Topic: Rare Civil War photos document life between battles

[Highwind Dragoon]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_newsroom/20110412/us_yblog_newsroom/rare-civil-war-photos-document-life-between-battles

That does not look like a lot of fun. 

[Mooning Freddy]

The American civil war... So horrid as it seems to me so unneeded. So many people died, simply because they wished to defend their lifestyle. Maybe if both of the sides weren't so bloody stubborn half a million lives could be spared.

[X]

It was totally unnecessary. Their declaration of independence should've seen to it. But due to the bad habits of some of those people (like wanting to keep black slaves) they had to start a meaningless war over it. I also firmly believe that the civil was was a first attempt to bring about the new world order which would have been the Illuminati's brainchild at that time. But obviously it failed and now many people who didn't have to die are dead.

-X

[Mooning Freddy]

What keeps bugging me about the war is that...
Well, it's always about Lincoln being the great hero, while the Confederacy being the "bad guys". That's the way they teach American history, isn't it? But you can't really say that, not about a historical conflict. While it is true that the South refused to free their slaves, and keeping slaves is bad, this is only something we can say today, when human rights are something people are aware of from the youngest age.
Back then, the agricultural Southerns could see no other way than to keep slaves; they needed workers, and lots of them. Easy for the industrial North to say, "free your slaves", wasn't the entire economy of the South based on Agriculture, i.e. black labor?
I mean, if I put myself in the position of a Southern farmer, and I had like, 20 slaves working on my field, and suddenly this guy comes from the North and tells me to free the slaves, what would I tell him?
Probably "no, are you crazy? F**k you."
So OK, Lincoln did free the slaves, and kept the United States... United, but the war he led brought the deaths of half a million Americans and destroyed the South economically. So is that such an achievement in the long run? Or has he just sped up a process fated to occur eventually? 

[X]

The south could have freed the slaves by turning them into a productive workforce with pay, freedoms, health care and so on instead of keeping them as slaves. But did the south think of this? I have my doubts.

-X

[Ridureyu]

There are many arguments on both sides, and both sides had their hsare of heroes and villains.  It was a really sad war, ultimately, but it had been brewing for a long, long, LONG time, and was unavoidable by the time Lincoln came into office.

Yeah, it's cliche, but it's the best answer.

[Successor The Cruel]

Ahh, hell yeah!  I'm a total Civil War buff.  General Lee is one of my inspirational figures.
Thanks for posting this stuff.

Well, it's always about Lincoln being the great hero, while the Confederacy being the "bad guys". That's the way they teach American history, isn't it?

Not necessarily.  We have plenty of things that honor the Confederate States of America, from films, to documentaries, to full on monuments, to some of the state flags, to reenactments of some of the battles.  Slavery and secession certainly aren't condoned these days, but there are many Confederates who are viewed as American heroes now, inside and outside the former Confederate States.  The aforementioned General Lee being one of them, as well as Stonewall Jackson and several others who are generally looked upon with esteem.

So OK, Lincoln did free the slaves, and kept the United States... United, but the war he led brought the deaths of half a million Americans and destroyed the South economically. So is that such an achievement in the long run? Or has he just sped up a process fated to occur eventually?  

That war was quite hard to avoid.  The country essentially split into two groups, and one group felt it was within their rights to leave and form their own country.  The United States viewed that as an act of rebellion, so they went to put down the rebellion.  The other side viewed them as an invading army, and so they fought.  Something would have to give, and neither side was willing to give... and so they fought.  You allude to Lincoln starting the war, but it was technically the Confederates who did that when a United States fort in a Confederate States state was still manned with United States soldiers.  The Confederates demanded they surrender the fort, but seeing as that was United States property, they weren't going to readily do that, so the Confederates attacked (and defeated) the Federals first, thus really causing the war to happen in full effect.

For many of the Confederates, it wasn't about slavery, seeing as how most of them didn't even own slaves.  It was about loyalty to their homes and land, and also fighting for what rights they felt they had.  If they wanted to leave, they thought they should have state sovereignty based on certain articles, and it wasn't a totally black and white issue.

[Tanatra]

Ahh, hell yeah!  I'm a total Civil War buff.  General Lee is one of my inspirational figures.
Thanks for posting this stuff.

Same here. Good to meet ya!

For many of the Confederates, it wasn't about slavery, seeing as how most of them didn't even own slaves.  It was about loyalty to their homes and land, and also fighting for what rights they felt they had.  If they wanted to leave, they thought they should have state sovereignty based on certain articles, and it wasn't a totally black and white issue.

This is true. Many Confederates like General Lee actually thought slavery was evil, but couldn't bring themselves to fight against their own states, and in effect families and friends. In fact, there is a county in north Georgia called Union County; it was founded during the Civil War because the people in that region were pro-Union! Few people in North GA owned slaves because that region is rather mountainous and doesn't lend itself well to farming.

Also, I don't think many people realize just how close the Confederacy came to winning the war, on quite a few occasions. After the Union was routed in the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861, Stonewall Jackson straight up told his superiors "Give me 10,000 fresh troops, and I'll take Washington." He never got them because the the Confederate Government was so amazingly overconfident that they closed their recruiting offices! There were so many close-calls surrounding the Battle of Gettysburg that I don't even know where to begin, and if Lincoln wasn't re-elected in 1864, the war would have been lost. The Union was clearly winning, but the citizens were absolutely sick of the war by that point. Lincoln's rival in the election (ironically, a general that he relieved of command a few years prior) was running on the campaign platform of peace. If Atlanta hadn't been captured on September 2, in all likelihood Lincoln would have lost.

When studying wars (especially the Civil War and WWII,) it's situations like the aforementioned that really make you think about the notion of fate, and how different the world could have been if things went differently.

[Successor The Cruel]

Oh yeah.  Gettysburg may have been won by the Confederates if General Ewell hadn't been such a bone head and taken the good ground when there was no one on it : p
If Stonewall had been alive to command that Corps, I'm almost certain he would have done it.

If the Confederates won Gettysburg, they very well may have won the war.  I think what leads me to admire them so much is just how well they did when they had such great odds stacked against them.  On the whole, their military leaders far surpassed the Union's.  Even though the Confederates were turned back when they tried to invade the north at Antietam and Gettysburg, they really gave the United States a run for its money each time, unlike the many complete disasters that happened when the Union kept trying to break into Virginia to get at Richmond : p

[Gunlord]

Hmm...while I'm not a Civil War buff, exactly, I do have more than a passing interest in the conflict. To add my voice, if I may, another thing to remember before portraying the war as good guys vs. bad guys is that while the North was fighting to preserve the Union, many Northerners weren't fighting to free the slaves. Racism was *hugely* prevalent in the North as well, and many Northerners *hated* black people as much as their Southern foes did--they just wanted to stop the spread of slavery because it threatened their jobs (free labor would decline wherever slavery went, so the thinking goes).

Still, at least everybody likes free labor. While Successor-sama is right in that most Southerners didn't own slaves and fought to protect their homeland, I think the political system of the Confederacy as a whole was inherently more malignant than that of their foes. The Confederate constitution *explicitly* upheld slavery ("No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed," see the full text on http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Confederate_States_of_America), while our favorite constitution at least had the manners to just kind of sidestep the issue ("all other persons," "persons held in bondage," hee hee).

[Successor The Cruel]

Yeah, the blacks couldn't win for losing.  Just drew the short end of the stick, I guess...

HOWEVER...

They didn't have it ALL bad ALL the time:

MANDINGO 1978 MOVIE SLAVE SEX

*shrug*
I could think of worse things : p

: O
Gee, what kind of garbage did I just link to?  Man, the South was so screwed up : p
By the way, the slave master finds out what happened (of course) and all hell breaks lose.  Very interesting movie.  It ends with the slave master impaling Mandingo (his name is Meade, but no one on the internet calls him that) with a pitch fork : p
Or maybe in the movie version he shot him, I can't remember.  But I do remember that he ordered Mandingo to get inside this huge bowel of insanely boiling water, and Mandingo falls inside of it.

[Mooning Freddy]

OH YAH AWESOME INTERRACIAL SECKS!!!

lol that's some horrible redneck accent she has there. Also the annotations made me laugh my ass off.