The Civil War Sucks

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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.

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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No question about the Loyalists...esp. in New York (amongst the most famous were the Delanceys--brothers that commanded for the Brits--a street remains with that name because the father was a great NYer).

The numbers not only reflect advances in killing technology, but population. There were only 2.5 million people in the colonies at the start of the war.

on Saturdays you would see the poor farm and outlying village folk come into town. Rail thin men, either scrawny or obese women, barefoot children in overalls and all, gazing hungrily at candy in the store, looking like Dorothea Lang (?) photos from Appalachia during the Depression.

Yes, I too was struck by these mountain folk who appeared in town on Saturday nights to drink 3.2 beer laced with white lightening while sitting in their pick-ups. To me the men did not look so scrawney as lithe and tough as were most of the farmers down on the flats who worked hard before agriculture was fully mechanized. I can just imagine what the yeomanry of The Valley who filled Jackson's foot cavalry 80 years before looked like - lithe and very strong and able to march long miles on meagre rations.

It is sad that the beautiful Shenandoah languished in poverty, and for underclasses, ignorance, from reconstruction until the industrial boom of the second world war. But poor and ignorant people are not necessarily stupid and it would be folly to so suppose and worse to say so out loud. They fought that war for the right to be left alone for very few of the yeomanry had slaves, just as Nathan Bedford Forrest fought for the right to be wrong.

The North was not taxing the sale of Southern Cotton.

Export taxes are prohibited by Article I, Section 9, Clause 5: "No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State."

If you can find a citation for your claim that the North taxed Southern Cotton, please do so; otherwise, please stick to driving the Milleneum Falcon.

As a Northerner, I've always been glad we won the Civil War and crushed the rebels [insert Darth Vader breathing here], but now I realize the error of my ways. Had we lost the war, we would have been spared the Dallas Cowboys, NASCAR and Billy Jeff Clinton.

Seriesly, though, I have always believed that the Southerners who fought the Civil War, from Robt. E. Lee down to the 13-year-old privates, deserved much better than they got from their leaders. Lincoln and the Republicans were NOT pressing for abolition; they did oppose extending slavery in the territories and they hated the Fugitive Slave Law. Secession, logically, made no sense; it meant that the South lost the territories, lost the Fugitive Slave Law, and condemned the region to fight a war that they had very little chance of winning. Indeed, it is a tribute to the Confederate Army that they lasted as long as they did. Unfortunately, as in many other occasions thoughout history, the politicians in charge were not worthy of the men who fought for them.

"BTW, I've started reading Shelby Foote's 2,976 page history of the Civil War and it is fascinating reading. Barne's & Noble has in stock this work in three separate volumes.

As well, 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."

Shelby Foote's works are great reading....the only problem is all three volumes are very heavy, and it literally wears you out trying to read them on a couch......LOL!

I received the Ken Burns "set" as a gift when it first came out in VHS. I've been waiting to purchase it on DVD.

Personally, I like nothing better than a good Civil War debate.

I think if you review your history you will find the proclimation came after the battle of Sharpsburg, not Gettysburg.

As to what was the efficient producing cause of the war of northern aggression, whether the matter of slavery or the shot on Sumpter, I recall fondly the rhetorical philosophical question posed many years ago by one of my professors, "we are all of us born in original sin, but how far back do you want to take proximate cause?"

"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."

Til after Antietam, not Gettysburg. You are a full year "off" on that score.

Fair enough, dear Capriole, the North hasn't felt war since the War of 1812, and than only in a few places. The emphasis is more on the Revolution here, and I think that's a good thing: we all need to be reminded of the sacrifices made for American independence by our (well, yours and mine, at any rate) forebears. The Revolution has the virtue of being primarily a unifying mythology, whereas the Civil War is divisive -- though, perhaps, unifying in the South.

But, at the risk of sounding nativist, I also think an important difference in modern Northern and Southern attitudes towards The War is that so few in the North today haven any sense of personal family connection to The War. The vast ethnic immigrations from the late 19th century on (save in post-modern South Florida, which is now a de facto Latin American country) flooded the industrial North with millions for whom the Civil War had no personal meaning, who were primarily economic immigrants. These are the people whose children and grandchildren favor gun control and provide the backbone of radical liberalism, their stake in American society is primarily economic and many of them have simply not been inculcated since birth with our heritage. It is from these quarters (especially after WWII, as the professoriat changed as a result of the GI Bill -- very few of the scholars who promoted the anti-American revisionist views about American history, and who reject American exceptionalism, are the descendants of those who founded and built this country, and fought its wars.) that America as an idea has been under attack lo these past 50-odd years.

My completely unreconstructed great-aunt Jack also referred to it as "the Wah", as did my also completely unreconstructed great-aunt Quenelle.

Mama Jack was a posthumous child, and when they asked her mother (my g grandmother Nannie Beall) what she was going to name the baby, she said "Jackson Edward, after my dear departed husband, of course." They asked "What if it's a girl?" and she replied, "I'm going to name her Jackson Edward anyway."

She compromised on Jackson Eddiebeall. When we visited the old family house in Eufaula (now owned by the Historical Society) we climbed up into the cupola, and there on the plaster in a very childish scrawl was "Jackson Eddie Beall Long". Must have been written around 1895 or so.

They grew up in the middle of the hot Reconstruction/Redemption battle in E. Alabama. My other gg grandfather (Jackson Edward's dad) wound up in the middle of the Spring Hill election riot. His account of the events (dictated to my Aunt Quenelle) is highly amusing. He was a veteran of the Wah, served in the AL legislature although he never got around to taking the Oath . . . although he was a very shy man personally, he was in the Partisan Rangers and was something of a fire-eater during the Wah . . .

"Alexander was the best artillary commander on either side during the war and fought in virtually every major battle in the Eastern theater of operations."

Alexander wrote a couple of books about his time as Commander of the CSA's artillery, and the war in general. I'm a big admirer of his.

That said, your comment that he was the "best artillery commander on either side" just isn't supported by fact in my opinion. The Union Army's superiority in Artillery, both in actually numbers and proficency, is akin to the CSA's vaunted superiority in the first two years in Cavalry.

Like I said, I'm a big fan of Alexander's. But there simply is no comparision between the levels of expertise that shows Alexander in a favorable light in this regard.

I've always wondered just how many Civil War vets had come back hooked on opium pills, laudenum, etc.

Lots. If you read the daily papers from the era (and that's a really good way to get a feel for daily life) they are FULL of ads by doctors, naturopaths, and just plain quacks offering to cure laudanum addiction.

It's a six of one half a dozen of the other, though. Paregoric is still the very best quick med for unspecified diarrhea, it was a godsend when my kids were babies - they get dehydrated so quickly. "Cholera infantum" killed way too many kids in the era before sanitation and pure water - including my gg grandfather's first child, George, whom he never even saw because he was off at the War. You just have to be careful with the dosage (and that was the problem with the self-medicating soldiers).

Her husband's family has been in the county since before the Revolution, good solid county people: the sort who've sent their sons to Virginia or Washington & Lee since Mr. Jefferson's time and their daughters to Sweet Briar or Randoph-Macon Women's College since The War, masters of the hounds for generations, someone in every generation taking their turn as masters of the hunt, two or three Cinncinati memberships in the family. You know people like this, you probably are people like this.

That's the Virginia side of our family. Our Alabama side is a little more earthy (they still ride to hounds though.)

Funny: my daughter is looking at W&L. Her prep school sends a goodly contingent there every fall. I don't think she'd go for Sweetbriar or R-M, she's always gone to a co-ed school.

As much a Southern partisan as I am, and as much as I admire Alexander, as an artilleryman I have to give the honors to Henry Hunt, chief of artillery for the Army of the Potomac. Without Hunt's masterful work at Malvern Hill and Gettysburg, the Army of the Potomac would not have survived.

And all artillerymen, North or South, should be inspired by Lt. Caleb Cushing whose US battery was at the impact point of Pickett's Charge: mortally wounded, he was still working his remaining guns, calling for charges of triple canister at point blank range!

Well times change, and the brightest girls in the South now go to places like Virginia, Washington and Lee, Davidson, and Vanderbilt instead of Sweet Briar, Randy-Mac, Hollins, Mary Baldwin, etc. I wanted my daughter to go to W&L, but the music was too weak. A couple of her friends from high school went to W&L and love it.

http://www.ket.org/civilwar/causes.html

The issues that caused the Civil War had been brewing since the United States was formed. The most important causes Southerners listed for the war were unfair taxation, states' rights, and the slavery issue. Here are some primary sources that show how heated these issues had become by the late 1850s.

Unfair Taxation
The history and economy of the North were very different from those of the South. Factories developed in the North, while large cotton plantations developed in the South. The Southern plantation owners relied on slave labor for economic success. Their crops were sold to cotton mills in England, and the ships returned with cheap manufactured goods produced in Europe. By the early 1800s, Northern factories were producing many of those same goods, and Northern politicians were able to pass heavy taxes on imported goods from Europe so that Southerners would have to buy goods from the North. These taxes angered Southerners.

Laws unfavorable to the South were passed.

States' Rights
Southerners felt that the Federal government was passing laws, such as import taxes, that treated them unfairly. They believed that individual states had the right to "nullify", or overturn, any law the Federal government passed. They also believed that individual states had the right to leave the United States and form their own independent country. Most people in the North believed that the concepts of "nullification" and "states' rights" would make the United States a weaker country and were against these ideas.

"As much a Southern partisan as I am, and as much as I admire Alexander, as an artilleryman I have to give the honors to Henry Hunt, chief of artillery for the Army of the Potomac. Without Hunt's masterful work at Malvern Hill and Gettysburg, the Army of the Potomac would not have survived.
And all artillerymen, North or South, should be inspired by Lt. Caleb Cushing whose US battery was at the impact point of Pickett's Charge: mortally wounded, he was still working his remaining guns, calling for charges of triple canister at point blank range!"

I have the Dale Gallion (spelling) print "Fire at the Angle" hanging in my den at home.

Henry Hunt knew his business. Alexander was good, but he wasn't on par with Hunt.

Speaking of Hunt, one of the great "what if" questions has always been "What if Jackson had been at Gettysburg, and had attempted to take Culp's Hill or Cemetary Ridge on July 1st, 1863?"

A good rendition of what "might have been" can be found in Gingrich's book "Gettysburg". I strongly suggest you check that out. In this fictionalized account, Hunt's artillery decimates the CSA's lone attempt before "moving around to the right" as Longstreet and Hood wanted Lee to do.

Just finished the second volume, "Grant comes East". I highly recommend both, and eagerly await the final one or two books (I've read in this forum from "carton256" the authors are debating one book or two to complete the series).

If you liked the Shara's triology, you'll like these.

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