[lbo-talk] Civil War - was Catalonia the latest flashpoint in the Euro crisis

[andie_nachgeborenen]

Lots of people opposed the resort to war. They were mainly pro-slavery Democrats. In fact, people opposed the war all the way through with vigor and occasionally violence, as in the racist New York draft riots. Some, but by no means all of this, was checked by Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus. George McLellan, who created the Army of the Potomac and was fired by Lincoln after Antietam for refusing, to the greatest extent that he could, to use it to fight, was the Democratic candidate in 1864, running on a peace-with-the-South platform, and probably would have won but for the Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg.

I'm not the sort of person who says that the Old Man was always right, but it's worth reflecting on the fact that he supported the war -- I mean Mr. Lincoln's War -- as far as I can tell without qualification. As did the world's working classes, the slaves and freedmen in both  North and South, even though it was never, on Lincoln's part, a war to abolish slavery. (Not that he didn't view slavery as a great evil and its abolition as a considerable but incidental benefit.) 

My point is that while it may seem very daring and radical now to say, Lincoln was a bloodthirsty Bismarkian statist and his war an unnecessary slaughter, that was not the view that the more progressive elements in international working class politics took at the time. It was the view taken by the most backwards currents in both popular and elite politics in the North and internationally. Maybe the left and progressives were wrong in retrospect, but it seems pretty clear that progressive opinion from the start of the war all the way through was pro-war and pro-Union.

Sent from my iPad

On Sep 22, 2012, at 10:48 PM, "Carl G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:


> The question at issue was devolution: can it be progressive? 
> 
> The answer suggested was no, and I was trying to offer some counter-exampes.
> 
> It also seems worthwhile to consider whether a US citizen should have supported or opposed Lincoln's resort to war. 
> 
> --CGE
> 
> On Sep 22, 2012, at 8:29 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> 
>> What might or should have been always generates a pretty chaotic discussion,
>> and I'm not sure what is achieved by it.
>> 
>> But John Brown and the significant forces (national and inter-national) he
>> represented has to be included n the calculation. Attempts to foment a slave
>> rebellion were not loony, and almost certainly would have continued,
>> probably intensified.
>> 
>> Carrol
>> 
>> 
>> 
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