American Civil War: questions from a Canadian

Factual Questions
141

My husband’s g-grandfather was at the Siege of Petersburg and we’ve visited the battlefield twice; some of the mine tunnels and the crater itself are still there.
The Union officer in command at the Battle of the Crater was Ambrose Burnside, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He was responsible for the fiasco of Marye’s Heights at the Battle of Fredericksburg, which Wikipedia describes as “one of the most one-sided battles of the war, with Union casualties more than twice as heavy as those suffered by the Confederates.”
Our kids were just 8 or 9 when we first went to Petersburg, and even they realized that riding into the crater was crazy. From what I remember hearing at the battlefield, it was dark, 4:40 AM, and then the cavalry was carried away with fighting madness. They’d been idle during the siege for weeks, and when finally something was happening, they reacted impulsively.

The History and Culture section of the Petersburg National Battlefield page says “Throughout the 9.5 month siege of Petersburg, 70,000 soldiers became casualties in an event considered to be a precursor to World War I.”

Petersburg National Battlefield (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov)

142

Foote was a confederate sympathizer. Lost cause and all. Sure, he sounded like he was trying to be even handed, but his true hero of his was fucking Nathan B Forrest, that racist murderer and founder of the KKK- and who really wasnt significant in the war. He was just one of a handful of CSA cavalry raiders, who combined did have some effect.

And in many western films, the hero is an ex CSA raider- in both True Grit, Outlaw Josey wales, and many others. So not only a traitor, but a murderous terrorist.

Grant also sent Sherman on his march to the sea, which totally demoralized the South (and freed a lot of slaves).

My great-great grandfather took the sign-up bonus right off the boat, but since he was a woodcutter, the Army actually got smart, and he spent the war cutting railroad ties for the Union. Not that that wasnt without some dangers, but hardly on the level of your ancestor.

The Union at least had shoes.

When I was a kid you could get a bunch for a few dollars. Now they are desired collectables, but so easy to fake.

Great on tactics and leadership, not so good on logistics or strategy.

Imperial Japan treated it’s prisoners even worse.

Green live wood is hard to burn, and fire can turn against you.

England had made some iron clad versions of their line of battle wooden ships- similar design, sails, broadsides etc. Thin armor. No turrets. Once people saw how the Monitors worked, turrets become de rigueur. One of our double turrented seagoing monitors would have sunk that RN “ironclad” in a few minutes. But, to be honest, it was one of the first,

He was one of a number of good cavalry raiders for the CSA. He was a racist and a murderer. After the war he founded the KKK. Naturally, later on in the South he became a hero, despite being a so-so general. In the North he is despised.

143

Britain’s Boer War concentration camps killed about 25% of prisoners, but most of those were children: about half the Boer children in the country were killed. The British operated as “take no prisoners” during that period, so direct POW numbers were low.

Death rate for Japan’s Australian POW’s has been put at 36%, including those directly massacred after already being held as prisoners.

American POW/DEF death rate after WWII has been put at 1%. I don’t know how that relates to different locations: I’ve seen the figure of 3% for in-theatre POW’s during the post-war period when Europe was on half-rations.

For Americans, I think the one to look at would be the Philippines insurrection / War of Liberation, parts of which were conducted with brutality, and which coincided with high rates of civilian deaths from cholera:

144

Chicago’s Camp Douglas is often described as the North’s Andersonville. Camp Douglas historically hasn’t gotten as much bad press as Andersonville, mostly because the winners get to write the history books.

If you go by the statistics then Camp Douglas wasn’t quite as bad as Andersonville, but both camps were horrible. Both camps held about 40 to 50 thousand men. Roughly 13,000 prisoners died in Andersonville. Roughly 6,000 died in Camp Douglas. Scurvy was rampant in both camps.

Both camps suffered from a lack of resources. Prisoner exchanges ground to a halt in 1863, with the main sticking point being that the Confederates refused to return black prisoners to the North. Both sides were left with far more prisoners than they could handle.

These weren’t the only two camps. For example, Elmira Prison in New York held about 12,000 men. About 3,000 prisoners died there. Conditions at all of the camps were horrible.

Wikipedia has a list of all Civil War prison camps:

145

I thank everyone for their learned replies.

I had a history teacher who liked to compare Canada with the United States. During its time, Canada has had some deep divisions, conflict between England and France and their emigrants, power struggles between “Upper Canada” and “Lower Canada” and The West, controversies with regard to First Nations and Aboriginal peoples, and other struggles for independence.

Canada largely did rely on compromise “to keep the peace”. This history teacher was fond of saying “Canada, unlike the United States, has never had a civil war”. Perhaps it is true Canadians are slower to anger, can better understand rival perspectives, slightly less fond of guns and fighting, emphasize community as well as “frontier spirit” and individual action, is less inclined to “hero worship”, and did not have a “powderkeg issue” like slavery that was also heavily tied in with regional economic success. But perhaps not.

I think he meant two things. That after a time compromise was a sensible alternative to war.

Yet this might also be seen in the terms Grant demanded when meeting with Lee at Appomattox. The series gives the impression these terms were quite reasonable and calculated to encourage Southern states to honourably rejoin the United States. How were the peace terms viewed by Southern states at the time? And today?

His second point was divisions still exist in Canada because they were avoided or de-emphasized, instead of being thoroughly settled through force. I’m not sure I agree with this. Reconstruction and Jim Crow might suggest conflict that not cause really these issues to disappear. Even after the great civil rights successes a century after civil war, identity issues seem bigger in the United States than in Canada, though still significant in both countries.

Drawing a distinction between types of generalship was helpful to me. The series sometimes discussed logistics and overall strategy, but not very much, and not really in terms of details such as the style of giving orders. Of course, such detail may not be possible in a general series of limited scope. Are their other Civil War documentaries worth watching? Books you found interesting and would recommend?

146

Shelby Foote was quite the engaging fellow, as revealed by author Tony Horwitz.

"In 1998, (Horwitz) visited Foote for his book Confederates in the Attic , a meeting in which Foote declared he was “dismayed” by the “behavior of blacks, who are fulfilling every dire prophesy the Ku Klux Klan made”, and that African Americans were “acting as if the utter lie about blacks being somewhere between ape and man were true”. Foote emphasized that his loyalties during the 1860s would have been to Southerners: "I’d be with my people, right or wrong. Foote also argued that freedmen had led to the failure of Reconstruction and that the Confederate flag represented “law, honour, love of country.” Foote stated that he would have been willing to fight for the Confederacy: “If I was against slavery, I’d still be with the South. I’m a man, my society needs me, here I am.”

Yes, Foote was a swell guy.

147
Hijack, do not respond

Herd instinct often overrides ethics.

Look at how many Palestinians make excuses for Hamas.

Hell, look at how many Americans make excuses for Hamas, just because they use “anti-colonial” rhetoric.

148

This was I assume the benefit of bagpipes, probably easier to be heard over the din than lower-pitched trumpets and drums.
(The story goes that the Irish gave the Scots the bagpipes around 600AD and the Scots still haven’t caught on to the joke.)

Wouldn’t that also be a reflection of the American Revolution, can-do spunky individuals rebelling against the large British Empire?

Again, a slight exaggeration. There were plenty of slaves who could and did live long lives and bought or were given freedom. Slavery however was also a means of removing enemies from the edge of the Empire and breaking them up into small groups that could not reorganize and fight again. Plus, in the days before the welfare state, it was a way of allocating the feeding of a potentially rebellious underclass to the people who could feed and house them. Toward the end of the Empire, the system appears to break down and the government needs to bring food (and circuses) to placate the capricous mob in Rome.

But… where’s the compromise between “slavery is evil and must be abolished” and “no we won’t”? There is no middle ground… “they can be slaves Tuesday through Thursday, but no whipping”?

I recall discussing History of Technology course with a prof when I considered taking it. He mentioned that standard sized clothing was a byproduct of the Civil War, when manufacturers wsimply made assorted sizes of uniforms to order then ran with that concept for civilian clothing after the war, replacing a lot of custom tailors and home-sewn clothing. Boots were Mass produced the same - a bunch of standard sizes so everyone could get a rough fit. However, the first army boots (like yo’ mama wears) were not even left and right, just one shape. When that was adapted for civilians later, they quickly found out flat undifferentiated shoes were not acceptable and made proper shoes.

Sometimes truths are self-evident.

IIRC there was an intense arms race to produce bigger and better ironclads (and then, iron boats) leading up to WWI at which point the navies turned out to essentially be useless duds with only one notable naval battle. Submarines proved more useful overall.

I wouldn’t truly agree with that. There was, as I pointed out here years ago, the (fairly amateur) Rebellion of 1837 - both French and English factionss rebelled against the British Empire, which was instrumental in persuading Britain that some form of democratic rule was necessary to prevent a repeat of the American Revolution. We also had the Metis rebellion(s). Most conflicts everywhere are either regional or ethnic. Hamas, for example, is simply a bloodthirsty and vicious continuation of a struggle between sides starting in Palestine (the British mandate) that has carried on in various forms to this day.

Based on a century and a half since the end of the American Civil War, i would suggest that did not solve the basic problem - of civil rights for blacks, simply because Reconstruction wimped out quickly into partisan bickering in Washington and the full proper reconstruction of the South never happened. The short-lived era of black participation in government disappeared into a swamp of Jim Crow legislation when unrepentant Confederates were allowed to regain power in the southern states.

149

No surprise there.

The Battle of Coronel was also somewhat important- it again punctured the myth of RN invincibility. However, in WW2 naval warfare was extremely important. But yeah the High Seas fleet and the RN Grand Fleet didnt do much, although the Germans did show that that Fishers vaunted battlecruisers could not fight in the line of battle.

150

[Moderating]

This is a hijack and an unnecessarily politicization of this FQ thread. This is an official Warning.

151

Historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Will Durant, discussing Roman history, noted a big difference between slaves who toiled on gigantic farms (latifundia) and those in an urban household. The latter had “humanizing contact” with their masters and sometimes won favour or release. The former were treated like animals, toiled during daylight and were much abused.

I did not realize the Civil War led to standardized clothing sizes and differentiated footwear.

152

Counties in Texas, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana, too. There’s an odd memorial, of a sort, to Davis in Abbeville, Georgia; as he attempted to escape at the end of the war, he spent the night of May 8, 1865 in that town. He was spotted by soldiers of the 4th Michigan Cavalry, who chased him almost exactly 26.2 miles before capturing his party in Irwinville, Ga. That being the distance of a modern marathon, the towns put on an annual race of that distance, covering the route of Davis’ party. Half of the runners are given gray T-shirts and set out first; the other half, blue, and chase the gray runners.

I can’t speak to all Southerners of the time, but Lee went to Appomattox expecting Grant to impose much harsher terms - his nickname in the press was “Unconditional Surrender Grant”. When Lee found out that Grant planned to parole all the enlisted Confederates and allow them to return home, (and sent 30,000 rations across the lines for the relief of the malnourished Confederate troops) he was so grateful that for the rest of his life, he would not permit harsh words about Grant to be spoken in his presence.

According to the biographer Charles Bracellen Flood, Lee’s greatest talents were as an educator. After the war, the trustees of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, convinced Lee to take the position of President. They had thought merely to use his name and reputation to attract students and funding, but Lee took an active role in transforming the former classic liberal arts school into something akin to a modern university. He instituted classes in photography, surveying, agriculture, and Spanish; founded a journalism school, incorporated a law school, and increased courses in chemistry, biology, and the other natural sciences. He also visited the North to recruit Northern students, and tried to make sure they were welcomed on campus. According to Flood, if he had only ever been judged by his academic career, he would rank among the great educators of American history; at the end of his life, he declared that his greatest regret was taking a military education.

Of course, he believed that African-Americans could not be trusted with a vote, and did not do much to curb racial violence by students against blacks in the community, so he certainly wasn’t a saint; but that doesn’t take away his role as an innovative educator.

153

The series said Lee “taught every subject but mathematics” but did not really imply his influence was so large, or education so broad.

154

I assume factory-produced clothing and footwear (ncessitating a sizing system) was inevitable with the advent of industrial cloth production, and especially with the population growth concentrated in urban areas about the same time as the CIvil War. Mass production certainly has major advantages over made-to-order.

Perhaps like much else, the war accelerated the development of inevitable technological improvements.

The thing with footwear was the soldiers had little choice expcet to accept what they were issued, plain clunky things that covered their feet with no arch support and no allowance for left or right - unless they had the money and time if stationed for a period near a cobbler’s workshop to get custom boots. The average consumer could afford to be picky and patronize a more accomodating store.

155

That makes sense.

156

One aspect of the series not always mentioned is the voice casting. As The Guardian notes

Plimpton isn’t the only unexpected bit of voice acting in the film [as George Templeton Strong]. There are plenty of terrific actors, like Sam Waterston as Abraham Lincoln, Jason Robards as Ulysses S Grant, Morgan Freeman as Frederick Douglas and M Emmet Walsh, Jeremy Irons, Derek Jacobi and Pamela Reed elsewhere, but there are some left-of-centre choices, too. Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Miller, Hoyt Axton and Garrison Keillor (as Walt Whitman!) all make appearances.

157

Independance Day maybe. War of the Worlds maybe. First Blood maybe.
But the three I mentioned are Civil-War films.

I was watching the end of “The Last Samurai”, where the cream of the noble south die in a valiant charge against the machine guns of the industrial north, incredulously wondering "who would make a move about the American Civil war, set in feudal Japan?, when I realized – Americans would watch that movie.

Am I being wooshed?

158

I also had three relatives in the war, a father and two of his sons. One of those sons was the grandfather of my maternal grandmother. She told me of some of the stories he passed on to her, including his incarceration as a POW at Andersonville. He survived but his health was affected for the rest of his life.

159

In the Peninsular War, Napoleon repeatedly marched his troops, drums beating and Eagles proudly displayed, in columns against Wellesley, whose troops were spread out in disciplined lines.

The redcoats were frequently deployed on a reverse slope so that the advancing troops could not see them. Once the shooting started, the flanks of the line could close in and destroy the Crapauds.

160

Since he’s talking about slaves in the Roman Empire in that quote, where the system of slavery wasn’t race based, that seems a bit unfair.

(Not that I agree with the rest of his point, which has tinges of “The Romans made a desert and called it peace”. But not really “White Man’s Burden”)