I learned all about civil war from Shakespeare:
“O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!(275)
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of times.
Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy
Which like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips(280)
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue,
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,(285)
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter’d with the hands of war;
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds,
And Caesar’s spirit ranging for revenge,(290)
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.(295)”
But with all its destruction and horror, I still say if the choice is ONLY between dying on your knees, or dying on feet, I would chose the latter.
“Give me liberty or give me death.”
The last Civil War before Shakespeare was the War of the Roses, which he was obviously aware of, since he wrote his plays: Richard II; Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; Henry V; Henry VI, Part 1; Henry VI, Part 2; Henry VI, Part 3; and Richard III about the war, from incidence to bloody conclusion. But it had ended a century before his birth, and no public friends of the House of York survived to his day to talk about the downside. Also, as Civil Wars go, it had been rather mild, with most injuries to professional soldiers and hardly any damage done to non-military structures. If he had survived another 30 years or so he would have seen the real thing, in the English Civil War of Cromwell vs. Charles I.