The Civil War Sucks

Spy Magazine ^ | March 1994 | Joe Queenan

[SamAdams76]

The Civil War Sucks!

by Joe Queenan

(March 1994 Spy magazine)

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Admit it! It sucks!

You know the feeling: Some friends call and invite you down to their house in Charlottesville, Virginia. There'll be pecan pie, horseback riding and, of course, that old barn burner between Virginia and Virginia Tech. But the real lure - the bait they know you can't refuse - is a chance to visit some of the important landmarks of the War Between the States. Your friends, huge Civil War buffs, are real tight with this 103-year-old lady who just happens to be Stonewall Jackson's niece, and she'll be taking everyone on a guided tour of the battlefields of Fredericksburg, Richmond, Appomattox and, yes, even Bull Run. Sound like fun or what?

You can hardly suppress your enthusiasm. Ever since PBS ran that nine-part series about the Civil War three years ago, you can't get that titanic struggle for the nation's soul out of your thoughts. You positively love Civil War history - the War Between the States was the crucible in which this Mighty Union was forged, and that brother vs. brother imagery hits you right in the pit of your stomach every time. You adore Civil war films like Glory; your eyes get all misty whenever you hear "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" - particularly when it's sung by Mahalia Jackson - and one of your lifelong ambitions has been to free up enough time to read Shelby Foote's peerless, three-volume, 2,976 page history of the Civil War. Oh, yes, you'd love to visit Fredericksburg, Richmond, Appomattox and Bull Run with Stonewall Jackson's niece.

But then you remember: Your apartment needs a paint job, your car's been acting up lately, there's the new Laurie Anderson show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this Friday, and, oh yeah, your mom's planning to come up for the weekend. So reluctantly, remorsefully, you beg off.

But after you put down the phone, you have to be honest with yourself and admit that the real reason you turned down that trip to Charlottesville isn't because of your apartment or your car or Laurie Anderson's new show or your mom. The real reason you backed out is because deep down inside, you harbor a dark secret that millions of Americans share with you but never, ever dare to admit in public.

The Civil War sucks.

Admit and you'll feel a whole lot better. Ever since you were a kid, you've despised the Civil War, an inglorious, unheroic and wretchedly downscale series of horrid massacres pitting scraggly gangs of racist, barefoot, poorly equipped Neanderthal rustics against a sea of inept but numerous urbanites in a pointless confrontation that schoolchildren are still taught to believe was fought for moral principles, when everyone knows it was fought over money. Ever since you were a little kid, you're dreaded words like Gettysburg and Chancellorsville, bland theme parks for the dead where Civil War-buff teachers used to drag you on class trips when you'd really rather have been in New York City, Disney World or even Asbury Park learning something useful. Ever since you were a little kid, you've had a niggling suspicion that, compared with the Peloponnesian War, Caesar's Gallic Wars, the Crusades, the Napoleonic Wars or World Wars I and II, the American Civil War was a hokey, small-time, ginsu-knife affair that would have been over in three months if the North's generals hadn't all been cowards, bunglers or drunks. The only reason people visit Gettysburg is because it's easier to get to than Waterloo, el-Alamein, Stalingrad or Hastings, battlefields were genuinely important historical events took place.

By every criterion imaginable, the Civil War is a hopeless failure. Certainly we are taught as impressionable schoolchildren to believe the Civil War was a noble crusade to free the slaves. But by the time we reach adulthood, most of us either are white people or have been around enough white people to know that white people just don't do things like that - it isn't in their DNA. And unlike other famous wars, which were suffused with brilliant strategic ploys such as Hannibal's sneaking over the Alps with his elephants or Nelson's slipping between the French fleet and the Egyptian shoreline at the Battle of the Nile, the Civil War was a dreary series of slogging hecatombs in which the Union expended vast amounts of manpower to defeat absurdly outnumbered, poorly equipped rebels who never really had a chance to win a war they had no business starting in the first place. The North vs. The South at Vicksburg was like a fistfight between you and your three-year-old niece Brittany - with Brittany blindfolded. Gettysburg involved about as much tactical genius as a contest between the Indianapolis Colts and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

If Americans were really honest with themselves, they would admit that few words in the entire English language inspires more pure dread than Civil War. What was the novel that tens of millions of Americans grew up loathing? The Red Badge of Courage. What's the movie that Aunt Emily always drools over? Gone With The Wind. What was that horrible song Elvis used to bring down the house with just before he died? "American Trilogy" - featuring "Dixie," "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "All My Trials," Cuisinarted together in one odious smorgasbord of patriotic twaddle. Gone With The Wind, indeed.

The movie we should really be paying attention to is The Miracle Worker. About halfway through this inspirational classic, the Keller family is sitting around the dinner table chatting when suddenly the deaf, dumb and blind Helen, played by Patty Duke, throws an unbelievable fit and starts breaking all the furniture in the house. Why would she unexpectedly explode in such a fit of rage? Easy. She threw a fit because her dad was discussing Ulysses S. Grant's siege strategy at the Battle of Vicksburg. Even though the kid is deaf, dumb and blind, she can sense that another idiotic conversation about the War Between the States, conducted by a pair of pedantic Civil War buffs, is taking place a few feet away. So she loses it.

Don't we all feel some of Helen Keller's rage deep down inside? Thanks to Civil War buffs, we've got mind-numbing board games with names like Gettysburg and Chancellorsville, in which geeky teachers' pets manipulate a bunch of cardboard armies in a prepubescent effort to recreate the great one-sided battles of the past. Thanks to Civil War buffs, we've got Raymond Massey as Young Abe Lincoln, Henry Fonda as Young Abe Lincoln, Sam Waterston as Young Abe Lincoln.

Thanks to Civil War buffs, we've got unreadable crap like Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and washed-up first basemen like Keith Hernandez who would rather talk about the silence at Appomattox in 1865 than the silence at Shea Stadium in 1987. Thanks to Civil War buffs, the Disney Company's perfectly wonderful plan to build an amusement park that normal people might actually enjoy a few miles down the road from Manassas Battlefield may now be deep-sixed. Thanks a lot, Civil War buffs. Thanks for books like The Outlaw Josey Wales, written by a redneck fascist, that make redneck fascists seem like heroes. Thanks for all that horrible Walt Whitman poetry. Thanks for "O Captain, My Captain." Thanks for "Sic semper tyrannis" or "Sic semper fidelis" or whatever it was that screwy #!@#!! was hollering while leaping from the balcony at Ford's Theatre. Thanks for Confederate flags that bikers can wrap around their foreheads. Thanks for movies like The Birth of a Nation that the Ku Klux Klan used as recruiting films. Thanks for expressions like "You ain't just whistlin' Dixie.'"

Let's face it: The only good thing that ever came out of the Civil War was the remark "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?" And Mrs. Lincoln, a retard, probably didn't get the joke.

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[arly]

is the author of this tripe any relation to Mike"Lumpy Riefenstahl" Moore by chance?...I see alot of writing similarity.

[Shooter 2.5]

The real tragedy of a Civil War is it doesn't give you a chance to kill foreigners.

[squarebarb]

Try this book. Women imprisoned in great numbers during the civil war in missouri.

[Redcoat LI]

I'll second that,all slaughter,no style.

[Podkayne]

History buffs like to repeat over and again that few realize how close the south came to winning the "War of Northern Agression".

In addition - the majority of confederate soldiers were not the rich, land-owning, chivalrous, slave-holding gentry who controlled all things and had started the secession. The typical confederate grew up on a farm, knew how to use a rifle and how to live off the land. This is in contrast with the yankee immigrant city dwellers who were drafted and who made up a large percentage of the union army.

In battle after the battle the south lost marginally and used their resources to much greater advantage.

They fought for their land much as Russians fight for mother Russia. There are still great cultural differences between yankees and those living south of the Mason Dixon line.

If, for some terrible reason, there were ever to be another polarization between north and south you can bet your bottom dollar that the next war would be won before it even started.

[Congressman Billybob]

The Union considered Maryland a Confederate state by sympathies. The commander of the Union battery, on Federal Hill in the Inner Harbor, had warned the locals at the outset that in the event of any uprising, his first shots would go into the Maryland Club on Mt. Royal Avenue.

Though Maryland sent many of her sons to die on both sides in that conflict, she was a "Confederate" state.

Congressman Billybob

Latest column, "To the Supreme Court: I Quit"

[bagman]

"The despot's heel is on thy shore."

"Avenge the patriotic gore that flecked the streets of Baltimore."

Someone sure that it was Southern.

[bagman]

Your million or so civilian deaths is way too high. Do you have a citation to back it up.

[Vision]

Just asking, do you consider Maryland a Southern state?

I see the Confederacy beginning of everything south of Pratt Street in Baltimore's inner harbor. That was were the Baltimore Riots took place. Although I know Confederate soldiers were coming from Maryland's most northern counties.

[what's up]

These are numbers I have heard:

500,000 lives lost in WWII.

600,000 lives lost in the Civil War.

If the figures are true, this was far from a ginsu knife fight.

[baseballmom]

http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/cwc/other/stats/warcost.htm

Link showing casualties in all US wars.

[untenured]

Weird article I came across and I thought I'd share.

I didn't know stuff from Spy was online. "Admit it - it sucks!" was a feature they ran for awhile, trying to deflate pointy-headed devotion to something that people became expert in mostly to show off or stand out. I remember that jazz and the organic grocery were two other topics.

I always liked Spy, and am sorry it's gone.

[Skooz]

I've been viewing Ken Burn's DVD's on the Civil War on my new 60" HDTV. It's an awesome documentary even though Ken Burn's is an horse's ass in person and PBS sucks.

I taped the series years ago when it was on PBS. I recently broke out the old tapes, and they just didn't cut it. So, I paid the $99.00 + tax for the DVDs and I am very happy I did. It is superb.

I watch it on my 25" not HDTV. But, I hope to watch it on my new 57" HDTV that I would like to buy just before football season.

I bought the Shelby Foote trilogy for my dad several years ago. When he died, I inherited them and plan on reading them sometime.

[CatoRenasci]

I find these many euphemisms for the civil war amusing. My completely unreconstructed grandmother, who grew up during Reconstruction (born 1871) in Tennessee, would use some of them (War of Northern Aggression; Late Unpleasantness) for fun, but when she was speaking seriously it was always just the War, or if she was speaking to someone born after WWII, the Civil War. When I went to college in Virginia in the 1960's at VMI, as unreconstructed a Southern institution as you can imagine in those days, it was 'War between the States' in the high school text books, but the course at VMI was "Civil War and Reconstruction" and we had the "Civil War Roundtable".

[PUGACHEV]

"the American Civil War was a hokey, small-time, ginsu-knife affair that would have been over in three months if the North's generals hadn't all been cowards, bunglers or drunks." ...

The Civil War was the last Napoloeonic war, and the first fully modern war dependent upon railroads, and telegraphs. The year-long siege of Petersburg fully anticipated the First World War, and Grant's Richmond campaign anticipated our strategy in the Vietnam war. My favorite Civil War history, by the way, is Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, a four volume collection of first hand accounts colleced and edited by The Century Magazine. Sadly, it's out of print, but used copies are avaiable on the Am**on Marketplace.

"Just asking, do you consider Maryland a Southern state?

Today, parts of Maryland, those areas South of the District of Columbia, are certainly Southern: St. Mary's, Charles, and Calvert Counties, for example. But back in 1860, everything below Frederick, including Baltimore and the District of Columbia, was sympathetic to the South. Understanding this, General Windfield Scott was wise to quickly sieze the District of Columbia armory when Virginia succeeded to prevent the pro-Southern District of Columbia militia from taking control of the city, which is just what they had intended to do. While in Maryland Southern sympathy was so strong that General Benjamin Butler was forced to place cannon on what is still today known as Federal Hill to keep Baltimore under Union control. Recalling those troubled days, Maryland's official state song written in 1861, Maryland, My Maryland, contains the following lines :

The despot's heel is on thy shore,

Maryland!

His torch is at thy temple door,

Maryland!

Avenge the patriotic gore

That flecked the streets of Baltimore,

[snip]

Virginia should not call in vain,

Maryland!

She meets her sisters on the plain-

[snip]

She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb-

Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum!...

[Mo1]

Don't we all feel some of Helen Keller's rage deep down inside?

Is this dude for real?

[stainlessbanner]

Ken Burn's is an horse's ass in person and PBS sucks.

bump

[PUGACHEV]

"When I went to college in Virginia in the 1960's at VMI, as unreconstructed a Southern institution as you can imagine in those days"

Boy, isn't that the truth. Perhaps you remember that Virgina had a unique holiday back then known as Lee-Jackson Day. It's now Lee-Jackson-King day, but in those days it was just Lee-Jackson day to honor Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

Of course, that peculiar holiday was unknown to most people in the North, and the Virginia Board of Bar Examiners made use of this to give Southern boys a leg up on the bar exam. They would ask a procedural question that required you to calculate the last day on which a responsive pleading could be filed. The normal 21 days (or whatever it was) was calculated to fall on Lee-Jackson Day. Native Virginians, being well aquainted with the holiday, knew that the deadline was therefore extended one extra day; a non-Virginian wouldn't pick that up. The examiners then used the answers to sort out who was and wasn't a Virginian and acted accordingly.

[CatoRenasci]

LOL. Now why would some damnyankee fancy pants want to come down carpetbagging at the Virigina bar, anyway? Seems to me the bar examiners were just doing their civic duty.

[Chewbacca]

The American Civil War was a war fought over taxation and tariffs. The North was taxing the sale of Southern Cotton to help subsidize the Northern States. Cotton and tobacco was the major export at this point in history and northern factories and States didn't have a whole lot of foreign trade going on. The southern States had a valid reason for leaving the Union.

The slavery issue wasn't used until after Gettysburg to keep the English from supporting the southern cause. England having already abolished slavery within their country. By turning the war into an issue over slavery helped to turn away England from supporting the South.