No one gets excited about dressing up in raglan sleeves and cardigans.
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Lincoln well understood the tenuous hold the Union had on such States & understood that he could ill afford to risk further straining their seriously divided support.
Likewise, he resisted calls for an earlier issuance of the emancipation, realizing that without some semblance of a battlefield victory, it would appear an act of desperation to European countries he sought as allies or at least to be neutral. Antietam (barely) provided that.
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Those are also likely factors for not freeing the slaves in Northern states, but I still think an even more decisive factor was his recognition that the Constitution did not grant him the legal authority to do so.
Lincoln was a lawyer before he was a President, and with the prominent exception of his 1861 suspension of habeus corpus rights for accused rebels he generally confined his actions to what the Constitution allowed.
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There might be a deeper and darker story on that.
In the North, they never really abolished slavery. They never freed any slaves. (That’s a generalization, probably wrong in specific cases.) All they did was ban importing of new slaves and that the children of slaves were “free” (indentured to age 25 or suchlike). Slavery gradually disappeared (aka people died) without destroying any property value, and no one could sue the government for recompense of their property.
Excuse that preamble, but I think that it’s important for what follows.
Through the commodification of slavery, mortgages on slaves bundled into bond issues, investors in the North indirectly owned an awful lot of the slaves in the South. (No doubt those Northern investors resisted any sudden end of slavery that would destroy their holdings.)
At some point in the Civil War, probably early on, the cash-strapped South would have repudiated any Northern debts, making the mortgages and any investments built on them, worthless.
When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the deeper reason that he could do it was because he wasn’t destroying any Northern property assets. The mortgages on the slaves freed were already worthless, and the investors probably didn’t want to draw attention to themselves as proxy slave owners while the war was raging.
Here’s a retro-prediction of something which must have happened: When the war was over, the worst kind of bottom-feeders probably bought up some of that slavery mortgage junk paper for pennies and headed South. With the Confederacy gone, those debts would be legal again, and with the asset that backed the mortgages gone, no way to sue the Union for recompense of lost property, there was no way to pay those debts, resulting in many a palatial southern manor being seized by Yankee debt collectors. I bet that burned, even more than Atlanta. (Too soon?)
This is all my unqualified speculation. I’ve not saying that it’s the whole story, but like viewing history through the lens of class struggle, following the slavery money might reveal things not apparent (or buried) in standard history. What I’d love is a good analysis in depth of slavery capitalization up to and during the Civil War by an economic historian with some forensic accountants.
And with that, I need some brain bleach.
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Also the Crimean War was pretty much a monumental clusterfuck for all parties involved.
You also only see WWI re-enactments in the skies. Nobody wants to reproduce trench warfare live.
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@Bushbaby @lyd I would not consider it an afterthought. While framing it as “who’s running this show” points towards states’ rights, the principal right was slavery. As Lyd points out, if you read Confederate documents, they were always emphasizing the right to own slaves. Strong states’ rights meant they would be able to prevent the Federal government from interfering with slave ownership. And you can also look at the major flashpoints leading to the war (Dredd Scott, Missouri Compromise, Bloody Kansas) and they hinged on slavery. Economics and territorial expansion as drivers were also completely entwined with slavery.
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Francis Horton says he thinks the double-barreled cannon was probably thrown away. Not true! It’s on display outside the City Hall in Athens, Georgia. There’s a plaque and a wikipedia page and everything. One can do a google search for “double-barreled cannon” and find all manner of things about it.
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“The double-barreled cannon is an American Civil War-era experimental weapon and is now a modern landmark located in Athens, Georgia. While originally built for warfare, the cannon never saw battle”
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Maybe because it’s difficult to reenact the Charge of the Light Brigade safely?
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This is the closest I’ve seen anyone come to a Crimean War re-enactment.
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Just want to pose a thought experiment. Suppose the south had one and brought in the states rights that people claim the war was really about. So now we have a situation where Georgia has slavery and Michigan does not. A person who was enslaved in Georgia flees from that state and ends up settling in Michigan.
Now, under Georgia law that person is property of a person living in Georgia. Under Michigan law, that person is a person and cannot be property. If the war was about the rights of states to determine their own path, and that was what the slaver who “owned” that previously enslaved person fought for in the war, then I suppose we’re saying the slaver would say, “Well, my former slave lives in Michigan now, where they are not my property, and my highest value is to respect the rights of the people of Michigan to decide their own fate, just as my states decides its own fate, so I respect that they person is now free in Michigan.”
By the way, this was a bit of a trick. This isn’t a thought experiment, it’s what was really going on. And that was not what the slavers thought of the matter.
The problem is that the the slave states didn’t want states rights. They wanted their ideology imposed on the other states. They wanted that previously enslaved person returned to the slaver who “owned” them.
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One thing I just learned recently is that, while most of the slave states that stayed in the Union ended up abolishing slavery through state constitutional amendments by the end of the war, Delaware and Kentucky did not, and also voted against ratification of the 13th amendment. Therefore slavery didn’t end in Delaware and Kentucky until the 13th amendment took effect in December of 1865. So that was over three years after the Emancipation Proclamation, 10 months after the end of the civil war, and 6 months after Juneteenth.
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two books are mentioned The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World and Empire of Cotton: A Global History.
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As a historian… I second that! It can drive some innovation and technological changes, but it’s not the only engine of technological advancement, not even remotely.
Right! Historians who study this stuff tend to focus on the broader field at the time and often show how there is rarely if ever a singular moment of invention. It’s often years, if not decades and hundreds, if not thousands of people contributing, many often uncredited for their work, especially women and people of color. If you take computing, in the popular historical accounts, you’d think it starts with Jobs and Gates, when really anyone with a working knowledge of the field knows it’s all the way back in the 19th century, with Lovelace and Babbage… and that women played a critical role in the 20th century as human computers!
But we’re way too invested in our big man/rugged individualists/genius inventor narrative or in the war is the engine of history narrative… both really. It’s still hanging out, despite the absolute years of historical work showing how weak an argument both concepts are… mainly because history, especially popular history tends to be a conservative field, slow to change, still dominated by white men invested in these tropes…
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War ups the urgency and removes financial hurdles. It removes the question of “Who is going to pay for that?” to “We need something like this before they do.” You’re right that nothing sprung to life fully formed. Most everything was already being worked on to a degree. When the government asks for something to fill a particular need then there is suddenly a rush to fill it. It gets tested and refined. Private companies who were already working on similar projects can hire more engineers, machinists, technicians, etc to develop a project faster if they know there is a good chance there will be an instant customer in way of the government.
There are several examples I can think of where people were already working on the technology, but the urgency of beating other nations to it caused more rapid advancement, such as rocketry, atomic power and of course the atomic bomb.
And some technology is fully formed on its own before the military decides to adopt it. There are many things developed and refined first by hobbyist and other companies for civilian markets that initially the military had little to no interest in it. It was only after demonstrations of their utility that they were won over. “Drones” were seen mostly as toys until the high end hobbyists formed companies that made some very robust and usable tools (talking the small RC ones, not like the Predator drone.) The .50 caliber sniper rifle was 100% developed as a concept by long range shooters making homemade bench-rest bolt guns on their mills. Then forming companies to sell to other shooters. And ultimately developed weapons for the military.
Also things like self driving cars. I know DARPA runs contests on such things now, but companies are also developing it because there is a huge civilian market that will change the way we travel in the future.
So tl;dr - I agree war doesn’t necessarily drive innovation. It does facilitate and speed it up at times.
I completely agree we don’t NEED wars to facilitate innovation. Investing in technology where the pay off is a decade or more away is a smart move. Unfortunately the Congress Critters (and some of the citizens) see such investments as frivolous. Unless suddenly we are at war and suddenly there is a need. 
People are horrible at long term planning.
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Harry Turtledove did a series of books with the premise the South won, became its separate state and carries it through to WWI and then eventually WWI
The South end up freeing the slaves anyway so blacks could be drafted into labor units for the military and industrial labor. Also because their British and French allies would not continue support without doing so. The North allies itself with Imperial Germany. The series eventually gets to a Southern Hitler figure.
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Not always, no. Things are being developed all the time, and is funded in a variety of ways.
[ETA] The “war as engine of innovation” is basically just a means of justifying mass violence against people.
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certain fields benefit from wartime appropriations, and others suffer greatly-- from lack of manpower, from interrupted trade, from the fact that certain activities are “behind enemy lines” etc etc. You cannot invest if your investment is likely to be expropriated, or bombed.
I agree while we might enjoy war time developments in peace time, that it shouldn’t be a justification or a reason to go to war. Fortunately, despite some troubled hot spots, overall world wide, war is way down.
Well, sure. Valid point. We only have X amount of manpower. We were so desperate for it during WWII that we - gasp - let women work! So while X people are at war, and Y people are supporting that effort, other projects not directly related are going to be pushed aside.
No, that’s not what I’m saying at all, though. I’m saying that war isn’t the primary mode of innovation. War at the heart of it is far more destructive than procreative.
I disagree with that too. Violence has gone back up in recent years, especially if you count states suppressing their own populations, which as BLM is reminding us, is happening in our own country. The Stephen Pinker view that we’ve made progress to a more peaceful world only tracks if you only focus on Europe post world war 2, and even there, it falls down if you include Eastern Europe and constant soviet suppression of anticommunist movements, or in some cases, Western european suppression of socialist or pro-communist movement.
The biggest development in war since the end of the World wars has been their export to the decolonizing third world, and their elision by defining war only by the metrics of the First and Second World wars, as if that’s the only way to define a war, by formal declarations and European actions (yet another Eurocentric world view). Keep in mind that many, many of our military actions since world war 2 were NEVER declared wars.
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