The+Civil+War



media type="custom" key="11497530" Students find it hard sometimes to make sense of John Calhoun. Was he the “War Hawk” guy who along with Henry Clay helped to propose and then legislate the “American System” in the wake of the War of 1812? Was he an enthusiastic “nationalist”? Or was Calhoun the “sectionalist” and strong defender of “states’ rights” who defied Andrew Jackson over the “Tariff of Abominations” in South Carolina? The “keen mind of the south” who seemed to urged civil war and opposed the Compromise of 1850? Well, the answer is simple. John Calhoun was both. He started his career as a nationalist but became one of the most skillful of those southerners arguing and politicking for disunion. A very shrewd observer, John Calhoun could see the future where because of industrialization and population growth in the North and West the South would no longer played such a preeminent role in the United States of America. Clinging to the past, Calhoun would threaten to destroy this future America rather than live in it.

media type="custom" key="11497542" Aged but not infirm, John Quincy Adams after his unhappy and unsuccessful presidency took up the much less important post of a lowly member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts. There he fought a lonely and unsuccessful fight against the “gag rule” against discussing slavery in Congress. Then, after a violent slave revolt on the Spanish vessel “Amistad” left the ship floating into American waters, JQA gave the final address to the Supreme Court arguing that the slaves should be allowed to go home to Africa, not back to Spanish masters and harsh “justice.” The case had major political ramifications in the United States because of the issues of slavery and slave violence. This recreation of the 1841 speech by director Steven Spielberg is, strictly-speaking, historically inaccurate. The speech by Adams is much changed, the background music is intrusive, and there hangs over all of it that saccharine Spielberg over-emotionalism. Nevertheless, there is also the Spielbergian ability to get to the emotional heart of the matter. There is John Adams looking at civil war while staring at his father’s statue, and there he is saying the following: “Give us the courage to do what is right. And if it means Civil War, then let it come. And when it does, may it be finally the last battle of the American Revolution.” Only someone with 20/20 historical hindsight could give such an incredibly daring and accurate speech for that time. (And you better be first in line to sign up for the army and fight in the resulting struggle.) This is “Hollywood,” but it is worth watching, taking into account the liberties taken with the history.

media type="custom" key="11498706" This lecture in some detail treats the Kansas Nebraska Act: why Senator Douglas enacted it, some of the consequences, how it altered the political party system, etc. We look at this as both the result of the Mexican War, and also as a major cause (the start?) of the Civil War.

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media type="custom" key="11497554" All the way back to the election of 1800 where one political regime (the Federalists) lost power and decided to yield to a victorious majority (the Republicans), we talked about the way of managing political change through the ballot box, if at all possible, and making change by the bullet unnecessary. Much of the world has mostly used the bullet instead of the ballot box, and the United States of America is a happy example of a political system where compromise gets us through the day in our affairs – with one MAJOR EXCEPTION, and that would be the Civil War that started in 1861. This war had been a long time coming, as we have seen, and common soldiers did talk heatedly about states’ rights, slavery, and union. (American soldiers in WWII or the recent Iraq War did not talk much about the politics of the struggle, in contrast.) Occupied Missouri during the Civil War, for example, devolved into a bitter guerrilla war between unconventional Confederate sympathizers who hid among the general population or out in the forests and the Union soldiers trying to subdue them and effect obedience to the federal authority. Scenes like the one in this video clip became commonplace throughout Missouri, Kansas, and many of the border states, as well as in the south in the latter parts of the war. Maybe Americans were eager for this war because the causes were so deep and the people so angry. Maybe the Americans had just forgotten what war was really like. Well, the Civil War would be by far the most traumatic event in the lives of the participants, and some 600,000 Americans would perish. This is change by the bullet, not the ballot box.

media type="custom" key="11497574" Lawrence, Kansas became the unofficial capital of the anti-slavery forces in “Bleeding Kansas” created by Stephen Douglas and his Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. A southerner would encounter “Yankees” who came from a society different from what one would encounter south of the 36 30 line, and here is the crux of the issue: even if the “South” and “North” were part of the same country, they were moving in distinctly different directions towards the future. The South was a traditional, slave-based society with traditional mores looking more to the past than to the future. In contrast, the North was growing, changing, industrializing. The North was undergoing massive amounts of immigration of Irish and German immigrants, and they went to work in the new factories and railroads found across New England and the Middle West. The North experienced the 2nd Great Awakening and significant reform movements. The North was pointing towards a future of factories and free labor. It was the North that began to tax itself for public schools. The South had remained the same, and they could with some truth claimed that the North were the real revolutionaries – they had remained the same, and it was the North that changed (creating the Civil War).

media type="custom" key="11499562" This lecture explains the background, philosophy, and life events of John Brown in Kansas and at Harper's Ferry and introduced the question: "terrorist" or "freedom fighter"? Lecture also touches lightly on other acts of violence fostered by religious extremism.

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media type="custom" key="11497594" The person of John Brown in the late 1850s sparks sharp disagreements over whether his actions at Pottawatomie Creek and Harper’s Ferry were justified or not? Was he a “terrorist”? Was he a “freedom fighter”? Nothing is clear except perhaps for this : with the advent of John Brown’s raid and then his execution by Virginia authorities, the Civil War between north and south was not far away.

media type="custom" key="11498674" This lecture deals with the series of events in the USA as the sectional crisis centered over slavery heated up: "Uncle Tom's Cabin," Compromise of 1850, Dred Scott, Kansas Nebraska, the caning of Sen. Sumner, the Lincoln Douglas debates, the breakdown of the national party system and subsequent rise of purely sectional parties, and the election of 1860.

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media type="custom" key="11497604" Both sides entered the Civil War overconfident: the South confident in their “king cotton” and gentlemanly “honor,” the North in their greater numbers and the cause of “union.” Nobody thought the war would be so bloody and last so long. But it was and it did. Maybe it had just been too long since Americans had endured anything like this? Maybe they just forgot what war was really like? At any rate, starting on April 12, 1861 (Fort Sumter attack), both North and South would learn.

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media type="custom" key="11497614" With the development of both high technology canon and rifled muskets by the 1860s, the tools of war had acquired a lethality hitherto unknown. Yet infantry tactics had not changed to those in the Napoleonic Wars fifty years earlier. The result? Generals got large numbers of their troops killed during the Civil War and the butcher’s bill was drastic. Combine these new lethal weapons and unchanging tactics with the horrible state of medicine and medical training and you have an enormous “price in blood” for the American Civil along with the technology of war. Generals ordered their soldiers in frontal assaults similar to those performed in the Napoleonic Wars, even as the technologies of war had changed and become much more lethal. Some 600,000 American died in the Civil War (most from disease!) and this was more than died in all the rest of our wars combined until recent times. Look here at the price in blood.

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media type="custom" key="11497646" Not until the 1890s did we human beings discover that germs cause infection and disease. Without such knowledge and the subsequent medical practices of washing one’s hands and keeping wounds and hospitals clean, wounded soldiers were almost safer outside a hospital than inside. Doctors amputated limbs even for minor wounds, as experience taught them gangrene would set in otherwise. And after a big battle, for example, an army doctor might have amputated dozens and even hundreds of arms and legs with medical tools that looked not dissimilar to a saw one would use to cut down a tree. There might be the blood of hundreds of others on the doctor’s hands and smock. There were reports of army hospitals the day after a big battle where stray dogs and pigs were found in the back eating the amputated limbs left on the ground by exhausted personnel. Watch this scene from “Dances With Wolves” and observe.

media type="custom" key="11497664" It is all too easy to dismiss persons from the past as impossibly distant and impersonal. It is hard to relate; they are gone. But while alive they were no different than you or me, and the human cost of the Civil War can be brought home by watching these persons parade past you in this video. When looking at large events in this Civil War unit, keep faces like these in your mind. They had hopes and dreams and families and friends, just like you and me. History handled them, and history will handle us: we are all food for worms, sooner or later.

media type="custom" key="11497672" What was it like to be wounded at Antietam or Gettysburg or Spotsylvania Court House? To find oneself in a Civil War era hospital? To watch people die horribly all around you? To smell of gangrene and hear groans? To die yourself in a hospital bed? What exactly was it like? Watch this absorbing video from the famous documentary “Civil War” documentary by Ken Burns, with a cameo in this spot by none other than Walt Whitman…

media type="custom" key="11497694" Nothing that Abraham Lincoln said or did during the Civil War was as controversial or divisive as the issuing, by executive order, of his Emancipation Proclamation. With his pitch-perfect political instincts, Lincoln knew this would be the case. Therefore, he waited (enduring the sharp criticism of abolitionists and the Radical Republican branch of his own party) until the country seemed to be desperate enough and ready for radical measure, and then (after the “victory” at Antietam) issued his plan to emancipate slaves in precisely the territories he could not free any: inside the Confederate States of America. Notwithstanding all the carping by northern Democrats who claimed they signed up to fight for “union” and not for “nigger rights,” this was a stroke of political genius. Converting the war into a “higher cause” through emancipation not only struck at the Confederate’s slave supply of captive labor, but it made the CSA radioactive to European countries like Great Britain who would have nothing to do with being seen as fighting for slavery. It was the beginning of the end.

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media type="custom" key="11497704" Both among “Butternut” regions of the North in southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio (ie. border states) and among working class Democrats in the big cities, one would find militant opponents of Abraham Lincoln’s prosecution of the war against the Confederate States of America (“so called”). While “war Democrats” in the North supported Lincoln and the war as a way to preserve the Union, “peace Democrats” grew heavily incensed by any efforts that seemed to favor blacks and end slavery (ie. an “anti-slavery war”) – and some even seemed to be Confederate sympathizers (ie. Clement Vallandigham). A huge consideration of President Lincoln as he moved cautiously towards his Emancipation Proclamation was to keep “war Democrats” inside his Republican coalition in the North by coaching his actions firmly in the context of wartime necessity and preserving the Union (and not “nigger rights”). As is seen in this clip with abolitionists trying to convert “peace Democrats” to their cause through a dramatic enactment of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Lincoln was going to have a hard job garnering support for the Emancipation Proclamation in at least some circles in the North.

media type="custom" key="11497716" It would be hard to underestimate the central importance of “The Gettysburg Address” both to our Civil War unit and to all of American history. Abraham Lincoln on November 19, 1863 strove in this brief speech to explain to his country (and to History) what the United States is about, what its soldiers died for at the Battle of Gettysburg, and what is “the remaining work” left for the living to complete. Hearkening back to the famous funeral orations of the ancient Athenians, he talks in organic measures of “conception” and “birth” and the dual images of “dying” so that “life” might continue. But the work is so hugely abstracted from the details of political life in 1863 that Lincoln is able to slip in this hugely important and hugely controversial idea that the work of the war is to have a “new birth of freedom.” He is saying – without saying it – is that the Civil War is about ending slavery. Yet he never uses the “s” word, and he says no more than what he obliquely points to. It is a revolution in political thought insofar as he is, on top of the moldering bodies of dead Union soldiers, cleaning the Constitution and American politics of its old compromise with inequality and slavery. It is also a revolution in style insofar as it cuts to the quick, shows no ornateness, and is brief. The old conceptions of earlier epochs in history with Jefferson and Jackson are over. The “modern” future in America will be one of an indissoluble “United States” (not “united States”) dominated by free labor, factories, steel, railroads, and cities of full of immigrants and natives as American seek to adapt Jeffersonian and then Jacksonian democracy to an industrial age with new conditions and new needs – the 20th century.

media type="custom" key="11497724" Abraham Lincoln had not wanted the Civil War to descend into a remorseless revolutionary struggle that would create immense bitterness. But such it had become, nonetheless. So Lincoln was absolutely ready to countenance his generals tearing apart the south and liberating its “property” (ie. slaves) in the name of military victory; and such is what William Tecumseh Sherman effected in his “March to the Sea.” Military success such as enjoyed by Sherman meant that Abraham Lincoln would be re-elected President in the 1864 election, and that meant the Confederate States of America was doomed. Lincoln began to plan for a post-war reconstructed United States of America, and he outlined its general lines in what was perhaps his greatest speech, his “2nd Inaugural.” It would be his last major speech.

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media type="custom" key="11497744" Walt Whitman had the opportunity to look at the “patriotic gore” of the Civil War up close in the hospitals where he did light nursing work and read his poems to the wounded and dying. This lecture connects Whitman’s war poetry and the wounded from the early 1860s to the images of the wounded from more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: as seen most literally here, the face of death and injury in war does not change all that much over time. I never liked this quote by Robert E. Lee but it seems appropriate in this context: “It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.”

media type="custom" key="11497756" The final victim of the many victims of the war, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth on the evening of April 14, 1865 at Ford’s Theater. He died the next morning across the street in a bed at the Petersen House. Perhaps this blow hit the American people so hard because it came so unexpected, with the country’s guard finally down after the surrender of Robert E. Lee and his Confederate army shortly before. Maybe it hit so hard because no American president had ever been assassinated before. This is America’s passion play, with Lincoln dying on Good Friday before Easter – the martyred president seen as having died for America’s original founding sin of slavery. Perhaps this is the Civil War ending with a madman (John Wilkes Booth) and a mad act, after having started with a madman (John Brown) and a mad act.

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media type="custom" key="11497772" When Republican Party politicos dumped Hamlin from the vice presidency for Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, nobody ever thought the border state senator would ever become President of the United States. It was simply a political bone thrown to the border states. Abraham Lincoln was firmly in the presidency, in good health, and would serve out his second term whereupon the country could choose someone new. No president had ever been assassinated before, but Abraham Lincoln would be the first. And then Andrew Johnson – a Democrat with few friends in the Republican North, a southerner hated by most of the South for remaining loyal to the Union – was president. It was an unhappy presidency. His “presidential reconstruction” was wildly unpopular in the North as the winners of the war saw the South act as if it had won the war, with Johnson apparently in collusion with them; this would help elect a more “radically” Republic Congress in 1866 that would directly challenge President Johnson’s authority to run the country. Barely surviving an impeaching trial by a single vote, Presidential Construction would end not with a bang but a whimper.

media type="custom" key="11497906" Congressional Reconstruction started with a sweeping Civil Rights Act passed over President Johnson’s veto, and then the imposition of a military occupation across the defeated South: the Confederates must learn, the Radicals concluded, that they in fact lost the war and their societies must change. The 13, 14th, 15th amendments must be ratified for the seceded states to re-gain admittance and representation to the Union, and a Freedman Bureau would move in to help former slaves build a multiracial democracy in a “new South.” The traditional Democratic leadership (re. Confederates) would come to resent immensely the “Black Republican” rule imposed at bayonet point in their societies, with their “scalawag” and “carpetbagger” white allies helping African Americans to rise to positions of power and authority unheard of before 1865. Thus was set the bitter wrestling match over who would control the social and political structure of the post-Civil War south. Did Congressional Reconstruction remedy the ills of Presidential Reconstruction? Or did it create evils of its own? Both?

media type="custom" key="11497922" The Southern Democratic response to the “Black Republican” rule by “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags” was to use organized, extralegal violence and intimidation to “redeem” state governments back to traditional rule by local white elites. Deeply ambivalent about African Americans to begin with, the North began to tire of endless polemic in the South and came to release the region back to the Democratic Party in the 1870s. The end of the Reconstruction experiment would have tragic consequences for African Americans.

media type="custom" key="11497932" Mr. Geib mentioned that in the South there existed considerably more anger about Reconstruction than about the Civil War itself -- tempers were white hot, and nasty violent deeds done by night were not uncommon. This vignette about the Red River Parish area of Louisiana and the tensions between "Carpet Bagger" Marshall H. Twitchell and ex-Confederate "White League" member Ben W. Marston lays out this history in concrete detail. It crystallizes into real life the abstract ideas of "Black Republican rule" and "redeemer Democratic" opposition: this resulting "Coushatta Massacre" is what the struggle could mean on the ground. Pay attention to final result for Twitchell and Louisiana (not to mention the rest of the South), as well as the absolutely unrepentant views of Marston's great-grandson, James G. Marston, III.

media type="custom" key="11497948" American author Pat Conroy and native South Carolina had written thusly about "Gone With the Wind:" “It is the story of war told by the women who did not lose it and who refused to believe in its results, long after the occupation had begun. According to Margaret Mitchell, the Civil War destroyed a civilization of unsurpassable amenity, chivalry, and grace. To Southerners like my mother, "Gone With the Wind" was not just a book, it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance. If you could not defeat the Yankees on the battlefield, then by God, one of your women could rise from the ashes of humiliation to write more powerfully than the enemy and all the historians and novelists who sang the praises of the Union. The novel was published in 1936 and it still stands as the last great posthumous victory of the Confederacy. It will long be a favorite book of any country that ever lost a war. It is still the most successful book published in our republic.” Whether one mourns the end of the Confederacy and its supposedly wonderful culture, it is worth noting the story's continuing importance to some in the South. Whether it is the "most successful book published in our republic" is arguable, and its righteous and resolute conviction that "the wrong side surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse."

media type="custom" key="11497960" This short video trailer was produced in 1939 as an introductory piece for “Gone With the Wind” film, although it only very obliquely refers to it. This short “history of the old South” is meant to help viewers of the longer Margaret Mitchell-based film understand how the south was founded and how the Civil War came about -- in short, how the antebellum South came to be the way it was. The historiography is very arguable, and perhaps it shows more about America in 1939 than it does about Georgia in 1869. Pay particular attention to the strange interpretation of the importation of African slaves as primarily a post-1808 phenomenon, the simplistic portrayal of African-Americans lamenting how hard it is to pick cotton seeds from cotton, and the description of an old South (which is itself an invention of 20th century America) that was full of chivalry, grace, and elegance (“Cavaliers and cotton”). The implication seems to be that “cotton” made the south back in the past, and then remade it during and after Reconstruction? Did cotton really bring the rehabilitation of a prosperous South after the Civil War? And did we lose much of value by destroying the plantation aristocracy of the antebellum South and the slave labor it was built upon? Or should we be happy it is “gone with the wind”?

media type="custom" key="11497970" An absolutely crucial video to watch to understand how, after the fact, the White South managed to interpret the Civil War in such a way that they come out not as the “losers” but as the “winners” of both the Civil War and, more importantly, Reconstruction. (“It is quite a trick to win the war in retrospect, after having lost it on the battlefield, no?) A person cannot understand segregation and the next hundred years of “Jim Crown” Southern history without properly appreciating the sentiments of White Southerners expressed in this video. The perceptive viewer will hardly need a Black Southern response.

media type="custom" key="11498106" While expedient and workable in the extreme context of the post-Civil War south where cash seemed almost non-existent, the “share cropping” system of agriculture would become a great evil to many African Americans (as well as to fewer white Americans) in the rural south. “Freedmen” would farm on land owned by others, and then they would pay part of their crops to the owner of the land as rent; as nobody had any money, farm laborers did not have to get paid in cash. It was a sort of barter system: you give me your labor, I will let you work on my land and keep some of what (cotton, soybeans) you produce on my land. (Instead of getting paid in cash, you get paid in cotton or soybeans.) The problem was over time the “sharecroppers” became indebted to the owners of the land who often cheated them, and hence they would find themselves trapped in working for land they would never own in a world they could never succeed in. They never was any incentive to work hard to secure for oneself long-term profit of improving a farm that belonged to you; you didn’t own the farm, and any profits went to owner, not you. For decade after decade the stereotype of being a “poor black sharecropper” from the “Deep South” rang true, as African Americans endured poverty, misery, and discrimination while surviving as best they could – it was not for no reason that so many African Americans jumped at the opportunity to move out of the south in various waves of migration in the 20th century. Locales like the Southside Chicago, Eastside St. Louis, Harlem in New York, and cities like Los Angeles, Oakland, and Richmond in California, are now major African American population centers that got their start as places where southern blacks came to escape “sharecropping” and the “Jim Crow” south.

media type="custom" key="11497980" The end of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the death of the “black Republican” experiment meant African Americans would receive their freedom but only that. They would not receive any land, and that would mean they would remain under the economic control of their former masters as “sharecroppers.” They would not receive the vote, and that would mean they would be under the political control of the white Democratic south. In fact, African Americans would live in a “Jim Crow” system of segregation that, in some ways, resembled slavery. The African American leaders W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington took very different stands on how to move the “freedmen” forward, and black people would contemplate their polar opposite philosophies when deciding how to operate in an intensely racist late 19th century USA. With his Tuskegee Institute and own example, Booker T. Washington preached temporary accommodation to segregation as African Americans worked themselves “up from slavery” in jobs like masonry and carpentry. DuBois urged unceasingly resistance to white supremacy led by the “talented 10%” of African Americans in organizations like his National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

media type="custom" key="11497992" We Americans staring at screens all day long in a sort of hypnotic gaze has to be just about the best proof possible of Plato’s allegory of the cave: they look at the flittering lights in front of them, and they drink it all in without thinking whether what they are viewing is “true” or not. Are we Americans well served by our hypnotic screens? Is what we watch and how we spend our time making us better people? Better able to understand the world around us? Or otherwise?

media type="custom" key="11498004" When you look at the breaking news around the world and see heartache and tragedy in images, what do you think? Do these photos give you access to a better understanding of what your fellow creatures are experiencing in other climes? Or do you think you know more than you really do? What can a photograph communicate effectively to its viewer? What can it not do? Why? Is photography “real life”? Or is it an “art form” not unlike painting, poetry, or music?

media type="custom" key="12024275" Pioneering photo-artist Frances Benjamin Johnston helped created the genre of photojournalism. Can we really say, as Susan Sontag seems to, that we understand less of the past because of her work?

media type="custom" key="11498010" Susan Sontag’s article in “The New Yorker” on war and photography definitely gave us food for thought. Sontag clearly is not a big fan of the photographic medium. Here one encounters many of Sontag’s more salient assertions surrounded by famous (and little known) photographs of war. What do you think about Sontag’s argument?

media type="custom" key="11498024" Our photograph-saturated culture of consumerism, pop culture, and a mass media-articulated relationship to reality: a million cameras, and then many millions of viewers on screens that are everywhere. Alcohol, sports, pornography, fashion, wealth, celebrities, entertainment, entertainment, money, money, money: image is all.

media type="custom" key="11498016" Is the glass half empty? Or half full? In the same spirit historians argue not so much over the facts of what happened but about what is their importance. Was the Civil War epoch in American history marked more by change? Or by continuity with what came before and afterward? Especially with regards to African Americans, the question of change versus continuity is arguable. But the mere fact that Americans at that time talked of the truly “revolutionary” nature of the times speaks volumes to the many changes that did take place.

media type="custom" key="11498036" The antebellum South had a vision of life as “traditional," emphasizing local control, a small government with few taxes - an agricultural economy of independent small farmers, dominated by a planter aristocracy and slavery. Society had clear gradations with a distinct hierarchical structure - people knew their place. Life did not change much. The rhythms of life were traditional, and Southern society looked to the past. In contrast, the Northern vision of the future emphasized a relentless innovation, aggressive individualism, social fluidity, advanced science and high technology – a modern colossus of capitalism and industry, ready to take its place among the “great powers” of the earth. It had little time for the past or for Negro slavery. Northern society looked to the future. But let us ask the following question: during and after the Civil War, did the United States of America follow the wrong path? Have we done those political and economic things we should not have done? Would Thomas Jefferson look at our world and be ashamed? Be disappointed in us? How about Alexander Hamilton? George Washington? Andrew Jackson? Ben Franklin? Henry David Thoreau? Think about the way in which you, your friends, your family, your neighbors, your school, and your society lives. The good, the bad, the ugly. Keep these questions in your mind as you watch these images of the contemporary America we have built and live in, and take a step back and ask, “Is this good? Bad? Both?” What do you think as you watch this video and think?