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| Confederate dead at Sharpsburg MD, September 1862 |
Speaking of which, I've also just read a rather longish piece in Salon by Glenn W. Lafantasie, a working Civil War scholar. You might find it interesting. I don't know. It covers a lot of ground. He doesn't have much use for the so-called "reenactors," those (crazed, at least in my opinion) people who dress up as Union or Confederate troops and shoot blanks at each other and fire blank cannons at each other reenacting battles that happened 150 years ago. Basically, he objects to the prettification of what by any understanding was a horribly ugly, bloody, and tragic time in our history. As he puts it, a "war that should, by all rights, repel us and horrify us and send shivers of fright down our spines."
Exactly. Over 620,000 Americans died in the Civil War, a horrific number. This country bled a vast ocean of real blood during those four terrible years, but you would never know it from the way the war is thought about--if it's thought about at all--and portrayed and acted out by grown up boys, who like to dress up and play soldier. The guys in the picture above didn't get up and dust themselves off when the battle was over. The casualties at Sharpsburg were four times the total suffered by American soldiers at the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944. More than twice as many Americans lost their lives in one day at Sharpsburg as died in combat in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War combined. The casualties at the battle of Gettysburg surpassed in three days what it took over six weeks to amass at Iwo Jima during the second world war. Casualties in the Civil War are more than the total of casualties of all of America's other wars combined, and, yes, that includes the world wars and the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The essay includes a few paragraphs about Civil War books that he likes and recommends. It's a tricky business, this. I can't say I agree with all his choices, but I will say it's nice to see Bruce Catton's marvelous trilogy on the Union Army of the Potomac getting a shout-out. This (and being born in Vicksburg MS with its glorious national military park) was what turned me on to the Wah when I was a teenager, those many long years ago.
5 comments:
I read Mary Boykin Chesnut's diaries years ago, and they were phenomenal because they told things that had been pretty much hidden from the public gaze. The general concern about slave rebellions - which were numerous - was surprising. What was more surprising is that even though resentment is so normal and it should be expected, we spent years trying to convince ourselves that slaves were content.
I really like Wiley Sword's "Shiloh, Bloody April" for a single battle.
... and we were just at Shirley Plantation, so wandered around Malvern Hill on as we marched off to Richmond...
Shiloh and Malvern Hill were both sanguinary enough to satisfy the most bloodthirsty among us. James McDonough's =Shiloh: In Hell Before Night= is probably the best book on that battle, although Wiley Sword's book is also very good.
For all their fears--and I don't find them surprising at all--the slaveowners had virtually nothing to fear from their vast slavery population. During its 200 years of existence in North America, you can count the slave revolts virtually on one hand. Slave revolt was their worst nightmare, but even during the white manpower-depleted years of the war, the slaves remained remarkably docile. I don't think anybody's ever studied the reason why. Does this say something about the character of the institution in the US? or the character of the slaves? or both?
Hope you had an enjoyable trip.
Ah, and technology allowed for recordings of all that death. The Civil War set the stage for modern recordings of war, namely still photography. A double-edged sword, I think.
But don't you think once photography was invented--and movies and YouTube and etc--that it would be used to record anything and everything? I myself don't think photographic recording of war is a bad thing. What is a bad thing is that the media does not show the full horror of what war does. If people had to see pictures of blown apart victims of bombs, bullets, and everything else we do to kill each other, if this is what they saw on the evening news every day, maybe the outrage against what war really is would be a weighty force in stopping it. But the media loves war without the horror. So it gives us all the "glory" stuff and none of the real stuff.
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