beatrice_otter | (Reply)

Sort of, yeah. Although, to be perfectly fair to the Confederate politicians (I generally try not to be, because OMG WERE THEY INCOMPETENT ASSHOLES for the most part), a lot of their problems had to do with a lack of an established bureaucracy to carry out what they legislated. Like, It doesn't matter what the politicians decide if there isn't anybody who is going to carry them out, and the US had enough trouble getting the machinery of government created itself, and WE weren't trying to do it in the midst of a war. So they did, legitimately, have a very hard job. They still carried it out in a completely incompetent manner. Partly because most of them were not very connected with reality. They had their Glorious Ideals of What The South Should Was And Should Be, and a large number of them were completely unwilling to deal with any facts that contradicted that.

There's probably a decent chance that they would have been able to accomplish things if they'd had the mechanisms of government already established to back them up. (Not sure, because you have to PAY FOR the mechanisms of government, and boy howdy did they hate paying for ANYTHING.) But our current government HAS those mechanisms of government, and still can't do anything.