We Must Love One Another

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Excerpted from "September 1, 1939

by W.H. Auden

One last Entry About September, 1862

What follows is a letter from General George McClellan to William H. Aspinwall, a New York Democrat.

Head-Quarters Army of the  Potomac

Sharpsburg, Sept.  26, 1862

My dear Sir

      I am very anxious to know how you and men like you regard the recent Proclamations of the Presdt inaugurating servile war, emancipating the slaves, & at one stroke of the pen changing our free institutions into a despotism - for such I regard the natural effect of the last, suspending the Habeas Corpus throughout the land.
     I shall probably be in this vicinity for some days &, if you regard the matter as gravely as I do, would be glad to communicate with you.

In haste I am sincerely yours

Geo B McClellan

McClellan was a general who clearly was willing to express his political thoughts, and felt the president was setting up a tyranny. It gives us a way of understanding how inert McClellan was after the battle of Antietam. He was waiting for the political situation to develop, perhaps hoping President Lincoln would be impeached or overthrown, possibly thinking he might take charge of the government himself.

By behaving as he was, did he give aid and comfort to the Confederates? In my opinion, by the autumn of 1862, General McClellan was so hostile to Lincoln that he was secretly hoping for a Confederate victory. It's about as close to treason as any American army officer since Benedict Arnold. 

More on the Battle of Antietam and the Civil War

Let us suppose for a few minutes that the battle of Antietam, fought in September, 1862, had ended differently than it did in fact. What might have been the consequences for our United States of America?

First, let's eliminate the implausible: Robert E. Lee's army was in no position to annihilate the Union forces at Antietam. But suppose he did manage to check George McClellan's army and force it  to  retreat, say into the Washington defenses? Western Maryland, inhabited mostly with Union sympathizers, would have been open to him. Lee had ordered his soldiers to pay for anything they took from local people, but the pay was in Confederate paper money, already losing value rapidly in 1862, so the difference between purchases and confiscation didn't seem very great to the farmers there.

In any case, Lee could have replenished his food supplies, made off with hundreds - maybe thousands - of horses, and, after being resupplied with ammunition, continued into Pennsylvania, or approached Washington from the northwest. Either way, the result would have been a disastrous defeat for President Lincoln. If the Union could not even hold its own territory, its prospects for victory would be slim indeed.

Without a victory, the Emancipation Proclamation would have languished in President Lincoln's desk drawer. And without the Proclamation, there would be little to prevent the English and French from intervening in the American war.

Cotton was in short supply after a year without imports from the south, unemployment was increasing among textile workers and civil unrest was being threatened. The Foreign Minister was quietly in favor of a call for an armistice between the two sides, to be followed by a conference which would lead to southern independence.

The French emperor, the slippery Napoleon III, was eager to go further, ready to send warships to break the Union blockade of southern ports, which would have been intolerable to the Lincoln administration. But Napoleon was not willing to act without English leadership.

If Lincoln rejected the British offer, as he would have had to, Napoleon might have had his war with the United States.

And now we have the Republicans in Washington, still a smaller political party than the Democrats, facing the electorate in the Congressional elections of November, losing the civil war and embroiled in an international crisis against what were widely felt to be the two most powerful countries in the world. To say the Lincoln men would have been rebuffed is an understatement.

Lincoln had vowed to continue the war against rebellion until victory, or his death, or until the northern states compelled him to quit. But here he would be, beset on all sides, his policy rejected by the voters, with a hostile Congress ready to take office in December 1863. (In those days the new Congress didn't take office until more than a year after it was elected.)

He would have been forced to negotiate independence for the Confederate States.

Aside from independence, the peace conference would have determined the size of the new nation. Would Kentucky have been part of it? Or Missouri? Would Virginia have insisted that the counties of what is now West Virginia be returned to her? Would the Confederacy have included western lands, what is now Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona?

Once the civil war was ended, there would be no real reason for the USA to fight England and France, so concluding that war might have been comparatively easy.

Some alternative history writers like to claim a defeated north would have attacked Canada, trying to gain "compensation" for the loss of the southern states. I can't see that. England would never have stood for it, and neither would the northern people, sick of war and skeptical of the abilities of their generals after they were so recently beaten by the south.

Wherever the boundary between the United States and the Confederate States was drawn, it would have been a wary peace between them. Both sides would fortify the border areas, spending mountains of  money on weapons and soldiers. Trade between them would have only resumed slowly and very guardedly. The economies of both nations would have suffered, but the south would have suffered more. Ironically, the economic deprivation in the south would have spurred the industrialization the south had always deplored, and a part of the "southern way of life" would have disappeared.

And what of slavery and the slaves? Only the most abject and defeatist northern government would allow southern slave catchers to enter the United States in search of runaways. The task of keeping the slaves in bondage would have overwhelmed the south. The slaves would have freed themselves by escaping to the north.

As years passed would there have been any chance of reconciliation? Frankly, I don't think so. Secession had been a watershed event, there was no way the white southerners would have retracted it except under compulsion. The question is whether the south would have diversified enough to become a viable nation or would they have become a client state for the Europeans, supplying cotton at low prices and buying finished goods at much higher cost, if most Americans could afford to buy at all.

The truncated United States would still have emerged as a great power, would still have played a great part in world affairs, but would have been in constant anxiety about relations with the CSA. Perhaps a second war would have erupted at some time between the two.

Civil

September, 1862

One hundred fifty years ago this month, America came perilously close to being divided into two countries, mutually antagonistic and liable to be used as pawns by the wily European powers. Most Americans today aren't aware of just how close the Confederate States of  America was to victory that month long ago.

To review a little, earlier in the summer of 1862, General Robert E. Lee and his newly renamed Army of Northern Virginia  relieved the city of Richmond from impending capture by Union forces commanded by George B. McClellan. Driven from the vicinity of the Confederate capital back to a base on the James River, McClellan dithered all through July and into August, repeatedly assuring President Lincoln that he would resume his  offensive soon.

It didn't happen. Frustrated almost beyond endurance by McClellan's inactivity, Lincoln and his administration put together a new army, the Army of Virginia, led by the bombastic and incompetent General John Pope. This worthy claimed he would not be satisfied to fight a kid gloves war, instead would bring the conflict to the civilian population of Virginia and boasted his army would not retreat in the face of the Confederates.

Infuriated by Pope, and confident that McClellan would do nothing, General Lee swung his army northward and defeated Pope at the Second Battle of Manassas, forcing the Yankees back into the forts around Washington D.C. Pope was disgraced, was relieved and sent to Minnesota to fight the Sioux, and McClellan, who had finally evacuated his camps on the James, was placed in command of all the United States troops around the capital.

Lee had accomplished his first great objective, clearing almost all of Virginia of Union soldiers. He now set out to shock the north into making peace. On September 3, southern troops began  crossing the Potomac River into Maryland. His idea was to win a battle in the north which would panic the population so badly that Lincoln would have no choice but to make a deal establishing Confederate independence.

Probably everyone remembers enough high school history to know what happened next. Advancing slowly, as was his habit, General McClellan found the southern army at Sharpsburg, just along the banks of Antietam Creek. With better than a two-to-one numerical advantage, "Little Mac" launched a series of uncoordinated attacks on Lee's forces that nearly broke through the southern lines, but failed at the last minute, and left the Confederate forces in place as the sun set. Two days later, having stood off the Yankees, but without a victory to show for all their trouble, Lee's army retreated to Virginia, unmolested by George B. McClellan.

Soon afterwards, President Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, changing the war from a political struggle to a moral crusade.

The Civil War was of greatest importance to the Americans themselves, but both the British and French governments were interested spectators. The two European powers were industrialized to a greater or lesser extent by 1862, and a substantial part of their industry was textiles. It was, I suppose, a stroke of luck for the north that the southern cotton harvest of  1860 had been the largest ever, over five million bales, and most of that had been exported to Britain and France. In short, their warehouses were jammed to the rafters with raw cotton when secession came.

But by the summer of 1862, all that cotton had been spun and woven into clothing, and there wasn't any more coming from America. Yankee ships blockaded southern ports and the Confederate government had embargoed cotton in any case, trying to compel English and French recognition.

Smart businessmen know to diversify their sources of supply, and cotton was being grown in both Egypt and India, but there was still a shortfall during the summer of 1862. Mills shut down, unemployment rose, and along with joblessness, the danger of hunger riots increased. The one thing that scared the pants off the British ruling classes was the threat of mass riots.

A vote to recognize the Confederacy failed in the House of Commons in mid-July, just before word of Lee's initial triumphs against McClellan reached London. The House adjourned at the end of the month for the summer without taking another vote. The Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, and his cabinet also left town for their country estates. (It is remarkable that the British government in the middle of the nineteenth century was still pretty much a part-time affair.) They would  reconvene at the beginning  of October, after the harvest.

Before leaving London, however, the Foreign Minister, Lord Russell, wrote a note to Palmerston, suggesting the time to intervene in the American conflict had nearly come. Intervention would take the form of a message to both sides asking for an armistice and a peace conference. The French emperor, Napoleon III, would join in the message. The southern president, Jefferson Davis, would surely agree, leaving the Lincoln government with the impossible choice of effectively recognizing the Confederacy, or going to war against Britain and France.

Now perhaps we can see how history teetered back and forth between two very different outcomes that September. If Lee had not invaded Maryland, or had defeated McClellan there, the world would be far different in 2012. If President Lincoln had not issued the Emancipation  Proclamation, the European powers still might have intervened, but as the war aims of the north changed, so did public opinion, especially in England where anti-slavery feeling was strong and deep in the population.

Next post, perhaps we can speculate a little about what might have happened if there had been a Confederate States of America.