Lee's quote demands context. "Retreat" was certainly in his lexicon; afterall, he was nicknamed "the King of Spades" for his defensive approach to the Peninsula Campaign. The quote "the enemy is there ..." only makes sense if you agree that Lee understood it to be fact that he must inflict a decisive defeat to the AOP to have a chance at a political resolution to the war. As you say, the battle was destined to rage on because both sides realized that the war was about beating the men, not taking cities.

Obviously, marching on D.C. would have posed a slew of political problems, but Meade was certainly going to make Lee go through him to get there.

Marching to Philadelphia was only a potential scenario of what may transpire if Meade did not find it suitable to engage Lee prior to that. Lee and Meade both were looking to engage and Lee stayed on to fight because despite the factors working against him at the close of Day 1, he still believed he could win (personally, I think he was right; he SHOULD have won at Gettysburg but for the failures [of both tactics and insubordinance] of his generals to carry out their Day 2 orders).

I live in California, but I have been to Gettysburg on a number of occasions as well. It's really hard to describe what goes through my head when I am there.

Just for eveyone's interest the Civil War started 150 years ago April 12. Confederates at Fort Johnston (and at other locations) shelled Fort Sumpter in Charleston Harbor on this date in 1861.

Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Sumter

-Zeno

They had a good History Channel show about all that happened in April 1865. I didn't realize that although Lee had already surrendered to Grant's terms when Lincoln was killed, there was still a question whether remaining armies in the South might continue the struggle. Sherman offered Johnston even more lenient terms than Grant's to Lee which Johnston and the South's secretary of war agreed to. But the North under then President Johnson refused to ratify those terms and insisted Johnston agree to Grant's terms. Jefferson Davis was adament for the South fighting on via guerrilla warfare but his cabinet was united against him. Johnston agreed to the revised terms of surrender. Lee threw his considerable reputation and influence in support of peace and becoming good citizens of the Union. Word of peace did not get to Texas in time to avoid the last battle fought near the Rio Grande - a Southern victory.


PairTheBoard

for me (grew up near Charleston) we were basically taught this: the war was about slavery, the south was wrong in every way, shape and form, slavery basically never existed anywhere outside the south (except for a few places up north, but they quickly realized how wrong it was and changed their ways), Lincoln was a hero and should be idolized, etc. etc. etc. and yes this is really what we were taught in school, in SC, probably about a 45 minute drive from Fort Sumter (gotta love the propaganda campaign that is still ongoing). There was very little mention of Sherman's march (I wish he was still alive today just so I could kill him, but that is for personal/family reasons), the state's rights argument is dismissed basically with a laugh, and there is no history of the institution of slavery outside the south (with a little mention of caribbean slavery), and yet we wonder why the school system sucks around here (thats OK we will just try and throw some more money that we don't have at it, that has to make it better).

the funniest story I can think of regarding education and the civil war came from when I was in college. I was taking a course in the history of "the old south", my professor was this english guy (still trying to figure out how a english guy got a job at a major southern university teaching southern history, as we tend to be a bit picky about the whole Civil War thing)...on the first day of class within the first 10 minutes of class, in the middle of his whole introductory speech he just blurts out "and yes I know the Civil War wasn't fought over slavery" (meaning as the primary and only cause of the war). it was such a random, out of the blue statement (considering he was talking nothing about history at the time).

The following excerpt is from the website for the Institute for Historical Review:

Many people accepted the rumors spread by Douglas supporters that Lincoln favored social equality of the races. Before the start of the September 18 debate at Charleston, Illinois, an elderly man approached Lincoln in a hotel and asked him if the stories were true. Recounting the encounter later before a crowd of 15,000, Lincoln declared:

I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.

He continued:

I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

So, Lincoln believed slavery to be immoral, but further believed that blacks should always remain socially and politically inferior, and should never have the same basic civil liberties as whites? In his perfect world, slavery sounds like the better option.

The Smithsonian website has ongoing articles on the Civil War:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...ntent=civilwar




along with dedicated articles in their monthly magazine, for those interested.


-Zeno

Recent Smithsonian (July/August) has an excellent article on The First Battle of Bull Run. As I stated above, the Smithsonian will have articles and facts about the Civil War probably over the next 4 years or so, for the 150 year anniversary. Worth checking out.

-Zeno

I was a little bit familiar with this, but found it interesting reading Peter Wehner's article about author Harriet Beecher Stowe and her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I didn't realize how influential Stowe's writing was on shaping the nations opinion concerning slavery.

The Impact of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/20...le-toms-cabin/

Booth was supposed to be making $10K/year from acting, which is atleast $2M/year in today's money. He was one of the top 5 actors in the US. So sort of like Tom Cruise. However, stage performances obviously didn't have the audience of movies.

This. Jesus God Almighty, this is 2011. How is stuff like this still glossed over or 'controversial?'

That's not the way I learned it in Virginia History class in school What you say is basically true, but there is a another side of it. I will try to discuss this objectively. Once the southern states were put under military occupation, men who served in the Confederate military were prohibitted from voting or had to sign some oath to vote. Since women didn't vote and the Confederacy was drafting white men from 17-50, this resulted in black voting majorities in most states and districts. The standard southern account is that the south was exploited by carpetbaggers, corrupt northern businessmen and politicians. It is true that the Klan and others used violence to terrorize and intimidate blacks and white Republicans and help restore white Democratic rule. Blacks generally continued to vote until the 1890s, when various segregation laws were also passed.

succession itt

The majority of the people in the South did not even have slaves.(Less than 25%) Slaves were expensive and would cost about $100,000 today.

The South had a legal right to succeed from the Union.


One interesting fact is:

Free black men actually owned slaves in the South.

http://www.uwec.edu/geography/ivogel...s/charles3.htm


Another interesting fact is northern factories would sell weapons to the south.
This goes to show that Americans will do anything to make a buck.

I am amazed how the history books always say that the Civil War was mainly caused by slavery.

1. I don't think that debate has been settled; if anything, the arguments that individual states did not have a legal right to succeed are more compelling;

2. Beyond restricted trades in cotton to licensed parties from the North and cotton-for-food in restricted instances, I have not read anything about the north trading with the south, especially the North selling weapons. Your claim thus exposes a fallacy - however, I would be interested to see where this is supported.

3. I think among most factors, it is fair to say slavery was the main cause. If it was not the main cause, in fact, it was certainly the main cause in building up to whatever other cause is being argued. Arguing for anything else requires as best a nuanced argument which nevertheless will still feature slavery very prominently.

I have had college professors say this. I am going to have to do more research on the subject. I doubt that multiple professors would have lied to me. They did claim that some of the weapons did not actually work.

Yeah, I have no cause to doubt you. I am just interested in reading up on it since I have not heard of it before.

It was mainly caused by slavery. And none of the points you made are good evidence to the contrary. The point that a majority of southerners did not own slaves is flawed on two levels. One, it implies that just because someone did not own slaves means they did not support slavery. This is very wrong. As the article in the thread pointed out, they might hope to own slaves some day. They may have friends who own slaves. Your stat was less than 25%, but 25% is still is a huge number (1 out of every 4 people). Perhaps more importantly, they may not be able to tolerate the idea of black people being equal. They may have considered abolition an affront to deeply held racist views. The issue of slavery wasn't just about wanting to own slaves, it was also about the idea of racial superiority. In his cornerstone speech, the vice president of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens said

"The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."

Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition."

You don't have to own a slave to lap that kind of thing up, just as violent racism in this country following the Civil War was not just the avenue of the rich.

Second, your point implies that secession and going to war were unanimous decisions. There were many in the south who did not agree with slavery or even with the war in general, but the decisions of those states did not belong to everyone. Some might even say "I don't believe in slavery, but I'm loyal to my state, so I'll fight for it." That doesn't mean the secession and war weren't motivated by the issue of slavery, just that some cared more about state loyalty than what the motivating factors were.

There was also quite a bit of defection. Almost every state in the Confederacy had (white) units serving in the Union Army.

I'm unclear whether the Sacramento Escorts are Union or Confederate. I only buy union.

Thought this would be interesting to everyone but especially civil war buffs--

Complete Civil War submarine unveiled for first time:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45980970/?ocid=ansmsnbc11

Portion of linked article given below:


"NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — Confederate Civil War vessel H.L. Hunley, the world's first successful combat submarine, was unveiled in full and unobstructed for the first time on Thursday, capping a decade of careful preservation.

"No one alive has ever seen the Hunley complete. We're going to see it today," engineer John King said as a crane at a Charleston conservation laboratory slowly lifted a massive steel truss covering the top of the submarine.

About 20 engineers and scientists applauded as they caught the first glimpse of the intact 42-foot-long (13-meter-long) narrow iron cylinder, which was raised from the ocean floor near Charleston more than a decade ago. The public will see the same view, but in a water tank to keep it from rusting.

"It's like looking at the sub for the first time. It's like the end of a long night," said Paul Mardikian, senior conservator since 1999 of the project to raise, excavate and conserve the Hunley.

In the summer of 2000, an expedition led by adventurer Clive Cussler raised the Hunley and delivered it to the conservatory on Charleston's old Navy base, where it sat in a 90,000-gallon tank of fresh water to leach salt out of its iron hull.

On weekdays, scientists drain the tank and work on the sub. On weekends, tourists who before this week could only see an obstructed view of the vessel in the water tank, now will be able to see it unimpeded.

Heartbreak of the Hunley

Considered the Confederacy's stealth weapon, the Hunley sank the Union warship Housatonic in the winter of 1864, and then disappeared with all eight Confederate sailors inside.

The narrow, top-secret "torpedo fish," built in Mobile, Ala., by Horace Hunley from cast iron and wrought iron with a hand-cranked propeller, arrived in Charleston in 1863 while the city was under siege by Union troops and ships.

In the ensuing few months, it sank twice after sea trial accidents, killing 13 crew members, including Horace Hunley, who was steering.

"There are historical references that the bodies of one crew had to be cut into pieces to remove them from the submarine," Mardikian told Reuters. "There was forensic evidence when they found the bones (between 1993 and 2004 in a Confederate graveyard beneath a football stadium in Charleston) that that was true."

The Confederate Navy hauled the sub up twice, recovered the bodies of the crew, and planned a winter attack.

On the night of Feb. 17, 1864, its captain and seven crew left Sullivan's Island near Charleston, and hand-powered the sub to the Union warship four miles (6.4 kilometers) offshore. From a metal spar on its bow, the Hunley planted a 135-pound (61-kilogram) torpedo in the hull of the ship, which burned and sank.

__________________________________________________ _

-Zeno

.

Southerners have hated "Yankees," for far longer than since 1865. You should read Albion's Seed for a detailed analysis of the different migration patterns tht led to us having northern and southern characters that were so radically different.

But when Jefferson Davis or someone of his time said they hated "yankees," they were not referring generically to people in the north. They meant a subset of the northern population--the New England Puritans, who, by that time as was widely known, had immigrated west, carrying with them their philosophy to additional states (including Illinois).

Here is Jeff Davis (Via Shelby Foote) describing who southerners meant during the civil war when they said "yankees."

He is talking about the puritan migration, (and the puritan migrants) that is detailed so well in Albion's Seed; he is not just referring generically to northerners. During the war, and after, "Yankee" quite naturally became synonymous with "northerner" simply because northerners were enforcing Yankee philosophy. But in its original meaning, a Yankee was a New England born subscriber to puritan ideals.

Or, I guess it'd be fair to say, "Yankee" was an effective insult to call a generic northerner because the "yankee" subset of northerners had been despised in the south since the late 1600s at the latest. Remember, that Virginia is the "Cavalier State" because its population both sided with the crown against Cromwell and received a huge influx of refugees when Cromwell won the civil war. The New England Puritans obviously sided with Cromwell, and received a similar tide of refugees upon the restoration of the crown.

This hatred stuff goes waaaaaay back.

Davis' speech actually gets rather amusing, and if you can set aside your modern pro-union bias and his vitriol, there is actually some stinging truthfulness to what he says about the conduct of the Lincoln administration:

I mostly threw in the second quote because I think it is quite beautiful in its vituperative eloquence. The main point I wanted to make was that the animosity between Yankees and the other 3 major migrant groups in the US goes way back to fairly early colonial times. One more plug for Albion's Seed, which breaks all of this down wonderfully.

(Lincoln himself was descended from a Puritan, Samuel Lincoln, who emigrated from East Anglia to Massachusetts in 1637. Albion's Seed, p.836 FN 34).

Heh, I am in the middle of reading Shelby Foote, so I am sort of up on all of this. Jackson's greatness is mostly myth.

In the army, I sort of imbibed the conventional military wisdom regarding Jackson, which, as it turns out, comes more or less directly from Foote:

1. Jackson was consistently excellent in the Shenandoah Valley.

2. Jackson's failure to be at the right place at the right time and other miscommunications were largely responsible for the failure at seven pines.

3. Jackson was not the architect of the flanking maneuver at Chancellorsville--it being possible was reported to him and Lee by a staff officer, and Jackson was actually observed making the flanking march by lots of union field commanders, whose alarms were ignored by their superiors.

Not to say he wasn't an excellent fighting general, but "greatest military strategist in recent history," or words to that effect, are myth, not history.

Edit to add:


It's worth noting that Jackson probably would not have considered himself a great strategist. Foote reports an interesting conversation between Jackson and Lee on the eve of battle at Chancellorsville. As they are pondering WTF they should do about the Union force that has gotten into their rear, Lee asks Jackson what he thinks they should do. Jackson says, "you know best; tell me what to do and I will see it is done." They are sitting there discussing a frontal assault, when up comes the staff officer and says, "hey, I think I found a concealed route to the exposed federal flank on the Orange Turnpike..."

So, I dunno, but I think even Jackson probably recognized that his skills were more toward the actual execution of other people's plans than strategic thinking. Even the Shenandoah campaign was Lee's idea to relieve pressure on Richmond. Jackson mainly executed it with excellence.

When I was in the army, the jargon divided military thinking into three spheres of increasing influence and scope that I will loosely describe as:

Tactics, the employment of small units on the battlefield;
Operational art, the employment of large bodies spread over a relatively broad geographical space; and
Strategy, the employment of national power.

I think most everybody would agree that Jackson was an excellent practitioner of the operational art, but the southern strategy derived mainly from Davis himself, with a huge assist from Lee.

As a Brit, not a history 'tard and having come into the thread by chance:

I have to - at least - double mpethybridge's praise/recommendation for Albion's Seed. This is absolutely essential reading for foreigners to understand the USA imo - I don't know anything even close to as informative. Imo this goes for USA-icans as well - though obv you have to judge for yourselves.

Hold on to yo Confederate money boys, the South's gonna rise AGAIN!