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It's OT, but one of the more insane coincidences I've come across in my life is that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day: July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
July 4 1863 was arguably the turning point of the US Civil War as well, near-simultaneous Union victories at both Gettysburg and Vicksburg.
As a non-American I was always under the impression that the Confederation never actually stood a chance.
But I might be completely wrong here.
The North was stronger on paper, but the South had better generals. A number of initial battles happened fairly close to Washington DC (remember DC is directly adjacent to Virginia, and Virginia was a Confederate state!), so things were touch-and-go early on. Furthermore, at the time of the split, there were still lots of officials in the US federal government who were sympathetic to the cause of the South. I don't believe the Confederacy had to worry as much about the loyalties of its officials. In any case, even after the immediate threat to DC was addressed, the Union wasn't making a lot of progress during the first years of the war, and there were a lot of people in the North who wanted to give up and let the Confederacy exist as an independent country.
The North's eventual win came at very high cost. In my opinion, we should memorialize Union soldiers more than we do. There was so much discussion of Confederate monuments the other year, but no one ever mentions the many Union monuments across the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Union_Civil_War_monume... A lot of people paid the ultimate price, fighting for the promise that "history will remember you for helping to end slavery!", and yet we don't remember them that much. It actually makes me rather upset to be honest.
> The North's eventual win came at very high cost. In my opinion, we should memorialize Union soldiers more than we do. There was so much discussion of Confederate monuments the other year, but no one ever mentions the many Union monuments across the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Union_Civil_War_monume... A lot of people paid the ultimate price, fighting for the promise that "history will remember you for helping to end slavery!", and yet we don't remember them that much. It actually makes me rather upset to be honest.
I'm not from the US but I find it really ironic that even from the outside it appears the US culture views this phenomenon as normal: the losers (Confederates) highly priced the traditional values (just take a look at the personal position of general Lee), thus those values got denigrated because they got associated with racism, taking along the ability of the winners (Union) keep the memory and gratitude to those who gave their lives for. I actually live in a country torn by a civil war (disputed to this day!) and man, it is tragic. The wounds seem to never really heal, they just reopen along line where the scars used to be at the next big dilemma in society.
I’m not sure what traditional values you mean…
The North and the South had sort of different dispositions. The North grew out of New England and New York, the kernel is sort of Yankee values, and then expanded outwards.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee
I’m not sure what the South’s traditional values are, I mostly associate them with a sort of slow-paced agrarian society, but I’m not sure to what extent that’s just a modern invention.
Which Confederate General was actually better? The only decent one would be Lee.
No idea where this idea comes from, the idea that the loosing side in a war had better Generals. For the Wehrmacht it's the same. People tend to forget thatbthise Generals lost their battles, and the war, at the end.
> Which Confederate General was actually better? The only decent one would be Lee.
Not at all. Longstreet, Jackson, Forrest, Stuart, Early (and that's just off the top of my head)...all of them routinely outperformed their Union counterparts in individual battles and smaller engagements for the first couple of years of the war. Until Grant came into his own and was able to properly empower others like Sherman and Sheridan, the Union didn't really have any competent generals (although Meade does deserve recognition for holding the line at Gettysburg).
The reason the Union still won was, first, logistics--as the saying goes, battles can be won by generalship but wars are won by logistics, and the Union had superior logistics (for example, running rail lines on the fly to support its armies). And second, the fact that the Confederacy failed to follow up key victories: for example, after the first battle of Bull Run, Washington, DC was pretty much there for the taking, but the Confederacy never tried. I suppose one could put that down to generalship, but I think it's more a matter of overall policy as regards the goal of the war: the Confederates weren't trying to conquer the Union, they were just trying to be independent from it.
(Similar remarks could be made about the Wehrmacht generals: no, they didn't lose all their battles, they actually won quite a lot of them, but because of the insane overall leadership they were under, and because once the war became protracted they were at a disadvantage in logistics, they ended up losing the war.)
I suspect the losing side often ends up with “better looking” generals because they end up fighting defensively. If you lose long enough you end up in familiar terrain, with a sympathetic populace, and your supply lines get shorter!
Eventually the war gets truly hopeless. Without any feasible objectives to go for, the loser has incredible latitude to try and stay alive and inflict harm. Never any need to take a tactically disadvantageous battle for strategic reasons if there’s no strategic hope, after all!
> The only decent one would be Lee.
Lee had a habit of couching orders as if they were suggestions or requests. The South's most effective general may have been Jackson. For the first half of the war, the Union's top general in the east was McClellan, who was useless.
[Edit] McClellan didn't fight in the west. And I spelled his name wrong.
[Edit 2] Lee overruled Longstreet, who wanted to flank the Union's right. Lee insisted on a frontal assault. That decision led directly to Picket's disastrous charge.
I don't understand why some generals are so averse to flanking actions. Is it because they are somehow considered cowardly, or "just not cricket"? Flanking actions are often decisive, and sometimes even the threat of a flanking action can critically disrupt enemy operations.
I don't even know much about the U.S civil war, but are you saying you don't understand how a great leader could be fighting for an unlikely victory?
> ...and there were a lot of people in the North who wanted to give up and let the Confederacy exist as an independent country.
Just because something was done doesn't mean it was a great idea. There is an uncomfortable counterfactual to explore of whether it a better idea to let people split up and self govern. It is very much a history-written-by-winners moment to assume it is self evident that people have to be conquered for their own good.
A remarkable number of countries that weren't invaded by Union soldiers also gave up on slavery. It isn't economically feasible, anyone who tries to use it is going to get shredded by capitalists.
Does the North help enforce slavery in the split country scenario?
Does the confederacy happily let slaves escape across the border to freedom?
You are also sort of writing off the intrinsic value of freeing 4 million people sooner than later.
>A remarkable number of countries that weren't invaded by Union soldiers also gave up on slavery. It isn't economically feasible, anyone who tries to use it is going to get shredded by capitalists.
I'm actually not sure about this. Based on what I've read, many in the North had been saying for ages that slavery was going to go away on its own, and the war only happened when it became increasingly clear that that wasn't happening.
>Estimates of the number of enslaved people today range from around 38 million[1] to 49.6 million,[2][3][4] depending on the method used to form the estimate and the definition of slavery being used.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century
I think it's true that slavery was holding the South back economically, but their "shredded by the capitalists" moment came when they were crushed by the North's superior industrial economy during the war. I don't know how else it was supposed to happen.
Fundamentalism can keep going without concern over what is tenable from a capitalist viewpoint. There is Russia, North Korea and Iran right now, to just name some prominent examples.
(Then there is the uncomfortable juxtaposition of the words "self govern" within a country that kept slaves. The slaves of course aren't counted as self governing.)
The Confederacy was never going to win outright, and they knew it. Their goal was to force a stalemate, allowing them to continue to exist as a separate country from the United States.
edit: and for the first few years, it looked like they might be able to do that.
The US war of independence is considered won, and the US didn't conquer England. I'm sure I have all sorts of wrong headed bias, but I never thought the Confederacy had any larger goal than independence? Why would it be a stalemate and not a victory for them if they were allowed to exist as a separate country?
In some ways, I think it continues to exist as a separate country within the United States. Every demographic map you look at, political, health, education etc. you can see it. And whenever I have visited some of those states, it almost feels like another country. They even speak a different language, or at times sounds like it.
>allowing them to continue to exist as a separate country from the United States.
This inadvertently makes a point I like to make when discussing the US Civil War with those unfamiliar with it. The US didn't really have a civil war. It split into two separate countries and then had a regular war, where one country conquered the other.
I think maintaining their independence was "winning outright" for them.
They still seem to be winning the grand culture war.
The Union had a much larger population, far more resources, and almost all of the divided nation's industrial production capacity. In most cases, it's factors like those that determine the eventual victor in a war (see WWI and WWII for good examples of this).
But the weaker party doesn't need to defeat the stronger one. They just need to make the cost of the war greater than the price the stronger side is willing to pay. That's how the USA won its independence from Britain, after all. Part of what made the price too high in that case was assistance from the French (it was the French navy, not Washington's army, that sealed the victory in Yorktown, for example).
The leadership of the Confederacy was well aware of this and had diplomats all across Europe seeking help for their cause. If they had succeeded, history might have taken a very different turn.
A good book about Union efforts to keep Britain and other European powers out of the war: Our Man in Charleston, by Christopher Dickey.
The British/US comparison seems a bit hard to line up, though.
The British Empire had a whole planet to keep an eye on, losing in NA was of course not what they wanted, but it wasn’t existential or anything. America was a far away colony for them, long way to go to hold on to, basically, a resource extraction colony.
The US was a lot more motivated to take the South back. It is a big border, right near our population centers, far too risky to have a hostile country there.
If, like, Wales had tried the same strategy as America, I bet they wouldn’t have beat the English.
You have to define "win" here a little better. Especially in a war.
Win as in conquer the rest of the US? lol, no. That wasn't going to happen. The industrial base just wasn't there.
Win as in make it so costly to re-take the South that the rest of the US doesn't want to devote the resources? That was probably possible at certain points in the war.
If you like alt history, Turtledove does this in one of his 4 or 5 "alternate Civil War" stories. Not the one with the time-traveling Appartheidists, nor the fantasy version where the slaves are all magic-less blond people. The other one. Well, one of the other ones.
In it, Lee manages a string of early victories, gets within striking distance of DC before Lincoln can flee, and takes it. The US capitulates. It's not a 1-in-a-billion thing, but it certainly does read like a 1-in-5,000 thing.
Didn't Lee get within striking distance of DC in real life? See the second two maps here: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/battles-us...
IIRC, there was a point at which everyone in DC was gloomy because they thought it would be captured.
They didn’t have the industrial base to win.
Maybe if Europe had gone all in on supporting them with trade, refused to recognize the blockade, that sort of thing? But that’s a pretty big “what if?”
A case can be made that if Great Britain had officially recognized the Confederacy as a separate country, they might have won the Civil War. Not all historians would agree with that, though.
I'd argue that this is the only way the Confederacy could have won. Otherwise, they would have just been ground down in any long-term attritional fight.
It was a real possibility: Abraham Lincoln was worried sick about this. He knew the Union didn't stand a chance against a fully focused Royal Navy.
Sometimes, to a certain extent, people can choose the day they die on.
If a spouse or child dies…see Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds…
> Fifty years separate the Boston Tea Party and the Monroe Doctrine
The type of sentence that reminds me of
> Cleopatra lived closer in time to the building of the first Pizza Hut than to the building of the pyramids
> How did a group of British colonies become a self-proclaimed protector of continents within half a century?
50 years are a long time if a country makes the right moves. Think of where China was in 1973 and where it is in 2023. The same applies to making the wrong moves and they are much easier to do. There are so many examples that I won't make any. Pick your favorite one.
Couter example would be Republic of Rhodesia - from the breadbasket of Africa to a meme with zeros not fiting on the bill of Zimbabwean dollar.
Is that a counter example? I thought a counter example would refute the notion that 50 years is not a sufficiently long time frame for considerable change to occur.
There is not point in even discussing counter examples, since they don't make sense it this context. You just need to show that an example exists.
It's not about the time period mentioned in the article, but I highly recommend the similarly-named "The Men Who Built America" documentary series. Really interesting (and inspiring) if you're interested in the industrial development of the US circa 1860-1930.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV3DmWNCEaI&list=PL-_k1uJcDM...
I wonder how much the Monroe Doctrine might have been —at least in part— a reaction to https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Final_Act_of_the_Congress_of_... ?
The United States had already banned the slave trade in 1808 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_Prohibiting_Importation_...) so, no, it is unlikely that the Monroe Doctrine was a reaction to that.
"banned"; cf https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_Prohibiting_Importation_...
> The U.S. position meant that many slave ships from other countries falsely flew the American flag to avoid being seized by British anti-slaving patrols. ... The Atlantic slave trade was not ended until the U.S. Civil War, when American-built and -managed ships were prevented from operating.
Study the Clotilda…
Wish: Stories like these should be published during the weekend.
So that one can leisurely read, meander into the hyperlinks, watch a few related Ken Burns videos, and then ruminate even more by creating some Dall-E images.
Most of that time's history does not cover the incredible economic development that happened during that period, where US capita income leapfrogged that of Britain. Thousands of new patents were filed, new machines were created, and the foundation of the financial and industrial boom was created, the riches of which we still enjoy today.
They missed the events that made the United States a world power - the suppression of the Barbary pirates. There's an entertaining version of this as a YouTube video by Drachfinel.[1]
Up until the early 19th century, all the European sea powers, and the United States, were paying tribute to the Barbary pirates just to get into the Mediterranean Sea. This was one of the largest expenses of the early U.S. Government. Then came the War of 1812, US vs Britain, which the US won. A side effect was that the US now had an effective, battle-hardened navy. Which was sent to Tripoli to deal with the problem.[2] Which it did.
The European sea powers hadn't been able to take down the Barbary pirates. When the US did, the US started to be taken seriously as a country able to project power. It also began the American style of warfare - build big hammer, use big hammer - which worked well up to Vietnam.
This is where the line "to the shores of Tripoli", in the USMC Hymn, comes from.
You'd best be editing wikipedia (and its sources) real quick:
Following the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, European powers agreed upon the need to suppress the Barbary corsairs entirely. The threat was finally subdued by the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 and subsequent pacification by the French during the mid-to-late 19th century.
You have a blinkered view of the Barbary global threat - the British colonies were protected by Britain until the war of independance at which point the newly formed USofA had to fend for themselves and force their own treaty via the second Barbary War in 1815, but that didn't end or suppress the pirates .. that took the French hammer of 1830.
Not to mention what soperj already pointed out ... your take must be news to Anglo-Canadians.
> Then came the War of 1812, US vs Britain, which the US won
Never realized how bad the American education system really was. In what way did you win this war that you started?
The American education system is extremely local. I learned in NYC that we didn’t win the war of 1812.
The local control of education is also why education is such a hot battleground for the culture wars; it doesn’t take many zealots to take control of a local school system with low turnout elections.
As an immigrant now settled in the US, I'm shocked at how little Americans know about geography, especially for a country that has the most global impact. Often been asked whether I've climbed Everest and how cold it must has been in Tibet for me.
To this day, frustratingly George Bush hasn't learned to pronounce Iraq well, at least the smallest respect to a plundered country.
As appalling as Bush’s actual actions toward Iraq were, his pronunciation of Iraq is a pretty common one for his generation of US English speakers. I suspect that if you looked at 20th-century editions of authoritative US English dictionaries or pronunciation guides, the /aɪˈɹæk/ pronunciation would often be listed there.
The “correct pronunciation” of a country’s name in a foreign language, is not necessarily the one that natives of that country use. Languages around the world have altered the pronunciation of a country’s name when borrowing that word.
This “just so” take reminds me of a classic “Hark! A Vagrant” comic: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=340