Rave: Disunion, Civil War series on the NY Times

[Joe Shlabotnik]

I assume this is the same Abner Doubleday credited with inventing baseball, no?

The same 'Ol Abner...

Abner Doubleday (June 26, 1819 – January 26, 1893) was a career United States Army officer and Union general in the American Civil War. He fired the first shot in defense of Fort Sumter, the opening battle of the war, and had a pivotal role in the early fighting at the Battle of Gettysburg. Gettysburg was his finest hour, but his relief by Maj. Gen. George G. Meade caused lasting enmity between the two men.
In San Francisco, after the war, he obtained a patent on the cable car railway that still runs there. In his final years in New Jersey, he was a prominent member and later president of the Theosophical Society.
He is known for a once-popular legend that he invented baseball, a claim that he himself never made and for which there is considerable counter-evidence

[G. Keenan]

From an entry a while back, famous map showing the distribution of slavery:
Link

You can see that 9.7% of the population of Missouri were slaves, which helps explain why, although a slave state, it remained in the Union. In St. Louis 2.3% of the population was enslaved. In South Carolina by contrast, the first state to secede, 57.2% of the population were slaves.

[maddash]

I was only able to watch a little bit of it last night, but PBS had an excellent piece on Robert E. Lee last night on the show American Experience. I was glad to see that they weren't afraid to come right out and say that the Civil War was about slavery. It's always been somewhat common in the south to dance around the subject or just tell outright lies about the cause, but there's been a startling trend in other parts of the country to rewrite history and say the cause was about state's rights. Well, yeah, the southern states wanted the right to continue an institution of white supremacy where blacks could be held as slaves. Read the Mississippi Declaration of Secession, right there in it they say:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

Anyway, check it out here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperie ... ee/player/

[JL21]

It sounds like they borrowed a lot from Alan T. Nolan's "Lee Considered". Or from what I remember of Alan T. Nolan's "Lee Considered".

[lukethedrifter]

I was only able to watch a little bit of it last night, but PBS had an excellent piece on Robert E. Lee last night on the show American Experience. I was glad to see that they weren't afraid to come right out and say that the Civil War was about slavery. It's always been somewhat common in the south to dance around the subject or just tell outright lies about the cause, but there's been a startling trend in other parts of the country to rewrite history and say the cause was about state's rights. Well, yeah, the southern states wanted the right to continue an institution of white supremacy where blacks could be held as slaves. Read the Mississippi Declaration of Secession, right there in it they say:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

Anyway, check it out here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperie ... ee/player/

Just found what I'm going to watch with my daughter tonight.

[Leroy]

Or Dusty Baker.

[maddash]

Just found what I'm going to watch with my daughter tonight.

If you're really bored, Yale makes some of its lectures available online for viewing. David Blight is probably one of the better Civil War scholars in the country. You can watch pretty much his entire course on the Civil War for free.

http://academicearth.org/courses/the-ci ... -1845-1877

Tuition at Yale is something like $50,000 a year, btw. So that's probably $5,000 worth of free education.

[Freed Roger]

... glad to see that they weren't afraid to come right out and say that the Civil War was about slavery. It's always been somewhat common in the south to dance around the subject or just tell outright lies about the cause, but there's been a startling trend in other parts of the country to rewrite history and say the cause was about state's rights.

Revisionist history has been going on with the dancing around slavery issue as the central cause. You hear several arguments - states rights, North was just as racist as South, some slaves received decent treatment-better than if they weren't slaves, protection of the homeland, and this below -the relatively small portion of South were slaveholders.
From article in Disunion series.

In 1860, one quarter of Southern families owned slaves, and more than half of those who did possessed fewer than five. Less than 1 percent of the slaveholders owned as many slaves as Brevard, though these slaveholders owned approximately one-fourth of all the slaves and held political power.

But it doesn't matter, the war would not have happened without slavery issue that had been boiling over for hundreds of years, as the central driving force. Participants may have had other reasons, but the elite and people in power on both sides knew what the war was really about. Sadly most wars through history seem to be people instigated to fight for varied personal reasons -while the power brokers behind the war have a different reason -typically a natural resource.

[lukethedrifter]

Anybody read Cold Mountain?

[Freed Roger]

PBS had an excellent piece on Robert E. Lee last night on the show American Experience.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperie ... ee/player/

Got around to watching last night. Robert E Lee saga is so much to cover that they had to omit interesting facts i.e Robert E Lee (when in the US army) put down the John Brown Harper's Ferry Raid.

Very well done documentary, it brings home what an incredible man/military officer he was, and how he came to be the grand Icon for the South.

Ultimately it blows the deification away-

The former slave Frederick Douglass spoke for those who were offended by the "nauseating flatteries of Robert E. Lee... It would seem that the soldier who kills the most men in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest place in heaven."

And ends with post-war depiction of a broken/regretful Lee, who apparantly realized the Cause was not only lost, but perhaps even wrong in his eyes - as he regretted ever choosing a military career. And formally revoked the cause in his amnesty oath.

I never knew the history of Arlington Cemetary until this show. Perhaps appropriate that the national cemetary sits on Robert E Lee's estate.

In 1864, with Union dead piling up throughout the Washington area, the search for a suitable site for a military cemetery resulted in a recommendation from Major General Montgomery Cunningham Meigs (the Union Quartermaster General) that Lee's former estate be converted to a burial ground. Meigs, a Southern native, had remained loyal to the Union and reportedly hated Lee for his service to the Confederate cause. Out of the death and destruction of the Civil War, and from this personal hatred, was born Arlington National Cemetery