[PEN-L:30302] Re: RE: Re: military strategy

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

> "Devine, James" wrote:
>
>  Do you think that the US North's defense of the Union against the
> South was really against slave society? It had the effect of
> destroying that society (or at least of converting slaves into debt
> peons), but the war was about defense of the union, disputes about
> trade policy, and the like. The idea of freeing the slave (the
> Emancipation Proclamation) rose to the top as a strategy. You could
> say that the Union was _pushed_ by circumstances into destroying slave
> society, but that's not how it started.
>

I don't disagree, but I don't think this actually conflicts with the
Grant/Sherman position. I can't cite now the exact passages in Grant's
_Memoirs_, but as I remember them they were quite clear. The defense of
the Union could not succeed _except_ as an attack on slave society, and
for roughly the reasons I gave. However Lincoln et al regarded the War,
it was in substance an insurrection of _slave society_, and eventually
it proved impossible to suppress that insurrection without suppressing
the society. Grant saw this: he in effect saw that there could be no
conditions between Union & Lee (or the Confederate State), because
they/that were not the real opponent.

Barbara Fields points out that the slaves knew long before Lincoln did
that it was a war against slavery and not just a war against disunion --
and the slaves knew that because they knew the slaveowners. Her book,
_Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the
Nineteenth Century_, Yale UP, 1985, is illuminating on this. Grant's
_Memoirs_ are incidentally a real classic of American Literature. He was
as successful as a writer as he had been as a general. It's available in
the Library of America series.

Carrol

Carrol