150 Years of Misunderstanding the Civil War

[steve2470]

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/150-years-of-misunderstanding-the-civil-war/277022/?google_editors_picks=true#comments



In early July, on the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, pilgrims will crowd Little Round Top and the High Water Mark of Pickett's Charge. But venture beyond these famous shrines to battlefield valor and you'll find quiet sites like Iverson's Pits, which recall the inglorious reality of Civil War combat.

On July 1st, 1863, Alfred Iverson ordered his brigade of North Carolinians across an open field. The soldiers marched in tight formation until Union riflemen suddenly rose from behind a stone wall and opened fire. Five hundred rebels fell dead or wounded "on a line as straight as a dress parade," Iverson reported. "They nobly fought and died without a man running to the rear. No greater gallantry and heroism has been displayed during this war."

Soldiers told a different story: of being "sprayed by the brains" of men shot in front of them, or hugging the ground and waving white kerchiefs. One survivor informed the mother of a comrade that her son was "shot between the Eye and ear" while huddled in a muddy swale. Of others in their ruined unit he wrote: "left arm was cut off, I think he will die... his left thigh hit and it was cut off." An artilleryman described one row of 79 North Carolinians executed by a single volley, their dead feet perfectly aligned. "Great God! When will this horrid war stop?" he wrote. The living rolled the dead into shallow trenches--hence the name "Iverson's Pits," now a grassy expanse more visited by ghost-hunters than battlefield tourists.

This and other scenes of unromantic slaughter aren't likely to get much notice during the Gettysburg sesquicentennial, the high water mark of Civil War remembrance. Instead, we'll hear a lot about Joshua Chamberlain's heroism and Lincoln's hallowing of the Union dead.

*end of excerpt*

I almost didn't post this because of the region bashing that always breaks out, but hope springs eternal. Hopefully in this sub-forum it won't.

[intaglio]

1. Reading that I am reminded that 50 years later

Officers were still ordering their infantry to charge en masse into enemy fire ...

Sometimes it seems we humans are very slow on the uptake.

[tclambert]

5. You're thinking of WWI. Some officers didn't understand the effect of those new-fangled machine guns

The stupidity of trench warfare. Millions died going back and forth for a few yards of ground. And then there was Stalingrad in WWII. 2,000,000 dead. How do people keep getting talked into participating in such stupidity?

[Art_from_Ark]

7. And then, of course, there was the 1815 Battle of New Orleans,

where British commanders still hadn't figured out that soldiers in bright red uniforms marching in formation out in the open were easy pickings for snipers, despite having had the tactic used against them in the American Revolution 40 years earlier.

[Democracyinkind]

13. Plus they forgot the ladders.

At least I seem to recall that.

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

16. If they had studied the Siege of Petersburg, they would have known

Add barbed wire and machine guns, and it would be indistinguishable from the Somme.

Heck, there was trench warfare at the Crimea in the 1850s.

[Sherman A1]

2. Good piece

Thanks for posting.

[steve2470]

3. you're very welcome ! nt

[GTurck]

4. You explained....

the reality of war rather than its romantic and heroic propaganda. One does not have to be a combat veteran to know that all war is waste, cruelty, and horror.

[carolinayellowdog]

6. North Carolinians were far more ambivalent than either side's accounts make it seem

My only Confederate ancestor who didn't desert within months ended up being wounded at Gettysburg and taken prisoner, ending up at Point Lookout. He survived, whereas all my NC Unionist ancestors taken prisoner and sent to Andersonville died. After the war, the Unionist majority and Confederate minority in their community went back to a semblance of normality, and now old graveyards have a mixture of tombstones from veterans of both sides.

A few years ago I looked forward to all the sesquicentennial remembrances, but the more I learn about the war the more ghastly and demoralizing the story becomes. "Brother against brother" was no exaggeration in eastern North Carolina, and terror against civilians was a constant threat for years.

[Enthusiast]

10. There are a million fascinating accounts.

Howard Cushing Wright grew up in New York but served for the South. Howard's mother was from Charleson.

Howard wrote an amazing letter to his mother during the civil war that is reproduced in Harold Holzer's The Civil War in 50 objects. Highly recommended.

[groundloop]

8. Thanks for posting that.....

Being in Georgia I still come across a large number of people who still glorify the civil war, and the so-called struggle for states' rights. Interestingly, my great-grandfather was one of those who fled North Carolina and took his family to Arkansas to avoid being conscripted into the confederate army.

[East Coast Pirate]

9. This is what a Civil War chess set should look like:

Disease, in fact, killed roughly twice as many soldiers as did combat; dysentery and diarrhea alone killed over 44,000 Union soldiers, more than ten times the Northern dead at Gettysburg. Amputations were so routine, Faust notes, that soldiers and hospital workers frequently described severed limbs stacked "like cord wood," or heaps of feet, legs and arms being hauled off in carts, as if from "a human slaughterhouse." In an era before germ theory, surgeons' unclean saws and hands became vectors for infection that killed a quarter or more of the 60,000 or so men who underwent amputation.

Other historians have exposed the savagery and extent of the war that raged far from the front lines, including guerrilla attacks, massacres of Indians, extra-judicial executions and atrocities against civilians, some 50,000 of whom may have died as a result of the conflict. "There's a violence within and around the Civil War that doesn't fit the conventional, heroic narrative,' says Fitzhugh Brundage, whose research includes torture during the war. "When you incorporate these elements, the war looks less like a conflict over lofty principles and more like a cross-societal bloodletting."

[Enthusiast]

11. K&R!....nt

[Rowdyboy]

12. Excellent piece! Thanks for posting! I was born in deep south Mississippi. When the state seceded

from the union, my home county (primarily poor dirt farmers with very little slavery) supposedly seceded from Mississippi and formed the legendary "Free State of Jones" (it was Jones County). Lots of confederate deserters (including several of my ancestors) who survived most of the war by stealing from Union and Confederate supply trains.

[ShawnRIN]

14. Conitnued training for mid and seinior level military leaders

With all the budget cuts going on I think this shows that we must continue the support of professional military education programs.

[De Leonist]

15. Just my take

I'll admit my rememberance of the specifics the Civil War, it's beginning and ending are little rusty but it always struck me that the civil war was more about a conflict between two somewhat different economic systems than slavery or states rights. The Northern Industrialists vs The Southern Agrarians. But than the Civil War is not my strong point. I'm more into America's Labor History or the lifestyles of the men we call the Mountain Men or The Longhunters

[mamosta]

17. civil war

was the civil war a sword fight!!!!!!!!!!!!!!???????????

[Cooley Hurd]

18. Isn't this a VERY old thread to resurrect?

[Agschmid]

19. Sometimes Google does that?

[Al Carroll]

20. The biggest misconceptions...

1. That the war was North vs South. It was actually Confederate elites and their supporters vs everyone else, meaning loyal Americans both north AND south.

2. That South=Confederate. Most southerners were loyal Americans ie Unionists.
300,000 southerners fought for the Union.
Most other white southerners dodged the draft.
Most Confederate soldiers deserted.
Large parts of the south stayed loyal, often fighting off the CSA govt.

3. That the CSA was in any way noble. It was an elite run oligarchy, not democracy. There were 4000 political prisoners, mass executions of dissidents, a ban on political parties, rubber stamp elections, internal passports, and state terrorism that included biological warfare and the worst terrorist attack on the US until 9-11, the bombing of the USS Sultana that killed 1900.

And that's not even counting slavery.

4. Lincoln's accomplishments are also underrated. Defeating the CSA prevented their plans to bring back the slave trade, invade three other nations, and continuing slavery for 20-60 more years. Slaves had an infant mortality double that of free people, so ending it saved the lives of many Black children.

Lincoln also emancipated American Indian slaves in California, which most don't even realize existed.