Too late to edit:
Some official statements from the respective governments (source: Wikibooks):
hell, why US vs Germans, or US vs Afghans, we are all humans.
Look, people argue and sometimes it turns to terminal violence. As long as there is a difference of belief there will be violence.
Hell, in Ireland it is all irish, just catholic and protestant [though it is getting a lot better finally]
The acronym “ACW” has been in use by Civil War reenactors since at least the mid-1990s. I saw it a lot back in the day when I was reenacting.
I agree with Tranquilis that how the dead were buried had a lot to do with circumstances and opportunities right after major battles. Some but not all - certainly not a majority - of the dead were also reburied after the war, and identified if possible, but you will still find many graves simply marked “unknown.” Dogtags were not issued, although some soldiers bought commercially-engraved identification discs at their own expense. A dirty, well-worn uniform might not be easily identifiable as either Union or Confederate weeks or months after being exposed to the elements, and both sides used much of the same equipment (with more-poorly-supplied Confederate troops often using captured Union gear). The Shiloh battlefield, for one, has several burial pits where fallen Confederate were interred en masse.
I haven’t read this book, but several friends who have tell me it’s excellent. It’s all about how Americans, both North and South, dealt with the unprecedentedly widespread suffering and death of the Civil War, and has quite a bit on burial practices at the time: http://www.amazon.com/This-Republic-Suffering-American-Vintage/dp/0375703837/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255027094&sr=1-1
Those portions of the Colonies that later became to be called ‘the South’ were considerably less avid about that whole revolution thing than their Northern brothers. The South was largely agrarian, largely un- or under-industrialized, and had a very different social climate and outlook from the Northern states, which were immigrant-heavy, industrialized, and heavily urbanized. The existing social and cultural divide had been growing along with a lengthy series of political divisions and crisis. In fact, in the time of the Civil War, most people thought of themselves as citizens of a state before they thought of themselves as citizens of a nation.
OK, let me toss you a few keywords:
Deep South.
Texas.
New England.
Southern California.
Pacific Northwest.
Alaskan.
Do any of those conjur specific mental images and preconceptions? Those images may be sterotypes, and even grossly out of line, but they also illustrate my point - The US is sufficiently large and diverse that you could easily split it into six or eight nations, each having it’s own distinct and internally-consistent culture. In the days of the ACW, these divides were much more marked.
I think you’ll find that this is one of those cases where folks on opposite sides of a fence throw stones and insults at one another all day long, but as soon as an outside party threatens either one, they settle their differences and march together for as long as it takes to drive off the “furr’ners”. This is just everyday human nature at work. My father may jokingly aver that “damnedYankee” is a single word, but that didn’t stop him from serving as a career U.S. Army officer.
Keep in mind that there are very distinct differences between the Northern and Southern states. Much of it is exactly the sort of differences that you’d expend to find between urban and rural regions: the city folk see their country cousins as uncultured, stupid, and backwards – the country folk view their citified relations as rude, arrogant, and devoid of values. This is nothing new – I recall Aesop had a few words to say about the subject. With the U.S. the differences go way back and run deep. Many of those who fought for independence from England had little concept that the colonies would emerge as a single nation. Broadly speaking, Southerners tended to think of the American continent as a new Europe, each state becoming its own independent entity. Georgians were Georgians, Virginians were Virginians, and Marylanders were Marylanders. Even after England packed up and left, it took much debate and many compromises to come up with a system that everyone could agree on. Even then, however, fundamental philosophical differences remained, lurking and festering under the surface for some 60 years before reaching a boiling point. The Civil War, after all, didn’t come out of nowhere. Furthermore the Northern victory may have led to a re-unification, but it certainly didn’t lead to a cultural homogenization. I think that among the residents of Britannia you’ll find more than a few Scots, Welshman, et al, who will sympathize.
Try Scotland v. England. All British, not all English or Scottish. Common something or other that binds them together, but dissimilar something else that separates them. Some sort of wars betwixt them, IIRC, sometime.
hh
What about the War of the Roses?
The dead? Who the fuck cares about how the *dead *are treated when the South was performing war crimes like Andersonville?
Not obvious at all.
That implies that it was a war between various, equal states. Which isn’t accurate anyway – the war was between 2 groups, the USA and CSA.
Indeed, some in the North will say it was a war between the legitimate government and a few states in rebellion. Thus fanatics in the North will refer to it as the Slaveholders’ Rebellion or even Slaveholders’ Attempted Rebellion.
Why are you picking on the South? Camp Douglas in Chicago wasn’t exactly a fun place either.
That was between The Yorkists and Lancastrians, it wasn’t a full blown Civil War.
Tranquilis I’m English so I don’t get your point when you list those keywords, sorry.
Doesn’t work, England and Scotland are two separate countries, The USA is one
@Chowder, according to ‘This Sceptered Isle’ the Southern states were not particularly keen on the American Revolution as they benefited from trade with the UK (as did Canada). Also after the UK washed its hands in disgust and walked away, their ‘American’ sympathisers were treated as traitors, being hung is generally considered worse than incarceration in an early concentration camp.
It is quite amazing how unpleasant people can be to their fellow man, until one looks at the problem empirically.
shrug
OK. But then you probably don’t yet know enough about the culture and climate of the times for any of our explanations to really make any sense.
Don’t assume that that’s uncontested; see The Wars of the Three Kingdoms. That article mentions The English Civil War as still being a valid concept, but says that people sometimes use the term when they are actually referring to other parts of the conflicts. I believe the first (albeit relatively trivial) violence against Charles I’s policies took place in St Giles Kirk / Cathedral in Edinburgh.
With respect Chowder, I think you’re speaking for yourself there.
One difference is that the issues which motivated both sides in the English Civil War (which wasn’t confined to England and wasn’t the only civil war which ever happened here) are dead and buried whereas those which caused the American equivalent (states’ rights and Negro emancipation) still resound today.
Generally speaking burying large numbers of corpses without mechanical aids was very labour-intensive, in an era when the ‘tail’ of an army was much smaller. After Agincourt the local peasants were rounded up by a French noble and made to do it.
I always wanted to know why it was The War of Northern Aggression when the South was the ones who fired the first shots.
Lincoln even went so far as to introduce a thirteenth amendment to protect slavery in the Southern states in an attempt to avoid war. Ironically, the actual thirteenth amendment bans slavery (and it the first time that the term slavery was used in the Constitution. Before, it merely referred to slaves as Other Persons.
I never understood what the South wanted. They were upset that the Northern states weren’t returning escaped slaves as specified in the Fugitive Slave Act, but becoming I can’t see how making the Northern states a foreign country from yourself would help in that matter.
Even though it’s taught that way today, the Civil War really wasn’t about slavery. You can think of it more as the southern farming dudes vs. the northern factory guys. The South had an agricultural society, and felt that the North had too much control in government and was pushing the country too much in a direction that favored the industrial economy of the North. Letting the South keep their slaves didn’t help because it meant that the Northern guys would still have too much influence over the federal government and would continue to muck up the Southern way of life.
Basically, the South wanted the North to leave them the F*** alone.
All of the other stuff was just fuel for the fire.
This is the claim made by slavery apologists now, but that was not what the southern states said when they tried to secede.
For example, South Carolina, the first state to secede, issued a document “Causes of Secession”. The whole document is about slavery, and that free states won’t capture & return escaping slaves, that there is “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery”. Slavery is mentioned 18 times in the document, farming or agriculture never once.
Mississippi says it flat out: “it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course. Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world.”
The secession documents of the other states were similar. Slavery was mentioned in all of them.
To say the Civil War was not about slavery is just not accurate.