“Northern Aggression”? You couldn’t name it less accurately if you called it the War of Mutant Tomato Worms.
Unless you’re posting in the Pit, please skip the personal remarks.
The South did draft people increasingly as the war went on, and the draft laws were enforced on deserters and people who tried to evade it. Cold Mountain is not entirely imaginary.
That’s a really odd thing to say, considering that it was the confederates who fired the first shot by capturing Fort Sumter:
From Wikipedia
Well, too damned bad for them. They were defending something that was in its own way at least as evil as Nazi Germany, and as deserving of destruction. Oh, I have at least some sympathy for some of the random civilians; but I wouldn’t feel any compassion for their military and leadership if it had been exterminated to the last man.
And “War of Northern Aggression”? :rolleyes: If we want to use such a propagandistic label, how about “The War Against the Treasonous Southern Enemies of Humanity”? A bit more awkward, but at least it has the virtue of accuracy.
“Slaver’s Rebellion” is punchier.
Agreed.
Haven’t you read history? The commander of Fort Sumter touched off hostilities by attacking thousands of peaceful Southern cannonballs with his aggressive fort.
This is a nice case of 20-20 hindsight. While veterans absolutely did have the huge advantages cited, this certainly would not have been obvious to the ordinary citizen before the war, or during it.
I only have seen this mentioned once so far, but for the average Joe, North and South, life on the farm was pretty boring. You also never had any actual money to spend, for the most part. You joined the army, you got clothed, fed, and paid, you got to travel (most had never ridden on a train before, or been out of the county they were born in), and you got to meet people from all over the country. The possibility of getting killed was just part of the job, and probably outside of a few of the bloodiest battles, not really any greater than spending the equivalent amount of time on the farm (accident, disease, no real medical care, etc.).
I doubt that any more than a tiny fraction of the soldiers on either side thought much about the “cause” or the sociopolitical issues involved. As the war went on, many Confederates viewed themselves as defending their homes from Northern invaders, but at any given moment, most members of a Southern army were hundreds of miles from their actual homes. I don’t think you feel any particular passion to defend Mississippi if you’re from Virginia, for example.
Such is the case with many wars, whose early participants regard it as an adventure, and think it won’t last long anyway.
<SLAPS pseudotriton ruber ruber WITH A WET TROUT>
They fought because they were young, they were stupid, they were un-Worldly, and because they believed it was a “test of manhood”, whatever the Hell that means.