h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Those who say they understand it, don't read it.
Those who say they don't understand it, probably have read it enough to know."

If I say there seem to be contradictions between different parts of the Bible, would that count as not understanding it and having read enough of it?

Absolutely.

How did we manage to slip past the topic of the Civil War so easily on this thread? I don't like the way the Union handled it, and I feel they might as well have let the South secede. The worst parts are when the Union demanded conscripts from every state-- 2 states wanted to stay in the Union but refused to participate in the War (Arkansas and Tenn? Maybe not). In the end, they joined the CSA because the Union forced them to fight on one side or the other. That was pretty crappy.

(I'm not saying any of this flippantly just because I don't like grits, and it has little to do with how much you hate slavery.)

Anyhow, it struck me several years ago when Gorbachev put down some uprisings in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The Western press said he was acting like a dictator, but Gorby claimed he wasn't doing anything worse than Lincoln was trying to do by fighting the CSA. Of course, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia probably never signed anything to ratify membership in a "union" with the rest of the USSR, whereas the US states had signed on. But you have to ask yourself at what point it would be fair or reasonable for one of the states to break away from the Union. Maybe they'd want to use the wording from the Declaration of Independence, that it's their duty to break away when faced with tyrrany from the union?

And back to the Articles of Confederation -- our Yankee middle school teachers taught us that the Articles failed because they allowed too much power to the states, no centralized authority to levy taxes or keep an army, things like that. They might have said that the CSA eventually failed for the same reasons. Individual states of the Confederacy wanted too much independence from each other, could not form a strong enough centralized govt to combat Northern Aggression, et voila.

Am I way off base? I know you'll be better read on your history, but if you can name those 2 states that reluctantly joined the CSA after refusing to send troops to fight the CSA, I'll be impressed. (I'm too lazy to look it up.)

[On re-reading that, it sounds silly to say the "worst part" of the American Civil War was this bit of tyrrany. Lots of ugliness and atrocities on both sides, I suppose. But this seems the clearest point for showing that the Union had funky shenanigans going on, and that they weren't too interested in democracy. Maybe I only object to this because I fail to see the difference between conscript armies and slavery. It's too fine a line for me, not worth claiming much distinction.]

Well, actually, this is a very apropo subject.
As I said the beginnings of the War go far back, even to the chartered hereditary royal governorships that held sway in the individual colonies until the Revolution.

The slaves as property goes to the very heart of the matter once the industrial capabilities of the north began to count.
During the industrial revolution, a couple of blocks of four story buildings could generate as much income as two or three plantations of crops and slaves. The factory owners paid their employees less than it cost to feed a slave. Their biggest investment was in machinery. The plantation owners had hundreds of acres that required semi-skilled labor that could stay out in the sun all day.
In New Orleans, during the draining of the swamps, the Irish provided much cheaper labor than slaves and they were more expendable.

When new states were opened up, the matter of free or slave centered around the property issue. While property was taxed, it was also, in many cases, a reason for status in the community because in many states only property owners could vote. If you lived in a tent and had a slave, you could vote.

Immigrants played a big role, too. Fully two/thirds of the conscripts and volunteers were recent immigrants. They wanted to vote because they had come from countries where there wasn't much to vote about even if there had been elections.

Now, to tyranny. The tyranny of Lincoln was that he thought the land would return to the tensions and the weird alliances of the French and Indian wars and other such conflicts if individual or groups of states decided that they wanted their own trade agreements with foreign powers, or deal with their internal problems without Federal interference. If the secessionist states were allowed to go, all might go eventually, breaking up into little blocs or going off on their own. The ones with coasts or riverbanks would be richer than the landlocked ones and the transcontinental railroads would be almost impossible.

The war was an unpopular one in the North. Many states half-heartedly became involved and then only because they were forced to or one of their major manufacturers was promised a big army contract. Maryland was a good case in point.

It wasn't exactly a raging success in the South, either. A whole 1/3 of Texas counties voted against succession and Sam Houston refused to even hear the debate. Virginia split almost in half. Illinois sent boys to both sides. Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri had raging mini conflicts of their own that predated the actual declaration of war.
An Abolitionist minister in Sparta, Illinois was lynched years before the war. There is no clear dividing line between north and south. Washington, D.C. had more southern ties than northern and there were more southern sympathizers there then in Richmond, Virginia. Ohio had copperheads running the legislature.

As for the interest in democracy, the way in which southerners who voted against secession were tormented and harassed and, in some cases, lynched, in the fever of rebellion was something that was lamented by Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and the other educated men of the Confederacy. The bureacratic difficulties that the Confederate government faced and never began to overcome truly illustrate what a miracle it had been for the Union to have held together as well as it had.

No, Lincoln had seen Congress in action, he had seen the Illinois legislature in action and he knew that what was required was a strong hand, a strong stand, and strong measures. It was the dilly-dallying and the maybe we will or maybe we won't attitudes of the state party bosses that had weakened the Union to the point of dissolution.
After he was killed, everybody went back to business as usual. As soon as they could. The reconstruction was a joke and amplification of racist and geographic sentiment was horrifying. The anti-semitism and anti-immigrant attitudes were almost unheard of.
There were draft riots in both the north and the south. There were massive desertions and many military companies functioned at way below strength with officers that were qualified by their tailor rather than their education.

No, the tyranny was in the generations who ignored or exacerbated the
situation by playing local games and sending men to congress to help the local party machinery.

What Lincoln had to do, we can hope we never have to. What choices he had and what courses he didn't choose, we can only imagine. Once it was all over, everybody wanted to be a hero. Lincoln never got to write an autobiography and his wife was insane before he died. She was actually accused of being a Southern sympathizer, which she was, and a spy for the Confederacy, which she wasn't, because she was too busy trying to hide her shopping addiction that often carried her over budget. Lincoln was heavily in debt at the time he died and his son Robert ended up paying his debts over time. Well, those debts that were not forgiven by the sorrowful. Mary was almost turned out of the Springfield house a couple of times by foreclosure but Lincoln's old law partners forestalled it.

"What choices he had and what courses he didn't choose, we can only imagine."

What would have happened to the Union or the CSA if secession had been allowed without a struggle? A weaker union, maybe other states trying to secede, maybe the whole union would break up.

I'm also curious how we should handle it again today if one or two states wanted to secede. Does current membership in the Union imply eternal membership in the Union?

I didn't mean that "tyrrany" or anti-democratic behavior by the North implied the South was pure and lovely by comparison. I just meant that the simple view of history that some people still hold is too simple, good North versus evil South. Everything you said in that post shows the kinds of ways it was more complex than people usually imagine (or more complex than we're taught).

"No, Lincoln had seen Congress in action, he had seen the Illinois legislature in action and he knew that what was required was a strong hand, a strong stand, and strong measures."

Again, the comparison that comes to mind is Gorbachev cracking down on some secessionist states, or Putin trying to prevent Chechnya from breaking away. The South still had conflict within itself, but when 2/3 of Texas counties vote to secede, it seems like a denial of democracy if the Union prevents them from seceding. Assuming that the votes weren't rigged, or that the vote wasn't misrepresenting millions of poor people (obviously it was not representing slaves), assuming that there was a true majority preference for some states to break away, where does the authority come from to claim that the Union must not be dissolved?

"What Lincoln had to do, we can hope we never have to."

I'm totally willing to examine what Lincoln did and what we might have to do, and I don't think we would be right to kill people who want to split up the States. I'm less interested in Lincoln personally than in the Union as a whole, why they thought it was right. I'm less interested in George Bush right now than why 80 or 90% of Americans feel the current conflict is proper. I don't know Lincoln or Bush intimately enough to really judge them, but I think I know about the general conflicts well enough to think they aren't worth it.

Bread and circuses, buddy.
Causes mean nothing to a buncha idiots who want to kick some butt.
They swell up here and there in every country, regardless of political orientation. Regardless of education, economic welfare,
or level of sophistication.
That is the lesson of the gangs and the periodic riots.
People are not born to sit still forever being nice to each other.

The morons who voted for secession were land owners. The future draftees didn't have anything to say about it. The morons who peeved the successionists were landowners. The future defenders of the bankers and the industrialists didn't have much to say about it.
Look at the times! How much of the world was at war during the 1830's,40's, 50's, 60's, 70's?
All 'civilized' nations in that time treated common soldiers as the dregs of humanity unless they were related to one of them.
Look at the Crimean War, at Clara Barton, Molly Pitcher, Florence Nightingale... Field hospitals were often busier between battles, dealing with the diseases that spread with the bringing together of thousands of men from disparate areas. In 1917, a quarter of the drafted men sitting in training camps waiting to go to France suffered from the Flu Epidemic and many died.
The 'Great'War was supposed to be the 'war to end all wars' because people were tired.

The US has been spoiling for a fight since Desert Storm, the soldiers training and then being sent to Bosnia or Korea or Somalia. They want to kill something. Bin Laden gave them a target, a direction.

As I said far above, Lincoln believed that a broken nation would be fair game for diplomatic games and foreign alliances and a continent shattered by dissension and death forever.
When Washington had to deal with Shay's rebellion over the corn tax, he had to think about what it would take to make the infant government work. And one of the conclusions he came to involved dealing with the challenges to the government. John Jay ahd to think about these things, too. Like hockey, you have to have rules and penalties. Like hockey, somebody is going to get hurt. But that is the way the game is played.
The south had some genuine grievances. And at this late date, it appears that there was no mechanism to resolve them. There still might not be one.
But the honorable gentlemen (!) who chose to take sides against each other in the Civil (!) War and who later sat around in veteran's homes yapping at each other about shared glories saw the whole thing as a kind of giant duel for the honor of the south.
If you really want to have some fun, look up the National Geographics from 1965 and see what went on then. The whole centennial thing was grotesque and bizarre and it only came 11 years before the Bicentennial, which was a little strange itself. But 1965 was the beginning of the escalation of Vietnam and, believe it or not, there was a rebel swell of pride in the Army at being able to take on another enemy just like ol'grandad had!

Wow. Good point. I'm still thinking of it in oversimplified terms, as if massive groups of people in the South really wanted to secede, were well-informed about why they should secede, and as if the people fighting for secession were the same people who thought they would benefit. You're right, it's a lot messier than that.

You have to fold history and smack it about a bit to get it to fit into neat little boxes.