For Decades, Southern States Saw Thanksgiving as an Act of Northern Aggression

I've never really bought that story, in that form. It tacitly suggests that the South's economy was stronger with slavery than without. It seems more likely to me, though, that reliance on slavery was part of why the South's economy ended up being so weak in the first place. It allowed money to remain concentrated in the hands of a small, landed elite. That worked out extremely well for them relative to their neighbors, but also would have fueled a sort of falling tide that sinks all boats.

Which isn't to say that it doesn't change the economic equation if you take it away. But it's more tenable to say that the reason people were willing to go to war over it was more about the economics of power than about economics in general.

Legally, yes. Just because it is legal doesn't mean it is right though.

Moreover, the US was way behind Euope on this issue and I suspect they wouldn't have lasted long until sanctions were imposed on slave-produced goods, especially tobacco and cotton.

> they assume that non-elite white southerners are either stupid or evil to the point where they will start an extremely brutal war who's explicit aims are to preserve the wealth of the elite at the cost of everyone else. This seems... unlikely

What were the dissenting poor supposed to do? Refuse a paying army job? Travel to the North to read up on the other side’s views? Before the modern era, most wars were fought for personal reasons involving the elite. Commoners enlisted because the army paid and offered opportunities to rise in social status.

The South was run like a feudal society:

“Among the many scholars who have worked on this question, V.O. Key is a distinguished political economist from the Southern University of Texas who devoted his life to offering a factual and definitive answer. He is a founder of American political economic studies -- he used scientific factual surveys and data rather than ideology and speculation. So this issue of how rich ‘plantation’ oligarchs repeatedly got poor white farmers to vote against their own interests in local elections is really no longer a mystery. For centuries, the oligarchs limited public education, and tightly controlled the media in the South. Travel was restricted in the South before the Civil War. Southern newspapers consistently lied to the voters. The sermons, school-books, political tracts, and newspapers repeatedly ran ‘stories’ intended to keep the population angry and afraid of Slave ‘rebellions’ and foreign influences. Achievements of the Slaves, or any brilliant black person, were systematically suppressed.

Professor Key factually documents the repeated behavior of the rich plantation owners in taking and maintaining political power. Very few of these feudal lords did much for their own communities and they did not build a middle class. The rulers blamed Negroes, and Yankees and foreigners, for the poverty and lack of infrastructure in the South. Southern politics in State and Nation by V. O. Key

More recent scholarship -- influenced by V.O. Key's scientific and mathematical methodology in ‘political economics’ -- continues to document the fact that at the time of the Civil War, the South was one of the wealthiest regions of the world. The oligarchs had a global lock on raw cotton production and could easily have won the Civil War by paying for an army three times bigger than anything the North could have produced.

In addition, the South was heavily-armed and each State funded a "State militia". The "militia" was conscripted from almost all able-bodied poor white Southern males. They were conscripted into press gangs to hunt down runaway slaves. The North had no equivalent ‘state militias’.“

https://www.quora.com/If-the-majority-of-southerners-werent-...

To be clear, I am claiming that germans in world war one had better equipment (relative to the time) and training than Germans in World War Two. I'm not saying that the allied equipment was in general superior to the German equipment in the second world war. My understanding is that the German army of 1914 is generally considered one of the best fighting organizations ever fielded; they lost due to the dual problems of taking on the UK while depending on food imports via sea and that they were the aggressor in a war where the tech vastly favored the defender, a problem they didn't have in the second war. (as I was saying, an attacker's breakthroughs moved at foot-speed; the defender moved reinforcements at rail speed. Tanks restored the balance between the movement of the attack and the movement of reinforcements.) - that, and taking on the whole rest of the industrialized world in a war of production, especially without a credible navy is usually going to end badly.

The only specific claim I'll stand behind about german vs. allied equipment in ww2 is that at the outset of the battle of France, the Germans had worse tanks than the French, and that the French had a larger army. the Char, for example, was more than a match for anything the Germans had. (In skilled hands, a fair number of anything the Germans had.) It was way more expensive, (as one would expect for a heavier, better-protected tank with a bigger gun) and harder to support and keep in the field (sort of the opposite of the later situation with the Panzer4 and the Sherman, much later in the same war, where you needed several Shermans to take on one Panzer.) but it was very well protected, and had a very large gun for it's day. It was cast, rather than made from wielded plates, further increasing it's cost and it's protection (and further complicating repair)

I mean, "Better tank" is a funny thing to say; the allies later won the war with tanks that were inferior even to the panzer of the time, if we are using that standard. It was totally fine you needed several Shermans to reliably take out one panther, because the allies had such an advantage in material and logistics that they could reliably get numerical advantage after D-day.

But one on one, the Char, as I understand it, could be expected to beat the Panzer of it's day with ease. It was built for those one on one fights, and excelled at them... when it had the chance. My understanding is that the Char was an 'infantry tank' - it was built to sit and slug it out, essentially. It seemed that the idea of a heavy 'infantry tank' went out of style pretty fast after world war two started up; it looked like lighter tanks for exploiting breakthroughs (and simply being on the battlefield in quantity) which were called 'calvary tanks' at the beginning of the war seemed to be the tank design that proved most useful. I mean, turns out, these "medium tanks" were simply more useful than either giant or tiny tanks, and this wasn't known at the outset of world war two, as there weren't a lot of large scale tank battles in the Polish campaign or in the spanish civil war to learn from.

Look up Pierre Billotte in the Battle of Stonne for one particularly dramatic example of the Char in skilled hands in action against Panzers. (and if you find a good book about him in English, report back)

But, my point here is that France did not lose through inferiority of numbers nor through inferiority of equipment.[4] It was something else. Perhaps they just weren't prepared for the German army sending their tanks out faster than their supply lines in ways that the French were utterly unprepared for? But really, I think it might just be Tactics. The French were fighting world war one, perhaps fighting it acceptably well. Germany had been through a number of smaller wars meanwhile, and could see how the new technologies upended the old rules of war, and those technologies made decisive the time it took France to figure out that the rules had changed. (There's a view, in fact, that the same thing happened in the first world war; The French started out in bright red trousers and white gloves, that they were dramatically less prepared for the sort of war that the new technology created than the German aggressors were. But the technology of the first world war meant that they were not overrun before they figured out the new rules, and in the end, a willingness to fight, short supply lines, and a large population carried the day.)

(as another aside, I consider the idea that the French are somehow less willing to fight under unpleasant conditions or more likely to surrender than other countries, that "the last brave frenchman died during Napoleon's retreat from Russia" to be... ahistoric. )

May's "Strange Victory" isn't as good as Bloch's "Strange Defeat" - but as I recall (it has been some time) May seemed to suggest that much of this seemed like chance on the German side, too. That you had ridiculously overconfident people in charge, that a lot of the Germans who should have been listened to thought the plan to invade France was way too risky, way too likely to fail. but that somehow, perhaps because the technology of the day allowed for fast and deep breakthroughs and the French leaders were still thinking in world war one terms, that confidence worked out better than could have been reasonably expected. Or maybe it was a low probability event; a fluke. Low-probablility events do occasionally happen.

[4] Unless that inferiority was in airpower; The Germans had decisive air superiority on the continent at that time. And it could have been what made the difference; You could easily argue that air superiority made the decisive difference. - I mean, having arial surveillance could have gone a long way towards mitigating the French confusion at the command level, if nothing else. But air superiority alone doesn't seem like it was decisive in other theatres, so you have to come up with some reason why it made the difference here and not, say, against Russia.

(also I want to point out that while I am of the opinion that the Germans can be considered the aggressors in world war one, and you can reasonably make that case, it's not a universally accepted opinion as their culpability for world war two is.)

Fascinating comments, thanks for expanding. I thought your original comments on German weapon superiority were about ww2 not 1.