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Post by Fingerplucked on Oct 9, 2015 17:57:52 GMT -5
www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DTO64SQ?keywords=the%20skeptic's%20guide%20to%20american%20history&qid=1444429667&ref_=sr_1_1&s=books&sr=1-1 It's not a book this time, but only because there is one and only one format available, audio. It's part of the Great Courses series. This is the fourth or fifth one I've bought so far. All have been pretty good, but this one on American history may be my favorite so far. It reminded me of the thread that asked if and when conservatives have ever been on the right side of history. I thought about posting this there, but didn't want to stir up an old argument. Still, I thought it might make sense to copy my opening post there: It's not a fair question. When are conservatives on the right side of history? Never. Conservatives generally want to maintain the status quo or revert to some previous period, whether real or imagined. Liberals generally want to "fix" things. They want progress. If I can get away with those stereotypical definitions, then it's literally impossible for conservatives to ever be on the right side of history. Why? History is nothing more than a retelling of events and issues. History can be as detailed as you want to make it, but the only history anybody remembers and the only history most bother examining is major events and issues. Take civil rights as an example. Liberals championed them and conservatives fought them. Liberals won. We moved ahead on civil rights. Conservatives lost. Consider what would have happened if civil rights hadn't been advanced. Would liberals have lost? No, because they'd still be fighting the fight. It would still be an ongoing issue, unresolved, and it would remain unresolved until progressives got their way. Progressives can be on the "right" side of history. At best, conservatives can only win battles, delaying what may be inevitable. But conservatives can never win the war. Or maybe I'm wrong. I just can't think of any examples where conservatives were successful in permanently stuffing the genie back into the bottle. There wasn't much in that post that was right, given my new understanding. Much of what I got wrong could be summed up with my anachronistic view of history, assigning contemporary views to previous periods. Some of you got close to explaining that, but either you missed hitting it square-on, or I failed to understand what you posted. Some of the highlights were the Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Party which had nothing to do with today's progressives or liberals. There were some shared values, but there were also conservative and moderate values promoted by the early Progressive Party. The Civil War was not caused by slavery. Or states rights. Or abolitionists. Anyway, it's a good "book" that explores the myths we tell ourselves about our own history. I'm giving it 5 stars.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 9, 2015 20:43:48 GMT -5
Except the Civil War was caused by slavery.
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Post by Fingerplucked on Oct 9, 2015 21:00:32 GMT -5
You might be joking. Or not.
The professor makes a pretty convincing case for it not being fought over slavery or any of the other usual reasons, motivations, or excuses.
We know that Lincoln had no intention of ending slavery when the war first began. And although there were abolitionists before the war, they were a small minority with little political influence. We know that there were a lot of racists in the south, but the same was true of the north, with the distribution being pretty much equal between the two regions.
The north and south had their differences with the agricultural south and the industrialized north, but the two regions had more in common than they did differences. The real problem, according to the professor, was each region's perception of the other. They focused on the differences and each distrusted the other. It was the basic distrust that split the two. Slavery and states rights were nothing more than rationalizations, the logical mind coming up with reasons why people in the north didn't like those in the south and why those in the south didn't like those in the north.
The professor presented it a lot better than I'm doing here, but it didn't sound any different to me than people today distrusting each other because they're from the wrong political party or the wrong religion or the wrong sexual orientation or any of the other major issues we seem to divide ourselves over. He made them sound like people, people no smarter or dumber than we are today.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 9, 2015 21:58:23 GMT -5
I'm not joking. Take a look at the secession documents of each southern state. The preservation of slavery is a prominent issue in all of them.
But not everyone owned slaves? Yup, but the artificial labor market benefited non-slave owners as well.
States rights? That was part of it, except it was the souther states complaining about northern states exercising their rights not to return fugitive slaves.
There is a pretty compelling argument made here:
It's interesting to me that Doctor Colonel Seidule is a Washington and Lee graduate like I am. Our college is named after two southern land and slave holding gentry, and both of us accept the argument that slavery was the root cause of the war. The constitutional conventioneers chose not to address the issue forcefully, and Monroe and Pierce and Buchanan all continued to kick the can down the proverbial road with all manner of poor legislation.
What's worse is the collective retreat we all took after the civil war. Reconstruction failures and a raft of social and housing policies enacted in the North around the turn of the last century effectively continued slavery anyway, and we're all paying for it today.
As always, your point of view may vary from mine, but it would take a pretty compelling argument to get me to move.
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Post by Doug on Oct 9, 2015 22:51:29 GMT -5
The war was caused by the North attacking a independent country. Kind of like Pearl Harbor.
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Post by Marshall on Oct 9, 2015 23:36:11 GMT -5
I'll reiterate my quote from the first episode of Ken Burn's Civil War. There he says there were 21 million people in the north and 9 million people in the south. 4 million of the south were slaves. With 44% of the population as slave labor, it's hard to build a case that the 56% weren't ALL benefitting in some way from the economy of cheap labor. And that overturning that labor system would cause a total disruption to the entire economic system of the region.
Sure, Lincoln didn't set out to free the slaves. He didn't like slavery. But there was no way anyone could imagine how to extricate the country from the institution without major disruption. But then the south took it out of his hands by seceding because of fear of having abolition forced upon them.
I get where it could have been possible that the N & S so distrusted and misunderstood each other (and disliked) that they would search for reasons to justify their natural dislike of the other. But slavery so affected the entire life of the south (and had no benefit for the north) that it was always the elephant in the room when searching for a reason to dislike the other person.
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Post by jdd2 on Oct 10, 2015 2:28:10 GMT -5
(PaulS--they way the quotes are presented in that video..., well, I just turned it off.)
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Post by jdd2 on Oct 10, 2015 5:57:08 GMT -5
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Post by patrick on Oct 10, 2015 7:52:44 GMT -5
True, Lincoln didn't come into office intending to eliminate slavery, and that might have been politically unrealistic at that time, but the abolitionists were determined to prevent slavery from spreading to other states in the West as they joined the Union. The conflict over future slavery is what led to the clashes between the Jayhawkers and the Border Ruffians in Bleeding Kansas. |
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Post by Deleted on Oct 10, 2015 9:50:52 GMT -5
It comes across that way, doesn't it? We weren't close at school. I think he was a senior when I was a freshman. Regardless, I sent him a note when I saw this, and the tenor of his response indicated he was not very patient with folks who tried to explain away the causal nature of slavery, many of our fellow alumni included.
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Post by RickW on Oct 10, 2015 11:04:42 GMT -5
I imagine you can argue it many ways, depending on how you interpret what was written and said. The truth is, you could easily round up every one of those arguments and say the war was caused by all of them. People get angry/irritated/worried, and then things start to snowball in their minds, as they see more and more "evidence" of a threat from "those" people.
As Russell so loves to say, monkey politics. As the monkey said in Madagascar, "If you have some shit, throw it now."
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Post by Fingerplucked on Oct 10, 2015 11:25:03 GMT -5
I'm not joking. Take a look at the secession documents of each southern state. The preservation of slavery is a prominent issue in all of them. But not everyone owned slaves? Yup, but the artificial labor market benefited non-slave owners as well. States rights? That was part of it, except it was the souther states complaining about northern states exercising their rights not to return fugitive slaves. There is a pretty compelling argument made here: It's interesting to me that Doctor Colonel Seidule is a Washington and Lee graduate like I am. Our college is named after two southern land and slave holding gentry, and both of us accept the argument that slavery was the root cause of the war. The constitutional conventioneers chose not to address the issue forcefully, and Monroe and Pierce and Buchanan all continued to kick the can down the proverbial road with all manner of poor legislation. What's worse is the collective retreat we all took after the civil war. Reconstruction failures and a raft of social and housing policies enacted in the North around the turn of the last century effectively continued slavery anyway, and we're all paying for it today. As always, your point of view may vary from mine, but it would take a pretty compelling argument to get me to move. I don't think I have a compelling argument. Not one to change your mind anyway. Seeing the way this thread is going, that I now have something that everybody can disagree with, I think I ought to give the lecture on the Civil War another listen and at least present Mark Stoler's ideas a little better. I think I'll take notes this time. In the meantime, I'm watching this video. I may agree with your schoolmate by the end of the video, but at this point I find myself questioning some of his basic assumptions. And if I'm going to take notes on Stoler's lecture, I probably ought to take notes on your buddy's video, right? 0:48 I noticed he completely dismisses any cause or reason other than slavery. I assume he'll explain his dismissal of all other factors. 1:42 "Our new government was founded on slavery..." True, but in the broader sense, it was based on white male supremacy. We committed genocide on the native inhabitants. We took their land, we took their farms and we took their roads. We may not have been able to survive on our own if this continent had been completely undeveloped before our arrival. We certainly would have had no need for a government in the first place if we had not colonized and killed to take what we wanted. We developed the belief in manifest destiny, that God wanted us to to have this land. And as a footnote, but part of the white male supremacy, women were property. Is it really morally repugnant to enslave blacks when you believe that other races are inferior and somehow less than human? Another note, and maybe this will turn out to be premature, a reason to not make notes before I finish watching the video: I don't think our government was founded on slavery. Our government was founded on protecting property rights. Slaves were nothing more than a subset, a type of property. He would have been more correct in saying that our economy was based on slavery. Cheap slave labor drove the agricultural economic engine in the south, and the industrialized north was dependent on the slave labor produced raw materials flowing out of the south. 2:05 States Rights: I have to agree with him here. States rights are nothing more than a justification, not so different from today's voter fraud issues. Both are attempts to reframe the real issues. 2:30 I just remembered something from the lectures: Both north and south (and I think right and left) argued for states rights at times. In general, the side that felt disempowered at the time started claiming "states rights." 3:42 Non-slave owners also supported slavery because it ensured that they did not fall to the bottom rung of the social ladder. That's interesting. I think I'd have to agree with that. It sure sounds like "people." 4:36 Divisions in the country are all about slavery, quotes from Lincoln, etc.: Your schoolmate is being very selective in what he uses for evidence. Earlier I was searching for some kind of text from Mark A. Stoler as a means to avoid having to re-listen to the Civil War lecture. I didn't find what I was looking for, but I did come across a lot of Lincoln quotes. One that ought to be included in this video was Lincoln writing about his general disapproval of slavery, but his first priority, the one he had to swear to under oath before being able to assume the presidency, was to protect the union. Keeping the union together was Lincoln's first priority. Your buddy should not be so quick to dismiss the idea. 5:28 Your buddy is getting kind of carried away with his pride and moral superiority over the Confederates. Okay, I'm done. Overall I thought it was a good video. He presented his case and made his point. As I said above, I think he was being selective in the evidence he presented, although all history is like that. In his case though, I think he was being too selective. The video is meant to persuade more than to inform. Another thought: considering the length of time and the length of this post over just a five minute video, should I really go back and take notes on the professor's Civil War lecture? If I do, will anybody even read it? I think I'll go take the dog for a walk and think about it. |
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Post by epaul on Oct 10, 2015 12:13:24 GMT -5
Slavery was the issue that led to the secession, but it was the secession that led to the war.
I suppose this is a classic the chicken or egg debate, and I don't see any particular reason to parse it in one direction or the other (it's like arguing whether Peyton or Brady is the best QB of all time; disregarding Joe Montana's past or Aaron Rodger's present, or Terry Bradshaw, if rings count. All of them were and are damn good and all relied on a team of fellows).
But, if a choice is to be made between chicken and egg, while slavery led to secession, it was secession that led Lincoln to the war.
War is a terrible measure. Lincoln would have relied and waited upon politics to deal the issue of slavery. It took secession, the split and promised ruin of a nation's future, a nation founded on hope and filled with promise to lead Lincoln to the terrible solution of war, a solution whose cost Lincoln could not have possibly imagined. No human living at the time could have imagined the cost that lay waiting with this war.
(and if any living at the time would have had an inkling of the cost the cannons would bring, team pride would have been overcome by sheer awe and fright, and there would have been no war).
Lincoln did not embark on war to end slavery. He embarked on that terrible measure to hold the promise of this nation together. Once united again, the issue of slavery would be waiting for some other man and congress to deal with.
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.
It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
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Post by millring on Oct 10, 2015 12:26:40 GMT -5
I wonder what was so all-fired important about preserving the Union? What would the harm have been in having two sovereign nations on the North American continent? (Heck, now we've got three. Four if you count Kentucky.)
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Post by Russell Letson on Oct 10, 2015 12:34:18 GMT -5
Humans, the complicated, half-self-aware creatures they are, often act out of strange mixes of motives. Most of the historical clusterfucks I'm familiar with arose from combinations of very material (which generally means money-and-power) and psychological/emotional (e.g., ideological or symbolic) issues. As a materialist and general sourpuss, I'm inclined to see the material causes as at least reinforcing, if not driving the non-material ones. In the case of the Civil War, I can't imagine it happening without the economic-social-political problem of slavery. Racism and economic exploitation existed on both sides of the free/slave boundary, but slavery (the most extreme variety of racism & exploitation) required an especially virulent kind of racism to remain morally bearable to the owner class. And the south absolutely required slave labor to keep operating as they had for more than a century. Add to this economic situation an extremely conservative (in the sense of "focused on maintaining existing conditions and values") mindset with a very strong preference for local autonomy and you're all set for a showdown, with secession as the starting, um, gun.
Any historian who tries to subordinate slavery to non-slavery-related non-material motives for secession is in danger of cozying up to slavery apologists and Lost Cause sentimentalists.
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Post by epaul on Oct 10, 2015 12:34:44 GMT -5
By the way, the egg came first.
A long, long, long time ago, some bird very much like a chicken laid an egg, an egg that held great promise, for whether by mutation or cross species dalliance, from this egg would emerge something new to the world, a chicken.
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Post by epaul on Oct 10, 2015 12:43:14 GMT -5
I wonder what was so all-fired important about preserving the Union? What would the harm have been in having two sovereign nations on the North American continent? (Heck, now we've got three. Four if you count Kentucky.) I've wondered the same. Might have been fine. Or maybe we would done the Europe thing and had several dozen wars. Or better yet, the Middle East model. The dominance of the United States has led to a very stable continent. Canada is a partner, nearly another state. Mexico is the same, only less so. One dominant entity with two satellites, or three contenders for the throne? |
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Post by Fingerplucked on Oct 10, 2015 12:45:44 GMT -5
Humans, the complicated, half-self-aware creatures they are, often act out of strange mixes of motives. Most of the historical clusterfucks I'm familiar with arose from combinations of very material (which generally means money-and-power) and psychological/emotional (e.g., ideological or symbolic) issues. As a materialist and general sourpuss, I'm inclined to see the material causes as at least reinforcing, if not driving the non-material ones. In the case of the Civil War, I can't imagine it happening without the economic-social-political problem of slavery. Racism and economic exploitation existed on both sides of the free/slave boundary, but slavery (the most extreme variety of racism & exploitation) required an especially virulent kind of racism to remain morally bearable to the owner class. And the south absolutely required slave labor to keep operating as they had for more than a century. Add to this economic situation an extremely conservative (in the sense of "focused on maintaining existing conditions and values") mindset with a very strong preference for local autonomy and you're all set for a showdown, with secession as the starting, um, gun. Any historian who tries to subordinate slavery to non-slavery-related non-material motives for secession is in danger of cozying up to slavery apologists and Lost Cause sentimentalists. Good point. So maybe I should listen to the lecture again. It'd be better if you listened to the lecture though. I'd like to remove myself as middleman. |
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Post by epaul on Oct 10, 2015 12:48:41 GMT -5
Any historian who tries to subordinate slavery to non-slavery-related non-material motives for secession is in danger of cozying up to slavery apologists and Lost Cause sentimentalists. i And any historian who reinforces the meme that "Mr. Lincoln fought to free the black man" is cozying up to another set of myth-makers. |
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Post by Fingerplucked on Oct 10, 2015 13:01:31 GMT -5
BTW, I can see that I made a mistake in linking this to the earlier thread in general and the Civil War in particular. I suppose I could have gotten the same results by saying that this country was not founded by those seeking religious freedom or that most people did not support the American Revolution or that we won most of our wars and battles or that we go to war only when we need to protect ourselves and our interests or that FDR was not a liberal or that fear of the spread of communism was primarily a political tactic, forced upon the public.
The lecture series covered the discovery of America up through Vietnam and the Cold War, exposing popularly held beliefs that are partly or mostly myths we tell ourselves through selective cherry picking of the facts.
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