Why the hell did the Confederates start a war they could not possibly hope to win...

Lincoln would have let them keep slavery, he begged them not to secede

nah you do it to build St Peter's kek

Then why secede? All I know is "hurr slavery durr"

>but it breaks my heart to see crazy SJWs tearing down old statues of general Lee and the others. You don't have to share their beliefs, but once history is destroyed you can never get it back. Same as Isis destroying ancient sites across the Levant, we'll never have those treasures of human antiquity or American historical monuments again.

Kek not even a close comparison. The South is hardly as important as the ancient artifacts in the levant. Maybe if they were dated to the 1700s.

Lincoln was dead set against expanding slavery to newly admitted states. The confederates were afraid that without expanding slavery, the non-slaveholding states would eventually severely outnumber them, giving them leverage to abolish it somewhere down the line. The confederates wanted to keep slavery forever. Ironically, they achieved the opposite.

Antifa is going after the Sam Houston statue in Houston next

They aren't going to stop until they tear down the Washington monument

But they knew the north didn't wanted slavery because factories work better with "free" wageslave, and they knew they would become industrialized too in time.

All they needed was a century of slavery or less. Starting a war seem disproportionate to gain only a few decades over the peace option.

Mainly because Lincoln was elected after a long drawn out series of internal conflicts that looked to be makings of a war regardless (see bleeding Kansas). The Southerners didn't really know, nor did the Northerners know what a semi industrialized war would look like (line infantry tactics) or how one would work (industrialized vs agricultural economy). There was also a long held belief that the southern cotton monopoly on British textile mills was enough to get popular support among European powers. In hindsight this all seems pretty minimal compared to what happened, but remember that they didn't know.

Can we all just accept that Lee kinda sucked?

>Outnumbered and outgunned, but played offense instead of defense
>Defends Virginia at all costs, the rest of the CSA be damned
>Charges the Union center at Gettysburg.
>He charged the center.
>HE CHARGED THE FUCKING CENTER!
>HFW "It's all my fault."
Lee's strategies led to heavy confederate casualties when they needed all the men they could. The south could've won by fighting a defensive war on their home turf and making the union invasion unbearably expensive. It was the north that had the harder job, and had Lee not handed them his army on a silver fucking platter, the south would've had a chance.

To be fair to lee. It wasn't because he was a bad commander. He just let politics influence too much. Jefferson Davis wanted his prize General to wave his dick in the north after a string of honestly pretty good victories. And Lee foolishly listened. So he was more of a manipulable schmuck then anything

Well they are southerners user

Would you erect a statue of Benedict Arnold as well?

Fuck 'em. They were traitors.

>How retarded would you have to be to believe either of those things?

It's not THAT retarded. The possibility of intervening was discussed in British parliament. It never got very far, though, as the British public was very anti-slavery by then, and that really was what it all came down to, despite what dixietards claim.

>I'm not prejudiced against blacks or a southerner in the most traditional sense, but it breaks my heart to see crazy SJWs tearing down old statues of general Lee and the others

A lot of those statues are not so old, but were erected in the last 50 years as a protest against the civil rights movement.

Kinda like that dumb fucking flag.

Indeed. People born in recent years forget how hampered information and communication was back then. The south couldn't exactly turn on the BBC and conclude "Hey guys, I don't think we're gonna get the support we thought we were."

Didn't the CSA invading the North change public opinion from "Who cares about what happens in Virginia" to "Oh shit nigga they be burning our houses and shit"?

>Same as Isis destroying ancient sites across the Levant
I hate those fuckers so goddamn much, fucking damnit.

I don't think opinion was ever "who cares?" but there was definitely a large segment of the north that said "is it worth it?" Enough that McClellan almost beat Lincoln in the election of 1864. Everyone forgets that.

They didn't underestimated the Union.

>You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it … Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.
>William T. Sherman 1860

Thank you for the input, Simple Simon.

>The Southerners didn't really know, nor did the Northerners know what a semi industrialized war would look like
It would seem at least Sherman predicted how it would go, i.e. the South being crushed by the North's sheer industrial output, which indeed is how it played out in the end. The Southern leadership could have used some astute people like Sherman instead of retards like Jefferson Davis.

They were a single maneuver away from winning the war, wtf are you talking about?

Secession was still a mistake though.

The vast majority were put up before the end of the 19th century as a means of signalling an attempt at reconciliation between north and south. Sine the end of WW2 the US has slowly been moving backwards towards the domestic political situation we had in 1860. The removal of these statues is I think just further justification for that theory.

Virginia was the only state that really mattered desu

>there will never be a nearby containment country to which we can deport all of the niggers and evolution deniers
Why did Lincoln ruin the country that he loved?

Even if the confederates somehow managed to win at Gettysburg they never would have won the war

Fucking Nostradamus

All Americans are traitors to their rightful sovereign

This wasn't WW II, it wasn't necessary for them to burn every Union city to the ground and herd all Yankees into gas chambers. They just had to make the North willing to negotiate a settlement of some sort.

>People tearing down statues of Confederate war heroes and white supremacists is the same as ISIS destroying ancient sites in the ME

Nah, good riddance. They were traitors and the south should have been beaten into submission after the war. The Union's only mistake was ending reconstruction to appease Southern Democrats.

And Robert E. Lee fucked it up, because he's a shitty general. One of many shitty confederate generals whose history has been bowdlerized by southern apologists since 1866. If the South's military leadership were a company, they'd be Blockbuster circa 2006.

>The union gave up on reconstruction meme

It failed and they were chase out, nothing to do with giving up

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1876

>the Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South to end the Reconstruction Era of the United States. The Compromise effectively ceded power in the Southern states to the Democratic Redeemers, who went on to pursue their agenda of returning the South to a political economy resembling that of its pre-war condition, including the disenfranchisement of black voters.

Idk man sounds like they gave up in order to appease the South

>Republicans have to pull federal troops out to win the election
>If not, the Democrats win and pull out federal troops anyways

The Republicans didn't give up, they were cornered into leaving by the south

>Same as Isis destroying ancient sites across the Levant
2000 year old ancient monuments is the same as 130 year old statues of generals for the sleave army

Is this what Americans actually believe?

And when I said the same about memorials of Red Army soldiers in Poland, I was called a commie and a cuck ))))

Imagine if back then others used your argument to tear down those now ancient artifacts. The pyramids of giza were brand spanking new one day too.

But monuments of old rulers were torn down all the fucking time back then.

This is an irrelevant excuse after the fact that the other guy destroyed the reasoning in the above post.

t. not that guy

Look, let the southerners keep their statues of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. It's their history. But I demand that a ten foot tall bronze statue of Nat Turner, holding a hunting knife in one hand and the severed head of a white woman in the other, be erected outside Richmond city hall.

>Yankee fantasies

And why not? We won, motherfucker! Be grateful we didn't plow salt into your fields, hang every member of the confederate congress, shoot every third male in Richmond, and draw and quarter every captured confederate officer. And we left so much of the south intact! We didn't burn down nearly enough southern cities. I'll never forgive Sherman for sparing Savannah. He went far to easy during his march to the sea. Southerners should erect statues of Lincoln and Grant for being far kinder conquerors than they deserved.

Well, he got it down to a cue. What was this guy's profession? He seems incredibly smart.

His profession was making his prophecy come true, having been one of the leading Union generals.

You're a fucking idiot. Kill yourself.

He was cadet at West Point at the age of 16. He had no profession prior to military service. However, he did dabble in real estate in the 1850s. Apparently, the San Francisco market has always been cutthroat:
>"I can handle a hundred thousand men in battle, and take the City of the Sun, but am afraid to manage a lot in the swamp of San Francisco."

>Yankee banter

Honestly, the fact that the sons and daughters of traitors aren't working as feudal serfs on the estates of Grant's descendants to this very day is a miscarriage of justice.

I don't speak coward. Could you put that into terms men can understand?

>Brave
>Smart
Pick one. The only way to properly attack an enemy is with overwhelming advantage.

Britain should have helped the Confederates win the war, Its almost odd to me why they didn't, they were undoubtedly the most powerful country around and completely surrounded the continent with their Caribbean islands and Canada. I know that there were some negotiations between the CSA and Britons, but does anyone know why it never amounted to anything?

Because the Brits were staunchly anti-slavery by that point

>Tfw my state put a statue of Lee in the US capital rotunda

Stay mad rustbeltfag

>TFW when my country buried union dead on his home.

Get fucked civil war participation trophy winner.

I would unironically like this.

yes but the prospect was debated and alot of support went to the confederacy, otherwise we wouldn't have had the Trent affair.

>Entire potential country relies on the labor of niggers and cotton
>Without nigs they are completely irrelevant
lmao

>His home

It belonged to Mary Washington's family, he was just living there. They actually won it back in court and got the federal government to pay a fortune for it. Must have been pretty sweet to sit on the front porch and look out at all the dumb Yankees your pappy killed.

Damn. I can't even be mad. I concede. Your bantz are strong.

Obviously there would be some measure of support for the prospect of permanently crippling the US. But as delicious as it would have been for the brits, it didn't justify the effort of helping out some retard rednecks clinging to an institution loathed by the British general public.

Ancient monuments were made by slaveholders too, you know. Fuck off with your "moral" posturing.

>They possibly could have had a chance to win if they weren't under naval blockade by the union, a blockade that kept them from receiving the imported war materiel they so desperately needed as they were not as industrially developed as the north and thus not nearly as self sufficient.
But the reason they were under naval blockade was precisely because the south couldn't match the north's agricultural output.

>General Lee
General Grant was the true genius of the Civil War. Lee was really good at fighting the last war, and the eastern theater generals were really good at giving it to him. In the West Grant was spanking confederates all up and down the Mississippi

>As to whether they could have peacefully seceded or not, I doubt it.
They couldn't. The entire reason that they wanted to secede was because Lincoln said "no new slave states" and their entire economy was based on expanding slavery to new farmlands: they would have either needed to fight, invade the Caribbean, or collapse utterly.

>but it breaks my heart to see crazy SJWs tearing down old statues of general Lee and the others.
No, fuck that. You don't get to make statues for losers, that's what you call a participation trophy: a government funded participation trophy for a culture which lionized history's most ruthless welfare queens. They were put there many years later by the same assholes who voted for Jim Crow. Those statues represent the blatant distortion of history, a deliberate, bald-faced attempt to obscure the truth. True lovers of history cheer for the removal of those statues.

Lee was a pretty good tactician but a poor strategist, had no real sense of how to win a war. That's why Grant and Sherman were his superiors.

>Benedict Arnold
>traitor

Only his leg

No. The first half of this answer is correct, the second half is dangerous and it's a shame it's so widely taught. The South did NOT want to keep slavery forever, and was well-aware that it was on its way out with technology, and they were also well-aware of the abolitionist movements in other countries in the West.

The South was concerned that if slavery were to be abolished, blacks would not integrate successfully into American society, due to actions on behalf of both blacks and whites. And if you look around American society today, I think that that reasoning was true enough.

Not defending slavery, but they certainly didn't expect to keep it that way forever. Uneducated individuals who were bred for farm and housework were released into society and were told to be happy, but they had no idea how society worked and what they were to do with their freedom, and now we have a particularly dangerous cultural divide between whites and blacks here in the US (although to be fair there would always be some sort of divide, just probably not to this magnitude).

Don't stop there! A statue of Lincoln putting Davis in a rear naked choke hold. A grand oil painting of an eagle plucking an eye out of Stonewall Jackson's head. A mural of Billy Yank skewering a rebel drummer boy on the end of a bayonet. A giant LED billboard playing a short video of a black union soldier dragging a white southern girl by the hair to somewhere off screen.

>the South did NOT want to keep slavery forever

(citation needed)

If they expected slavery to end they wouldn't enshrine it in their constitutions. The Confederate Constitution even explicitly forbids any of its states from outlawing slavery.

Ha!

Freedom does not rely on some test of competency. Every year that passed without complete, unconditional abolition was an unforgivable sin and a stain on our country.

>Every year that passed without complete, unconditional abolition was an unforgivable sin and a stain on our country.
You mean like all those years New York was a slave state? And Pennsylvania and New Jersey?

Yes. Seriously, what the fuck did you think I was gonna say? Furthermore, I will say without hesitation that the most racist cities of the 20th century have been the very Yankee cities of NYC, Chicago, and Boston.

How was he supposed to win the war then? The Lee-Davis strategy really was the best the south could do. Of course they made mistakes but so did the union.

>Every year that passed without complete, unconditional abolition was an unforgivable sin and a stain on our country.

Should've sided with the British then. They tried to free the slaves in the colonies.

>The Lee-Davis strategy really was the best the south could do.
No. No, it fucking wasn't.

>the north's industrial* output

So what was the right one?

I don't know, I only posted in this thread twice.

I don't know either if racism can really be assessed. I live in California, which was largely shaped by the attitude common to the west, keep the slaves out.
>For some years past I have given this subject [African-American settlement in California] my most serious and candid attention; and I most cheerfully lay before you the result of my own reflections. There is, in my opinion, but one of two consistent courses to take in reference to this class of population; either to admit them to the full and free enjoyment of all the privileges guaranteed by the Constitution to others, or exclude them from the State. If we permit them to settle in our State, under existing circumstances, we consign them, by our own institutions, and the usages of our own society, to a subordinate and degraded position, which is in itself but a species of slavery. They would be placed in a situation where they would have no efficient motives for moral or intellectual improvement, but must remain in our midst, sensible of their degradation, unhappy themselves, enemies to the institutions and the society whose usages have placed them there, and for ever fit teachers in all the schools of ignorance, vice, and idleness.
>We have certainly the right to prevent any class of population from settling in our State, that we may deem injurious to our own society. Had they been born here, and had acquired rights in consequence, I should not recommend any measures to expel. They are not now here, except a few in comparison with the numbers that would be here; and the object is to keep them out.
>1st Governor of California, Peter Burnett's First Annual Message to the Legislature, December 21, 1849

They hoped to get support from europe, thinking that they would try to protect their cotton.

>There was no legal basis for it

Yes there was. It was entirely legal under US law to secede.

> The South did NOT want to keep slavery forever, and was well-aware that it was on its way out with technology,
Yeah, because who needs facts when it's pretty obvious that facts are prejudiced against southerners

There was violent racist terrorism in California's history, but the targets were mostly Chinese and Mexicans. Blacks suffered their share of police harassment, but nothing compared to the mass beatings and killings suffered by the aforementioned groups.

Asymmetrical warfare. Saboteurs, assassinations, bombings, basically whatever it would take to make life hell for an occupying force and make bills expensive for DC.

one has to wonder by the majority of southerners allowed a practice that saw their opportunity for labor greatly maligned to exist

they lived in the most wretched poverty, no matter the class

>What is population density

The slave population as a percentage of the south never increased after the revolution.

Which is to say that the slave population increased exponentially.

> (You) #
>Asymmetrical warfare. Saboteurs, assassinations, bombings, basically whatever it would take to make life hell for an occupying force and make bills expensive for DC.

Ah, so what the Confederates attempted to do against Sherman resulting in him burning down everything in site? Yeah, doesn't sound like a winning strategy. The civil war was a way over land and giving it up to the union was a surefire way to lose.

>Asymmetrical warfare.
That's ridiculous. What are they going to do when the U.S Army starts freeing and arming slaves and starts getting ALL of its political goals achieved?

In the era of muzzle loading rifles, irregulars got their asses kicked by blocks of infantry.

The confederacy's absolute best chance of victory was curb-stomping the U.S. Army long enough to achieve European recognition of statehood. They lost that chance right after Antietam.

The first targets were the natives who in California were systematically exterminated and the killers paid by Sacramento per body. The Chinese and Mexicans were barred from settlement not outright eliminated.

and don't forget consolidating into the hands of a tiny aristocracy of welfare queens, who owned plantations with 10,000s of slaves which they clung too with religious fervor, instead of like in the revolution era where gentlemen farmers owned dozens, maybe hundreds of them, and frequently freed them after his death.

>Slavery during the era of the founding fathers was ok until the evil Confederates made it bad

Yankee revisionism is so bizarre