If the South had won the War Against Northern Aggression...?

It was in the interests of Britain and France to see a less powerful United States, so it seems to me they would have invested in the South just to keep the two countries divided and to develp the Confederacy into an ally.

Until Gettysburg, the South had never invaded the North before.

Until 1914, when the CSA was reannexed by the USA while their European friends were otherwise disposed, and no North American help was to be forthcoming in either WW

Antietam/Sharpsburg? Was not Maryland a Union state? And think about it this way. Suppose Lee had won at Gettysburg. Do you think the U.S. would have given up without even trying to push the invader out and punish him?

Yes and no.

Marathon: Well, I never said Britain and France's sordid plan would WORK...

Win or loose ag Gettysburg, might not have made a difference. I'm saying, what if he had avoided Gettysburg and been able to maneuver the ANV into a position to threaten Washington. Lee didn't want the North to surrender, he just wanted them to sue for peace.

I think he would have ultimately ended in a defensive posture, and the war would have continued the way it did. Whether or not he lost at Gettysburg or a location further South, he was going to lose. By 1863, the Union had generals who understood better than Lee the way warfare had changed. Pickets charge at a location near DC is just as likely to collapse spectacularly as it did in Pennsylvania.

If it had been a defensive posture, Picket's charge would never have happened. That's what Longstreet was trying to say. Find a good defensible position between the Army of the Potomac and Washington, and wait for Lincoln to say, "Time out! Why don't we talk this over."

Lee's goal was to destroy the Army of the Potomac, if possible, and then forcing Lincoln to agree to a peace settlement.

What Lee SHOULD have done was use his presence in Northern territory to force the Union Army to attack HIM, not vice versa - and destroy the Union Army. That's what Longstreet wanted to do. The Confederates were always far better on defense than attack.

In other words, the best thing would have been provoke the UNION into making a suicidal charge. Every time I look at Gettysburg I want to hit Lee and say "WTF were you thinking, dude?!"

I should have been more clear. I meant that he still would have tried for the knockout blow, then retreated to a defensive posture. I suppose even without the grand offensive battle, Lee would have lost, though. As I've already pointed out, the North was not planning to quit after three years of fighting (much of it not going to Union advantage). Whether Lee kills the AVN at a Gettysburg or not, the AVN eventually dies from attrition. Sherman was still going to march through Georgia and the Carolinas.

Which is untrue. They were doing it to keep their property from being confiscated without compensation.

Well, I disagree. If Lee had been able to take out the Army of the Potomac...which was doable IMHO if Longstreet's plan had been followed, there would have been absolutely nothing to stop him from taking Washington. It makes no difference what Sherman was doing. It would have been checkmate.

Also, I don't think the Northern citizenry were as supportive of the war as you seem to.

How is that disagreeing? That just seems like an overly genteel way of saying they didn't want their slaves set free.

Europe and the American Civil War

The war had a direct bearing on the United States' foreign relations and the relations that were most important were those with the two dominant powers of Europe, England and France. Each country was a monarchy, and a monarchy does not ordinarily like to see a rebellion succeed in any land. (The example may prove contagious.) Yet the war had not progressed very far before it was clear that the ruling classes in each of these two countries sympathized strongly with the Confederacy-so strongly that with just a little prodding they might be moved to intervene and bring about Southern independence by force of arms. The South was, after all, an aristocracy, and the fact that it had a broad democratic base was easily overlooked at a distance of three thousand miles. Europe's aristocracies had never been happy about the prodigious success of the Yankee democracy. If the nation now broke into halves, proving that democracy did not contain the stuff of survival, the rulers of Europe would be well pleased.

To be sure, the Southern nation was based on the institution of chattel slavery-a completely repugnant anachronism by the middle of the nineteenth century. Neither the British nor the French people would go along with any policy that involved fighting to preserve slavery. But up to the fall of 1862 slavery was not an issue in the war. The Federal government had explicitly declared that it was fighting solely to save the Union. If a Southern emissary wanted to convince Europeans that they could aid the South without thereby aiding slavery, he could prove his case by citing the words of the Federal President and Congress. As far as Europe was concerned, no moral issue was involved; the game of power politics could be played with a clear conscience.

So it was played, and the threat of European intervention was real and immediate. Outright war with England nearly took place in the fall of 1861, when a hot-headed US. naval officer, Captain Charles Wilkes, undertook to twist the lion's tail and got more of a reaction than anyone was prepared for.

Jefferson Davis had named two distinguished Southerners, James M. Mason of Virginia and John Slidell of Louisiana, as commissioners to represent Confederate interests abroad, Mason in England and Slidell in France. They got out of Charleston, South Carolina, on a blockade-runner at the beginning of October and went via Nassau to Havana, where they took passage for England on the British mail steamer Trent.


Precisely at this time U.S.S. San Jacinto was returning to the United States from a long tour of duty along the African coast.. She put in at a Cuban port, looking for news of Confederate commerce raiders which were reported to be active in that vicinity, and there her commander, Captain Wilkes, heard about Mason and Slidell. He now worked out a novel interpretation of international law. A nation at war (it was generally agreed) had a right to stop and search a neutral merchant ship if it suspected that ship of carrying the enemy's dispatches. Mason and Slidell, Wilkes reasoned, were in effect Confederate dispatches, and he had a right to remove them. So on November 8, 1861, he steamed out into the Bahama Channel, fired twice across Trent's bows, sent a boat's crew aboard, collared the Confederate commissioners, and bore them off in triumph to the United States, where they were lodged in Fort Warren, in Boston Harbor. Wilkes was hailed as a national hero. Congress voted him its thanks, and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, ordinarily a most cautious mortal, warmly commended him.

But in England there was an uproar which almost brought on a war. The mere notion that Americans could halt a British ship on the high seas and remove lawful passengers was intolerable. Eleven thousand regular troops were sent to Canada, the British fleet was put on a war footing, and a sharp note was dispatched to the United States, demanding surrender of the prisoners and a prompt apology.


Rest of the article can befound here:

http://www.civilwarhome.com/europeandcivilwar.htm

Saturated font, didn't read.

God damn it, I wish people would stop copy/pasting with the WYSIWYG editor, or at least figure out how to change the text back to the normal size and font. It's Verdana size 2, for the record.

It's even worse when someone tries to make the text black, since I'm using a dark blue background.

They didn't want their property taken without compensation. Somehow you don't understand why people might strenuously object to suddenly losing that much capital investment.

Fuck 'em.

Which part is untrue? Don't drag out the carnard about the war starting over abolition. The Republicans were not an abolitionist party nor was Lincoln an abolitionist President when he was elected in 1860.

Which is neither here nor there as in 1860 abolition wasn't on the mind of Lincoln or the Republicans. Just stopping the spread of slavery, which meant the death of the power of the current crop of politicans in the South. Can't have that.

I doubt it. The racism of the South was a result of Reconstruction. Prior to the war, the South was really no more racist than the North. Slavery existed, both North and South, because of economic reasons and tradition rather than racism.

At the very outset of the war I'd agree with you about the power politics game. Lincoln did worry endlessly in 1861 that Europe might stick its nose in and the San Jacinto affair shows that. Washington basically surrendered to the British and gave into their demands. It's not really known how much the British really meant their threats, only that Lincoln treated them with complete seriousness. By the beginning and certainly the middle of 1862, before the Emancipation Proclimation was issued, British chances of entering the war were zero. Only a US attack on a British interest would have done it. By then Parliament had a chance to digest exactly what the Confederacy was, read the speeches that had slowly crept across the Atlantic. It repulsed those in power there and ended any chance of the British entering the war. France on the other hand was always a serious threat to enter the war. I believe that if Lee had gotten his grand victory at Gettysburg France would have jumped in.

While the French people had no taste for slavery Napolean III didn't care about it very much. He was looking to make his mark on the world and being a dictator he didn't have to worry about a pesky parliament. Moreover the French already had a decent sized force in Mexico that could immediatly flood through Texas and challenge the Mississippi River forces the Union had there.

A fruitless argument. The 3rd Reich had nothing it could offer either a hypothetical North or South. Racism in the South certainly would have existed even if the Civil War had not turned out the way it did. You don't go from property to equal overnight. The way Reconstruction was handled made it worst, but it's laughable beyond sheer ludicriousness to suggest that was the sole cause. When the North freed its slaves racism sure stuck around.

Only because Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and arrested the state legislature to keep them from seceding.

Even if Lee had won at Gettysburg, I seriously doubt that he would have stayed there. He knew he didn't have the resources to occupy that far into the North and would probably have retreated to Northern Virginia or near Washington City.

Where I'm from, you only speak to the enemy when carrying arms.

There were a lot of free blacks in the South who were treated as equals. One of the largest slaveholders in SC was a free black.

How do you think blacks were treated in the North at that time?

With all fairness to both sides, the Union would have tried, but I don't think it would have been worth much, at least not until after the damage was done. If the Army of Northern Virginia had crushed the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg, there was literally one brigade (Corocan Legion) to keep General Lee's Army from riding roughshod all over Pennsylvania, the lower parts of New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and most importantly, the District of Columbia. After all, the Army of the Potomac were the guardians of the Capitol. Without those 80,000 troops, there was nothing to keep Lee from ripping the heart out the Union.

The rest of VII Corps was tied up elsewhere, the Army of the Ohio was over a thousand miles away, and Grant's Army of the West was clear across the country at Vicksburg.

How much of that 'property' did they actually buy? How much of it was the offspring of their parents' 'property'? Were the families of that 'property' in Africa compensated for their loss?

I'm pretty sure they were eaten.