Civil War Demographics

Today is the 152nd anniversary of the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor and the start of the Civil War.  Even though the war started on this date in 1861 it was the decisions made by Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas to join the Confederacy after the attack on Sumter that were essential to the rebels maintaining their independence through four years of bloody conflict.*  To understand why, let's look at the 1860 census (you can find the source data here).

The US population in 1860 was 31 million of whom 22 million were in the states that stayed in the Union while 9 million lived in the seceding states.  Population is not destiny but it had a significant impact on military capabilities so let's look more closely.

Secession occurred in two waves.  The first, consisting of seven states, from December 20, 1860 and February 23, 1861, took place before President Lincoln's inauguration.  For the next ten weeks the count remained static and then the final four states seceded between May 6 and June 8, 1861.

The seven states that seceded and formed the Confederacy prior to Sumter were all in the Deep South - South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas - the heart of the cotton economy.  These seven states had a population of 4.98 million but 46% of these were slaves, leaving a white population of only 2.67 million.  If the four post-Sumter states had not left the Union (and even if their populations were not added to the North), it would have meant that the North's population would have been 8 times more than that of the white population in the original seven Confederate states.  It is difficult to see how these states could have been successful militarily for any lengthy period of time in fighting a conventional war.

The four post-Sumter states had a population of 4.13 million of whom only 29% were slaves, adding a total of 2.93 million whites to the Confederacy, more than doubling the white population of the original Confederacy, along with bringing geographical depth to any defensive strategy and reducing the North's manpower advantage to 4 to 1.

This also puts into perspective the manpower loss of the Confederate states in the Civil War.  About 5% of its white population died, including about 20% of adult white males.  In today's context it would be the equivalent of 16 million Americans dying in a war - about 40 times the number of deaths in WWII and about 2,200 times the number of fatalities we have suffered in the last decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

The 1860 census also shows the relationship between the relative size of slave population and the timing of decisions about secession.  Six of the seven original states had slaves populations ranging from 44% to 57% of their total populations (Texas was an outlier with 30%) while the four states seceding post-Sumter had smaller slave populations, between 25% and 33%.  In the four slave states that did not secede the slave population did not exceed 20%: Kentucky (20%), Maryland (13%), Missouri (10%), Delaware (2%).

Reinforcing this analysis you can also look at the average number of slaves owned by slave-owning families in the slave states and  see a familiar pattern.  In the seven original Confederate states the average number of slaves owned per family was between 9 and 15 with an average of 13. The four late seceding states were between 7.5 and 10 per family with an average of 9.  The four non-seceding slave states were between 3 and 6 per family with an average of 5.

* The triggering event for the secession of the four states was President Lincoln's call on April 15, 1861 for 75,000 volunteer troops to bring the seceding states back into the Union by force of arms.  Although these states had tried to proclaim their neutrality, they were opposed to the use of force against the seven states that had left the Union.

Madness

U2 meet Prince.  Prince meet U2.

This is Muse from 2012.  Madness has a great sonic build, becoming more complex as it goes along.

If you have a good subwoofer and turn it up your entire house or car will shake.  THC believes this is a good thing.

A Further Note on Maggie

From Yaacov Lozowick's blog.  Lozowick was formerly the Chief Archivist at Yad Vashem in Israel and is currently Chief Archivist for the Israel State Archives.  He writes of his encounter with Margaret Thatcher in the 1990s:

". . . she came by Yad Vashem. In those days I used to meet all sorts of prominent folks and give them tours; I met presidents, prime ministers, and many lesser luminaries. None of them left the impression she did. Her intelligence was so fierce and unusual it was like a physical force, knocking over whatever wasn't solid enough to withstand it. I don't remember exactly what it was I showed her - it must have been assorted interesting documents, some Nazi, some Jewish, that was the sort of thing I normally showed in such cases. She saw the essential significance in each of them well before I had finished explaining what they were, and tied them into her understanding of the world. I vividly remember thinking at the time that being one of her aides or ministers must have been unusually demanding, since if you didn't have total control of whatever it was you were presenting to her she'd have made you feel like an idiot."

Although Lozowick's blog is mostly dormant since he took on his role for the State of Israel last year, if you are interested in the future of Jerusalem and of the prospects for peace you should look at the upper left corner of the blog and browse through Don't Divide Jerusalem and Seeking Peace, Living At War which collect his relevant posts on those issues.

He also operates a blog for the Israel State Archives,which under his direction has been much more active in declassifying documents.

Margaret Thatcher Has Some Fun

With the passing of the redoubtable Margaret Thatcher, one of the greatest political leaders of the post WWII world, let's take the opportunity to watch a portion of her last appearance in the House Of Commons as Prime Minister in 1990.  She's quite clearly having a good time responding to questions (if you've ever watched her other Question Time appearances you will know she was a formidable debater).  At the end of this video you can see the reference to the single currency.  It is thanks to Margaret Thatcher that Britain did not join and thus does not face the crisis that the rest of the EU is currently facing.  As yesterday's Business Insider noted, she predicted that the euro would be a disaster. 

One of the most enjoyable aspects of Thatcher was her ability to provoke her opponents in ways that revealed more about them than they intended.  British politics and society had always been class and status obsessed (and hostile to women) but by the time Thatcher became the first female Prime Minister in 1979 the opposition Labour and Liberal parties had become the home of the chattering classes (BBC, media, academics, the Oxbridge crowd and the younger generation of inherited wealth).  It drove these groups crazy that someone like Thatcher, who did not go to the "right" schools, and was a shopkeepers daughter(!), was not only Prime Minister, but refused to accept the assumptions embedded within the liberal shibboleths they had learned to faithfully recite and would instead attack their very premises.

Another topic that induced cognitive dissonance with her opponents was the subject of coal.  There is a whole genre of British films over the past thirty years glamorizing coal towns and miners (see, for instance, Billy Elliot) and explicitly or implicitly condemning Thatcherism.It's quite odd when you think about it since coal is the chief villain for those who see global warming as priority #1 and who tend to be the very people who make the movies celebrating coal as long as they can take a poke at Thatcher.  There's a further oddity here.  Margaret Thatcher was the first political leader to raise concerns over human activities raising global temperatures after she has persuaded by her scientific advisors of the potential threat in the 1980s.  The opening of the natural gas fields in the North Sea and the closure of much of the coal industry, strenously objected to at the time by the British Left, significantly reduced CO2 emissions by Britain.

And, of course, the greatest irony is that the largest reduction in CO2 emissions in the past 50 years was when the policies of Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (see, Tear Down This Wall) led to victory over the Evil Empire in the Cold War.  The collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe caused the largest reduction of CO2 emissions in human history.  The scale is really quite enormous.  From 1990 to 1995, global CO2 emissions increased by 4%.  However, in Britain (transitioning to gas), the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe emissions were reduced by 26%!  This reduction amounted to 1.6 billion tons a year or more than Japan or India currently emit in a year and which far exceeds the reductions achieved by the European Union in the 15 years since the signing of the Kyoto Protocol.

In fact, without Thatcher's closure of the British coal industry and the collapse of the Soviet Union, there simply would not have been a Kyoto Protocol.  So, if global warming is your top priority give Thatcher (and Reagan) a big thanks.

If you'd like to read more here is a wonderful tribute from Andrew Sullivan, who writes of the pre-Thatcher Britain of the 1970s:

To put it bluntly: The Britain I grew up in was insane. The government owned almost all major manufacturing, from coal to steel to automobiles. Owned. . . . .And in the 1970s, you could not help but realize as a young Brit, that you were living in a decaying museum – some horrifying mixture of Eastern European grimness surrounded by the sculptured bric-a-brac of statues and buildings and edifices that spoke of an empire on which the sun had once never set. Now, in contrast, we lived on the dark side of the moon and it was made up of damp, slowly degrading concrete. 

Fighting Fire With Fire

Burning Down The House from Talking Heads and the film Stop Making Sense.  Outstanding performance video.

Full Employment

Looks like the French have found the secret to job creation!  We need to stop being narrow-minded and adopt the best ideas no matter where they come from.  Of course we may have to modify our laws regarding employer-employee practices to allow for some of their innovative practices.  From My Little Paris thanks to Mrs THC.