History is Worth Knowing
We need to overcome our ADHD because not every lesson of history is a bright and shiny object.
I've been writing and studying many things over my 66 years on this planet and one theme I find running through all of world and American history is that we humans, at least from the perspective of knowing history, are all ADHD - if it isn't bright and shiny, we aren't interested enough to learn from it - but folks, there is truly nothing new under the sun and there is a wealth of information out there that is free for the taking.
Right now, I’m refocused on the events leading up to, during, and after the American Civil War.
I’m a native Mississippian, my ancestral family settled in what would become North Mississippi between 1790 and 1800, so I have a little different perspective of the people on both sides of the Civil War than some might.
I’ve read tomes from many sources, and I can say, almost without fear of contradiction, there are many so-called scholars out there who don’t know what they are talking about. Most of them tend to be left-wing politically and write from the “North was always the righteous party” position. Looking at their biographies, many fit in the “elite” categories, many attending prestigious private schools, moving on to Ivy League institutions where they received doctoral degrees. They also write as if the only time they have spent south of the Mason Dixon line is a plane change in Atlanta.
While I do not have empirical evidence to present to you, they seem more interested in settling a score or justifying certain actions as if they are not completely confident their side won.
For example, you never hear about the leaders, Robert E. Lee chief among them, who didn’t fight to retain slavery, but for their homelands. Many won’t know that a significant number of leaders on both sides were personally known to each other from their time in military academies (many were West Pointers) or military service in the Seminole Wars in Florida or the Mexican-American War in 1846-1848. Many also don’t understand that the Union was far less solid than it is today, prior to the Civil War, the Unites States functioned more like a confederacy (not the capital C confederacy) and states had far more independence and power to determine their own destinies than now. The strong and often overweening central federal government is a post-Civil War invention.
People also assume the North was always righteous and the South was always evil – well, newsflash, there were bad people on both sides – but there also were good people who had to make terrible choices. This was a war that literally tore people apart.
Some believed slavery was a horrific institution that should be abolished. Some, like Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, organized Sunday School classes for slaves and their children at the Presbyterian Church and against Virginia law, taught at least one slave to read. It appears through accounts of people who knew him, that Jackson probably despised the institution but believes that if God didn’t approve, it wouldn’t exist. We assume clarity of vision a century and a half since the Civil War ended, but put in historical context, slavery had been an accepted institution throughout known history and the drive to abolish it in the 1800’s was a relatively new global development.
While the world as a whole recognizes slavery as a horrific institution, it still exists today.
But you won’t know that by reading some of the “scholars.” As is true today, and while they deny there is such a thing as evil, some must justify their existence by calling their enemies evil as a means to feel superior – when they are far from evil.
Right now, I am reading several biographies of Confederate leaders, Stonewall Jackson is one of them. Through this reading, I was reminded of a quote from a speech he gave to students of the Virginia Military Institute in March of 1861. He said:
“The time for war has not yet come, but it will come, and that soon; and when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.”
His admonition is that when it starts, we can’t stop until it is finished.
I think that applies to the American renaissance I believe is beginning. When drawing our swords in any ideological or literal battle, there should be no question that we are not re-sheathing them until we are done.
History is a very good sword to have at your side.
For those who claim that the Civil War established that states had no right to secede from the Union that is the fallacy of the Argumentum ad Bacculum that “right makes right.” Both territories of Alaska and Hawaii acceded to statehood but with secession provisions in the articles of accession allowing each state to have the option of seceding if the people of each state decided to do so. In fact Sarah Palin’s one-time husband Todd had belonged to a secessionist party in Alaska. Lincoln initiated military action against the secessionist southern states due to the attack on Ft. Sumter allowing him to claim authority to suppress rebellion against national authority under Article Four. Many actions by Lincoln including imposing an income tax to finance the war and the imprisonment and military court martial of civilian southern sympathizers in the northern states were prima facie unconstitutional uses of his power. The accession of West Virginia into the Union, a weird case of a region of a secessionist state seceding from its own state was later challenged on constitutional grounds though the case was ruled in favor of the creation of the new state.
It is very easy today for people to anachronistically impute evil to the South for the practice of slavery but during the Civil War both Maryland and Kentucky which fought in the side of the Union were slave states whose slaves we’re not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Slavery was still being practiced elsewhere in the world after our Civil War most notably in the Brazilian and Ottoman Empires. And although it is now illegal in the United States there are still criminal enterprises that enslave both adult and child immigrants in our country with the adult slavery bring disguised as a form of indentured servitude.
Historians rewrote history claiming the Civil War was over slavery. Citizens of the north, the Union, were every bit as racist as those of the south. Union soldiers would have mutinied had they believed they were fighting and dying to free the lowly black man. One historian observed the American Civil War was among the first to have a written record of letters written home by soldiers. Slavery is suspiciously absent in those letters.