The Confederacy as a test case for preventive war

I should probably save this for April's Confederate "Heritage" Month posts.  But, what the heck, I'll do this one now.  There's no shortage of materail for "Heritage" Month.

It's an article by historian James McPherson who view the Confederacy's decision to initiate military hostilities at Fort Sumter: The Fruits of Preventive War Perspectives May 2003.

Like some later American leaders, Southern slaveowners had a tendency to make up their own reality and mistake it for the reality that actually existed outside their fantasies.  So when Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860, the slaveowners thought Doom was at hand. McPherson writes that some Southerners, not quite so lost in the world of their fantasies, said that they should wait until the Lincoln administration actually did something that might violate their sacred institution of slavery.  "But fire-eaters insisted that the South could not afford to wait until the North loosed another John Brown or other weapons of mass destruction."

So they seceded and started a war.  They were pretty darn confident of themselves, too.  After all, slavery had created a superior civilization in the South, hadn't it?  McPherson writes:

So the war came. And for several months, Confederate success seemed assured as Southern arms won important victories. After the battle of Manassas (Bull Run) in July 1861, the Richmond Whig proclaimed, "the breakdown of the Yankee race, their unfitness for empire, forces dominion on the South. We must adapt ourselves to our new destiny." Not to be outdone, the Richmond Examiner declared two months later that military victories had "demonstrated, at once and forever, the superiority of Southern soldiers. . . . The enemy know now that when they go forth to the field they will encounter a master race. The consciousness of this fact will cause their knees to tremble beneath them on the day of battle."

And how did it work out for the leader of the higher civilization of slavery?

Less than four years later, the empire of this master race lay in ruins. One-fourth of the white men of military age in the Confederate states had died. Two-thirds of southern wealth had been destroyed, including the value of four million slaves who now owned themselves. Burned-out plantations, fields growing up in weeds, and railroads without tracks, bridges, or rolling stock marked the trail of conquering Union armies.

Dang!  They must have had "bad intelligence" or something, huh?  (Lack of good sense is closer to the problem.)