Another look at the American Civil War

Gettysburg was a meeting engagement, before anyone could do anything the armies were decisively engaged.

You may be referring to Old Pete Longstreet disagreeing with the attack on the union center. It was a serious mistake. There was a mile and a quarter of open ground. Rail fences broke up and slowed the attack. Lee depended on and expected more than Southern valor could give. And even then they almost succeeded.

Gen Pickett said of Lee, "that old man destroyed my regiment". Paraphrased from memory.

Last Edited by s. d. butler on 01/01/2018 03:17 AM

gettysburg was the high tide of the confederacy. the finest fighting force in history. it was wasted in pointless attacks against fortified positions backed by superior artillery.

due to lack of calvalry, stuart off on another glory hunt instead of scouting for the army, a spread out southern army blindly ran into a quickly concentrating northern army.

attacking fortified positions on high ground backed by rifled artillery is never a good idea. a lesson that was not even learned by our military leaders until after wwi.

some claim that jackson would have taken cemetery hill had he been there, probably true, and then the high ground would have belonged to the confederacy.

once it was not, the confederate army should have moved south and then east taking a line along powhite creek, and forcing a hysterical washington and baltimore to demand the same frontal assaults against a fortified position.

the southern army was more mobile and provided spectacular results when they used position and maneuver.

after gettysburg the southern army was weakened to such an extent that defense was the only option left and the results nearly 2 years later was inevitable.

the campaign to invade the north was another huge gamble, the more pressing matter was the siege of vicksburg, if the first corp (longstreet) with some brigades from 2nd and 3rd corp had been railroaded west grants army would have been surrounded and possibly annihilated.

so much for coulda, shoulda, woulda.

Talk to me Goose.

"some claim that jackson would have taken cemetery hill had he been there, probably true, and then the high ground would have belonged to the confederacy."

No fighting force on earth at the time could have taken Cemetery Ridge. No matter who the commander was.

Everything was wrong for the Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg, Stuart is just one of the things, exterior lines vs interior lines, failed attacks on both flanks, high ground, a mile and a quarter of open ground....

As far as maneuver the only Generals that really did this were Jackson in the Valley campaign and Bedford Forrest.

Most Confederate armies and tactics relied on the offense. Direct attack, not maneuver. As the book attack and die attests.

With the exception of Chancellorsville and Lee defeating the McClellan attack in 1862 there wasn't much maneuver at all.

The truth is that the US Civil War was started and finished by members of the b'nai b'rith.

Let me know when you want to discover our true history.

To solve the mystery, we go back 20 years before the start of the American Civil War.

British Foreign Minister Palmerston launched Zi onism in 1840. He wrote that the Je ws desired to return to Palestine (Abba Eban points out that the Je ws knew nothing about this); and a month later, the British landed troops in Palestine for the first time.

B'nai B'rith was started officially in 1843 by some obscure Freemasons in New York, as a secret society "like Freemasonry" for Je ws. B'nai B'rith was to shape and lead a particular political faction, with a particular agenda, within the Je wish community.

The agenda for this project came out in a famous speech given two years later at South Carolina College. The speaker was Edwin DeLeon, from a Je wish family in South Carolina that was already notorious for its involvement in the slave trade and in Scottish Rite Freemasonry. DeLeon was later a leader of the Confederate Secret Service.

DeLeon praised his teacher at the school, Thomas Cooper, an English atheist and Lord Shelburne's adventurer, who had first proposed that the South secede from the Union. DeLeon hailed Cooper as a tender-hearted religious heretic and "an earnest ... disciple of the school of Bentham and Malthus."

Much More on Google "America's 'Young America' movement:
slaveholders and the B'nai B'rith
by Anton Chaitkin"

Here it is

[link to www.schillerinstitute.org (secure)]

True History of the Civil War and MUCH MORE

Industry and Economy during the Civil War

During the war, Congress also passed several major financial bills that forever altered the American monetary system. The Legal Tender Act authorized the federal government to print and use paper money, called "greenbacks," to pay its bills and finance the war. Even though greenbacks were not backed by similar amounts of gold and silver, creditors were required to accept them at face value. By the end of the war, the government had printed over $500 million in greenbacks, and the American financial system's strict reliance on transactions in gold or silver ended. The National Bank Act created a national banking system to reduce the number of notes issued by individual banks and create a single federal currency. The Internal Revenue Act eased inflation primarily by placing excise taxes on many luxury items such as tobacco and jewelry. More famously, the first U.S. income tax was imposed in July 1861, at 3 percent of all incomes over $800 up to 10 percent for incomes over $100,000 to help pay for the war effort.

For better or worse, the political philosophies underlying the creation of the Confederate States of America, with its emphasis upon a strong state and a weak central government, coupled with its vast investments in a slave-labor-based agricultural economy, meant that the South had neither the ability nor the desire to develop the kind of industrial economy or centralized financial system required to sustain a "modern" war. By contrast, the Union's willingness and ability to vastly increase the influence and footprint of the federal government not only contributed directly to its military success in the war, but it also transformed many other areas of national life, including industrial, economic, agricultural, mechanical, and financial realms. Simply put, the United States of America would be a very different nation today than had the war never been fought. If we are truly the world's last remaining superpower, then it is, at least partially, the massive industrial and economic expansion enabled by the Civil War that allowed us to ascend to that role in the first place.

[link to www.nps.gov (secure)]

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[link to www.treasury.gov (secure)]

[link to fraser.stlouisfed.org (secure)]

For this and other good reasons is why Lincoln was one of the worst presidents in American history.

150 Years of Misunderstanding the Civil War
6/19/13

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."

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.

[link to www.theatlantic.com (secure)]

for later reading

5 Things You May Not Know About Lincoln, Slavery and Emancipation
9/21/12

Lincoln wasn’t an abolitionist.

Lincoln did believe that slavery was morally wrong, but there was one big problem: It was sanctioned by the highest law in the land, the Constitution. The nation’s founding fathers, who also struggled with how to address slavery, did not explicitly write the word “slavery” in the Constitution, but they did include key clauses protecting the institution, including a fugitive slave clause and the three-fifths clause, which allowed Southern states to count slaves for the purposes of representation in the federal government. In a three-hour speech in Peoria, Illinois, in the fall of 1854, Lincoln presented more clearly than ever his moral, legal and economic opposition to slavery—and then admitted he didn’t know exactly what should be done about it within the current political system.

Abolitionists, by contrast, knew exactly what should be done about it: Slavery should be immediately abolished, and freed slaves should be incorporated as equal members of society. They didn’t care about working within the existing political system, or under the Constitution, which they saw as unjustly protecting slavery and slave owners. Leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called the Constitution “a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell,” and went so far as to burn a copy at a Massachusetts rally in 1854. Though Lincoln saw himself as working alongside the abolitionists on behalf of a common anti-slavery cause, he did not count himself among them. Only with emancipation, and with his support of the eventual 13th Amendment, would Lincoln finally win over the most committed abolitionists.

[link to www.history.com]

All you have to do to verify the truth of this is read the letters of the Union soldiers at the time. They explicitly said they weren't fighting for anything except "preserving the union".

Eli Whitney had a big part to play in this. He did not mean to
But because of some of his inventions. His cotton gin meant that much more cotton could be deseaded and processed. The more cotton that could be cleaned and used meant the need for cotton increased causing more slaves to be needed. Also once the war started he was one of the first people to design guns with interchangeable parts. More guns were then able to pbe produced for the war.

The “Glowing Angels” Who Saved Civil War Soldiers Turned Out To Be Luminous Parasitic Bacteria
8/7/17

[link to www.warhistoryonline.com (secure)]

The Price of Freedom: Americans at War - The Spencer Rifle

By the summer of 1863, Christopher Miner Spencer despaired that the Bureau of Ordnance would never see the merit of his repeating rifle. Determined to provide Union soldiers with a quicker, more accurate rifle, Spencer took his gun to the White House. On 18 August 1863, President Lincoln agreed to test the rifle with Spencer on a weedy plain extending from the White House to the unfinished Washington Monument. At a distance of forty yards, Lincoln fired seven consecutive rounds into a wooden board, directly hitting a crude bulls-eye with his second shot. Lincoln presented Spencer with a fragment of the board on their return to the White House. Lincoln was pleased with the rifle’s accuracy and efficiency. In a matter of weeks, Spencer’s small Boston factory was receiving more orders than it could fill.
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Even when the Confederate army captured Spencer carbines, they were useless because they required rimfire cartridges not made in the South. Over 94,000 Spencer carbines were purchased by the Federal government and another 120,000 were purchased privately.

[link to amhistory.si.edu (secure)]
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[link to www.aotc.net]
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Truth shoots down Spencer rifle lore
9/29/06

According to popular lore, President Lincoln personally intervened in the Union Army’s weapons selection process in1863, ensuring that the repeating Spencer rifle, a revolutionary small-arms technology rejected by hidebound ordnance officers, was adopted and issued to Federal forces, thus changing the course of the war. The truth of the matter, is somewhat different, as is often the case.

In fact, Spencers were in service before Lincoln laid eyes on one. An 1862 contract to supply the Army with 7,500 Spencer rifles was fulfilled by the spring of 1863. By late summer, in the wake of its successful use at the battles of Hoover’s Gap, Tenn., and Gettysburg, the Spencer had acquired an excellent reputation in the field, and demand for the guns from Union soldiers and commanders increased.

Maj. Gen. Stephan A. Hurlbut, commanding the XVI Army Corps and the city of Memphis, Tenn., requested Spencer “Navy rifles” to arm two regiments of mounted infantrymen.

[link to www.washingtontimes.com (secure)]

The tariffs against British imports caused the war.

Great thread. So many American wars histories have been twisted in books. By some I mean most.

One of many causes, to be sure.
The surge in political influence by the abolitionists played a big part as well. Once the desire to abruptly end the practice of slavery became their main goal and gained traction in Washington, I think the war was almost inevitable at that point.

The Economics of the Civil War

A major finding of the research into the economic dynamics of the slave system was to demonstrate that the rise in the value of slaves was not based upon unfounded speculation. Slave labor was the foundation of a prosperous economic system in the South. To illustrate just how important slaves were to that prosperity, Gerald Gunderson (1974) estimated what fraction of the income of a white person living in the South of 1860 was derived from the earnings of slaves. Table 1 presents Gunderson’s estimates. In the seven states where most of the cotton was grown, almost one-half the population were slaves, and they accounted for 31 percent of white people’s income; for all 11 Confederate States, slaves represented 38 percent of the population and contributed 23 percent of whites’ income. Small wonder that Southerners — even those who did not own slaves — viewed any attempt by the federal government to limit the rights of slaveowners over their property as a potentially catastrophic threat to their entire economic system. By itself, the South’s economic investment in slavery could easily explain the willingness of Southerners to risk war when faced with what they viewed as a serious threat to their “peculiar institution” after the electoral victories of the Republican Party and President Abraham Lincoln the fall of 1860.
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The Tariff

3. The Tariff. Southerners, with their emphasis on staple agriculture and need to buy goods produced outside the South, strongly objected to the imposition of duties on imported goods. Manufacturers in the Northeast, on the other hand, supported a high tariff as protection against cheap British imports. People in the West were caught in the middle of this controversy. Like the agricultural South they disliked the idea of a high “protective” tariff that raised the cost of imports. However the tariff was also the main source of federal revenue at this time, and Westerners needed government funds for the transportation improvements they supported in Congress. As a result, a compromise reached by western and eastern interests during in the tariff debates of 1857 was to support a “moderate” tariff; with duties set high enough to generate revenue and offer some protection to Northern manufacturers while not putting too much of a burden on Western and Eastern consumers. Southerners complained that even this level of protection was excessive and that it was one more example of the willingness of the West and the North to make economic bargains at the expense of the South (Ransom and Sutch 2001; Egnal 2001:50-52).

[link to eh.net (secure)]

Thanks, MoN. I haven't done a whole lot with it lately, just trying to keep it going. I've been able to look at a lot of the videos and writings suggested by others on this thread, and I hope to get more in-depth about certain topics. For right now, it's just a place to post opinion and info that gives deeper insight into the cause(s) of the war, and to post any interesting or obscure 'history'.

Lack of manufacturing abilities tied the knot

I've studied and researched a lot of American wars, but weirdly enough, not so much the civil war. So i look forward to diving into all this information soon.

This thread reminded me of a thread i made a while ago lol
I'll drop it here, you'll probably enjoy the info.

Thread: The real reasons for the Spanish-American War. The conspiracy for sugar.

Not really. Gettysburg was a meeting engagement. It's easy to armchair quarterback it.

The author of the post you are lauding says "it's never a good idea to attack high ground backed by rifled artillery" Then goes on to say Jackson could have taken Cemetary ridge maybe, some say.

Cemetary Ridge wasn't just high ground. The attack was across a mile and a quarter of open ground. Broken up by at least one rail fence.

And then goes on to say the Confederates should have moved south and east to high ground.

How exactly could that have been accomplished? Once the armies were decisively engaged?

Probably no one could have been railroaded west to relieve Vicksburg. The layout of the Rail roads was one of the severe problems the C.S.A. had.

Debating the Causes of the Civil War
9/19/11

A torrent of controversy has in fact arisen alongside the Civil War’s sesquicentennial, the most prevalent being debates over the war’s causation. Perhaps it is to be expected. Ever since the conflict’s inception, scholars have hotly debated whether, for example, the crisis was precipitated by Southern economic backwardness or Northern economic nationalism; the institution of slavery itself or its possible territorial expansion; a conspiracy of the “Slave Power” or a conspiracy of Northern manufacturers seeking to exploit the agrarian South.

Earlier this year, Time ran a story on the prevailing view of the Civil War’s causation among leading academics. In it, James McPherson stated that “everything stemmed from the slavery issue,” and David Blight finished off the article with the conclusion that “slavery was the cause of the war.” Similar unicausal sentiments have since popped up elsewhere. With such strong declarations coming from such preeminent scholars of the subject and the era, it would appear that the debate has been settled.

Well, not quite. While this line of argument has certainly become the mainstream, in recent years the Civil War’s economic complexities have garnered renewed scholarly attention. Economic issues may not have outweighed the broader issue of slavery as the primary causal factor of secession and war, but, scholars have recently sought to show how the oft-overlooked international political economy influenced other causes, including slavery.

[link to notevenpast.org (secure)]

A look at the South before the Civil War
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Life in the Southern Colonies
1/23/13

As the mid-eighteenth century arrived, life for the Southern colonists was the best that the British colonial experience could ever have yielded. In almost every aspect of their lives, these peoples had achieved a standard of life not equaled even in the mature societies and economies of Western Europe. The evidence of details of the lives of these people has not been balanced across the economic and social ladder as one might expect. While there has always been a reasonable body of knowledge covering the landed gentry and the upper class of the colonial era, there is still comparatively little known of the majority of the middle and lower classes in the South. Because of the lack of diaries, letters or official documents for most of the population, the details of the lives of these forgotten population remains rather sketchy. What we do know about this largest segment of the Southern population is that they were a hardy, self-respecting and self-supporting people.

From the very beginning the key to prosperity for the Southern colonist was the near universal opportunity to acquire land. Land was the source and measure of wealth in the world at that time. A tobacco planter wrote, “If a man has Money, Negros and Land enough he is a complete Gentleman.”[1] And land was abundant. In Jamestown the investors in the parent London Company were given 100 acres for each share of stock they owned.[2] Later, as the colony developed, the colonial government gave anyone who paid his own passage to the New World 50 acres free through the “headright system.” In Maryland, Lord Baltimore granted manorial estates to any who would import 50 persons to his colony, and as a result over 60 manors were established there.[3] Around Charles Town, South Carolina in the late seventeenth century, land was valued at only one penny per acre.[4] Thus, the acquisition of land was not the issue. The more critical issue of the colonial period was not how to obtain land; it was how to obtain adequate labor to work the land.

[link to allthingsliberty.com (secure)]

Part 2
[link to allthingsliberty.com (secure)]

Part 3
[link to allthingsliberty.com (secure)]

Judah Benjamin is a Civil War character that is under-mentioned.

...for later.