The Civil War

“He hates what he believes and loves it at the same time,” -Kitchen Sink by TOP

This week I’ve been studying the American Civil War. From the Battle of Bull Run to the Battle of Cold Harbor, to the Siege of Petersburg, and many bloody battles in between, the whole thing was a viscous mess.

The prompt says to tell what my favorite part about this weeks’ lessons. I quite liked the fact that I didn’t have a PDF worksheet. I like the map, I think mostly for the fact that I used sharpies, which I love.

What I found most interesting about studying the Civil War was the fact that I’m human, that they were human. Me and you and them and us, as a species, we did that. Even though we weren’t alive then, and we had nothing to do with it, we did that. And life as we know it now is a product of what people did then.

Can you imagine it? Not being a specific person or anything, but just being there, apart of it? Fighting for what you believe in, sometimes to the death, fighting for your rights and your freedom. Killing people. That’s the bit that gets me; people killed people. I mean it’s completely downplayed from what it was, made softer for the public’s consumption, but it was brutal and bloody and violent. And that’s the thing. Violence is sick. Its freaking disgusting. BUT at the same time, I get it because I’ve got some freakish, violent fantasies, and I’ll cheer when someone gets a popped in the face, and I love horror movies and oh my gosh. And then I guess that’s human nature, right? We are violent and murderous, but at the same time loving and caring and sweet. I can’t think about any of this without twisting it into a pressing psychological matter, which I find disturbing in myself, and along with the fact that apparently “everyone goes through stuff like this”, I find people in general disturbing. After this thought process, I go back to the matter at hand, the Civil War, and basically I decide that everyone involved just cared so much about what they believed and what they thought was right, that they would defend it with everything they had, crossing psychological lines and mental borders and moral boundaries, killing and maiming and destroying those who stood in the way.

Slavery was one of the baseline causes of the Civil War. You could say it was THE cause, but that wouldn’t be necessarily true. The area the Southern states occupied were more equipped with the natural resources and good soil and such to grow crops such as cotton and tobacco, so they grew and developed and a great many plantations popped up, and as they used slaves for laborers on plantations, slaves were more employed in the Southern area rather than the Northern area, and Southerners relied more heavily upon slaves for their income. The boss-men of the country tried to tell the states what they could do and what they couldn’t slave-wise, saying that this state or the other would be a slave state or a non-slave state, which freaked the Southerners out because a lot of them had became prissy gentlemen who couldn’t work like the slaves had done. They wished to secede, to make their own country were slavery was perfectly legal and they couldn’t be told they could own slaves. Now, Abraham Lincoln thought that secession was illegal, although he didn’t really have a position on slavery at the beginning; he said he wouldn’t get into that because it wasn’t his business. But he did think secession was wrong, as I said, and that was what the fight was about. These states had every right to secede, even if they had shoddy reasons for wanting to do so. And the people believed that they did have this right, even those against slavery. It doesn’t make sense for them to not have it. Lincoln was going against what the people believed, and he realized it. He changed his stance. He changed it from anti-secession to anti-slavery, and this grabbed the people. Many thought slavery was wrong, possibly a by-product of not relying on the slaves to keep food on the table, possibly pity, possibly its just they thought it was wrong to treat other humans like defecation. Lincoln gained a following with this new stance, enough so that the Union side was able to beat the rebel side. There was no secession, slavery was abolished, the war officially ended.

This is the Civil War to my understanding. Battles took place that were bloody and vicious, and things were gained that aren’t so much material as emotional… And people became free. The notion that a human could own another human was abrogated.