Political Frenzy

Another letter from my Uncle Roger.

Dear Attack, After reading your April 3 blog questions came to me that only the great one could ponder and hopefully answer. If you could jettison yourself back in time and be a strapping young voter in the 1864 election between George Mc Clellan and Abraham Lincoln; who would you voted for? After nearly 3 and a half years and approx. 500,000 Americans killed would you have voted for “cut and run” McClellan who believed the war too costly and wanted to negotiate with the south for separate nations. Or would you have voted for honest Abe, who wanted to put the pedal to the medal and end the war with absolute victory. This absolute victory would later cost more American lives (between Nov. 1864 to April 1865) than all the American wars from Korea onward. We know what happened, but what would have happened if McClellan would have been elected?

I would have voted for McClellan and I would have supported the South’s secession. If the southern agrarian states attempted to secede today, I would support them again.

In the American Civil War, the Union paid in blood to retain a territory it did not need, and keep citizens who did not want the title. Why? What for? Abraham Lincoln and the United States Congress didn’t want the fissure of their nation on their hands, and out of a convoluted sense of ego and nationalism, they sent men to their deaths to “maintain the union”, and prove that “united we stand”.

The facts are the states that would become the Confederation had a radically different economic structure, based on agriculture, and had a near irreconcilable culture with the north. Regardless of what modern pop-history will tell you, the Civil War was not about slavery, and the issues of economy and culture were primary in the conflict.

I feel the same way about the Civil War as many feel about World War I - why? For God’s sake, why? Some distorted sense of honor? Some puerile pissing contest? Oh, you can quote me rhetoric:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on 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. ~Abraham Lincoln

But that is just so much nationalism, not a logical attempt to do what is best for the people whom he was sworn to protect. Separately, the agricultural economy of the southern states and the industrial economy of the northern states would have been better regulated, and the interests of the culturally disparate regions would have been better served. To this day the fissure between the north and south has put a strain on American politics.

In the evolution of nations, a Confederate South and a Federal North would have been a natural progression. Slavery would not have long endured in the south, with economic and cultural pressure from the other civilized nations of the time, so I am wholly unconcerned about the repercussions of that. Instead, a powerful alliance could have been forged under McClellan’s United States and Lee’s Confederate States if the diplomacy had been handled properly, and I believe that the two Americas would eventually have united under a common flag, each nation being a larger governing body more like the E.U.

Instead, Lincoln pushed for “absolute victory”, letting rivers of blood flow towards a botched “reconstruction” and hostility that exists to this day between conservative agricultural culture and liberal metropolitan society. Absolute victory does nothing but cripple the victorious and humiliate the defeated.

The only time absolute victory ever worked was when the Romans decided that Carthage had no right to stand, exterminated the Punic people, and leveled the city, leaving not a brick standing. I don’t think that’s the kind of thing Americans should aspire to.

George McClellan, 1864, Abraham Lincoln, Civil War