Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 3:30am

The Entire Civil War

 

 

 

Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the twentieth century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-nineteenth century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.

Shelby Foote

 

 

 

An excellent brief retelling of the Civil War by the Civil War Trust using animated maps:

 

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Don L
Don L
Tuesday, August 29, AD 2017 4:52am

Can we have the “entire Civil War” when the war it is still going on? It merely shifted its adversaries.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Tuesday, August 29, AD 2017 5:36am

Thank you, Donald. That was an excellent video. I was awed through the whole retelling of the Civil War, and thunderstruck that 2% of the US population had died during that war, which would be 6.5 million dead today. Liberal progressive feminists would erase all memory of this horrible war, but we must remember the heroes and villains on both sides of this conflict or we are sure to repeat in a far more terrible way the bloodshed and violence which they brought on one another.

Tom
Tom
Tuesday, August 29, AD 2017 8:55am

Foote was right. This conflict forever changed our nation and altered its fundamental constitutional framework, for better or worse.

Micha Elyi
Micha Elyi
Tuesday, August 29, AD 2017 1:19pm

The causalties were understated. 4% of American men died. 0% of females.

Feminists call that “oppression of women.”

Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd
Wednesday, August 30, AD 2017 2:35am

One has to wonder whether the Civil War was really necessary, especially when considering the lost lives of 600,000 and unspeakable hardship. Agricultural mechanization would have rendered most slavery uneconomic. Also, the Civil War was highly profitable to some northern industrial interests. While it is probably an American heresy to say such a thing, I have to wonder if the Civil War was really necessary. Couldn’t slavery have been defeated in another way. And beyond that defeating slavery is not worth the lives of 600,000, nor was it against the faith of the Catholic Church. Just sayin’

Tom McKenna
Wednesday, August 30, AD 2017 8:00am

It was unconstitutional for the federal government to abolish slavery by invasion of states and overthrowing their governments. Lincoln knew as much and until 1862 never advanced emancipation as a war aim. Slavery likely would have passed away without war, since it was dying everywhere in the West. The paradox of the Civil War for me is that it was so thoroughly unconstitutional in its origin and execution, and yet it had the salutary effect of eradicating slavery in one bloody, awful fall of the ax. The latter effect is why the former defect is excused, overlooked, or by some (like my law school Con Law prof) defended as a necessary revolutionary act to get rid of federalism and build a “national” state.

Ed Lorden
Ed Lorden
Wednesday, August 30, AD 2017 12:32pm

That is certainly one of the side effects of the Civil War — the destruction of a federal union. It is one I see or hear rarely, which is a bit disturbing. The fact that Lincoln decided to force the issue of a nearly all powerful Union is the beginning of the slide to an autocratic state, similar to Socialism, that saw it’s maximum (hopefully) in Barack Obama’s administration.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Wednesday, August 30, AD 2017 2:08pm

Large scale growth in the federal government awaited the Progressive Era, the New Deal and World War II.

Again, the ratio of federal expenditure to GDP in 1929 was about 0.028 In 1939 it was perhaps 0.094, and a considerable fraction of that was accounted for by agencies which were eliminated during the war.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Wednesday, August 30, AD 2017 2:14pm

“Slavery likely would have passed away without war, since it was dying everywhere in the West.”

The emancipations in Europe were a component of an agrarian reform which conferred allodial tenures on the peasantry (in the Hapsburg and Tsarist domains). There wasn’t much industry in either realm. In the Caribbean, the British government after 1807 worked assiduously to suppress slavery in it’s dependencies over the objections of planters. The usual counter-factual offered is Brazil. I don’t think redeploying slave labor from agriculture to industry was much of an option in Brazil.

Elaine Krewer
Admin
Wednesday, August 30, AD 2017 4:20pm

“4% of American men died. 0% of females.”

I dunno about that. For one thing, nurses working in the military hospitals where thousands of men died of disease might have been exposed to the same diseases and who knows how many might have died. Also, there had to have been civilian casualties, particularly in areas afflicted by guerilla warfare or subject to intense sieges that cut off food supplies, and at least some of those casualties had to have been women. No historian seems to have a decent estimate of how many civilians died in the Civil War, but given the still relatively primitive state of medical science at the time and the prevalence of diseases such as cholera, I would think that number was more than “zero percent”.

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