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A pity he couldn’t find a more worthy cause for his leadership.
He features in a good story at the war’s ending too. He was, by then, a General and had an Iron Criss from Stalingrad. In the last days, outside Berlin, he disobeyed direct orders from Hitler and, instead attacked east, toward Berlin and opened an escape route to the West allowing his men, the Potsdam garrison and parts of the Berlin garrison to get across the Elbe and surrender to the Americans with as many civilians as possible…avoiding falling into Russian hands. He may have evacuated a quarter of a million.
How true but for his time and place … I hope that doesn’t make me seem too much of a relativist. In the US we have our CSA people who soldiered at the peak of the calling in service to another evil.
There is a remarkable book titled The Last Panther by Wolfgang Faust that tells the story of that episode. Faust was a Panzer crewman on the Eastern Front and on through the final battles of the War. He was part of one of the units Wenck saved.
Which evil cause are you referring to? The support of slavery, or the subjugation of states and forcing them to remain in the Union?
The only evil I refer to is the theft of the fruits of a man’s labor (bolstered by rape, beatings, no recourse to courts, forceful separation of families, etc.) aka slavery.
I wonder, if in a document which provided for the creation of a new state in the Union but lacked a procedure for leaving the Union, whether secession was a legal option. But the answer to the Appeal to Heaven was no it was not.
P.S. The State of South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter thus precipitating the War of the Rebellion dragging her sisters into the abyss.
South Carolina fired on an occupying force that was about to be reinforced in an effort to keep the state from realizing self-determination. Self-determination was the entire purpose of the American War of Independence. Both sides of that war had good causes and both had equally bad causes.
The Wehrmacht had no good causes.
I do not intend to go through this with a Lost Cause devotee. Those 1861 Democrats opted for war and Uncle Billy and his his bummers made sure they got what they wanted.
And Lincoln didn’t want war? He quite clearly did.
OK – I’ll bite on this one. I’ll ask for the clear evidence Lincoln wanted war.
I find it odd that people who see the machinations of politicians today somehow think that just a few generations before we were born that politicians were somehow sainted.
And don’t get me started on how Samual Adams was not much different than a crooked union boss today.
Arete in combat is frequently never an ideological position. It is frequently a personal confrontation with death surrounded by men you have bonded with during training and in social interaction. Most heroes fight for very narrow goals that begin with preserving one’s life, the lives of the men with you and might expand to include the lives of your loved ones at home but seldom more.
German, Italian troops and their allies on the Eastern front performed with great courage and skill against Russians who performed even greater feats of courage for a system that would kill them for even minor failures, then destroy their families and imprison them for criticism of their Sociopathic Leader.
Both regimes were wicked to their core but men are seldom that simple.
The American Confederacy never approached the moral depravity of the National Socialist or International Socialist model that enslaved and murdered whole nations and people for their wicked ends.
The Confederacy was wicked in very narrow range of the American moral order and most of the moral opprobrium focused on it is for domestic political consumption.
If I understand you correctly, you wanted Lincoln to violate his oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, which means the Union of states operating under that constitution, and abandon federally owned property (Fort Sumter). You also say that Lincoln wanted war, but it was the south that initiated the crisis by seceding because they did not like the fact that a candidate they did not like won the election. Lincoln never said that he was going to end slavery. He merely said that he wanted to stop its extension. The south seceded for the express reason that they believed that slavery would be eliminated by the northern states as a result of the election. While the US Constitution never uses the words slave or slavery and is silent except for how other persons are counted for the census, the Confederate Constitution explicitly says that slave owners have the right to move within the Confederacy with their slaves. So the war was started by the Confederate states when they fired upon Sumter for a Constitution that expressly authorized slavery. So you are saying that you think that Lincoln was responsible for the war and that it wasn’t about slavery because a newspaper in Buffalo says so? For Lincoln to not protect federal authority would have destroyed the Union and the Constitution that we live under today.
I agree with all up to your last two paragraphs. How does wickedness get apportioned in your universe? It seems to me that wicked is wicked and must be condemned. BTW, I am open to forgiveness but not forgetfulness. That perhaps makes me belligerent but I refuse to be gulled into approving, in any form except admiration for soldierly virtue, the actions of the CSA or its servants.
@eddyericsson, if you don’t mind I will adopt your reply to @skyler as mine as well with one addendum. That is this: the fire breathers were led down the path of perceived superiority by the dough faced administration of James Buchanan (Dem. PA) . Thus misled they thought they could prevail. The Democrat Party has been a pernicious element in the body politic of our nation from the beginning of the federal period.
I agree entirely with you comment on Buchanan. Lincoln, however, adopted a Jacksonian/Taylorite approach to defending the Constitution. People forget that Taylor, despite his southern roots, was ready to lead the army to march on South Carolina during the 1850 crisis. It was only after he died that the road to Civil War was set when Fillmore accepted the Compromise of 1850 without the Taylorite support of keeping slavery out of the territories.
So what you’re saying is that I’m right. Lincoln could have avoided the war, but didn’t.
I suppose you could say that Lincoln could have chosen to let the Constitution to collapse and the country sent into sectional chaos. Yes. That’s right. Lincoln could have chosen the way you advocate and let that happen. He didn’t and we are all the better for it. The southern states brought it on and fired the first shots. Lincoln chose to be strong rather than weak in protecting the Constitution. Total surrender and appeasement as you advocate for that time always avoids conflict in the moment. But it never end well. It means that those who do not support freedom and equality get to accuse others of being in favor of war unless they surrender.
Lincoln had no oath to invade. It’s a fallacy that defense of the Constitution requires involuntary participation. The Constitution was freely entered into, and without the ability to leave the Union, the Constitution becomes an instrument of tyranny, as we have seen.
If those seven states wanted to secede, that was their right and a powerful inducement for the federal government to not overstep its limited role. Instead, Lincoln’s aggressiveness caused six more states to secede and then the death of 600,000. War was not the only way to end slavery, and it certainly wasn’t the best. War, however, was the only way to coerce the secession to end.
That is certainly not the case. Those seven states would have come back eventually, without slaves.
Which part of the Constitution was in danger of collapsing? The Constitution did not depend on a specific number of states, in fact the number of states was in regular flux. Do not confuse the Constitution with Union. The two are nearly antithetical. Lincoln’s agitprop was so effective that many people even today don’t even think about this. They spout “preserve the Union” without thought or attempt to explain why it would be or wouldn’t be a good thing. I think it’s much more sensible to understand the Union as a voluntary association, since self-determination was the entire purpose of the War of Independence. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the states are not sovereign and in fact it says powers not expressly granted to the federal government are denied, which obviously includes the power to kill 600,000 people in order to force them to stay in the Union.
Linciln had an oath to protect federal property. He did and Fort Sumter was fired upon. What the southern states did was unlawful. If you want to go on defending a Constitution that enshrined slavery, you are welcome to. Lincoln acted lawfully against treasonous actions. His actions resulted in the emancipation of close to 4 million people enslaved within the borders of your rebellious states there. Lincoln preferred a slow ending of slavery, but the south chose treason and defense of enslavement through their written Constitution. If you want to defend treason and slavery, I’m more than happy to do debate you. You’ll lose that debate every time. You can’t defend the indefensible.
Treason? No. Loyalty, back then, was first with the state. Once the state ended its association with the federal government, loyalty shifted. It was not treason.
I don’t defend slavery, obviously. The tragedy of the war was that ending slavery was used as justification to destroy freedom.
You are correct. Lincoln was no Buchanan.
@skyler is a Lost Cause devotee. These types of arguments are akin to wrestling with a pig. The porker enjoys it and you get covered in mud.
There is my giggle for the day. (And before noon…its going to be a long day.)
“Lost Cause” is an intellectually valid term for people who don’t want to think to summarily dismiss others who do.
And you have a Happy Thanksgiving as well.
My iphone changed the word vapid to valid. Sorry about that.