Civil War Thread

Both the Unions and Confederates camped on what is now my hunting property. I can take you to two different locations where researchers from the university have dug up musket balls and belt buckles and other debris from their camps.

 

The best appreciation for how close the South came to winning the war came from James McPherson's Tried by War: Lincoln as Commander in Chief (I haven't read Battle Cry of Freedom, so I have no idea if he was just rehashing the same ideas, but, nevertheless....) and, of course, Team of Rivals.

What stood out to me most was how effectively Lincoln held various Northern factions together, and how tenuous those relationships were all the way through until the final campaigns of the war in 1865. The details are fuzzy now since it's been a few years, but it was a delicate balancing act throughout the war to keep everyone in the North pulling the same direction, and that greatly affected how and where the war was fought.

I always pictured the North going full throttle after 1st Bull Run, intent on winning a complete victory, but that was certainly not the case and there were numerous real opportunities during the war for some kind of negotiated peace, far more than I ever realized, and many of those would have looked at least a little like a victory for the South.

 

One of my dad's favorite history lessons from Mexico were Los San Patricios during the Mexican-American war where the Irish soldiers defected to fight for their Catholic counterparts.

 

One of Lincoln's strategies for doing that was to let private citizens run their own peace feelers to the Confederacy, believing the efforts would fail to even get started and thus discredit negotiation. The only meeting he participated in was in the late winter of 1865 (maybe out of past friendship with Confederate VP Stevens) in which Lincoln said he had nothing to offer. Of course, by then it was obvious the war was nearly won.
One of Lincoln's biggest fears was that Union and Confederate generals, who all knew each other from very small prewar West Point, would negotiate their own armistices on various battlefields.

 

Late-Blooming Dad Just Now Getting Into Civil War History

 

That was the functional impact of the Emancipation Proclamation: after that, the Union was pretty much committed to unconditional victory.

After that, any sort of halfway settlement that allowed even a limited continuation of slavery would have been a disaster for the Union.

 

We don't watch TV in front of Fiona, so in the mornings, while Fiona's mom is at work, we listen to Irish music.

(We listen to a Gaelic Storm Pandora station, which gives us a good mix of Irish rock and roll, as well traditional songs.)

Heard this song this morning about the leader of the San Patricios, which got me onto reading about them/him.

He didn't get executed, as many of them did, but they did brand a "D" for deserter on his cheek.

Lyrics: John Riley | The Paul McKenna Band

 

The Weather Channel has this churning-sea graphic running near the bottom of the screen. When they go to a reporter, that shot shows the person down to the knee, then it looks like they're standing in the ocean with water all around them. It's horrible.

 

It's a metaphor that the South will rise again

 

A few weeks ago, my wife's cousin called her to say she wanted to get rid of these leather-bound books her grandmother and great-grandmother had collected. "We don't read; want them? We don't want to sell them, so you can have them. They take up too much room." I had a few that I've collected over the years - around six. We are both high school English teachers, so we said, sure, why not.

We went over with a box, thinking there were a dozen. Instead, the final count was 613. All between 1726-1938. So to our house they all went.

There were a number of Civil War books, but one that stands out is "Southern History of the War" by E.F. Pollard, editor from the Richmond Dispatch, from 1866. It is 1,258 pages and about four inches think, complete with pictures and maps. It appears to cover everything from pre-war until the end. I'm curious to see what angle this was taken, or if it is a straight account. I hope I can find time to find out, but life of a high school English teacher doesn't much allow for pleasure reading until the summer ...

 

You REALLY need to talk to people who lived and grew up there.

The problem was centralized planning, not "productivity problems." Lots of "stuff" was produced, but things bogged down after that.

An example from Vladivostok, from the book "Lenin's Tomb":

There were two shrimping companies in the 1970s, one under Moscow control, the other not. They both produced a tremendous amount of shrimp. The one not under a central planning system got its goods to market fairly efficiently. The other one had to "wait from orders from Moscow" every step of the way, the result being a good portion of shrimp becoming rotten and having to be thrown out.

 

No wonder people still argue over the Civil War. We haven't finished paying it off yet.

Nation's oldest Civil War pensioner collects $73 a month from VA