If the Civil War were fought today, which side would you fight on?

[Jason]

First let me say I love my Country, and I am more than willing to die for it.
While I would hate to take up arms against my fellow brothers, and the thought of it make me sick, I could do it.

I am a Yank by birth, but Southern my blood. I have roots in Missouri and Arkansas on my Mothers side, and I am proud of that. There are certain songs that tear my eyes like the National Anthem, but Dixie always has too.

I find myself listening to some civil war type folk music songs titled, Southern Soldier, Favorite camp songs of the Civil War by the 2nd South Carolina String Band. It just makes my wonder, what would I do?



After thinking it over, I would have to side with the South.
I am totally against Slavery, but that's not what the Civil War was about, it was about State's Rights.

[theCZ]

Well, my family had already moved west (from Maine) by the time of the Civil war, and my home state of Nevada was very important to the Union cause, so I would definately fight for the north.  We don't really have much rebel spirit where I'm from I guess!

[grislyatoms]

The South, without reservation, given the same political / social / economic situation.

[RealGun]

Canadian.

[kudu]

Since the Civil War was truly about states rights, and less about slavery.  Slavery was just really being fazed out, or at least not economicaly feasable at the time period, what with the cotton gin and more industrialized machinery that was coming into being, it was just an excuse for the north to go to war.  I would side with the south.  It still should have been one country united at the end though.

[telewinz]

I'd still choose a "winner", the North.  The South would still be a 3rd world country if they had won, the "Southern Cause" was more emotion based than logic.  Besides, even if the North would have lost the 1st time, within ten years they would have found cause to re-invade the South and this time they would win (again) hands down.

[Preacherman]

As an immigrant to the USA, perhaps I have a less impassioned, more objective view.  The main concern of the Civil War, IMHO, was the preservation of the Union, and secondarily the freedom of the slaves.  I think that the preservation of the Union would get my vote, and my service.

[jefnvk]

I'd do my best to stay out.  Neither side was really right when it came down to it.

[K Frame]

On the side of the Gorlaxian Continuium.

We'll let you stupid silly SOBs beat each other senseless, and then waltz in and take over when you're at your weakest.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH (deep breath)

AHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

[K Frame]

"Slavery was just really being fazed out, or at least not economicaly feasable at the time period, what with the cotton gin and more industrialized machinery that was coming into being, it was just an excuse for the north to go to war."

Say what?

Kudu, the cotton gin made slavery TREMENDOUSLY profitable. Prior to the gin, slavery was dying, at least in cotton producing areas, under its own weight because it took so long to clean a pound of cotton.

With the gin, cotton could be cleaned anywhere from 100 to 1,000 times faster. More land could be put into production (and it was).

Matching the explosion in cotton production was the demand for cotton both in the North and in England. By the 1850s British demand for cotton was so immense that they decided to look elsewhere in the empire (India and Egypt) to establish their own cotton supplies to reduce the dependence on American cotton.

Had the Civil War not happened, the Southern cotton economy would only have held out until the 1870s at the latest, when a combination of factors -- soil exhaustion (even George Washington knew it was stupid to plant the same crop in the same soil year after year), the boll wevil, and Colonial cotton, would likely have brought slavery down.

While I agree that states rights were the rallying cry for many in the Southern States, one has to wonder why the foundation documents for the Confederate States of America went to such GREAT pains to protect the institution of slavery.

"it was just an excuse for the north to go to war."

Beg pardon?

That sounds suspiciously like the claims that some make that the United States was actually responsible for the Pacific war because we "pushed the Japanese into it." Given that eleven southern states suceeded, raised an army first, and fired the first shots of the war, it seems like the other way around to me.

[Antibubba]

North.  If Lincoln's assassination hadn't occurred, and that bastard Jackson hadn't been in charge, Reformation would have been just that.  I think-who can really know?

[Old Fud]

the South was right on two counts:  The constitution had guaranteed them the right and power to be slave-holding states, and there was absolutely nothing in their contract with the Union that precluded leaving it when the contract was breached.

But the Issue that caused all this was SLAVERY and don't anybody think they can weasel out of considering it.  
Perhaps the decider was the law requiring northern states/people to RETURN THE PROPERTY of Southerners to them.  Meaning a God-fearing anti-slavery person in the north was obliged by law to turn an escaped slave in to the law to be returned to his owner in the slave-holding state he had managed to get out of.  This the yankees could not abide.

The north didn't start the war.  South Carolina seceeded, then occupied a federal fort and took the feds under fire when our troops wanted their property back.    So the truth is that the South started the war.

Many Americans simply wanted to let them go.  
The government of the United States of America went to war and initiated a draft to fill the army ranks.  

I'm a Wisconsinite who was born in the 30's, grew up when the draft was real and active, and was fully prepared to BE called up by my country.
The civil war was fought with my Wisconsin forefathers who were drafed into that war.  So was WWII, Korea and more.

If my country called me, I would go.

Fud

[BryanP]

While I've lived in Tennessee for the past 17 years (and most of my family is from here) I would fight for the Union.

[Sean Smith]

Why is it that "State's Rights" always seems to be fighting for the wrong side... pro-slavery, pro-segregation, etc.? I don't like any tyranny, be it federal, state, or the local dog catcher.

I wonder when we are going to hear the lie about how the South owned fewer slaves than the North? (HINT: read the census data, it ain't even close).

And it is kind of hard to reconcile the "slavery didn't matter" line with the actual statements of the Southern politicians.

Message of Jefferson Davis to the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America, from J.D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy, Including Diplomatic Correspondence, 1861-1865

Montgomery, April 29, 1861.

As soon, however, as the Northern States that prohibited African slavery within their limits had reached a number sufficient to give their representation a controlling voice in Congress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States was inaugurated and gradually extended. A continuous series of measures was devised and prosecuted for the purpose of rendering insecure the tenure of property in slaves. Fanatical organizations, supplied with money by voluntary subscriptions, were assiduously engaged in exciting amongst the slaves a spirit of discontent and revolt; means were furnished for their escape from their owners, and agents secretly employed to entice them to abscond; the constitutional provisions for their rendition to their owners was first evaded, then openly denounced as a violation of conscientious obligation and religious duty; men were taught that it was a merit to elude, disobey, and violently oppose the execution of the laws enacted to secure the performance of the promise contained in the constitutional compact; owners of slaves were mobbed and even murdered in open day solely for applying to a magistrate for the arrest of a fugitive slave; the dogmas of these voluntary organizations soon obtained control of the Legislatures of many of the Northern States, and laws were passed providing for the punishment, by ruinous fines and long-continued imprisonment in jails and penitentiaries, of citizens of the Southern States who should dare to ask aid of the officers of the law for the recovery of their property. Emboldened by success, the theater of agitation and aggression against the clearly expressed constitutional rights of the Southern States was transferred to the Congress; Senators and Representatives were sent to the common councils of the nation, whose chief title to this distinction consisted in the display of a spirit of ultra fanaticism, and whose business was not "to promote the general welfare or insure domestic tranquillity," but to awaken the bitterest hatred against the citizens of sister States by violent denunciation of their institutions; the transaction of public affairs was impeded by repeated efforts to usurp powers not delegated by the Constitution, for the purpose of impairing the security of property in slaves, and reducing those States which held slaves to a condition of inferiority. Finally a great party was organized for the purpose of obtaining the administration of the Government, with the avowed object of using its power for the total exclusion of the slave States from all participation in the benefits of the public domain acquired by all the States in common, whether by conquest or purchase; of surrounding them entirely by States in which slavery should be prohibited; of thus rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless, and thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars. This party, thus organized, succeeded in the month of November last in the election of its candidate for the Presidency of the United States.

The protection of slavery seemed to be a paramout concern of Jefferson Davis. In total, he mentioned "slave," slaves," or "slavery" no fewer than 23 times in that speech (of which my quote is only a small part).

As another example among many, again citing the primary source material (as opposed to barmy revisionist "historians"), in The Address of the people of South Carolina, assembled in Convention, to the people of the Slaveholding States of the United States (one of two official pronouncements produced by South Carolina's Secession Convention), "slave" and its derivatives come up no less than 30 times. Its closing declaration is:

We ask you to join us in forming a confederacy of Slaveholding States.

That's an awful lot of talking about slavery for slavery to not matter to 'em.

[Derby FALs]

That's an awful lot of talking about slavery for slavery to not matter to 'em.

Wars are not fought for ideals such as abolition. They are fought for economic reasons. Ideals are used to rally support. The South went to war primarily over taxes. The US had 24% of the population (South) supplying 72% of the Fedreral income.

[Pebcac]

I was born in Memphis, Tennesee, and raised in the South.

I'd fight for the Union.  The reasons are already listed above in several posts.

[Sean Smith]

The South went to war primarily over taxes.

Curious, then, that the representatives of the Southern states in 1860 hardly talked about taxes at all, but loved to talk about the threat to their "property in slaves," miscegenation, etc.

Were the Southerners that rare breed that only talked about what they didn't care about?  

[Werewolf]

If fought today a Civil War would hardly be about slavery or even states rights - so my answer would have to be - depends on the issues.

However, if I'd lived back then I would have fought for the North (even though I'm a tried and true southerner and have been all my life - except for about 6 months living in CT).

Are there good reasons to rebel against an established government? YES!

But the reasons the south had weren't even close to being good.

Millions of people suffered and hundreds of thousands died because a few landowners didn't like the high tariffs on cotton and desperately tried to preserve a doomed economic system. They didn't believe that the good of the country as a whole should override the good of an individual state or an individual landowner.

Those landowners/leaders took their chances and millions of others paid the price. IMO the sorry SOB's got off easy. The leadership of the south should have been rounded up at war's end and summarily hanged - their bodies left to rot as a reminder to all those who would dare to trod a similar path.

[Jacobus Rex]

Slavery was never an issue for the average southern person.  To use Texas as an example:   Texans ratified secession in February 1861 by a 44,317 to 13,020 margin.  That was more than 3 in 4 Texans supporting the secession.  Most adult men working at the time made from 50 cents to one dollar per day.  A slave before the war would cost nearly $2,000.  That was more than 8 times the yearly salary of most men.  Most people could never hope to own a slave and for the most part had no interest in it because of the "cost" involved in slave ownership.  Slave owners at the time were about as common as yacht owners are now.  I don't think the average Texan in 2005 would go to war to protect the "rights" of yacht owners and would not have gone to war to protect slave holders in the 1860's.  The average Texan supported the secession because of a growing feeling of encroachment of their rights and livelihood by the federal government.  More laws, more taxes, etc.  The south had a booming economy that the northern big money families had no control over.  Moreover, the south's economy was not just based in cotton.  The south had one of the largest economies in the world and would have continued to do so in the future.  For example, oil was poised to become important starting about 40 years after the end of the war.  Other agricultural and animal industries boomed in the south as well.  Cattle markets become more and more important in the decades following the war.  Had it not been for the war, the south's manufacturing industry would have equaled the north in a decade or two.  At the point, it would have been the north that suffered an economic collapse.  The current level of poverty, etc. in the south is a result of the infrastructure destruction and economic chaos of the south being destroyed by the war and the suppression/exploitation of the reconstruction era.

[Sean Smith]

Slavery was never an issue for the average southern person.

The average Southern person didn't cause the war to take place, either.  So what was an issue to them is of only tangental importance.  Their political leaders, on the other hand, were obsessed with the preservation of slave power, because it hit them in their own wallets.  It's like saying slavery wasn't an issue for the average Northern person, either.  Both statements are true, but so what?  That says nothing about the issue's impact on events.

Anyway, secession was moronic.  It caused the exact OPPOSITE of the desired outcome to take place: total abolition of slavery, total subjugation of the South to a vastly increased central government, utter economic collapse, and so on.  It accelerated and radicalized the trends that the Southerners supposedly wanted to prevent, and at vastly greater cost for everyone involved.  And anybody with half a brain would have realized that this was the case at the time (a fair number of Southerners did, including Robert E. Lee).

Take Lincoln's most radical rhetoric from 1860.  Double its intensity.  Even if you assume that he could actually implement a program on that basis in an undivided Union during his term (unlikely with all the Southern Democrats and more moderate Republicans that would still be in congress in this hypothetical), the end result would be maybe 10% of utterly radical changes that resulted from secession and war, none of the physical devastation and death toll... but we're supposed to believe that secession wasn't idiotic?!

[RevDisk]

Neither side.   So, I would have moved west and faught either side that bothered me.   If either side tried to conscript me for their own purposes, I'd definitely go to war against that side.  


I dislike the Southern institution of slavery.  Constitution applies to everyone.   That simple.  Yes, I know slavery was dying out.  It was becoming cheaper to rent labor then buy humans.  (Look at the railroads for an example.)  This is still no justification for slavery.  It should have never existed in the first place.  

The Southern states did have the right to opt out, and the Feds kept troops in a foreign country without the permission of the host country.  That is known as a foreign occupation force.  South was justified in shooting first.   Not saying it was a bright idea, but they were in the right in that instance.


I also dislike the Northern restrictive government.   The growing federalism, bigger government, higher taxes, etc.


I would have said, to hell with both sides.

[Oleg Volk]

I'd stay away from both sides and use the time to re-shape some other country to my liking ;-)

[atek3]

I think the south was right in the beginning to leave the union.  however, during the war both sides were completely authoritarian.  A pox on both their houses.  I disagree that the south would have been a 3rd world country had it successfully split.  With free trade and low taxes, I think the south would have flourished absent the "tariff and subsidize" republican northerners.

atek3

[Sean Smith]

Maybe I just look at things differently, but I consider behavior that can't be reasonably expected to do anything but accomplish the exact OPPOSITE of what you want, and gets piles of people killed in the process, to be unethical.  Ergo, I consider secession unethical, before you even bring slavery into the ballance... not because it was technically illegal (I don't think secession was illegal per se), but because secession had natural consequences, and pretending or hoping those consequences didn't exist killed about 600,000 people, and produced a far worse authoritarian government than it was supposed to prevent in the first place.

Swoon over the Lost Cause all you want, the disastrous results of instigating a civil war through secession and attacking federal installations was eminently predictable...and were, in fact, predicted by cooler heads on both sides.  The disparity between the North and South in industrial and human resources was well documented in 1860.  In fairness, politicians on both sides were singularly stupid in their expectations; the South was merely the stupider in its resort to disunion and war, because it could not realistically win.

[Glock Glockler]

Sean,

Secession was a bad idea as it proved itself not to work but that's where you get into that thing about hindsight being 20/20.  There have been plenty of situations throughout history when a determined people have been able to fight off an invader with superior forces, though no one has a crystal ball as to how a war to occupation will turn out.

I would have tried to broker a peace deal, the South gives up slavery and the North gives up on tarrifs and corporate subsidies, hopefully that would have averted a war.