May 1, 2018, 3:06pm Just finished the last round of touch ups on this post. Please prosecute and erase all violations of my copyright. Shortly after I shared this in 2007, Dateline must have falsely accused me of going to jail. But I can tell you liked my story about the Jankes because I saw that get stolen. And you must have liked my account of Lee's victories over Burnside and Grant because I saw that get stolen. And you must have liked my remark about being 97% African because I think Jay Leno stole that one for you, right? It was back when the reporters were calling him the funniest man in the world. And what did they call me again? Great reporting. The below portrait may also be a repeated work. I didn't spend long on it, and I'm still looking for a set of headphones that would fit the president.
After viewing Ken Burns' very comprehensive account of the American Civil War, it looks to me like it was started, more than any other single person, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. This is not to diminish the valiant efforts of abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, who publicly preceded her, or to understate the violent, catalytic role ultimately played by the radical John Brown, but such men had been stating their cases in political circles for decades without having much of an effect. This is a peculiar trait of Americans; needing a good story to help them understand a public issue. The evil of slavery eluded them until Stowe wrote her moving novel. It was the nineteenth century equivalent of appealing to the public on the Oprah Winfrey show. And it worked more effectively than all the combined efforts of the abolitionists who preceded her. Within a short time of publishing her book, the war started, and the slaves were freed soon after.
They probably told me in history class while I was asleep, but Lincoln had purely political reasons for freeing the slaves. He feared that England would intervene on behalf of the South, in order to recover lost cotton shipments, if America intended to keep its slaves. But England could not oppose a Union which promised to free the slaves and fall into line with England's own social policy of using orphans for the unpopular jobs. Emancipation would give the soldiers of the North a higher purpose to validate their sacrifices. Later on, the resource of black troops also proved to be valuable.
The cause of the war was clearer to blacks than to whites at the outset. Whites didn't want to admit that they were dying for their African brothers and sisters. In its first year, a unit of Northern troops was approached by a slave they'd just freed and asked where he could sign up to fight. He was bluntly told that the war wasn't about him and sent away confused. This happened a few hundred times before the white Northern troops caught on. Because Lincoln depended on their vote, he professed the same peculiar denial, insisting that the Northern cause was strictly one of unity. But his Emancipation Proclamation in late 1862, which stood to free the slaves and enabled the enlistment of black troops in the Union army, finally made the war's cause clear to everyone.
I think Lincoln was a highly astute politician and an extremely intelligent man. Coming out of nowhere to win the presidential election with a totally new party had to take considerable acumen. From there, he was faced with the task of preserving the Union through a prolonged and bloody civil war. He sensed that the country would have to change and fearlessly proclaimed the necessary measure. I had to draw his face in school one time. You start with a light bulb shape for the head, and put nice big flappy ears on the sides... I like the story about how his trousers fell down in front of the troops when he tried to dismount his horse. Then his hat fell off when he bent over to pull up his trousers. Such a lovable bumbler. Lincoln was a music fan, as well, who said he thought Dixie was one of the best tunes he'd ever heard. I bet he would have enjoyed Scott Joplin immensely. I can picture him listening to the Maple Leaf Rag through big headphones.
The word Yankee may originate from the Dutch Janke, since New York City started out as New Amsterdam. You've heard of the Janke brothers, right? Janke Anderson and Janke Vanderplug. They landed at Plymouth Rock, with their Heineken kegs loaded on wagons, and chopped down trees to make a corduroy road for their bicycles. It was a bumpy ride downhill to Manhattan. A couple of Virginians were spying on them from high up on the evergreens and heard the Jankes on the way down. Vanderplug dropped his handkerchief and Anderson picked it up after him, crying, 'Janke, your hankie!' Then Vanderplug looked over his shoulder and saw his brother getting too close and shouted, 'Janke, don't flank me!' By the next day, the news of the arrival of the strange 'Yankees' had travelled down the whole Mississippi. Southerners spelled it the way they'd heard it pronounced. They didn't care about the spelling.
I was surprised to see how close the South came to winning their independence. The 1864 election was a suspenseful moment in history. Will Lincoln win? Or will McClellan beat him and grant the Confederacy its independence? Success at the polls depended on success in the battlefield. The more destruction Sherman could report, the better Lincoln's chances of reelection. Sherman's ride through Georgia turned out to be very timely in this respect. The Southern view of the war was more focused on their political organization as a looser association of states with final authority resting in local hands. Perhaps, as an independent state, the Confederacy would still have been forced to abandon slavery later on, but, for the slaves, themselves, there was no time like the present. Laughably enough, the Southern army recruited at least one black battalion of hospital orderlies in 1865. Lee's appeal for black troops at this time attests to their high performance against him on the battlefield. As for localized political power, it may have some advantages, but I think it is unsound for a wide region like a country. A big country needs a strong federal government to hold it together.
Confederate Generals Lee and Forrest racked up the most impressive statistics, but the Union generals were more human. Grant was a boozer. Burnside was a crier, and so was Grant. Grant wasn't afraid to break down into loud, fitful sobs after losing seventeen thousand men at the Wilderness. He drank himself to sleep and was just fine the next day. Sherman hated reporters. He thought they were scoundrels. You know what Sherman said about reporters? He said that if he killed them all at sundown, there'd be news from hell by breakfast. Given my personal experience with reporters, I must declare him a poet.
Soldiers' letters home from the period indicate far more conscientious grammar than that exhibited by letter writers today. Soldiers wrote like poets back then. This ability seems to have deteriorated somewhat over the following century, as telegrams gained more and more against the written word as the method of choice for long distance communications. The videos soldiers send home on the internet now do nothing to improve their language skills. And TV shows like Saturday Night Live, that turn my words into images, deprive viewers of the chance to read thousands of amusing, well written scripts.
The men of this war usually spoke in fully framed sentences, typically with gruff voices. Both Grant and Sherman had a bourbon rasp, which was highly suspicious, given their ability to loot vast quantities of Jack Daniels from the states they occupied. Lincoln had a distinctly reticent, though gentle, voice. He spoke in calm, measured utterances, at a low volume that demanded total silence from the crowd. Bedford Forrest spoke with a heavy Southern accent. And contemporary historian, Ed Bearss, sounds exactly like Nixon. Is that an accent? I thought that was just Nixon. Oh well, I know he's not one of the others. Just wondering.
The soldiers of the South distinguished themselves as a superb fighting force. They came out of nowhere, popping up in cornfields or opening fire from treetops, inflicting enormous losses on the Union columns. But as Lee killed, Burnside cried, and the dwindling Union army edged inexorably forward. There was a short period where Lee ran out of bullets, which the North took advantage of to restore their badly depleted numbers under Grant. An exhausted Burnside was then sent stateside, eyes puffy, moustache drenched in sinuses. The war commenced, with Lee killing and Grant crying.
Once the Union forces were quite visibly depressed, up rose the women of the South, unleashing their fearsome glares of feminine reproach at the already demoralized Northerners. Plantation porches became as feared as land mines, as passersby were cut to ribbons, or dropped dead of shame, in the scathing path of their furious scorn. But their own president, Jefferson Davis, could have spared Georgia and South Carolina the costly ruin that came after Atlanta's fall if he'd simply surrendered when Lincoln won the U.S. election in November 1864 and the Confederacy's imminent defeat became obvious. The Southern women were out of line to punish Yankees for those losses.
On the alcoholic front, Confederates drank moonshine while the Union soldiers preferred homemade absinthe. The men made up names for their concoctions. For example, Southerners called their moonshine XXX, while the Northern men named their absinthe O Be Gleeful. It was also popular to smoke a green pipe tobacco called Don't Be Funny, while drinking, or snort lines of a fine white powder, known only as Skip to My Loo, which caused terrible insomnia. For music, both sides favoured psychedelic brass bands, especially during battle.
Grant made a memorable quote when he spoke of his solemn respect for Lee's dedication to the Southern cause, '...though it was, I believe, one of the worst causes for which people ever fought.' We now know from DNA studies that the original theories of racial purity are totally wrong. According to scientists, everyone is African. Africans went to Europe and got mixed up with the Neanderthals a little bit, apparently. Neanderthals may have been related to Morlocks, we're not sure. They were cold adapted, probably fair skinned and blonde, rather hairy, and with bright yellow eyes that glowed in the dark. Meanwhile, the Africans who traveled to Asia mingled with another tribe called the Denisovans. Denisovans were a streamlined, coastal people who were highly skilled in the water. Anyway, in this sense, Africans are the the purest humans. All it takes to show the African 97% of any modern human is one black parent. Hey, don't look at me. This is modern genetic theory. But I digress.
Only days before the final surrender of Southern forces, Lincoln was assassinated while viewing a play. The culprit was a wildly popular actor named John Wilkes Booth. Booth easily accomplished the evil deed, even taking time to stop by the bar for a drink immediately beforehand. Everyone trusted the star. How did this mentally unstable person gain such an inflated sense of his importance that he could pass judgement on the conduct of an entire country and find himself fit to punish it as a whole? Could it be from going on a stage and reciting other people's impressive words to adoring audiences all his life? Booth took himself as a hero for sneaking up behind the president in a theater and shooting him in the back with a little Derringer. When the public roared their disapproval, it truly took him by surprise. Of course, if Booth had limited his targets to artists and authors, rather than politicians, he would have got a lot farther with his efforts. Today's actors, such as those listed in my Copyright Issues page, are more careful about who they assassinate.
Blacks moved forward from slavery to segregation, which was an improvement, but still had a long way to go. And America became a stronger union, with one part of it that intensely hates the federal government. As for the name of the country, U.S. became acceptable, dropping the 'A' for America, but keeping the 'U' for United, in order to firmly supplant any further 'C's' for Confederate - or Civil, for that matter. Reviewing the Civil War offers an effective diversion from other wars and teaches one absolute lesson: slavery kills everyone. The U.S.A. learned this lesson by 1865, but Germany would still have to find out the hard way later on. And now I think I know why Eva and Adolf liked Gone with the Wind so much, because, to them, it was about poor white supremacists getting invaded by damn mongrel Yankees. But that's another war. Sorry.
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