Ever since I could read, I've been reading about the Civil War. Bruce Catton (my favorite), Shelby Foote, James MacPherson--there are more books written about Lincoln than any other subject, and I think the Civil War is a close second.
I have no illusion I really know what those times were like, although I have imagined them. I was alive when men who had fought in that war were still alive, old codgers, but alive. A mere 80 years after the Civil War began, the sons of men who were born during it were shipping out to fight in World War Two.
But still, it is an act of imagination, not memory to resurrect the Civil War.
I still learn new stuff with every new book. "The Destructive War," is one of the most recent and it simply details the depths of hatred which that war fed and from which it drew.
I can guarantee you one thing: Those gun toting White Supremicists who were marching in Charlottesville have not a clue what the Civil War really was about, nor about Robert E. Lee--it's all a Disney movie inside their heads. They cherry picked the meaning for their own purposes.
I do not think for a moment, the events in Charlottesville or even Durham, North Carolina have much to do with the Civil War. They have to do with today. In so far as today's attitudes were shaped by attitudes passed down through generations, there is a relationship, but unless racism served a purpose, it would simply be discarded.
Speaking with some Free State Project ultimate libertarians, the line from them is the Civil War was not about slavery, but about being free from a distant central government imposing their values on you in your local shire. The fact is, every soldier probably has his own reason for joining up--as Boris Pasternak observed in "Dr. Zhivago" happy men do not leave home to go fight.
But once they got there, whatever they believed in the beginning, as Lincoln so astutely observed, as the war ground on, and as the freed slaves began to follow the union army as it slashed and burned its way across the South, there was no question the ultimate reason was somehow that "peculiar interest" which was slavery.
History, of course, is one long argument, but there is little doubt, the Civil War, ultimately was fought to end slavery, which in turn reshaped the economy of the South, as a by product, not as a war aim.
It is also inarguable that Robert E. Lee, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, and all those other gallant gentlemen who were the superb generals of the Confederate armies were traitors, committed treason by anyone's definition, as did Washington and Jefferson before them.
We do not allow the defeated soldiers of the Third Reich to erect statues to Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and Himmler. They are part of history, undeniably, but we do not celebrate them and we do no allow the Germans to do that.
But Hitler lost, and so did Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy.
I for one, am grateful for that.
I have no illusion I really know what those times were like, although I have imagined them. I was alive when men who had fought in that war were still alive, old codgers, but alive. A mere 80 years after the Civil War began, the sons of men who were born during it were shipping out to fight in World War Two.
But still, it is an act of imagination, not memory to resurrect the Civil War.
I still learn new stuff with every new book. "The Destructive War," is one of the most recent and it simply details the depths of hatred which that war fed and from which it drew.
I can guarantee you one thing: Those gun toting White Supremicists who were marching in Charlottesville have not a clue what the Civil War really was about, nor about Robert E. Lee--it's all a Disney movie inside their heads. They cherry picked the meaning for their own purposes.
I do not think for a moment, the events in Charlottesville or even Durham, North Carolina have much to do with the Civil War. They have to do with today. In so far as today's attitudes were shaped by attitudes passed down through generations, there is a relationship, but unless racism served a purpose, it would simply be discarded.
Speaking with some Free State Project ultimate libertarians, the line from them is the Civil War was not about slavery, but about being free from a distant central government imposing their values on you in your local shire. The fact is, every soldier probably has his own reason for joining up--as Boris Pasternak observed in "Dr. Zhivago" happy men do not leave home to go fight.
But once they got there, whatever they believed in the beginning, as Lincoln so astutely observed, as the war ground on, and as the freed slaves began to follow the union army as it slashed and burned its way across the South, there was no question the ultimate reason was somehow that "peculiar interest" which was slavery.
History, of course, is one long argument, but there is little doubt, the Civil War, ultimately was fought to end slavery, which in turn reshaped the economy of the South, as a by product, not as a war aim.
It is also inarguable that Robert E. Lee, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, and all those other gallant gentlemen who were the superb generals of the Confederate armies were traitors, committed treason by anyone's definition, as did Washington and Jefferson before them.
We do not allow the defeated soldiers of the Third Reich to erect statues to Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and Himmler. They are part of history, undeniably, but we do not celebrate them and we do no allow the Germans to do that.
"The victors write the history" some Nazi huffed at his trial at Nuremberg. And surely if Hitler had been victorious, Churchill, Roosevelt and the American army would have been vilified and statues to Rommel and the glorious Luftwaffe would have gone up from Berlin to Paris.
I for one, am grateful for that.
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