At 02:33 AM 2/24/04 -0500, Allan wrote:
>I believe you mis-spelled "Southerners". Or perhaps "Confederates".
Nope. Southron was and remains the term for a person who supported the
Confederate States of America, as opposed to someone who just happened to
live in the southeast.
>And don't forget that the South fired the first shot.
When Federal troops moved in under cover of darkness and occupied Fort
Sumner, right smack in the middle of the CSA's largest harbor, something
had to give. The agreement worked out was that Anderson and his troops
would remain in place until their food ran out, at which point they could
surrender without loss of face. When Lincoln ordered ships to make the run
into the harbor to reprovision the fort, he didn't leave the Confederate
government with much choice.
It's perhaps useful to remember that the Northern states had just
passed a
law that raised import duties, the "sales tax" of that era and the Federal
government's primary funding source, from around 15% to around 35%. Even
without the increase, the Federal government was taking about a hundred
million a year out of the South in fees widely deemed to be governmental
protection fees supporting Northern industry.
Import duties were collected at customs houses, which is what Ft.
Sumner
was. That's why so many interpreted the occupation of the fort as a
statement that the federal government intended to collect the additional
tax come what may.
There was a lot of behind the scenes negotiating going on as the
Lincoln
government attempted to get the Southern states to agree to return to the
Union. Lincoln offered to roll back the tax increase to something around
20%, with the added inducement of a constitutional amendment guaranteeing
that the Federal government would not interfere with the institution of
slavery, but by that time, the secession fever was so strong that the offer
to roll back the tax increase fell on deaf ears.
>Some Southerners
>had been preaching war for years, and very many were happy when it came.
No doubt.
>But you've reduced The Civil War (The War Between The States) to blue
>and grey, and it wasn't that simple then either.
Such things never are.
>There were Union
>militias formed in the deep south, and union sympathizers into the
>deepest of the deep south. Likewise there were Confederate militias
>formed north of the Mason-Dixon line that made life interesting in the
>North. And there were also Confederate sympathizers all over the north.
Indeed. The slaveholding states of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and
Missouri fought on the Northern side.
>The Confederate states themselves were a fractious lot that had more
>differences than commonalities. Particularly in the last year of the
>war, their leaders spent nearly as much time fighting among themselves
>as they did fighting the Union.
Too true.
>Your comment about the military-industrial complex rings hollow, because
>after 1865 the military-industrial complex practically ceased to exist.
You might find it interesting to study the relationship between Lamar
Dupont and the Lincoln administration.
> The United States didn't keep a large standing army, so it didn't need
>a large industry to supply a large standing army.
There are those who would suggest that given the corporate forces
unleased
by the war, most of the "troops" weren't in uniform, that it was only when
the troops were needed to show the flag, as in the "secession" of Panama
from Columbia, that the connection between corporate America and the troops
became explicit.
>And yet, to this day, The Civil War was our most damaging war to date.
>Largely because of the use of Napoleanic tactics in early industrial
>warfare there were huge numbers of casualties. Because of this The
>Civil War produced more American deaths than all of our other wars
>combined.
Cold Harbor is a good example of the scale of the tragedy.
>I say again, get Bush out of the White House first. Worry about making
>major changes to the federal government later.
Your call. My perspective is that we all lost the war, and that the
governmental protestations of democratic action have been a sham ever
since. As the boss of Tammany Hall said so well, "I don't care who you let
vote so long as I get to decide who runs."
Given the rampant emotionalism evident on both sides, it's likely that
the
game will continue in stalemate for some time to come.
To quote Mayor Daley, "Today, the real problem is the future." It's my
hope that opening up new energy sources at the grass roots level (which I
thought was the point behind this list) will open up new options for
change. That's why we're working on building a micro reactor for converting
carbon-based waste into methanol.
It used to be that newspapers had a stranglehold on information, but
the
internet has completely undercut their ability to control public
perception. I believe that the development of _in situ_ power sources has
the potential to similarly dethrone the oil companies and make their
stranglehold on society into a historical footnote.
Politicians, right and left, lie. That's hardly news, and hardly likely
to
change unless conditions render them irrelevant. That's why I'm here on
this list, to glean information which might help further that goal. It's
becoming quite evident that other would rather pursue their paritsan agenda
regardless of how many people it drives off-list.
Walt
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