Posted on 11/23/2016 6:01:04 PM PST by Loud Mime
I am studying our Civil War; anybody have any recommendations for reading?
"By the time John Brown hung from the gallows for his crimes at Harper’s Ferry, Northern abolitionists had made him a “holy martyr” in their campaign against Southern slave owners.
"This Northern hatred for Southerners long predated their objections to slavery. They were convinced that New England, whose spokesmen had begun the American Revolution, should have been the leader of the new nation. Instead, they had been displaced by Southern “slavocrats” like Thomas Jefferson.
"This malevolent envy exacerbated the South’s greatest fear: a race war. Jefferson’s cry, “We are truly to be pitied,” summed up their dread. For decades, extremists in both regions flung insults and threats, creating intractable enmities.
"By 1861, only a civil war that would kill a million men could save the Union.
An Excerpt from A Disease in the Public Mind by Thomas Fleming:
'On April 18, 1861, Colonel Robert E. Lee rode across the “long bridge” that linked Virginia to Washington and tied his horse in front of Montgomery Blair’s house on Pennsylvania Avenue, opposite the building containing the State War and Navy Departments. It was an appropriate setting for one of the most crucial conversations in American history.
Waiting for him was balding seventy year old Francis Preston Blair. There is no record of the exact words, but we know that Blair, after the usual courtesies, grew solemn and told Lee that he had been authorized by President Lincoln to offer him command of the Northern Army that would assemble when the 75,000 volunteers reached Washington.
Here was a moment when history’s direction hung on the loyalties and beliefs and emotions of a single man. If Robert E. Lee had accepted this offer, there is at least a possibility that Virginia would have refused to secede. Even if she seceded, Lee’s prestige as a soldier, his links through his father and his wife to George Washington, would have had an enormous impact on the legitimacy of the South’s resistance. Northern newspapers would have trumpeted the significance of his decision. Deep divisive doubts would have been implanted in the souls of thousands of wavering southern Unionists, especially in Virginia. The duration of the war, its very nature, would have changed.
As Colonel Lee sat there, trying to absorb this astounding offer, what did he think and feel? What did he remember? From what we have seen of his life in this book, almost certainly the first memory was John Brown. That madman’s rant about sin of slavery and the blood that was required to wash it away, the pikes he had been prepared to put into the hands of enraged slaves, pikes that might have been thrust into the bodies of Lee’s daughters and wife, the letters in Brown’s carpetbag linking him to wealthy northern backers. Could he invade Virginia or any southern state at the head of an army composed of men who believed John Brown was as divine as Jesus Christ?
Yes!
The one from 1861 through 1865 or the one from 2020 through 2022?
Good question, but I was referring to one that I’m not fighting.
Agreed, Battle Cry of Freedom is a great read. Another very interesting book is The Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest by John Allan Wyeth. As it turns out, the author became a monumentally important person himself. He served under General Forrest during the Civil War, then about sixty years later he served in WWI. He then went on to design and create the American system of Physician Training (I believe in New York City).
http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-3522
https://archives.alabama.gov/famous/j_wyeth.html
Killer Angels is a fun historical fiction. I Rode With Stonewall an excellent first person account. Battle Cry of Freedom by McPherson a very good overview of the causes and conduct of the war. Lee’s Lieutenants and R.E. Lee by Douglas Southall Freeman is the classic Lee authority. Bruce Catton books for the north’s perspective.
I’m sorry. Sandburg’s books on Lincoln are chock full of obvious errors. I couldn’t get through the first one because there was so much I recognized as wrong.
I was 14 when I read it. I need to go back through it.
So, I ended up with over a hundred books and a lot of trivia in my brain. I've recently started re-reading some of them.
That’s why I recommend the first book in the Bruce Catton trilogy: The Coming Fury. It covers the period before the Civil War.
Prior to the Civil War, the United States was an agricultural economy. Industrialization occurred later, starting in the 1880’s.
This is true, but it doesn't address my point which is that New York and Washington DC rigged the game so that all money flowed through them.
And this is the problem we are still dealing with today.
Yup read the CSA veep’s reasoning written after the loss. Also read his speech at the inception of the CSA and how it was done to keep slavery now and forever
Your link no work
Since you’ve got it in quotation marks exactly who asked, when, and where? Where was it reported?
Henry Steele Commanger
Oh, Sorry, I thought you meant the one coming up.....
Seriously ?
McPherson?
Why stop there...
Howard Zinn perhaps
Will this be the most ignorant Freepers pipe up with answers they think will win attaboys
Or some decent posts
I’m wagering 80/20
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