Reading the Tea Leaves
What if ?
Historians deal in “what if’s” a lot…it’s a way to see how things really are not preordained. That a combination of elements needs to fall together in a certain way for the result to present itself. We are constantly co-creating the future a day at a time. There’s a lot of “what if’s” going on right now.
Here’s my what if from 1860. If after Lincoln was elected how would the political power in the south have reacted if a VERY well respected fortune teller had read the tarot cards, tea leaves, the sky…whatever…
and told them that by firing the first shot on Ft. Sumter in Charleston Harbor SC they were going to loose everything they were willing to go to war for ?
That hundreds of thousands of their young men would be dead. That slavery would be totally eliminated. That there would be more widows and orphans, cripples and drug addicts than had existed in the previous 75 years all together. That many of their plantations and their cotton economy would be pretty much destroyed.
Or if there was a Dr Who or Jules Verne or Outlander time machine, would they still do it? Was there so much pride, arrogance, we know what’s best attitude that they would still roll the dice ?
Given where we are today, I’m VERY curious what you all think and feel about this what if ? ….and reading the tea leaves.
Peace
It's an interesting question, Mike, but I write about this time period, too, and I would strongly disagree with you that "slavery was totally eliminated." Under the odious Andrew Johnson, and for the next 100 years, slavery was reworked into a different form, through Jim Crow laws, grandfather clauses that virtually eliminated Black voting rights, the reigns of terror conducted by the KKK and other white supremacist organizations throughout the country, the loophole in the 13th Amendment that allowed and continues to this day to allow enslavement of a created prison class— I can go on, but you get the point.
Under Johnson, Confederate leaders and elite enslavers were pardoned (they just had to go to Washington DC and grovel to Johnson in person) and were elected right back into office. Their confiscated lands were taken from the newly freed enslaved and restored. There were devastating war losses on both sides but there was no punishment of the elite Confederates for their treachery.
This election has horribly demonstrated that all those factors are not only still at work, but rekindled with billionaires funding the fire.
So - did the Confederacy really lose? Really? I wonder...