Which President Was Worse -- Lincoln or Obama?

Noted Civil War Historian and author Shelby Foote, whom Burns interviewed for his Civil War documentary, has gone on record disagreeing with Burns take on the war in his mini-series. He was especially against the fact that Burns focused so much on the issue of slavery, which is what modern PC revisionists tend to focus on as well.

There were many things that led up to the war, of which slavery was only a small part.

Who were mustered and led by the Confederate War Department:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_Army


Notice the dates - that's BEFORE the Battle of Fort Sumter.

Again, there's numerous examples of the leaders of the Confederacy saying they didn't employ Black soldiers, as previously cited, including the Secretary of War, his main attache, Governors of the States of the Confederacy, and several notable Generals.

Foote sure did.

To give Burns credit, he did a fairly good job once he got into the war itself, but he blew it out of the water with slavery. The documentary says nothing about the Panic of 1857, the tariffs, Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, or any of the other issues. The damage Burns did completely outweighs any of the good he did.

There again, he produces documentaries for the Public Broadcasting Service.

Nuff said.

Seriously, Demi, just stop. You're getting so far out in left field that it's not funny and I don't want to see you do that to yourself.

Stop right there. Foote was noted BECAUSE of Burns documentary. Prior to that he wasn't highly considered. It was his story telling that shot him to fame, and rightly so - not his academic bona fides.

Indeed, he started as a novelist, not a historian. And widely panned by academics on those grounds because he was a college dropout. His first historical work didn't even include footnootes. His degree was an honorarium given because of his fame in the Burns documentary.

Hell of a character, certainly was widely read, and was the voice of Ken Burn's documentary which launched him to fame. Prior to that he was a successful writer, but not a major figure as a historian.

Foote never claimed to be. IIRC he considered himself more of a historical witer than a historian.

Nevertheless, he spent 20 years poring over the Official Records and various other sources, and writing a fairly even handed and definitive history of the war. He may not have that college degree or be "vetted" in your opinion, but I think he's a much more credible resource than hacks like Ken Burns or McPherson.

It might also be said that Foote made Burns famous.

McPherson is a hack because you don't like what he says. He has every credential in the world, including major historical awards, a Pulitzer prize for his writing on the Civil War, and was president of the American Historical Society.

He may be an asshole, but that doesn't make him wrong.

Foote certainly had a hand in making Burns famous - Burns initially wasn't even going to include him in the documentary. But when he met him he realized he had a narrative style that as he put, 'could speak to the South's voice without the bitterness and dishonesty.' LOL.

Note I overstated Foote's lack of credentials - his historical work overall was significant, but was criticized for again being largely a narrative, and not one that was sourced to indicate where he gained his information from. That's a requirement for any historical treatise to be taken seriously by academics. It did go a long way to popularize research into the Civil War - though not nearly as much as Burn's documentary..

Oh, and had a chance to peruse anything on the fact that Confederate musters and later of conscriptions of troops were done by the rules of the Congressional Congress yet? They explicitly banned non-white troops. Probably why one of the very earliest examples of blacks in the Confederate Armed Forces, the Louisiana Native Guard, were disbanded just a year into the war despite the critical need for troops on the South's part.

Levine does a great job of examining why arming the slaves was such a problem for the South here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=KO...m=6&sqi=2&ved=0CEwQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

There's a good 20 pages of 'Confederate Emancipation' there, and Levine shows how absurd the concept that blacks were actively enrolling as volunteers. Indeed, of the 180,000 Union black troops, 150,000 of them were escapees from the South.

Yeah, I know - asking your sources to have things like actual degrees or to show their work by citation when writing is a problem.

Because you don't really have any of those types, do you? LOL.

Typical pompous douche baggery at its finest.

LOL. Yeah, it's tough being on the losing side all the time, isn't it?

Seriously, what's your take - do you support the notion that there were 50-80K free black men who willingly took up arms for the Confederacy? That's the bar that Maud has set here, and let's just say there aren't many that subscribe to that view without an underlying political motivation.

OK. I realize debating the issue everyone else is debating is pointless here. You could dig up Zombie Jefferson Davis and Zombie Robert E. Lee and if they said "NIGGERS!? Trained, organized, and allowed to have guns in large numbers!?!? Are you out of your mind!?!?!?" And M.D. would come up with an way to rationalize it away. That said, yes. At the time you had a slave revolt in Haiti that overthrew the government there. You had John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry, attempting a slave revolt. (That was put down by Robert E. Lee IIRC.) No Confederate in his right mind would want large numbers of black people with military training. It would almost guarantee a coup in their minds (and probably in reality).

But I digress. The point I was going to make is, in the rest of the post I reference, M.D. talks about state -vs- federal government and I can see an argument for it. The more local you get, the more likely you'll be governed by people who share your opinions and motivations. The higher you go in government, the more you wind up with a government that has to compromise in ways that please no one.

Not only is a decentralized government weaker--and therefore less likely to oppress its people, it is also more likely to support its constituents.

Having said that, today we live in an age where we are a global superpower and are forced to function on a world stage. A nation of united states can't do that the way The United States can.

Hmmmm... seems Douglass thought that the Confederacy expecting blacks to fight for it was an act of "madness."

This from his autobiography, scanned here from the original 1881 document:
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglasslife/douglass.html

Page 368.

This is clearly referring to the Confederate call in the final stages of the war, and not any practice prior. It almost seems like he thinks blacks wouldn't fight for the Confederacy in any numbers whatsoever.

See, here's what you don't get and why you don't understand the black Confederates: black people are just as complex as everybody else. You try to oversimplify them. In your own ways, you're just as bigoted and narrow minded as someone who thinks black people sit around eating watermelon and drinking Colt 45.

In your mind, slavery was a bad thing (And it was. No argument there.) so there just could not possibly be Southern blacks who were proud to be Southern and were willing to fight and die for their country.

Nope - very well could be, for any number of reasons, including respect for individual Southern whites like stated by the handful of blacks that fought for Nathaniel Bedford Forrest. It could be due to immense propagandizing, and if you can do that to anyone, it's someone whose every aspect of life you control. It could be for personal gain, as no doubt some blacks who were freemen treated with the Confederacy on a business basis.

What it doesn't explain is why they'd be that stupid in large numbers, and indeed, there's no indication they were. Again, 150,000 of them left the Confederacy to fight for the Union.

Read the link I provided to Levine's work - there are dozens of quotes from high profile Southerners, several newspaper stories, all about how the slaves wouldn't work for the Confederacy when they could avoid it, how the fled the Confederacy in droves when they had the opportunity, and how even the Southerners finally began to understand that the great lie that slavery was a gentle affectation of the South and that the slaves bore affection for their masters was wrong. Indeed, there were arguments against having the slaves as laborers for the Confederate Army - they deserted in great numbers and when they didn't acted as an extremely effective spy net for the Union.

http://books.google.com/books?id=KO...m=6&sqi=2&ved=0CEwQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

Many of your anecdotes are likely correct, and historians acknowledge that some blacks did fight for the Confederacy. The break is how many - and wide spread deployment in tens of thousands is simply wrong. The Southerners themselves said so at the time.

Again, you're trying to oversimplify. Some southern men fought for the North. Some northern men fought for the South. Where I live in Tennessee was predominantly pre-Union and almost seceded from the rest of the state.

In my great great grandfather's family, there were six brothers. Five fought for the South and one fought for the North. He was captured and died at Andersonville.

It's even boring the living crap out of me.

And the storm has knocked the power out.