The Right Way to Study the Civil War
This was posted yesterday on a forum.
Kids intro to US Civil War My 9-year old son would like to read a book on the War Between the States. Any recommendations?
Little boys like to play war. They like to play with toy guns. They want to read about war. They like to read about victories without considering the bloody cost of these victories. They are drawn to aesthetically bloodless bloodshed early.
If you read about this war, you should read about 700,000 young men who were sent to their deaths by politicians. Then there were the girls they left behind. These girls did not marry.
One of the problems with the Civil War literature is this: only three literary figures actually fought in it. Do you know who they were? Probably not. I'm going to put a link in, and I want you to click to it. Two were in the North. One of them was in the South. There are very few Americans who have heard of two of of them. Let's see if you can guess who they were. To find out, click here.
Boys like to read stories about winners in battles. They get a taste for this. When they grow up, they read the same sorts of books. Civil War historiography is the largest segment of American history in terms of books. Everybody wants to talk about the battles. On the whole, the battles were militarily irrelevant. The North had trains, the telegraph, the industries, the navy, and the population to sustain the war. It had the tax base. It had the banking system. The fall of Atlanta sealed the fate of the South, but it was not a battle. If it had taken place after November, Lincoln would have lost the election. If the South had held out until the following March, McClellan probably would have settled with the South. But Atlanta fell, and McClellan wasn't elected.
The forgotten fact that you should begin with concerning the Civil War is this: the future of North from 1860 to 1865 was dependent on the Illinois Central Railroad. Lincoln was a lawyer with that railroad. Stephen A. Douglas was a lawyer with that railroad. In senior management was George McClellan, who oversaw both of them. So, in the election of 1860, the President was going to be won by an Illinois Central lawyer. In the election of 1864, the election was going to be won by an employee of the Illinois Central Railroad. Anybody who thinks this was random is the kind of person who believes that it was random in 2004, when a member of Yale's Skull and Bones was going to be elected President. This is an organization that selects 15 people a year. Out of all the people in the United States, the only candidates who made it to the top were Skull and Bones members in 2004, neither of whom was allowed, or is allowed, by the secret oath of the organization to discuss the organization. Similarly, historians of the Civil War rarely bother to talk about the centrality of the Illinois Central Railroad.
A decent book on the Civil War would cover these three topics:
1. How did the war come?
2. How was the war financed?
3. What were the post-war social changes directly attributable to the war?
Every war should be studied this way.
You can find Civil War books on these topics, but you cannot find these topics discussed in detail in one book. You do not find one book that focuses on these three questions.
SLAVERY AND TARIFFS
The war began over one issue above all others: slavery. That was not why the North invaded; that was why the South seceded. Statements that specifically stated this, in state after state, confirmed what South Carolina initially said: the reason for secession was slavery.
The book should cover one topic above all topics: how South Carolina seceded. It did so on the basis on a single issue: its commitment to slavery. The politicians had almost done this in 1828, and if they had, they would have succeeded. But they waited too long to do it the second time. The secession document is here:
Here is what it said:
We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.
On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.
The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.
Lincoln went to war to save the union, and to make certain that the union would stay in control of tariff revenues, especially tariffs collected at the port of Charleston. That is why the war began there. That is why General Beauregard began firing on Fort Sumter, which was under the control of his former West Point instructor, Maj. Anderson. The South wanted the revenues that were coming in through the port of Charleston and the Port of New Orleans. They wanted the money, and Lincoln was not going to let them have it.
The South's spokesman who told the truth on this matter after the war was the man who had been Stonewall Jackson's chaplain and his aid to camp: Calvinist theologian and Presbyterian pastor, Robert L. Dabney. Dabney wrote a defense of slavery during the war, and he allowed it to be published as a book in 1867: A Defense of Virginia (And Through Her, the South. He placed slavery and its defense front and center. After the war, all other defenses of the South shifted the issue to the constitutional right of secession, ignoring slavery as the primary reason.
The North invaded for two reasons: Lincoln wanted to preserve the union, and he wanted to collect the tariff revenues that were flowing into southern ports. He made that clear in his first inaugural address. He was perfectly willing to settle on the issue of slavery in the South.
I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. . . .Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this and many similar declarations and had never recanted them; and more than this, they placed in the platform for my acceptance, and as a law to themselves and to me, the clear and emphatic resolution which I now read:
Resolved, That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend; and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes. . . .
I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution--which amendment, however, I have not seen--has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.
But he would not let Southerners capture the tariff revenues that were coming through the southern ports.
The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.
By the time he gave this address, the South had departed.
If you read the standard histories, you don't get any sense of why the war came: the South's defense of slavery and the North's defense of tariffs. A book may promote one of these, but it does not promote both. Southern authors want to talk about the constitutional right of secession, and Northern authors, retroactively, want to see it is a war to suppress slavery -- not at the beginning, but after 1862.
CONCLUSION
This is why I think boys should not be encouraged to read books on the Civil War. They should instead read primary source documents on why the war came.
Boys like tales of military heroes. The heroes are sent to their deaths or their glory by politicians.
Until readers are ready to read about the politicians on both sides who condemned 700,000 men to their deaths, I recommend not reading about the Civil War.
[Note: for those who think I am incorrect on slavery as the cause of Southern secession, read Appendix D of my book, Hierarchy and Dominion. Download it here.]