The American Civil War
The American Civil War is also commonly called the War Between the States. In early 1861 eleven states from the southern portion of the United States of America decided to leave the USA to form the Confederate States of America (CSA). The CSA is now normally referred to as the Confederacy. The northern states which chose to stay in the USA are usually referred to as the Union. The Federal Government of the USA looked at this move by the southern states as a rebellion.
One of the major issues which caused these southern states to get so terribly angry that they no longer wanted to even remain a part of the same country as the North was the issue of slavery. Many people in the North felt that the entire concept of slavery was abhorrent. But by 1861 even the poor and uneducated white southerners considered themselves to be racially superior to the black African slaves.
The civil war lasted from 1861 until 1865. In many families (including mine) there were soldiers who fought for the Union and others who fought against them as soldiers in the army of the Confederacy.
The first slaves had originally been brought to America by greedy Dutch businessmen who were completely happy to enslave free black African people and transport them to the new world just to make a nice profit. The people who survived the journey endured the most horrible conditions on board the ships while crossing the Atlantic Ocean. A great many died before reaching America.
Kind of like happens when one uses opiates, the wealthy southern plantation owners soon grew dependent upon a steady supply of these black African slaves. The blacks in many cases worked themselves to death and the indolent whites grew lazy.
The American Civil War was the deadliest war in American history. Many civilians died plus 620,000 soldiers. More soldiers died of disease and poor nutrition than died in battle.
I am now 60 years old. When I was a very young and impressionable boy, my maternal grandmother Florence May Barlow Barnwell played a much more active role in raising me than my mother did. My grandmother was born on 11 May 1890, which was about 25 years after the end of the civil war. But the stories she told about Sherman’s march through Georgia were so vivid and personal it seemed almost like she had actually been there. Her father had served under General Sherman in the union army during the march through Georgia. Fifty years later I can still remember with horror and actually feel emotionally just how brutal the civil war and this scorched earth policy were. What sticks out in my mind more than anything is her description of the young soldiers who managed to survive, coming back from the war having lost most of their teeth. The soldiers' nutrition was so poor that they suffered terrible scurvy because of not eating sufficient fruit and greens, and insufficient amounts of vitamin C.
In late 1864 Major General William Tecumseh Sherman of the Union Army conduced a campaign which has come to be known as Sherman’s March to the Sea, the Savannah Campaign, or as my grandmother called it Sherman’s March through Georgia. He and his union troops (including my great grandfather) left the captured city of Atlanta, Georgia on 15 November 1864 and ended up capturing the port city of Savannah, Georgia on 21 December 1864. So the entire campaign lasted only about 5 weeks.
The USA commander Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant believed that the civil war could be won if the union troops followed a strategy of destroying the south’s economic capacity for warfare which also broke both the civilians and the military psychologically. Sherman followed his orders and employed a scorched earth policy. He ordered his troops to burn all crops, kill all livestock, and consume or destroy the supplies of both the confederate military and the non-combatant civilians living in the South. His troops were ordered to destroy all civilian infrastructure along their path, so they even took up and carted away the south’s railroad tracks and railroad ties or heated them in bonfires and then wrapped the railroad ties around trees.
The following is part of General Sherman’s field order dated 9 November 1864.
V. To army corps commanders alone is entrusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton-gins, &c., and for them this general principle is laid down: In districts and neighborhoods where the army is unmolested no destruction of such property should be permitted; but should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility.
VI. As for horses, mules, wagons, &c., belonging to the inhabitants, the cavalry and artillery may appropriate freely and without limit, discriminating, however, between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor or industrious, usually neutral or friendly. Foraging parties may also take mules or horses to replace the jaded animals of their trains, or to serve as pack-mules for the regiments or brigades. In all foraging, of whatever kind, the parties engaged will refrain from abusive or threatening language, and may, where the officer in command thinks proper, give written certificates of the facts, but no receipts, and they will endeavor to leave with each family a reasonable portion for their maintenance.
One hundred and fifty years later is there anything which we can learn today from these brutal tactics employed by the federal government of the USA? Some of the distrust and hate for the federal government still lingers on in 2009.
Unreasoning intolerance and brutality breeds brutality in return.
This means that when the white representatives of the government in Washington D.C. appear to be abusing poor people or black people in America, there still is a very strong emotive reaction on the part of many people. Most of them probably don’t even know why they are experiencing such a strong emotional response.
I see distinct parallels between the Republican Party’s appalling treatment of President Barack Obama in 2009 and the brutality employed by the north during the civil war. I see the same sort of unthinking brutality coming from the opponents of universal health care. Whether it is southern racists brutally killing white civil rights workers from the North, or burning crosses and lynching innocent blacks, this sort of brutality builds up and eventually results in a payback.
Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It is very possible that I won’t see it my lifetime, but I am fairly certain that there will eventually be an intense reaction to what has been happening in Washington, D.C. for the last 30 years. The wealthy traders on Wall Street who in the middle of the worst recession since the 1930’s are still are receiving million dollar bonuses have been nicely bailed out by the federal government in Washington, D.C.
But very little has been done for the middle class people whose jobs have been sent overseas in order to evade the American laws regulating work place safety, environmental pollution, freedom of the workers to organize into trade unions, and the minimum wage. Not much help has come from the government to the many people who have lost most of their life savings in their 401K pension plans. The same applies to the many people who have lost their homes and their jobs because of the greed and widespread corruption among elected officials in America.
In almost all advanced countries in the world, everyone in the country has equal access to the health care system whether they are rich or poor. Not so in the USA. People are still dying in America because they are denied health insurance due to pre-existing conditions or because they cannot afford the exorbitant price of health care.
The progressive and liberal elected officials in American are not succeeding in implementing new regulations and laws to stop this financial house of cards from crashing down again. This impotence is the case even though the Democratic Party overwhelmingly controls all branches of the government: the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Presidency. The omnipresent corruption called campaign contributions, the greed, and the right wing conservatives in both political parties have been quite effective in stopping any sort of genuine reform from taking place.
I fear that the pressure for fair treatment of everyone in America will continue to build, and that one day there will be a terrific and unstoppable explosion. The biggest problem with revolutions is the complete uncertainty regarding what will come out the other end. It is much wiser to treat all people fairly in the first place.
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