How long would slavery had lasted if the South decided NOT to secede?

[ieoeja]

22. I got it from "The Battle Cry of Freedom".

And that author tended to look at direct, contemporary sources. Historians often rely on the work of previous historians. So if it changed somewhere along the line, it remains changed. Take Sherman's March to the Sea.

In "The Battle Cry of Freedom" the author looked up contemporary southern diaries and newspapers articles. Source after source damned the retreating Confederates and praised Sherman's men. In particular, they praised Sherman for feeding the starving southerners. By that time the South had converted to food crops, but war time inflation was so bad that the Plantation owners were unwilling to sell the food.

First city Sherman came to he was astonished to see the people starving in the breadbasket of the south. That is when he ordered his men to start confiscating food. Not as part of a burnt earth, total war policy. But to save the southern people from starvation!

And, except for the plantation owners, of course, that is all you find in the contemporary record. Flash forward a few months and some of the same people who praised Sherman are damning him. But as we have seen many, many times in the past, Conservatives are extremely Orwellian. The problem with a military culture, and the Norman South was most definitely a military culture, is that people are raised to believe what they are told.

"Gore is so stupid, he thinks Islamic terrorism is a bigger national security threat than China! LOL!" - Bush and Cheney over and over again in 2000

"Bet you're glad Gore didn't win now?" - every GOPer in the US, 2001-09-12, the day after we were attacked by Islamic terrorists


**Note: what most amazed Sherman about this post-war revision was that his army *did* engage in a scored earth polity on the march through South Carolina. In addition to South Carolina starting the whole bloody thing, but being far away from where most of the war's action took place, escapees from Andersonville showed up at their camp the night before they entered South Carolina. Sherman said he probably couldn't have stopped what happend in South Caroline had he wanted to, and he sure as hell did not want to stop it.

But nobody was talking about that. Instead, they relocated what happened in South Carolina to Georgia for some odd reason.