IIRC the FFL have never won a battle.

Oh, I am afraid I may take some flak for this.. but here goes...

#1 Lincoln "freed" the slaves with the Amancipation Proclamation.. which only covered slaves in the Confederacy and was only designed to hurt the South's production ability.

#2 the Civil war was fought over slavery...where most people of the time felt that it was states rights vs the power/role of the federal government. IMHO the end of slavery was a byproduct of the war.

Hope I didn't step on any toes...

Well here goes for a British perspective on things.

As regards the French never winning any wars, well the last one they won against us unaided was in 1066!

That Columbus discovered America. In truth, what he did 'discover' and prove was that the world was a lot bigger than we thought.

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Oh, I am afraid I may take some flak for this.. but here goes...

#1 Lincoln "freed" the slaves with the Amancipation Proclamation.. which only covered slaves in the Confederacy and was only designed to hurt the South's production ability.

#2 the Civil war was fought over slavery...where most people of the time felt that it was states rights vs the power/role of the federal government. IMHO the end of slavery was a byproduct of the war.

Hope I didn't step on any toes...

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Very good points. The whole problem is too many focus about the salvery issue. Lincoln never wanted to end slavery. He just did not want it spread into new states. The south saw this as a threat to thier way of life and economy. They wanted the states to be allowed to be the choice on slavery. It can come right down to $$$$$$$$$.

Lincoln did not believe that whites and blacks could live together in peace. He had planned to relocate the entire black population of the United States to Central America.

The first civilian killed by the abolitionist John Brown and his cohorts at Harper’s Ferry was a free black man.

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The reason for the (US) civil war was to free the slaves.
In our education system it seems that any answer other than “to free the slaves” is incorrect, regardless of the reasons that motivated men to risk there lives.

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I'm glad to see someone agrees with me.

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That the Japanese made a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese had intended the declaration of war to be delivered prior to the attack.

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Good point. A Reader's Digest documentary I have said that the failure of the Japanese embassy to deliver the declaration on time, was due to the ambassador's inability to type quickly. I don't know how accurate that is, just a thought.

Okay I was mostly talking about what the actual army was fighting for. I guess I should change the myth to "the confederate army was fighting for slavery" or "the common confederate soldier was a slave holder and was fighting to keep his slaves" or something along those lines. I hadn't actually put that much thought into the government side of the issue.

Matt

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Oh, he had plenty to do with it, though it's politically incorrect to say so.

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Not "politically incorrect" , simply incorrect. The thing Reagan can be credited with was some moral leadership, such as denouncing the Berlin wall. But the communist system was defeated from within, especially by the truly heroic people of Poland, and ultimately by Gorbachev's refusal to send in the Red Army to put down the latest in a long series of rebellions. Once people knew he wasn't going to send tanks into the streets of eastern Europe, things really fell apart and it was a matter of time.

This is a big, complex subject but IMO Reagan's role is vastly overrated in the USA.

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We built the B1, the MX, the Pershing 2, started down the road to the largest peace time build up of American Military might in history.

..... None of this would have happened without the help of our allies and without Ronald Reagan.

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All those programs were begun under Jimmy Carter believe it or not. The big buildup started while he was President, but the effects only kicked in while Reagan was in. I'm not trying to rehab Jimmy Carter here, but Reagan would not have had the benefit of those programs had he initiated them...they would have been too late for his presidency.

* we were taught in school that when they shot up Ft. Sumter; it was the start of the War Between The States. But that's not even close! What started the Civil was was when Lincoln sent 90,000 Union regulars into Northern Virginia.

gary

The program remained highly controversial. In particular, Senator William Proxmire continually derided it in public, arguing it was an outlandishly expensive dinosaur. During the 1976 federal election campaign, Jimmy Carter made it one of the Democratic Party's platforms, saying "The B-1 bomber is an example of a proposed system which should not be funded and would be wasteful of taxpayers' dollars."

Another cancellation
When Carter took office in 1977 he ordered a review of the entire program. By this point the projected cost of the program had risen to over $100 million per aircraft, although this was lifetime cost over twenty years. He was informed of the relatively new work on stealth aircraft that had started in 1975, and decided that this was a far better avenue of approach than the B-1. Pentagon officials also stated that the ALCM launched from the existing B-52 fleet would give the USAF equal capability of penetrating Soviet airspace. With a 1500 mile range, the ALCM could be launched well outside the range of any Soviet defenses, and penetrate at low altitude just like a bomber, but in much greater numbers. A program to improve the B-52 and develop and deploy the ALCM would cost perhaps 20% of the price to deploy the planned 244 B-1A's.

On 30 June 1977 Carter announced that the B-1A would be canceled, in favor of ICBMs, SLBMs, and a fleet of modernized B-52s armed with ALCMs.[5] Carter called it "one of the most difficult decisions that I've made since I've been in office." No mention of the stealth work was made public, the program being top secret, but today it is known that he started the Advanced Technology Bomber (ATB) project in early 1978, which eventually led to the B-2 Spirit.