Comments on: Wigs on the Green

By: SCOTTtheBADGER

SCOTTtheBADGER — Fri, 15 May 2009 06:41:33 +0000

Raised in Wisconsin? Marianne’s a BADGER! HUZZAH!

By: Quartermaster

Quartermaster — Thu, 14 May 2009 01:30:19 +0000

Yep, we aren’t shooting people for now. If the left keeps acting as they are wont to do, you want a good weapon because it may flare up again. Reconstruction and the military occupation of the south shares many characteristics of what we are seeing now. Reconstruction almost set off a guerrilla war in South Carolina, which bid fair to spread across the south. It converted the KKK, which started as good natured clownishness, into the foundation of a guerrilla movement.

I really hope the left settles down and decides to grow up. that type rarely does and just leaves wreckage behind for the adults to clean up.

By: Quartermaster

Quartermaster — Thu, 14 May 2009 01:25:01 +0000

Longstreet suggested moving the Army of Virginia to a position to theaten DC, Baltimore and Philadelphia simultaneously. Lee rejected the move. I’ve never seen why, but haven’t looked hard either. It would have been an ingenious move. Meade would have been forced to fight Lee, breaking his teeth on prepared positions, backed with rifles. If teh Army of the Potomac had suffered Overland Campaign losses at that time, it most likely would ahve resulted in the end of the war, from broken northern morale, at a minimum. Instead Lee gave the Confederacy Gettysburg. After that, it was all over but the crying.

If you look at the war post Gettysburg, the northern strategy doesn’t add up. The south’s logistical problems were becoming obvious even in the north. Even before the end of the POW exchange cartel, the south was not making good its losses. It was hard to field the armies they did on a population of one fourth that of the north. The south made up for it in valor, and northern military stupidity. Grant’s willingness to expend men like water won the war, but it was still a very close run.

Looking at the political problems we have now, it is increasingly recognized that the wrong side won. I think the country would have come back together after the north moderated and rejected Lincoln for expending the men he did, and losing. Harry Turtledove’s novels spin a good yarn, but the mystic bonds of memory that Lincoln tried to use so hypocritically would have seen most of the country reunify. Part of new England might not have rejoined in that, but given what Massachussetts was becoming even then, I don’t think it would be much of a loss.

By: AW1 Tim

AW1 Tim — Thu, 14 May 2009 00:28:18 +0000

By point of reference, prior to the war, when referring to this nation, people said “These United States are”. Afterward, it became “The United States is”.

Therein lies the crux of the problem.

We need to return to the concept of “These United States”, and stop the tyranny of an all-powerful Federal Government.

By: virgil xenophon

virgil xenophon — Wed, 13 May 2009 23:47:06 +0000

Good reprise of some neglected history, TwoFiveZulu.

By: TwoFiveZulu

TwoFiveZulu — Wed, 13 May 2009 23:32:21 +0000

Prior to the war, even many Northerners agreed that a sovereign state had the right to withdraw from the Union. A large body of people in the North were willing to accept a peaceful separation from the South. Lincoln had thousands arrested without trial for expressing such views, including several Maryland legislators who, while remaining in the Union, opposed using force to keep other states from seceding.

The Declaration of Independence proclaims that “these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states” — that is, 13 separate sovereignties, not, as Lincoln said, a single, monolithic “new nation.” When these sovereign states ratified the Constitution they did not surrender their sovereignty. Several of them, in their acts of ratification, reserved the right to secede, and the other states, by accepting these acts as valid, recognized that right.

Lincoln on the other hand, took the position that “the Union is much older than the Constitution” and that no state could ever withdraw from it. As the historian Pauline Maier puts it, Lincoln’s understanding of the Declaration of Independence was based on “wishful suppositions.” He was guided by Daniel Webster’s famous nationalist slogan, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable” — an illogical credo that leads to dangerous nonsense. If liberty was “inseparable” from Union, why did the framers adopt constitutional safeguards to prevent the possibility of federal tyranny?

But like so many great controversies, the debate between North and South was settled not by reason but by force. And in the history books, as usual, the victors’ rhetoric prevailed over the losers’ logic. Today few Americans, even in the South, understand the case for the Confederacy. Any talk of “sovereign” states — the vital question of 1861 — sounds archaic.

In the end, both sides lost the war. A country out of touch with its own ancestors is truly impoverished — and uneducated.