American Civil War

Back in the year 2000, I became very interested in the history of the U.S. Civil War, which took place from 1861 to 1865. Early in 2000, my family and I stayed at a cabin in northern Georgia that had some very good books about this epic conflict between ideology, cultures, and regions. Later that year, I took a history class about the Civil War at the University of Florida, although I was disappointed in how it was presented. My best exposure to Civil War information was, however, from the excellent History Channel series Civil War Journal (which is still shown early in the morning sometimes).

The U.S. Civil War has been described as the “first modern war”, with the widespread use of exploding shells and the beginning of automatic weapons and submarines. In spite of this, the generals running the war’s operation too often employed outmoded methods of combat that more closely resembled the Napoleonic Wars from earlier in the century. In particular, the frontal charge was overused, to catastrophic ends, by both the Union and Confederate sides, in disparate battles such as Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and Cold Harbor. It wasn’t until later in the war that more effective tactics such as attrition, hit-and-run, and siege warfare began to define the parameters of the conflict.

Also, although the fighting itself became more modern and lethal, the level of common medical knowledge then was still woefully backward, with antibiotics unknown and sterile procedures unrecognized. Limb amputation was the common method of preventing infection from wounds that just a few decades later could be completely healed with penicillin. So, being wounded was a much graver matter for a soldier, with many of them dying later, in tented hospitals, long after they were wounded.

Someday I’d like to visit some of the most famous battlegrounds and retrace the two sides’ positions and movements. The sites I’m the most interested in are the aforementioned ones that featured misguided charges. I guess that one mistake in strategy hits me hard, because I’m also interested in World War I. And the military leaders in that conflict repeatedly and stupidly ordered insane, suicidal charges over the tops of trenches that decimated an entire generation of young men from Britain, France, and Germany! You would have thought that these “geniuses” would have learned from what had happened during the American Civil War. But, perhaps, they were so provincial in their prejudices that they couldn’t bring themselves to believe that anything of value could be learned from those “backward” Americans across the Atlantic!

The U.S. Civil War was about many things, but the most glaring factors were bringing the seceding states back into the Union, abolishing (or keeping) slavery as an institution, and the dispute over tariffs regarding the import of overseas agricultural products. But when the “rubber hit the road”, the war was mainly about plain, ordinary folks, who knew or cared little about these issues, fighting and dying for the interests of others. Which, unfortunately, is what war usually finds itself being reduced to.