{"id":3455,"date":"2011-04-12T10:02:00","date_gmt":"2011-04-12T10:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/daffeythoughts\/2011\/04\/anniversary-of-the-big-war.html"},"modified":"2011-04-12T10:02:00","modified_gmt":"2011-04-12T10:02:00","slug":"anniversary-of-the-big-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/daffeythoughts\/2011\/04\/anniversary-of-the-big-war.html","title":{"rendered":"Anniversary of the big war"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
<\/a><\/div>\n

Today is the 150th anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, that event which obviously brought our country full force into the Civil War.\u00a0 I\u2019ve mentioned to folks that, ironically, despite my love for history, I have spent little time studying the Civil War.\u00a0 I\u2019m only vaguely aware of the dates in which it was fought (1861-1865). Perhaps the reason is, when I was growing up, almost all of history was, well, the Civil War.\u00a0 That\u2019s what everyone was talking about.\u00a0 From Roots<\/em>, to the Blue and the Gray<\/em>, TV was obsessed with it.\u00a0 It was the defining historical subject\u00a0at that time.<\/p>\n

Eras I preferred, such as Medieval studies, the Colonial and Revolutionary periods, and the Napoleonic era were mostly\u00a0on the back burners at best.\u00a0 World War II was largely forgotten, replaced by a growing sense of the importance of Vietnam \u2013 Word War II being that archaic time that Mr. Roper and Archie Bunker types reminisced about.\u00a0 So\u00a0perhaps it was because of this that neither Vietnam,\u00a0nor the Civil War, hold much appeal to me.<\/p>\n

Also, there is the strange twisting and turning that is historical studies.\u00a0 History, as they say, reflects more the modern historian than the historical subject at hand.\u00a0 As I grew up in the 70s and\u00a080s, especially in our Post-Roots<\/em> culture, the growing emphasis on America\u2019s Sins was overtaking any all American studies.\u00a0 Racism was quickly becoming the go-to sin of\u00a0our nation.\u00a0 Everything was racism.\u00a0 And America \u2013 all of it -was Racist.\u00a0 To combat the objections some might have\u00a0about such a sweeping generalization, we were assured that no blue blooded American boy ever cared one lick for a minority.\u00a0 How then to explain the Civil War, where tens of thousands of Northerners appeared to have died for the cause?\u00a0 Easy.\u00a0 The Civil War, or so I was told,\u00a0was not about Slavery at all.\u00a0 Oh, that\u00a0may have been the spark that ignited the fuse.\u00a0 But it was ever and always about States Rights and preserving the Union.\u00a0 That was it.\u00a0\u00a0Slavery, as folks of the day\u00a0loved to point out, was no big deal for most of the war.\u00a0 In fact, it was an afterthought.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And this fit well, as we were moving to tear\u00a0down any and all positive references to America\u2019s past.\u00a0 Lincoln, long immortalized as one of our greatest \u2013 if not the greatest \u2013 presidents, had\u00a0to be brought down.\u00a0 His flaws, failings, and sins were focused upon.\u00a0 Gone was the crusading idealist, and in came the closet racist, caring nothing for the actual slaves themselves, seeking only to expand federal power and impose totalitarian-like control of the nation.\u00a0 Or so the popular portrayals and\u00a0scholarship of the day seemed to suggest.<\/p>\n

Funny thing is, that\u00a0apparently took hold and became assumed knowledge.\u00a0 As\u00a0I\u2019ve said before, nothing works like mass propaganda.\u00a0 And so a generation or more of Americans came to see the Civil\u00a0War as a giant\u00a0geopolitical conflict only vaguely concerned with the issue of slavery, and not concerned at all with the slaves.\u00a0 In many media portrayals of the time, in fact,\u00a0abolitionists were shown to be fanatics, zealots, and the epitome of intolerance compared to the more level headed players of the day.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fast\u00a0forward twenty years.\u00a0 As our nation\u00a0moves toward a Post-American identity, where any and all celebrations of America\u2019s past must be squelched due to sensitivities\u00a0involving its heinous sins, we have a problem.\u00a0 If the Civil War was merely about state\u2019s rights and the union, with the North\u00a0almost coming across as the aggressor\u00a0and the imperial power, then why not\u00a0celebrate those brave young Southerners who stood firm against such typical American\u00a0lust for power?\u00a0 Why not have \u2018Hurray for the Confederacy Day?\u2019\u00a0 After all, as we were told over and over and over again when I was growing up, not all Southerners wanted slavery, supported it, or endorsed it.\u00a0 Some even struggled because of it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Well now, that just won\u2019t do.\u00a0 And so in recent years, veritable\u00a0battles have been fought over any notion that the Confederacy should in any way be celebrated.\u00a0 All of it \u2013\u00a0All Of It \u2013 was nothing\u00a0 other than an American Nazism, a plague needing cleansed from our memory.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because apparently the Civil War was all about slavery, and the horrible, racist, white south\u2019s insistence on preserving this most evil of institutions.\u00a0 That was it.\u00a0 That was the purpose for the war.\u00a0\u00a0Time and again during these debates, I\u2019ve heard activists, politicians, scholars and historians insist that we remember the Civil War was first and foremost a struggle against the racist south and the evil of slavery.\u00a0\u00a0Just how this speaks to the heroism and valor of the Northerners is yet to be flushed out.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Just how this will look another thirty years from now is anyone\u2019s guess.\u00a0 It will depend, like all historical reflections do, on just what the latest, hippest agendas and controversies of the day happen to be.\u00a0 As usual, the truth will most likely be found by taking the\u00a0traditional history, adding the various latest theories, and dividing by two.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is the 150th anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, that event which obviously brought our country full force into the Civil War.\u00a0 I\u2019ve mentioned to folks that, ironically, despite my love for history, I have spent little time studying the Civil War.\u00a0 I\u2019m only vaguely aware of the dates in which it was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2805,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nAnniversary of the big war<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Today is the 150th anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, that event which obviously brought our country full force into the Civil War.  I've\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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