One hundred fifty years ago today the political differences that had been brewing for decades led to a shooting war between one group of Americans and another. What’s commonly referred to as the Civil War began on 12 April 1861, when cannon manned by soldiers of the Confederate States of America fired on troops of the United States of America at Fort Sumter, located on an island in the harbor of Charleston, S.C.
Eleven states from below the Mason-Dixon Line seceded from the Union following the election of Abraham Lincoln as President in November 1860. He was the first Republican to achieve that high office. The party itself dated only from 1854.
The issues causing the war were complex and still argued today. Southerners mostly claim they left the Union in defense of “states rights”, declaring that the federal government was overreaching its Constitutional mandate and interfering too deeply in the lives of we-the-people. But the particular right that they were defending was the system of human chattel slavery that underpinned the agrarian economy of the South.
Conversely, Yankees like to aver that they spent their blood and treasure to eradicate slavery. This ignores all the economic complications, not to mention the fact that, while for many of them ending slavery was positive in theory, if they thought about the post-bondage world at all, they didn’t expect the ex-slaves to move into their communities or compete with them for jobs.
Well, whatever. The fire eaters of South Carolina were the first to secede and it seemed appropriate that they be the first to fire on federal troops. This initial engagement (General Pierre Gustave Toussaint Beauregard, gotta love that name, for the CSA, Major Robert Anderson commanding on the island) didn’t last long. On the 10th Beauregard demanded the fort’s surrender; Anderson refused. On the 12th Confederate batteries opened up and Anderson surrendered at 0230 the next day.
Thus began four years of unremitting misery, bloodshed and destruction; decades of post-war reconstruction and bitterness; and a legacy of intractability and unsettled scores that marks our lives even today.
Leaving aside the tone of politics in Washington, D.C. today, which are so divisive I’m sure that the only reason we haven’t seen some congressmoron haul out a sidearm and; blast an opponent is because there are metal detectors at all the entrances to the Capitol, I was convinced of this inheritance when I once dated a guy from Georgia. He was educated and taught junior high history. Yet when I happened to mention Sherman’s March to the Sea, he erupted as though it had taken place last week. He couldn’t help it; it was hardwired into his genetic code.
(On the subject of Capitol crimes, as far as I know no firearm has been discharged in the hallowed halls of Congress, but in 1856 a Congressman from South Carolina, Preston Brooks, attacked Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, beating him severely with a thick walking stick. Brooks had intended to call Sumner out to a duel, but was persuaded that Sumner wasn’t a gentleman and therefore not eligible to participate in an affair of honor, but should be thrashed as an inferior. Given the lack of civility displayed by current occupants of the Capitol, I guess it’s a good thing they know nothing of history, or we’d see a lot more canes appearing at debates.)
Also, my thesis advisor in grad school (on the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, BTW) used to refer to the period of 1861-1865 as The Woah of Nawthe’n Aggression. I’m pretty sure he taught an undergrad survey course on the War twice a year in hopes that it would end differently some semester.
But it didn’t, and for the next four years it’ll be a good thing to revisit the events that shaped our society so irrevocably.
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