I apologize for the lateness of this post. I was busy buying a car for my wife this evening. My new posting schedule will be the Civil War blog on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays and the Great War blog on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. (At least that is the plan!)
Now, on to business! The vast panorama that is the American Civil War gives Civil War Addicts all sorts of areas with which to focus our interest. You could spend a lifetime just studying one battle and still not know everything there is to know about it. Some focus their interest on the political arena and others on social aspects. There are even smaller genres, if you will, such as medicine or even fashion. Our American Iliad gives everyone plenty of room to carve out his or her own niche. That is what draws new addicts each generation.
In addition to meeting my beautiful wife, I spent my grad school days studying Military History. That is not a "cool" specialty in graduate school anymore. (Though it is more so now than it was ten years ago.) I loved reading and studying weapons and tactics. Plus, my time as a reenactor complimented this pursuit as well. When I taught US History survey courses during my adjunct days, I constantly had to remind myself that it was a survey course, lest I get bogged down in tactical minutiae that perhaps only one student in the classroom actually cared about.
There is one particular subject that I can't read enough about. That is the Battle of Franklin. Perhaps it isn't appropriate to say that a battle is your "favorite", but Franklin is the one that holds my mind captive. What I wouldn't give to see the Army of Tennessee march across that valley with bands playing and flags unfurled. When I close my eyes, I can see. Or at least what I imagine it looked like. I cannot get my hands on enough materials about this battle. If I had one specific obsession, it would be this.
So my question to your, dear readers, is this. What is the specific area of the American Civil War that holds you interest the most. Is it a battle? Or politics? Or 19th Century music or religion?
My name is Lee Hutch and I am a somewhat poorer Civil War Addict after purchasing the below. (But my wife's happiness is far more important to me than money.)
My obsession re: the War for Southern Independence involves the political arena. The basic issue in this arena, is the fact that one group of Americans (Northerners) were willing to deny another group of Americans (Southerners) their God-given right to self-determination, in 1861-65. This is especially troubling to me, because our founding principle..."consent of the governed," is the basis for the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the federal Constitution, and the establishment of the United States of America. How could Northern Americans continue to enjoy their God-given right to self-determination, while denying said right to their Southern counterparts? It just doesn't make any sense to me. The United States was formed via the voluntary ratification of the federal Constitution...no State was forced to ratify the Founding Document, since the United States was based on the freedom of choice as seen in the phrase, "...consent of the governed." Furthermore, once the war was over, and the former States of the Confederacy were forced to return to the old Union, that original "union by choice" was destroyed, and replaced with the "union by force" under which we live today. In essence, although A. Lincoln claimed to go to war to "preserve" the Union, in actuality he destroyed the original Union. How is that for irony? This knowledge is a sad reality for me, and one that I have to consider everytime I think about the over 750,000 lives that were lost during the War for Southern Independence. As the "London Times" mentioned in an article printed just after the war, the United States was in actuality no different than all empires...it had to use force to hold its people in control. So much for our belief in "consent of the governed." And I'll even go so far as to say that the "Great Experiment" in self-government, as envisioned by the Founding Fathers...failed.
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