began today 150 years ago, with the shelling of Fort Sumter by the forces of South Carolina. It is emblematic that the man in charge of the shelling and the commander of the fort were close: the Union commander had kept the Confederate commander at West Point for an extra year to help him train gunners because he was so talented at artillery.
In honor of listening to your enemies, I am actually watching PBS Newshour, with three academic historians being interviewed.
The poll discussed at the opening shows that close to a majority of Americans think our bloodiest war was about states' rights rather than slavery. The profs, speaking on behalf of "trained historians", all hold that it was about slavery. As I said recently, I am among the 9% who think that the two issues were inseparable.
IMHO, the combination of the resistance to expanding slavery into the new territories and the election of Lincoln sent a message to the South that they were being cornered and would soon be disempowered. So they bolted.
It has been common, when Northerners say that the war was fought to free the slaves, for revisionists to assert that it was to save the Union. The implication is that there is no moral virtue involved, just self-interested assertion and preservation of a particular governmental structure.
The profs interpreted the poll to show that Americans don't want to face the moral pain of slavery which, they, the profs, of course boldly and sadly embrace. I guess the liberal double-prize is that the war was indeed fought over slavery, making it a moral issue, but the North deserves no credit for the blood and treasure it expended in fighting it.
There's no pleasing some people.
2 comments:
Yes, best-case interpretation for American anti-Americans is that the South was bad (oppressive and romantic) and the North was worse (oppressive and hypocritical).
The Straussians insist that Lincoln fought the war only in order to save the "union." This thesis is compatible with Lincoln's view express'd upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe: "So you are the little woman who wrote the book [Uncle Tom's Cabin?] that started this great war!"
Strange that a "union" could be worth such tremendous ruin, bloodshed and maimings. If the secession had been of Western states in a tax revolt vs Washington D.C., Lincoln may still have prosecuted the war, but drumming up Eastern soldiers would have been much more difficult. I wonder, Could the union have won the war?
In any event, if the East had prevail'd and the Union preserved at the cost of 600,000 dead and many more seriously wounded etc, there would have been no moral idealism narrative possible. Such ruin and misery and bloodshed in order to preserve the power to tax settlers in land "bought" by Jefferson from the French empire. It would seem on the same level as WW1, and the Union would not have had any plausible idealist glory.
I wonder what "union" is worth such killing and misery?
Revaluing values as I guess my way along, e.r.
Many of my relatives see the current American president rather as having the character of [Uncle] Tom Robinson from "To Kill a Mockingbird" though with a Columbia and Harvard education. (They have the character of Atticus Finch. Opponents of their values are Bob Ewell.) ... The mythology of the American Civil War is so powerful that suburban educated-class Toronto is completely colonized by it!
Post a Comment