The American Civil War -- what's widely misunderstood about it?

part of the confusion stems from the union fighting the war primarily to keep the union intact, but the confederacy fighting the war primarily to keep slavery intact.

Another joke-name is "The Late Unpleasantness," which frankly I've always kinda liked.

or The Recent Unpleasantness

part of the confusion stems from the union fighting the war primarily to keep the union intact, but the confederacy fighting the war primarily to keep slavery intact.

uh. . . .it was a lot more complicated than that

are you asking if I went to college in the south? (I didn't, though I did take some courses here and there @ MTSU while I was living in nashville)

living in the south opens yr eyes to how embattled a region it is - imagine if the way you spoke was widely associated in popular culture with mouthbreathing stupidty

xp to pp

or stupidity as it were

tho stupidty has a nice ring to it

"unreconstructed teachers"

mr. cue: no, it wasn't -- see the stated reasons for secession issued by every state in 1860/61.

post-reconstructionist

official statements do not equal extensively documented popular sentiment

xp

I was just wondering where you had been taught that "northern aggression" line, that's all.

I've never heard that said in real life either.

care to cite the 'extensively documented popular sentiment' in favor of secession prior to fort sumter?

The Frank Luntz focus groups of 1861 must have been a hoot.

i remember reading in the first volume of that Shelby Foote Civil War book where he gave at least a couple of examples where Confederate soliders gave the reasons why they were fighting, and most of them didn't give two shits about slavery, they were fighting b/c the North was telling them what to do etc etc etc

what's really interesting about the war, the more i hear about it, is just how widespread geographically it was. like the aforementioned arizona theater of the war. when i was learning about it, for all we knew it was only along the mason-dixon line, with some minor inroads made by the south into the north cf gettysburg, followed by the final union push into the south.

a couple of (liberal) virginians / tennesseans I knew recounted stories of family members and teachers referring to it that way. one guy I knew went to college in richmond and according to his family that was "going off to the big city", so maybe this is more of a rural phenomenon? also these people were in school during the 70s which could be a factor.

xp to pp again

here's some fun reading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_the_American_Civil_War

War of Northern Aggression

The War of Northern Aggression is a name which suggests that the North was unjust or unconstitutional in making war against the South.[citation needed] The term is still used today, mainly by Southerners who still believe in the Lost Cause and who contend that the North unjustly and illegally invaded the South.

care to cite the 'extensively documented popular sentiment' in favor of secession prior to fort sumter?

I don't think that's what you meant to say, yeah? Or perhaps I was unclear. As Que points out there is documentation in the Shelby Foote book, and also in the Confederates In The Attic book I referenced above, that indicate there were a lot of complicated sentiments around the South's motivation for fighting, not just secession. Whether this predates Sumter, I don't know.

xp

I'm sure there are still some segregationists living under a rock somewhere who say things like "The War of Northern Aggression", but it's hardly widespread, at least in my experiences from 1980 on.

You still don't want to be called a Yankee, though, but that has more to do with carpetbaggers and Illinois retirees who complain about there not being any salt trucks when the roads get iced over.

No salt on the roads? What the hell, do you use the crushed up bones of our valiant Union soldiers?

I-40, never forget

We shut down the South and wait for the temp to go back above 32.

Learnt it from the British.

I don't think calling it "the war of northern aggression" really has anything to do with being a segregationist, though? it's tough sometimes trying to figure out what's racism and what's people dealing with the real feeling that the south was attacked and conquered on unjust grounds.

when I was living in the south in the mid 90s the south carolina statehouse was still flying the confederate flag.

i've never seen any evidence that the majority of southerners favored secession prior to fort sumter -- for one thing, as you rightly note, most of them didn't give a shit about slavery so the only reason they would've had to care about it would've been "a northern guy got elected," which even at the tensest moment probably wasn't enough to get them to actually fight to get out of the union. despite all the revisionist talk since, the pro-secession agitation was primarily promoted by advocates of slavery expansion, not principled "states' rights" types or opponents of tariffs or whatever.

of course, once the first shots had been fired it was a lot easier to paint the situation as "the north trying to push around the south," which certainly made it easier to recruit.

OK that makes sense to me.

things were pretty wild and wooly back then, check out some of the congressinal hijinks:

Since the present Congress commenced its session, the country has been more than once shocked at the outrages and brutality which have been perpetrated by those who sustain the present slavery administration. Col. Webb in a letter to the N.Y.Courier enumerates the cases as follows:

First, William Smith , an ex-Governor of the State of Virginia, and member of the House of Representative, assailed and beat the editor of the Evening Star , in December last, in the lobby of the House.

Second, Albert Rusk , a member of the House of Representatives, from Arkansas, assailed and beat the editor of the New York Tribune in the grounds of the Capitol, immediately after leaving the House of Representatives.

Third, Philip T. Herbert, of Alabama, a member of Congress, from California, shot down and killed an Irish waiter at Willard's, and is now under bonds to appear before the Grand Jury and await his trial for such crime as they may adjudge him to have committed.

Fourth, Preston S.Brooks , a member of the House of Representative from South Carolina assaults and beats unmercifully a Senator from Massachusetts, when occupying his seat in the Senate of the United States and engaged in the transaction of business legitimately appertaining to his station.

Someone should start a poll on our best writer-presidents.

Yeah, I'd vote for Samuel Clemens too.

TS: american civil war vs english civil war vs spanish civil war vs marvel civil war vs "civil war" by guns n'roses

A few thoughts on the "about slavery/not about slavery." One COULD say that there were as many reasons for going to war as there were combatants.

The slaveholding classes were not really the same group as the rank and file soldiery; they were the social and political and economic elites. They were mostly exempt from service, by design. And they did an excellent job of selling the war cause.

So of course lots of ordinary Southern soldiers would have said they were fighting for states' rights, or for freedom from Federal intervention, or to repulse the invader. And of course plenty of Southerners were at best iffy on slavery but felt they needed to defend their homelands (Lee is usually given as a paramount example of precisely this position).

But this doesn't erase the fact that the architects of secession (and thus the war) explicitly had slavery as the "states' right" they had in mind when they talked about states' rights. So it's correct in a sense to say that the war both was and wasn't "about" slavery.

AND, some of the current discussion about the war is colored by hangovers from the Civil Rights era. In Va., a not-insignificant portion of Civil War discourse and iconography is understood to be code not for 1864 but for 1964. It's no accident that the places the war was fought were also hotbeds of massive resistance to school desegregation. And even after that, the battle flag became Culture-War code for a more generalized resistance to perceived "correct" attitudes on race and politics. (This is just as true in much of W.V. and Md., BTW.)

It will be interesting to see how the conversation changes when the voice of that demographic is no longer such a large part of the conversation.

Oh and one more thing: I like Foote fine but one should keep in mind he was a Southerner writing from a definite Southern perspective. I don't mean he was an apologist or a bigot, though. I wouldn't group him (or Faulkner or Percy or Wolfe) in with the massive resistance crowd. He was of a generation that would have encountered the war in terms of family memory - grandparents etc. - so I think that might color how he frames the question.

I've been a bit surprised that Foote's been cited so often here.

because that miniseries wasn't very popular?

This is a very interesting website that compiles newspaper editorials during the "secession era" (1850's mainly)

http://facweb.furman.edu/~benson/docs/index.htm

(Don't wanna speak for Lord Alfred but perhaps what was meant is that he was a gifted writer, fine storyteller, and genial interview subject, but not necessarily the most rigorous of historians. Plus he wrote his narrative 50 years ago; there have been some not-insignificant developments in scholarship since.)

My upbringing involved both sides of the pendulum's swing - when I was a kid, Lee and Jackson were in the same unquestioned Virginian hero-worship pantheon as Washington, Jefferson, and John Smith. By the time I hit grade school it was the Baezian 70s and I got the full flower of the Guilty American school of history, in which the main message was "wow, we suck." By the time I got to college Sally Hemings was in the headlines and no one quite knew what to make of it.

It will be interesting to see how my daughter is taught, whether the pendulum has swung back, or what.

Only after reading Gore Vidal's (superb) Lincoln did I learn that the first three years of the war were a disaster for the Union, what with all those mediocre generals and the plodding manner of McLennan, the self-styled Little Napoleon.

this is a bit exagerated though. Eastern Theatre, not that good for the North from 1861 to 1893, but not so bad the South won any decisive victories. The Tennessee-Mississippi theatre, though, was one of continuous Northern victories (with occasional reverses) all through the war, including the first years.

Shelbey Foote seems like a nice fellow, though I was struck by how early on in his book he reports approvingly that Jefferson Davis would only have any of his slaves flogged if they had been convicted by a jury of their fellows.

Again, 50 years ago, Southern perspective.

also, the general public seems to think Lincoln entered office as an abolitionist, even that he always was one.

no one i have ever met thinks this, because it's the most commonly debunked 'fact' in u.s. history this side of "columbus thought the earth was flat."

J.D., meet Henry Louis Gates:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/arts/television/11look.html

In “Looking for Lincoln,” a documentary to be shown on most PBS stations on Wednesday, historians (are) enlisted to debunk myths about the 16th president for the host, Henry Louis Gates Jr., who appears to be encountering Lincoln’s realpolitik approach to preserving the Union for the first time.

Then of course there's that book published in 2005 attesting to Abe's gayness.

Eastern Theatre, not that good for the North from 1861 to 1893

That was one long war.

xp: yes, the PBS show touches on his collection of Stephen Foster remixes.

C/D: people questioning Shelby Foote's Civil War trilogy but bringing up the Gaybraham Lincoln book

C/D: People who don't understand the difference.

o captain i understand the difference

LOLs:

During the campaign, Barack Obama made clear that he supports the Freedom of Choice Act and would like to sign it into law as president. The pro-choice piece of legislation would essentially “repeal the Federal Abortion Ban and other federal restrictions on abortion care, as well as codify the protections of Roe nationwide.” Today on the floor of the Missouri House during debate on the legislation, state Rep. Bryan Stevenson (R) compared it to the Civil War:

“What we are dealing with today is the greatest power grab by the federal government since the war of northern aggression,” Stevenson said, R-Webb City, referring what Southern states called the North’s attempt to end slavery in the 1860s.

The remark caused a sudden gasp heard throughout the House’s chamber.

Stevenson later apologized on the floor for any “offense” his comments caused. He was urged to do so by African-American Rep. Don Calloway (D), who pointed out that the Civil War helped abolish slavery and it was “inappropriate to refer to that war as the war of northern aggression.”

how old is Stevenson, I wonder? over 70 I hope and pray.

Buy this:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07D6QQT77/ref=oh_aui_d_detailpage_o00_?ie=UTF8&psc=1

(not a part of this current discussion)

Recommended -- I read a couple of outstanding Civil War books by Stephen Sears: "Gettysburg", and "Landscape Turned Red" (which is about Antietam.) This is very much blow-by-blow, field level stuff, blood and violence and fools and cowards and incompetent leaders and natural-born genius strategists.

On the strategy side, Sears takes a fairly harsh view of McClellan, views Meade very strongly, gives Lee solid marks but not as strong as others might. He saves a lot of his sympathy for the soldiers who were thrown into what seems like the most hellish battles anyone had ever seen up to that point. The guy is a very very good writer imo.