actions how freedom might be lived.

Self-Emancipation

The Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863, and the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, abolished slavery in the secessionist Confederate states and the United States, respectively, but it is important to remember that enslaved people were liberating themselves through all manners of fugitivity for as long as slavery has existed in the Americas. Notices from enslavers seeking self-emancipated Black people were common in newspapers throughout the Americas, as seen in this 1854 copy of the Baltimore Sun .

The question of how formerly enslaved people would be regarded by and assimilated into the state as subjects was most obviously worked out through the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was meant to support newly freed people across the South. Two years before the Bureau was established, however, there was the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission. Authorized by the Secretary of War in March 1863, the Inquiry Commission was called in part as a response to the ever-increasing number of refugees—who were still referred to at the time as “contraband”—appearing at Union camps. The three appointed commissioners—Samuel Gridley Howe, James McKaye, and Robert Dale Owen—were charged with investigating the condition and capacity of freedpeople.

Historians are still working to understand the scale of refugees’ movements during the Civil War. Abigail Cooper estimates that by 1865 there were around 600,000 freedpeople in 250 refugee camps. Many of the camps were overseen by the Union, while others were established and run by freedpeople themselves. Conditions in the camps could be brutal. In 1863, the Inquiry Commission heard that 3,000 freedmen had fortified the fort in Nashville for fifteen months without pay. Rations were slim. In spite of these conditions, the camps were also sites where Black people profoundly restructured the South by their very movement and relationships.

Port Royal Experiment

During the Civil War, the U.S. government began an experiment in the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Plantation owning enslavers had abandoned their lands, leaving behind over 10,000 formerly enslaved Black people. With the help of abolitionist charities from the North, these Black farmers cultivated cotton for wages in the same places they had formerly been held in bondage. Their work was so successful that it inspired international calls for support, like this letter published in Manchester, England. The short-lived success of this experiment was largely ended at the government's hands, when the lands were returned to White ownership.

The Inquiry Commission, a large portion of whose records are held at Harvard, focused many of their efforts on the camps. It was not clear how, exactly, they should go about their work. The Commission was established before the field of sociology emerged with its institutionalized tools for the supposedly scientific study of populations. A federal body had never before been responsible studying people who were or had been enslaved. The commissioners travelled across the American South and Canada, observing and interviewing freedmen. They sent elaborate surveys to military leaders, clergy, and other White people who interfaced with large numbers of people who had escaped slavery. Through this work, the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission made Black people into subjects of the United States’ scientific gaze. Their records are an invaluable record of life under slavery; they also reinscribed underlying racial logics.

Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom has a collection of 189 objects related to the Commission’s inquiry . The vast majority of them are responses to their survey, written by White people the Commission identified as having special knowledge of freedmen. The view of slavery from this vantage point is limited. Most if not all of the respondents recount conversations with people who were or had been enslaved, but these accounts are all mediated by their authors and the Commissioners. There’s no telling what the quoted enslaved people would or wouldn’t have shared with these people, or why. If some shape of life under slavery emerges from reading these survey responses, it is a necessarily distorted one. The American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission is emblematic of a style of scientific discourse that set its sights on Black people and the cultural meanings of race without concern for the views of Black people. In this field, Whiteness was necessary for expertise.

The surveys are most revealing as records of how these agents of the federal government conceived of the question of freedom—what they called, “one of the gravest social problems ever presented a government.” What kinds of questions did they ask? The forms had forty-two questions. Some asked for geographic and population data. Others asked for information about life before emancipation: did freedmen carry signs of previous abuse (they did) and did their masters have an effect on enslaved peoples’ families (they invariably did)? The vast majority of the questions, however, asked for the respondent’s opinions and general observations of the formerly enslaved refugees. The Commission wanted to know about these peoples’ strength, endurance, intellectual capacity, attachments to place, as well as their religious devotion, their general disposition, work ethic, and ways of domestic life. The list ended with the most important question, which the previous ones had apparently prepared the respondent to answer to the best of their abilities: “In your judgement are the freedmen in your department considered as a whole fit to take their place in society with a fair prospect of self-support and progress or do they need preparatory training and guardianship? If so of what nature and to what extent?”

Slow Stretching Emancipation

The Emancipation Proclamation was widely celebrated by enemies of slavery, though it did not emancipate all enslaved Black peoples. Celebrations were held in Northern cities like Philadelphia and Boston . News of emancipation was slow moving, even in areas that were covered by the proclamation. In areas under Union control, like Port Royal, Black people were informed of their new legal status on January 1st, but in areas under Confederate control the proclamation was often kept secret from enslaved people or entirely ignored. In his memoir, Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington described his experience learning of the proclamation:

After the reading we were told that we were all free, and could go when and where we pleased. My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long praying, but fearing that she would never live to see. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography, pg. 21

From the questions the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission asked, it is clear that they imagined the freemen’s “fitness” to hinge on their ability to work for wages, own land, and maintain standard familial structures. The surveys asked whether freedmen “seemed disposed to continue their domestic relations or form new ones.” They asked whether, under slavery, enslaved children were taught to respect their parents. Commissioners wished to know if family names were common, and, if so, how they travelled through generations. The question about laboring for wages, which appeared towards the end of the questionnaire, was deeply connected to the question of what should come after slavery. If wages would not be successful in turning freedmen into laborers, a system of apprenticeship might be considered. The commissioners’ fixation on land was a result of the longstanding connection in the United States between citizenship and landowning. It was also a response to fears of Black migration. In all, the surveys show that the question of freedmen’s fitness was one of their assimilation into the intertwined relations of the capitalist wage and the family, as recognized by the state and church.

While the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission went about their work, freedpeople made their lives in ways that both answered the Commission’s questions and exceeded them. Some people found their way to camps to join the war effort; others went in search of family and still others made homes where they were. Washington Spradling, for example, told the Commission in 1863 how freedpeople in Kentucky pooled resources to pay for funerals and buy their relatives out of slavery, all under the oppression of new police powers. Across the South, as the Civil War raged, Black people brought about emancipation. They could not wait for the state’s commissions and reports. However, shades of their experiments in freedom are visible in the reports of the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission.

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By Charles Apple

Despite what you might hear from some people, we in the news media try hard to be fair and accurate in the stories we bring you every day. The journalism school adage is: “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.”

But that wasn’t always the case. One hundred and 60 years ago Saturday, in fact, a New York newspaper editor had an idea he could get rich overnight. All he needed to do was spread a baldfaced lie about President Abraham Lincoln...

It Was May 1864

The Civil War was dragging on, to the displeasure of voters in the North who were not necessarily sold on another four years of an Abraham Lincoln administration.

Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, however — newly in charge of the Army of the Potomac — had arrived in Virginia and was on his way to a siege of the Confederate capital of Richmond.

The phrase “light at the end of the tunnel” had not yet been coined. If it had been, rest assured it would have been used.

On May 18, two New York City newspapers ran some bad news: President Lincoln called for a “a day of fasting, humiliation and prayer.” More important, he was calling up 400,000 more troops for the war effort.

That morning, Wall Street reacted just as you’d have expected it to: Stock prices plummeted. The price of gold — then, as now, a haven for investors during tough times — shot up.

There was just one little problem: Lincoln had said no such statement yet.

Strangely enough, the story had appeared in only two newspapers. It didn’t take long for folks to wonder why.

A dispatch containing the news had arrived at 3:30 that morning, the nighttime press foremen said, after the night editors had gone home. The dispatch appeared to be from the Associated Press and was delivered in the usual way: by street urchin courier. This sort of thing happened all the time. Not suspecting a bogus report, the foremen at the World and the Journal had stuffed the item into that day’s papers and rolled their respective presses.

But other New York papers didn’t fall for the trick. Some had rules against late news — what we today call a “deadline.” A few others checked around, despite the late hour, and discovered that not all papers had received the AP dispatch. Smelling a possible rat, they ran the risk of getting beaten on the story and held it so editors could check it out the next day.

While the stock markets gyrated wildly, an angry crowd gathered outside the offices of the Journal of Commerce, demanding answers.

Lincoln was incensed. He issued a statement calling the news story “false and spurious,” accusing the Journal of Commerce and the World of acting “wickedly and traitorously” and ordered the papers shut down and the editors and publishers arrested.

It took investigators only three days to figure out who was responsible for the hoax: Joseph Howard, 35, the city editor of the Brooklyn Eagle.

What’s worse: Howard had pulled this sort of stunt before. In 1861, he had written that Lincoln rode through the streets of Baltimore on the way to his inauguration wearing “a Scotch cap and long military cloak.” In 1862, Howard had violated a military order by sneaking into the funeral of an Army general — dressed as a clergyman.

Howard and an accomplice — Eagle reporter Francis Mallison, who wrote under the suddenly ironic pen name Francis O’Pake — had borrowed money and used it to buy gold. They then composed the fake dispatch and had it sent to New York City newspapers.

By the time the stock market opened on May 18, news of the dispatch was all over town, but no one yet suspected it was fake. Howard sold his gold that morning for the kind of money we newspaper folks rarely see.

The Arrests

When detectives arrived at Howard’s home on May 20 to take him into custody, Howard expressed amazement that the false item had caused such a furor but admitted he had made up and dictated the story.

The next day, a police officer brought in Mallison, who confessed to taking dictation of the item from Howard and hiring a runner to deliver the fake stories to newspapers around the city.

By this time, New York’s other newspapers had begun editorializing about Lincoln’s closing the Journal of Commerce and the World. Military officials released the papers’ editors and publishers on May 21, a Saturday. They immediately began working on Sunday editions.

Howard and Mallison were sent to a federal prison at Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor, where they were held without an indictment or a trial.

Howard’s father begged Lincoln for the release of his son, which the president granted on Aug. 22. Howard then wrote Lincoln himself, asking for Mallison’s freedom. Lincoln obliged on Sept. 23.

Neither Howard nor Mallison or their publishers or newspapers were ever charged with a crime.

Mallison was welcomed back to the Eagle. He was promoted to city editor, quit to serve in the New York State Assembly and then worked as a political correspondent. He died of jaundice in 1877 at age 45.

Howard went on to even greater things: He worked for the New York Times, the New York Star, the New York Sun and the New York Herald.

Howard wrote a column on politics that was widely distributed throughout the country and not only founded the New York Press Club but also served four times as its president. He died of kidney failure in 1908 at age 74.

The Aftermath

The fake news story, the blip in the stock market and in gold prices and Lincoln’s ill-advised — especially in an election year — crackdown on New York newspapers all happened during the Civil War.

The South was slowly wearing down, but it was costing the Union Army manpower. Which is why a call by the president for more troops was so believable.

Sure enough on July 19 — two months after the gold hoax and while its perpetrators were still in prison — the president indeed issued a call for 500,000 more men ... 100,000 more than the hoax had said.

One must wonder what went through the heads of newspaper editors when they were handed news of this callup.

he entire episode is rather baffling. But investigative reporter Elizabeth Mitchell — former executive editor of George, a political magazine, and author of “Lincoln’s Lie: A True Civil War Caper Through Fake News, Wall Street and the White House” — suggests there is even more to this story:

First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln spent freely, Mitchell writes, and had run up enormous debts — debts of which her husband was not aware.

She had worked with a number of “mysterious” people to try to settle those debts before the 1864 election.

In April 1864, Mary Todd had met with a Republican official in New York.

Howard was a Republican and was well known in Republican circles in New York City.

And, perhaps, most telling... Lincoln had — on May 17, in fact — drawn up an initial statement calling for 500,000 more men to fight in the war. But then he chose not to release it. When he was told about the news stories, Lincoln first checked to see if someone had erroneously sent his dispatch to telegraph offices.

This edition of Further Review was adapted for the web by Zak Curley .

Real Civil Wars Are Much Worse Than ‘Civil War.' So Is Covering Them

S ince its debut in mid-April, Alex Garland's movie, "Civil War," has become a box office smash , while also triggering an enormous amount of interest and commentary among political scientists. The film is an ear-splitting, grisly portrayal of life in the U.S. countryside as a civil war roils the country. Seen through the eyes of a team of Reuters reporters and photojournalists bent on capturing an interview with the soon-to-be deposed U.S. president, the film is less about war and more about war journalists and the events they cover.

As such, the film has been both hailed for its realism and criticized for its muddled political messaging. Both views contain assumptions about how a U.S. civil war might unfold, acknowledging some facts but missing others. They also mostly focus on the film's "political realism" or lack thereof and ignore what it teaches audiences about the role of the media as both observers and participants in conflicts. Here are some things the film gets right and wrong about civil wars and war reporting, based on political science.

First, several commentators have noted the accurate, if caricatured, representation of war journalists as simultaneously traumatized veterans and thrill-seekers. The film captures the tension between these journalists' reckless, adrenaline-fueled camaraderie and deep moral professionalism. But more deeply, it portrays a characteristic of civil wars that Chris Hedges captures in his book, "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning": the notion that living through terrifying circumstances makes people feel alive and connected to one another.

Second, to the extent that Jordan Hoffman is right that the film's lack of clarity on the political context creates a confusion similar to what most Americans might experience watching a movie about civil wars in Syria or Sudan , for example: That's the point. As Dan Drezner notes , one strength of the film's portrayal of the random, senseless, apolitical face of civil wars is how this maps onto the reality of such conflicts. According to political scientist Stathis Kalyvas, violence in civil wars is often random and localized, having less to do with the big political picture than with simmering provincial grievances and local actors seizing the opportunity to settle scores. 

But far from being more grimly realistic in this regard than one might expect, if anything the film provides a far too sanitized version of how such a war might start or might look as it unfolds. In today's world, civil wars are rarely fought between government forces and a single, unified rebel army camped out neatly in fields, as portrayed here. Rather, they often involve the creation of and exploitation of power vacuums that trigger security dilemmas among communities, which then resort to tribal forms of self-protection and self-sorting in order to secure their lives, families and resources.

Barbara Walter, a political scientist and author of "How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them," argues that a second U.S. civil war would look nothing like the first one: Secessionist sentiment in the U.S. is pocketed and dispersed and could not oppose the federal government's military. Instead, violence might begin with numerous terrorist attacks followed by finger-pointing at scapegoats and minorities, causing communities to turn on one another not out of hate, but out of fear. As she writes , "The combatants will not gather in fields nor wear uniforms. They will create chaos and fear and force Americans to pick sides." 

If "Civil War" was meant to be a realistic commentary about both civil wars and media coverage of them, it didn't work perfectly as a film about either. But it might serve as a counterpoint to the politicization of civil war narratives in U.S. society.

Zack Beauchamp at Vox reminds us that it's precisely this logic, and not ideology or identity per se, that usually drives civilians into factionalized camps in wars. As political scientist John Mueller wrote of the civil wars in Rwanda and Bosnia, such side-picking generally involves ethnic or factional cleansing of sorts, not by spreading, fueling or tapping into hate but simply by fostering situations where it is more rational on an individual level to look the other way than to defend a neighbor, or where local militias become the authorities most trusted to defend civilians and are therefore easily mobilized with impunity against untrusted "others."

These dynamics generally create massive internal displacement and sexual as well as physical violence. Blocked interstates and supply chain bottlenecks would intensify deprivation, desperation and resource disputes. As such, the empty roadways and absence of images of internally displaced persons, starvation and widespread targeting or manipulation of civilians by combatants on either side-particularly as the film's journalist protagonists approached major urban areas-seemed noteworthy in this film. The picture painted is of a largely empty and tranquil countryside where the experience of civil war is as a story of far-off events that have yet to touch the everyday lives of rural and even urban inhabitants-a conflict that has started relatively recently and will be over relatively quickly. This belies the actual statistics of civil wars, which tend to drag on for years or decades once they begin, resulting in bombed out civilian centers, drone-filled skies and cross-border refugee crises.

The movie also pays scant attention to how civilians and communities in civil wars resist violence and factionalization. The images of one small town that refuses to be drawn into the fray are intriguing, until we see that this "pocket of peace" is being enforced at gunpoint. In reality, armed groups in civil wars generally enforce factionalization. Peace breaks out where communities come together nonviolently-as certain neighborhoods did in Baghdad and as women's groups have done in Israel and Palestine-to develop structures resilient to armed violence. For example, in her book, "The Frontlines of Peace , "Severine Autesserre documents how ordinary citizens can often hold violence at bay through micro-acts of resistance to the forces of entropy, creating informal connections across divides. In reality, Americans have intercommunal solidarity and support ingrained in their collective psyche as much as rugged individualism. But if such dynamics explain the relative bloodlessness of the war portrayed in Garland's film, the micro-efforts Autesserre describes appear nowhere in its story.

But perhaps that is because the story isn't about the dynamics of war and peace so much as about the journalists who are its protagonists. And it is clear the story is about war journalists, who run toward violence and sensational moments of conflict rather than peace journalists who would gravitate toward and highlight equally extraordinary but mundane moments of courage, solidarity across factional lines and resistance to war narratives. As such, the scenes where this Reuters team is confused and disoriented by peaceful communities ring true: They would not have chosen to remain in such a location, because the story available there was not the one they were chasing.

Instead, the impetus to cover the bloodshed as a form of moral intervention itself seems to be the crux of the story at the heart of "Civil War." This is an accurate portrayal of one ethic of photojournalism, if an exaggerated one. Yet David Sims is right to ask in his review of the movie whether, in such extreme circumstances, it makes sense for the film's protagonists "to not intervene when they come across human misery?" And as Charles Pulliam-Moore points out , "the film never seems interested in pondering what it means to take a ‘good' photo of war or what is being celebrated when we award journalists for capturing images of people in their most desperate moments."

A bigger problem, less explored here, is how that particular ethic gets balanced with other journalistic standards like accuracy and independence-and the dilemmas these pose for access in conflict zones. For example, in real life, journalists have much less room for unfettered maneuver among conflict actors. While some journalists do embed in small units-the documentary, "Restrepo," is one such example-this is normally the result of extensive negotiations with the militaries involved. Fighters engaged in combat are not likely to take kindly to war journalists showing up on a dime, cluttering up their battlespaces-and potentially recording war crimes to boot.

What that means is that such arrangements are often negotiated through information warfare specialists working for the political wing of armed groups or besieged governments, which, as sociologist Robin Vandevoordt's study on war reporting in Syria has shown , normally aim to circumscribe which journalists go where, what they see and what they report. Thus Garland's images of journalists throwing themselves into firefights, cameras in hand, with no prior coordination with the armed actors in question strains the suspension of disbelief.

Nor would most employees of global media organizations in a conflict zone maraud alone through the countryside hoping to get lucky in the first place. Rather they would be working with or trying to make their way to their local counterparts , contacted in advance and possessed of sources, safe houses and transportation in order to avoid being forced to rely on conflict actors-especially the opposition-for help reaching their desired interviewees. That's because the top moral imperatives for war reporters are actually not to "record so others ask," as one of the movie's main characters puts it, but rather to "seek truth" and "act independently." Since this precludes serving purely as propaganda tools, a realistic portrayal would include the tradeoffs global media organizations like Reuters must make, weighing the risks of cooptation against the benefits of gaining access.

Another imperative for war journalists is to "minimize harm," including to their team . Thus, if they somehow got embedded in a firefight along the way, real-world journalists would certainly wear helmets and body armor. They would discuss escape plans. They would not drag rookie teenagers along into the fray. They would not rely on the protection of random fighters. And while technically protected under the Geneva Conventions, veteran war correspondents would know that they'd be unlikely to walk away from the scene of mass graves being filled, or random murders being carried out, with their cameras, regardless of nationality. In real life, war journalists are killed or disappeared for much less.

Perhaps most importantly, because the Society of Professional Journalists' code of ethics teaches that the imperative of "record don't intervene" has limits , they would put down their cameras in moments where they had the ability to save a life and no one else could, for example with a drowning child or a burning soldier. Certainly when necessity demanded, they would pull a colleague out of danger rather than position their camera for a kill shot.

If Garland's film was meant to be a realistic commentary about both civil war and media, it didn't work perfectly as a film about either. But as a work of media itself, in a country whose political environment, according to many political scientists, is ripe for civil war, the fact that so many thrill-seeking movie-goers were unpleasantly surprised and even shocked might serve as a counterpoint to the glorification and politicization of civil war narratives in U.S. society. And perhaps that, at least, is a good thing.

Charli Carpenter is a professor of political science and legal studies at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, specializing in human security and international law. She tweets at  @charlicarpenter .

The post Real Civil Wars Are Much Worse Than ‘Civil War.' So Is Covering Them appeared first on World Politics Review .

Home — Essay Samples — History — Civil War — Causes of the Civil War

Causes of The Civil War

• Categories: Civil War

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Published: Jan 30, 2024

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Table of contents

Economic factors, political factors, social factors, the role of leadership.

• McPherson, J. M. (1988). Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press.
• Goldfield, D. R. (2005). America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation. Bloomsbury Press.

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Slavery and the Civil War Essay

Theme essays. diversity, extra credit option. reconstruction, works cited.

During the period of 1820-1860, the life of white and black people in the South depended on developing the Institute of slavery which shaped not only social but also economic life of the region. The Institute of slavery was primarily for the Southern states, and this feature helped to distinguish the South from the other regions of the USA.

Slavery played the key role in shaping the economic and social life of the South because it influenced the trade and economic relations in the region as well as the social and class structure representing slave owners, white farmers without slaves, and slaves as the main labor force in the region.

The development of the South during the period of 1820-1860 was based on growing cotton intensively. To guarantee the enormous exports of cotton, it was necessary to rely on slaves as the main cheap or almost free workforce. The farmers of the South grew different crops, but the economic success was associated with the farms of those planters who lived in the regions with fertile soil and focused on growing cotton basing on slavery.

Thus, the prosperity of this or that white farmer and planter depended on using slaves in his farm or plantation. Slaves working for planters took the lowest social positions as well as free slaves living in cities whose economic situation was also problematic. The white population of the South was divided into slave owners and yeoman farmers who had no slaves.

Thus, having no opportunities to use the advantages of slavery, yeoman farmers relied on their families’ powers, and they were poorer in comparison with planters (Picture 1). However, not all the planters were equally successful in their economic situation. Many planters owned only a few slaves, and they also had to work at their plantations or perform definite duties.

Slaves were also different in their status because of the functions performed. From this point, the social stratification was necessary not only for dividing the Southern population into black slaves and white owners but also to demonstrate the differences within these two main classes (Davidson et al.).

As a result, different social classes had various cultures. It is important to note that slaves were more common features in spite of their status in families, and they were united regarding the culture which was reflected in their religion, vision, and songs. The difference in the social status of the white population was more obvious, and the single common feature was the prejudice and discrimination against slaves.

Picture 1. Yeoman Farmer’s House

The Civil War became the real challenge for the USA because it changed all the structures and institutions of the country reforming the aspects of the political, economic, and social life. Furthermore, the Civil War brought significant losses and sufferings for both the representatives of the Northern and Southern armies.

It is important to note that the situation of the Union in the war was more advantageous in comparison with the position of the Confederacy during the prolonged period of the war actions.

As a result, the South suffered from more significant economic and social changes as well as from extreme losses in the war in comparison with the North’s costs. Thus, the main impact of the Civil War was the abolition of slavery which changed the economic and social structures of the South and contributed to shifting the focus on the role of federal government.

The Civil War resulted in abolishing slavery and preserving the political unity of the country. Nevertheless, these positive outcomes were achieved at the expense of significant losses in the number of population and in promoting more sufferings for ordinary people. A lot of the Confederacy’s soldiers died at the battlefields, suffering from extreme wounds and the lack of food because of the problems with weapon and food provision.

During the war, the Union focused on abolishing slaves who were proclaimed free. Thus, former slaves from the Southern states were inclined to find jobs in the North or join the Union army.

As a result, the army of the Confederacy also began to suffer from the lack of forces (Davidson et al.). Moreover, the situation was problematic off the battlefield because all the issues of food provision and work at plantations and farms challenged women living in the Southern states.

The forces of the Union army were more balanced, and their losses were less significant than in the Southern states. Furthermore, the end of the war did not change the structure of the social life in the North significantly. The impact of the war was more important for the Southerners who had to build their economic and social life without references to slavery.

The next important change was the alternations in the social role of women. Many women had to work at farms in the South and to perform as nurses in the North (Picture 2). The vision of the women’s role in the society was changed in a way.

However, in spite of the fact that the population of the South had to rebuild the social structure and adapt to the new social and economic realities, the whole economic situation was changed for better with references to intensifying the international trade. Furthermore, the abolishment of slavery was oriented to the social and democratic progress in the country.

Picture 2. “Our Women and the War”. Harper’s Weekly, 1862

Diversity is one of the main characteristic features of the American nation from the early periods of its formation. The American nation cannot be discussed as a stable one because the formation of the nation depends on the active migration processes intensifying the general diversity. As a result, the American nation is characterized by the richness of cultures, values, and lifestyles.

This richness is also typical for the early period of the American history when the country’s population was diverse in relation to ethnicity, cultures, religion, and social status. From this point, diversity directly shaped the American nation because the country’s population never was identical.

The Americans respected diversity if the question was associated with the problem of first migrations and the Americans’ difference from the English population. To win independence, it was necessary to admit the difference from the English people, but diversity was also the trigger for conflicts between the Americans, Englishmen, and Frenchmen as well as Indian tribes.

The ethic diversity was not respected by the first Americans. The further importations of slaves to America worsened the situation, and ethnic diversity increased, involving cultural and social diversity.

Diversity was respected only with references to the negative consequences of slave importation. Thus, the Southerners focused on using black slaves for development of their plantations (Davidson et al.). From this point, white planers concentrated on the difference of blacks and used it for discrimination.

Furthermore, slavery also provoked the cultural and lifestyle diversity between the South and the North of the country which resulted in the Civil War because of impossibility to share different values typical for the Southerners and Northerners. Moreover, the diversity in lifestyles of the Southerners was deeper because it depended on the fact of having or not slaves.

Great religious diversity was also typical for the nation. White population followed different branches of Christianity relating to their roots, and black people developed their own religious movements contributing to diversifying the religious life of the Americans (Davidson et al.).

Thus, the aspects of diversity are reflected in each sphere of the first Americans’ life with references to differences in ethnicities, followed religions, cultures, values, lifestyles, and social patterns. This diversity also provoked a lot of conflicts in the history of the nation.

The role of women in the American society changed depending on the most important political and social changes. The periods of reforms and transformations also promoted the changes in the social positions of women. The most notable changes are typical for the period of the Jacksonian era and for the Civil War period.

The changes in the role of women are closely connected with the development of women’s movements during the 1850s and with the focus on women’s powers off the battlefield during the Civil War period.

During the Jacksonian era, women began to play significant roles in the religious and social life of the country. Having rather limited rights, women could realize their potentials only in relation to families and church work. That is why, many women paid much attention to their church duties and responsibilities.

Later, the church work was expanded, and women began to organize special religious groups in order to contribute to reforming definite aspects of the Church’s progress. Women also were the main members of the prayer meetings, and much attention was drawn to the charity activities and assistance to hospitals (Davidson et al.).

Women also played the significant role in the development of revivalism as the characteristic feature of the period. Moreover, the active church work and the focus on forming organizations was the first step to the progress of the women’s rights movements.

It is important to note that the participation of women in the social life was rather limited during a long period of time that is why membership and belonging to different church organizations as well as development of women’s rights movements contributed to increasing the role of women within the society. Proclaiming the necessity of abolishment, socially active women also concentrated on the idea of suffrage which was achieved later.

The period of the 1850s is closely connected with the growth of the women’s rights movements because it was the period of stating to the democratic rights and freedoms within the society (Davidson et al.). The next important event is the Civil War. The war influenced the position of the Southern white and black women significantly, revealing their powers and ability to overcome a lot of challenges.

The end of the Civil War provided women with the opportunity to achieve all the proclaimed ideals of the women’s rights movements along with changing the position of male and female slaves in the American society.

The development of the American nation is based on pursuing certain ideals and following definite values. The main values which are greatly important for the Americans are associated with the notions which had the significant meaning during the periods of migration and creating the independent state. The two main values are opportunity and equality.

These values are also fixed in the Constitution of the country in order to emphasize their extreme meaning for the whole nation.

Opportunity and equality are the values which are shaped with references to the economic and social ideals because all the Americans are equal, and each American should have the opportunity to achieve the individual goal. Nevertheless, in spite of the proclaimed ideals, the above-mentioned values were discussed during a long period of time only with references to the white population of the country.

The other values typical for the Americans are also based not on the religious, moral or cultural ideals but on the social aspects. During the Jacksonian era, the Americans focused on such values as the democratic society. Following the ideals of rights and freedoms, the American population intended to realize them completely within the developed democratic society (Davidson et al.).

Moreover, these ideals were correlated with such values as equality and opportunity. It is necessary to pay attention to the fact that for many Americans the notions of democratic society, opportunity, and equality were directly connected with the economic growth. That is why, during long periods of time Americans concentrated on achieving freedoms along with pursuing the economic prosperity.

Thus, it is possible to determine such key values which regulate the social attitudes and inclinations of the Americans as equality and opportunity, freedoms and rights. In spite of the fact the USA was the country with the determined role of religion in the society, moral and religious aspects were not proclaimed as the basic values of the nation because of the prolonged focus of the Americans on their independence and prosperity.

From this point, opportunity, equality, freedoms, and rights are discussed as more significant values for the developed nation than the religious principles. The creation of the state independent from the influence of the British Empire resulted in determining the associated values and ideals which were pursued by the Americans during prolonged periods of the nation’s development.

The period of Reconstruction was oriented to adapting African Americans to the realities of the free social life and to rebuilding the economic structure of the South. The end of the Civil War guaranteed the abolishment of slavery, but the question of black people’s equality to the whites was rather controversial.

That is why, the period of Reconstruction was rather complex and had two opposite outcomes for the African Americans’ further life in the society and for the general economic progress of the states. Reconstruction was successful in providing such opportunities for African Americans as education and a choice to live in any region or to select the employer.

However, Reconstruction can also be discussed as a failure because the issues of racism were not overcome during the period, and the era of slavery was changed with the era of strict social segregation leading to significant discrimination of black people.

The positive changes in the life of African Americans after the Civil War were connected with receiving more opportunities for the social progress. Thus, many public schools were opened for the black population in order to increase the level of literacy (Picture 3). Furthermore, the impossibility to support the Southerners’ plantations without the free work of slaves led to changing the economic focus.

Thus, industrialization of the region could contribute to creating more workplaces for African Americans (Davidson et al.). Moreover, the racial and social equality should also be supported with references to providing more political rights for African Americans.

Reconstruction was the period of observing many black politicians at the American political arena. The question of blacks’ suffrage became one of the most discussed issues. From this point, during the period of Reconstruction African Americans did first steps on the path of equality.

Nevertheless, Reconstruction was also a great failure. The South remained unchanged in relation to the social relations between the whites and blacks. After the Civil War, segregation was intensified. The economic and social pressure as well as discrimination against the blacks was based on the developed concept of racism (Davidson et al.).

The Southerners preserved the prejudiced attitude toward the blacks, and prejudice and discrimination became the main challenge for African Americans in all the spheres of the life.

In spite of definite successes of Reconstruction, African Americans suffered from the results of segregation and discrimination, and they were prevented from changing their economic and social status.

Picture 3. Public Schools

Davidson, James, Brian DeLay, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Mark Lytle, and Michael Stoff. US: A Narrative History . USA: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Print.

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1. IvyPanda . "Slavery and the Civil War." March 15, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-civil-war/.

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IvyPanda . "Slavery and the Civil War." March 15, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-and-the-civil-war/.

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How Biden Adopted Trump’s Trade War With China

The president has proposed new barriers to electric vehicles, steel and other goods..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise, and this is “The Daily.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Donald Trump upended decades of American policy when he started a trade war with China. Many thought that President Biden would reverse those policies. Instead, he’s stepping them up. Today, my colleague, Jim Tankersley, explains.

It’s Monday, May 13.

Jim, it’s very nice to have you in the studio.

It’s so great to be here, Sabrina. Thank you so much.

So we are going to talk today about something I find very interesting and I know you’ve been following. We’re in the middle of a presidential campaign. You are an economics reporter looking at these two candidates, and you’ve been trying to understand how Trump and Biden are thinking about our number one economic rival, and that is China.

As we know, Trump has been very loud and very clear about his views on China. What about Biden?

Well, no one is going to accuse President Biden of being as loud as former President Trump. But I think he’s actually been fairly clear in a way that might surprise a lot of people about how he sees economic competition with China.

We’re going after China in the wrong way. China is stealing intellectual property. China is conditioning —

And Biden has, kind of surprisingly, sounded a lot, in his own Joe Biden way, like Trump.

They’re not competing. They’re cheating. They’re cheating. And we’ve seen the damage here in America.

He has been very clear that he thinks China is cheating in trade.

The bottom line is I want fair competition with China, not conflict. And we’re in a stronger position to win the economic competition of the 21st century against China or anyone else because we’re investing in America and American workers again. Finally.

And maybe the most surprising thing from a policy perspective is just how much Biden has built on top of the anti-China moves that Trump made and really is the verge of his own sort of trade war with China.

Interesting. So remind us, Jim, what did Trump do when he actually came into office? We, of course, remember Trump really talking about China and banging that drum hard during the campaign, but remind us what he actually did when he came into office.

Yeah, it’s really instructive to start with the campaign, because Trump is talking about China in some very specific ways.

We have a $500 billion deficit, trade deficit, with China. We’re going to turn it around. And we have the cards. Don’t forget —

They’re ripping us off. They’re stealing our jobs.

They’re using our country as a piggy bank to rebuild China, and many other countries are doing the same thing. So we’re losing our good jobs, so many.

The economic context here is the United States has lost a couple of million jobs in what was called the China shock of the early 2000s. And Trump is tapping into that.

But when the Chinese come in, and they want to make great trade deals — and they make the best trade deals, and not anymore. When I’m there, we turn it around, folks. We turn it around. We have —

And what he’s promising as president is that he’s going to bring those jobs back.

I’ll be the greatest jobs president that God ever created. I’ll take them back from China, from Japan.

And not just any jobs, good-paying manufacturing jobs, all of it — clothes, shoes, steel, all of these jobs that have been lost that American workers, particularly in the industrial Midwest, used to do. Trump’s going to bring them back with policy meant to rebalance the trade relationship with China to get a better deal with China.

So he’s saying China is eating our lunch and has been for decades. That’s the reason why factory workers in rural North Carolina don’t have work. It’s those guys. And I’m going to change that.

Right. And he likes to say it’s because our leaders didn’t cut the right deal with them, so I’m going to make a better deal. And to get a better deal, you need leverage. So a year into his presidency, he starts taking steps to amass leverage with China.

And so what does that look like?

Just an hour ago, surrounded by a hand-picked group of steelworkers, President Trump revealed he was not bluffing.

It starts with tariffs. Tariffs are taxes that the government imposes on imports.

Two key global imports into America now face a major new barrier.

Today, I’m defending America’s national security by placing tariffs on foreign imports of steel and aluminum.

And in this case, it’s imports from a lot of different countries, but particularly China.

Let’s take it straight to the White House. The president of the United States announcing new trade tariffs against China. Let’s listen in.

This has been long in the making. You’ve heard —

So Trump starts, in 2018, this series of tariffs that he’s imposing on all sorts of things — washing machines, solar panels, steel, aluminum. I went to Delaware to a lighting store at that time, I remember, where basically everything they sold came from China and was subject to the Trump tariffs, because that’s where lighting was made now.

Interesting.

Hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods now start falling under these Trump tariffs. The Chinese, of course, don’t take this lying down.

China says it is not afraid of a trade war with the US, and it’s fighting back against President Trump with its own tariffs on US goods.

They do their own retaliatory tariffs. Now American exports to China cost more for Chinese consumers. And boom, all of a sudden, we are in the midst of a full-blown trade war between the United States and Beijing.

Right. And that trade war was kind of a shock because for decades, politicians had avoided that kind of policy. It was the consensus of the political class in the United States that there should not be tariffs like that. It should be free trade. And Trump just came in and blew up the consensus.

Yeah. And Sabrina, I may have mentioned this once or 700 times before on this program, but I talk to a lot of economists in my job.

Yeah, it’s weird. I talk to a lot of economists. And in 2018 when this started, there were very, very, very few economists of any political persuasion who thought that imposing all these tariffs were a good idea. Republican economists in particular, this is antithetical to how they think about the world, which is low taxes, free trade. And even Democratic economists who thought they had some problems with the way free trade had been conducted did not think that Trump’s “I’m going to get a better deal” approach was going to work. And so there was a lot of criticism at the time, and a lot of politicians really didn’t like it, a lot of Democrats, many Republicans. And it all added up to just a real, whoa, I don’t think this is going to work.

So that begs the question, did it?

Well, it depends on what you mean by work. Economically, it does not appear to have achieved what Trump wanted. There’s no evidence yet in the best economic research that’s been done on this that enormous amounts of manufacturing jobs came back to the United States because of Trump’s tariffs. There was research, for example, on the tariffs on washing machines. They appear to have helped a couple thousand jobs, manufacturing jobs be created in the United States, but they also raised the price of washing machines for everybody who bought them by enough that each additional job that was created by those tariffs effectively cost consumers, like, $800,000 per job.

There’s like lots of evidence that the sectors Trump was targeting to try to help here, he didn’t. There just wasn’t a lot of employment rebound to the United States. But politically, it really worked. The tariffs were very popular. They had this effect of showing voters in those hollowed-out manufacturing areas that Trump was on their team and that he was fighting for them. Even if they didn’t see the jobs coming back, they felt like he was standing up for them.

So the research suggests this was a savvy political move by Trump. And in the process, it sort of changes the political economic landscape in both parties in the United States.

Right. So Trump made these policies that seemed, for many, many years in the American political system, fringe, isolationist, economically bad, suddenly quite palatable and even desirable to mainstream policymakers.

Yeah. Suddenly getting tough on China is something everyone wants to do across both parties. And so from a political messaging standpoint, being tough on China is now where the mainstream is. But at the same time, there is still big disagreement over whether Trump is getting tough on China in the right way, whether he’s actually being effective at changing the trade relationship with China.

Remember that Trump was imposing these tariffs as a way to get leverage for a better deal with China. Well, he gets a deal of sorts, actually, with the Chinese government, which includes some things about tariffs, and also China agreeing to buy some products from the United States. Trump spins it as this huge win, but nobody else really, including Republicans, acts like Trump has solved the problem that Trump himself has identified. This deal is not enough to make everybody go, well, everything’s great with China now. We can move on to the next thing.

China remains this huge issue. And the question of what is the most effective way to deal with them is still an animating force in politics.

Got it. So politically, huge win, but policy-wise and economically, and fundamentally, the problem of China still very much unresolved.

Absolutely.

So then Biden comes in. What does Biden do? Does he keep the tariffs on?

Biden comes to office, and there remains this real pressure from economists to roll back what they consider to be the ineffective parts of Trump’s trade policy. That includes many of the tariffs. And it’s especially true at a time when almost immediately after Biden takes office, inflation spikes. And so Americans are paying a lot of money for products, and there’s this pressure on Biden, including from inside his administration, to roll back some of the China tariffs to give Americans some relief on prices.

And Biden considers this, but he doesn’t do it. He doesn’t reverse Trump’s tariff policy. In the end, he’s actually building on it.

We’ll be right back.

So Jim, you said that Biden is actually building on Trump’s anti-China policy. What exactly does that look like?

So Biden builds on the Trump China policy in three key ways, but he does it with a really specific goal that I just want you to keep in mind as we talk about all of this, which is that Biden isn’t just trying to beat China on everything. He’s not trying to cut a better deal. Biden is trying to beat China in a specific race to own the clean-energy future.

Clean energy.

Yeah. So keep that in mind, clean energy. And the animating force behind all of the things Biden does with China is that Biden wants to beat China on what he thinks are the jobs of the future, and that’s green technology.

Got it. OK. So what does he do first?

OK. Thing number one — let’s talk about the tariffs. He does not roll them back. And actually, he builds on them. For years, for the most part, he just lets the tariffs be. His administration reviews them. And it’s only now, this week, when his administration is going to actually act on the tariffs. And what they’re going to do is raise some of them. They’re going to raise them on strategic green tech things, like electric vehicles, in order to make them more expensive.

And I think it’s important to know the backdrop here, which is since Biden has taken office, China has started flooding global markets with really low-cost green technologies. Solar panels, electric vehicles are the two really big ones. And Biden’s aides are terrified that those imports are going to wash over the United States and basically wipe out American automakers, solar panel manufacturers, that essentially, if Americans can just buy super-cheap stuff from China, they’re not going to buy it from American factories. Those factories are going to go out of business.

So Biden’s goal of manufacturing jobs in clean energy, China is really threatening that by dumping all these products on the American market.

Exactly. And so what he wants to do is protect those factories with tariffs. And that means increasing the tariffs that Trump put on electric vehicles in hopes that American consumers will find them too expensive to buy.

But doesn’t that go against Biden’s goal of clean energy and things better for the environment? Lots of mass-market electric vehicles into the United States would seem to advance that goal. And here, he’s saying, no, you can’t come in.

Right, because Biden isn’t just trying to reduce emissions at all costs. He wants to reduce emissions while boosting American manufacturing jobs. He doesn’t want China to get a monopoly in these areas. And he’s also, in particular, worried about the politics of lost American manufacturing jobs. So Biden does not want to just let you buy cheaper Chinese technologies, even if that means reducing emissions.

He wants to boost American manufacturing of those things to compete with China, which brings us to our second thing that Biden has done to build on Trump’s China policy, which is that Biden has started to act like the Chinese government in particular areas by showering American manufacturers with subsidies.

I see. So dumping government money into American businesses.

Yes, tax incentives, direct grants. This is a way that China has, in the past decades, built its manufacturing dominance, is with state support for factories. Biden is trying to do that in particular targeted industries, including electric vehicles, solar power, wind power, semiconductors. Biden has passed a bunch of legislation that showers those sectors with incentives and government support in hopes of growing up much faster American industry.

Got it. So basically, Biden is trying to beat China at its own game.

Yeah, he’s essentially using tariffs to build a fortress around American industry so that he can train the troops to fight the clean energy battle with China.

And the troops being American companies.

Yes. It’s like, we’re going to give them protection — protectionist policy — in order to get up to size, get up to strength as an army in this battle for clean energy dominance against the Chinese.

Got it. So he’s trying to build up the fortress. What’s the third thing Biden does? You mentioned three things.

Biden does not want the United States going it alone against China. He’s trying to build an international coalition, wealthy countries and some other emerging countries that are going to take on China and try to stop the Chinese from using their trade playbook to take over all these new emerging industrial markets.

But, Jim, why? What does the US get from bringing our allies into this trade war? Why does the US want that?

Some of this really is about stopping China from gaining access to new markets. It’s like, if you put the low-cost Chinese exports on a boat, and it’s going around the world, looking for a dock to stop and offload the stuff and sell it, Biden wants barriers up at every possible port. And he wants factories in those places that are competing with the Chinese.

And a crucial fact to know here is that the United States and Europe, they are behind China when it comes to clean-energy technology. The Chinese government has invested a lot more than America and Europe in building up its industrial capacity for clean energy. So America and its allies want to deny China dominance of those markets and to build up their own access to them.

And they’re behind, so they’ve got to get going. It’s like they’re in a race, and they’re trailing.

Yeah, it’s an economic race to own these industries, and it’s that global emissions race. They also want to be bringing down fossil-fuel emissions faster than they currently are, and this is their plan.

So I guess, Jim, the question in my mind is, Trump effectively broke the seal, right? He started all of these tariffs. He started this trade war with China. But he did it in this kind of jackhammer, non-targeted way, and it didn’t really work economically. Now Biden is taking it a step further. But the question is, is his effort here going to work?

The answer to whether it’s going to work really depends on what your goals are. And Biden and Trump have very different goals. If Trump wins the White House back, he has made very clear that his goal is to try to rip the United States trade relationship with China even more than he already has. He just wants less trade with China and more stuff of all types made in the United States that used to be made in China. That’s a very difficult goal, but it’s not Biden’s goal.

Biden’s goal is that he wants America to make more stuff in these targeted industries. And there is real skepticism from free-market economists that his industrial policies will work on that, but there’s a lot of enthusiasm for it from a new strain of Democratic economists, in particular, who believe that the only chance Biden has to make that work is by pulling all of these levers, by doing the big subsidies and by putting up the tariffs, that you have to have both the troops training and the wall around them. And if it’s going to work, he has to build on the Trump policies. And so I guess you’re asking, will it work? It may be dependent upon just how far he’s willing to go on the subsidies and the barriers.

There’s a chance of it.

So, Jim, at the highest level, whatever the economic outcome here, it strikes me that these moves by Biden are pretty remarkably different from the policies of the Democratic Party over the decades, really going in the opposite direction. I’m thinking of Bill Clinton and NAFTA in the 1990s. Free trade was the real central mantra of the Democratic Party, really of both parties.

Yeah, and Biden is a real break from Clinton. And Clinton was the one who actually signed the law that really opened up trade with China, and Biden’s a break from that. He’s a break from even President Obama when he was vice president. Biden is doing something different. He’s breaking from that Democratic tradition, and he’s building on what Trump did, but with some throwback elements to it from the Roosevelt administration and the Eisenhower administration. This is this grand American tradition of industrial policy that gave us the space race and the interstate highway system. It’s the idea of using the power of the federal government to build up specific industrial capacities. It was in vogue for a time. It fell out of fashion and was replaced by this idea that the government should get out of the way, and you let the free market drive innovation. And now that industrial policy idea is back in vogue, and Biden is doing it.

So it isn’t just a shift or an evolution. It’s actually a return to big government spending of the ‘30s and the ‘40s and the ‘50s of American industrialism of that era. So what goes around comes around.

Yeah, and it’s a return to that older economic theory with new elements. And it’s in part because of the almost jealousy that American policymakers have of China and the success that it’s had building up its own industrial base. But it also has this political element to it. It’s, in part, animated by the success that Trump had making China an issue with working-class American voters.

You didn’t have to lose your job to China to feel like China was a stand-in for the forces that have taken away good-paying middle-class jobs from American workers who expected those jobs to be there. And so Trump tapped into that. And Biden is trying to tap into that. And the political incentives are pushing every future American president to do more of that. So I think we are going to see even more of this going forward, and that’s why we’re in such an interesting moment right now.

So we’re going to see more fortresses.

More fortresses, more troops, more money.

Jim, thank you.

You’re welcome.

Here’s what else you should know today. Intense fighting between Hamas fighters and Israeli troops raged in parts of Northern Gaza over the weekend, an area where Israel had declared Hamas defeated earlier in the war, only to see the group reconstitute in the power vacuum that was left behind. The persistent lawlessness raised concerns about the future of Gaza among American officials. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the return of Hamas to the North left him concerned that Israeli victories there would be, quote, “not sustainable,” and said that Israel had not presented the United States with any plan for when the war ends.

And the United Nations aid agency in Gaza said early on Sunday that about 300,000 people had fled from Rafah over the past week, the city in the enclave’s southernmost tip where more than a million displaced Gazans had sought shelter from Israeli bombardments elsewhere. The UN made the announcement hours after the Israeli government issued new evacuation orders in Rafah, deepening fears that the Israeli military was preparing to invade the city despite international warnings.

Today’s episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Carlos Prieto, Sidney Harper, and Luke Vander Ploeg. It was edited by M.J. Davis Lin, Brendan Klinkenberg, and Lisa Chow. Contains original music by Diane Wong, Marion Lozano, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you tomorrow.

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Hosted by Sabrina Tavernise

Produced by Nina Feldman ,  Carlos Prieto ,  Sydney Harper and Luke Vander Ploeg

Edited by M.J. Davis Lin ,  Brendan Klinkenberg and Lisa Chow

Original music by Diane Wong ,  Marion Lozano and Dan Powell

Engineered by Alyssa Moxley

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Donald Trump upended decades of American policy when he started a trade war with China. Many thought that President Biden would reverse those policies. Instead, he’s stepping them up.

Jim Tankersley, who covers economic policy at the White House, explains.

On today’s episode

Jim Tankersley , who covers economic policy at the White House for The New York Times.

Background reading

Mr. Biden, competing with Mr. Trump to be tough on China , called for steel tariffs last month.

The Biden administration may raise tariffs on electric vehicles from China to 100 percent .

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Andrew Tate served with UK civil proceedings papers at Romania home

Influencer served legal papers in relation to allegations of rape and sexual assault made by four British women

Andrew Tate has been served with civil proceedings papers at his home in Romania in relation to allegations of rape and sexual assault made by four British women.

Lawyers representing the women said the alleged victims were bringing a case against the self-professed “ misogynist influencer ” at the high court in the UK, after the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decided not to prosecute him in 2019.

McCue Jury and Partners said the women alleged Tate, 37, “raped and assaulted them and will also seek damages for injuries they suffered as a result”.

Three of the four British accusers were the subject of an investigation by Hertfordshire constabulary, which was closed in 2019.

The law firm said: “Three of the women bringing the civil action reported that Tate had raped and physically assaulted them to the UK police in 2014-15. After a four-year investigation, Hertfordshire police sent the case to the Crown Prosecution Service for a charging decision.

“In 2019, the CPS decided not to prosecute … Despite additional evidence, the CPS have declined the women’s recent requests to review its decision. The criminal justice system let these women down; civil action is their last remaining route to justice.”

The women, who were seeking donations for the proceedings via crowdfunding, thanked their supporters on Wednesday.

Tate, a controversial social media influencer, and his brother Tristan Tate, 35, are also facing a trial in Romania .

A court in Romania ruled last month that a trial could start in a human-trafficking case, which accused the Tate brothers of rape and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women.

The pair were arrested near Bucharest in December 2022 alongside two Romanian women. All four deny the allegations.

The Tate brothers will be extradited to the UK after the proceedings in Romania, after Bedfordshire police secured a European arrest warrant in a separate rape and human-trafficking investigation.

The Bedfordshire force in March said: “As part of an ongoing investigation into allegations of rape and human trafficking, Bedfordshire police has obtained a European arrest warrant for two men in their 30s.

“We are working with authorities in Romania as part of this investigation and will provide an update in due course.”

A representative for the Tate brothers said they “unequivocally deny all allegations”, and were “fully committed to challenging these accusations with unwavering determination and resolve”.

• Andrew Tate

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