32 Replies to “Faces of the Civil War”

  2. Not at all. just the presentation of it does.
    Nice piece and it was good for a chuckle that a pro coal power ad ran just before the slideshow….LOL

  3. I enjoyed that. Canada has a rich history but if it were told Quebec would find out they lost and would be upset. Shhh.

  4. I saw no coal power ad. I have been watching the `Civil War`on PBS the past week. I have seen it before but it is just as fascinating again.
    In the Canadian context,that war which ended in 1865, left the United States with the largest standing army in the world. It is meaningful and significant that Canada founded a lasting union in 1867 partly to defend itself from a potential United States invasion. The United States proved itself to actually be the Boogey Man` in the 1812 to 1814 war. We had reason to be wary. We managed to defend our territory but Britain was only too happy to make unwarranted concessions in the peace treaty. They were up against a serious Napolean threat at the time. Sadly they gave up too much out of convenience and ignorance. We should have retained all lands drained by the Great Lakes and by Hudson`s Bay. Canadian distrust was founded.
    That war remains in our viscera regardless of individual interactions with them. All American political actions continue to be mocked and vilified as a residue of our enmity of those days almost 2 centuries ago.
    We have a great country here, politically and practically. Our union benefited from the American experience in our formation. The American revolution taught the Brits in how to deal with British Subjects in the colonies. We gained our independence gradually and peacefully for the most part.
    Our country needs and has few comparisons to American Party Politics today. I spend 4 months a year in the American Southwest. I am pleased to say to anyone there or here that I am a Canadian Conservative but claim no comparison to the Republican Party of today.
    I am NOT antiAmerican. Our opposition parties are but they do not know why. We can learn from each other. Besides we have a very strong fifth column down there.

  6. So very much more interesting and enjoyable than the previous piece of fluff (not that it isn’t necessary to keep us on the ready!)

  7. The Ken Burns series on the Civil War is indeed fascinating. I bought the VHS version in the early 90’s and watch it occasionally. It was also accompanied by an informative textbook.
    Hoarfrost has a very good point about the fallout of the war of 1812-14. The follow up treaties had a dramatic effect on the development of the West both US and Canadian. For instance the Treaty of London was signed in 1818 and ultimately established the 49th parallel as the boundary from Lake of the Woods to the Rockies. Beyond that lay the Oregon territory. However, the negotiations originally set the border at the 50th parallel which was an even number. Inaccurate maps and protests from British fur trade interests concerned about access to the Great Lakes caused the amendment to be made over sherry and cigars. Not a big deal at the time, nothing but wilderness and savages. But have a look at where the 50th parallel runs today and consider what a difference the original line would have made. A little known fluke of history 200 years ago.

  8. The US has lore. Montana through to Washington it is Lewis and Clark everything. As tourists I would explain to my daughter that French Canadian fur trappers were already there and Astoria was built to have an American prescence in areas Canadians trapped. What surprised me is people would listen to me talk to my daughter. They were American for the most part and seemed quite interested and surprised. No one got upset except a park ranger at Mt Ranier and I pronounced as rainya and not rainer. I apologized and said I pronounced it as the discoverers would have.
    Teachers get a lot of those summer jobs.

  10. I’m not a democrat…which is the party of the confederacy however….the tag the south generally uses is accurate…THE WAR OF NORTHERN AGRESSION.
    It is a interesting bit of trivia, that more Canadians fought on both side in THE WAR OF NORTHERN AGRESSION than fought in the WAR of 1812….largely because there weren’t many Canadians at the time and it was mostly small unit actions…because before railways supplying large numbers in the field was difficult….but then it was the only war they had…….

  11. Eskimo, was that a deliberate spelling error?
    I have a number of acquaintances and friends in Ontario who are descended from United Empire Loyalists and most have a dislike for the US, but do not mind shopping in Buffalo or vacationing in Florida. I suspect that most do not know why. Dislike of the US is also a natural part of the Liberal and NDP weltanschauung because the US is not socilaist enough for them.

  13. In my family album, I have a photo of my great-great-grandpappy in his Yankee uniform. My husband and I have been watching Ken Burns’ Civil War series on PBS, which gives an insight into the deep divisions in the American psyche which still reverberate today.
    I was struck by the literate and elegant use of the English language by soldiers writing home and posit something a friend pointed out the other day about our own lack of articulateness in these modern times.
    Nearly every one of those soldiers would have been a church going man, where they would have heard, week in, week out, the cadences of the Bible, of the most articulate Prayer Book if they were Anglican/Episcopalian, and the rhythms and themes of depth in the hymns.
    Here in Canada, our history is much tamer. As Hoarfrost points out, “We gained our independence gradually and peacefully for the most part” — in large part due to men like Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine, both of whom seem to be lost in the mists of time. The vast majority of Canadians have no idea who they are.
    Whatever people think about the USA, they’ve kept their history intact and remember and honour the men and women who have made their country great, something we have failed to do north of the 49th parallel. Unfortunately, when Pierre Elliot Trudeau took over, he and his henchmen did everything in their power to obliterate the British/Christian heritage of our country. They did no one a favour, as French-centric Canada has turned out to be a scandal and a scam for the ROC.

  14. I watch the Ken Burns series on the Civil War whenever it shows. It is indeed poignant, especially since, as Burns himself pointed out, he wanted the story told by the participants themselves through their words and their photographs. I think he succeeded.
    I agree with batb about the literacy and eloquence of the writing of the average individual of the day. In fairness, those letters may have been cherry picked exactly for those qualities, but I don’t think so. Educational standards have certainly slipped.
    I find a similar degradation has occurred when I read Thucydides “The Peloponesian War” vis a vis the standard of debate and oratory which he records. How close the rendering of the speeches is to actuality remains itself a topic of debate, but man, could those guys frame a rational argument! Would that the standard of political discourse today could return to that of 2500 years ago.

  15. I cannot explain the fascination of the US Civil War but it is obviously deep and wide-spread. I share it and so do many others judging by the comments here. I have read numerous books about the war, watched the Ken Burns series more than once and walked Civil War battlefields, including Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, Antietam and Spotsylvania.
    A little know fact about the war is that thousands of Canadians served in it — 50,000 by some estimates. Most joined the Union army but some also soldiered for the Confederacy. Several were awarded medals of honour.

  16. DrD, you concede the eloquence of many of the soldiers in their letters and attribute their elegant articulateness (is there such a word?) to higher educational standards which, at the time, would have been either in the home or in one-room school houses.
    I believe there’s more here than just higher educational standards. In those days, the church was most often the centre of society, it’s the place where everyone met every Sunday and in times of celebration and times of woe (“the day they drove old Dixie down, and all the bells were ringing”).
    The church and people’s faith were central to children’s education, something that our modern society has eschewed, much to our detriment, IMO.

  17. Like many here I watched the Ken Burns PBS docs last week. It struck me that Robert E Lee married George Washington’s grand daughter and in another clip FDR was addressing Civil War vets in 1938. The context of history is always fascinating.
    3 of my 4 grandparents came to Canada from the USA. A search revealed that 172 of my ancesters on my paternal side served in the Civil War. No country in its shoprt history has sacrificed more for its freedom than the USA.

  18. Batb, I don’t disagree with you. Wheresoever the articulateness derived, and indeed the church with its well-educated ministers setting the example would have been an important source, the leaders and educators in society strove for excellence in a way which seems to have been replaced with a dumbing down in the modern era. To our detriment? Definitely.

  19. I highly recommend people find Shelby Foote`s three book narrative. He was the pipe smoking Southern gentleman, who added much to Ken Burns documentary.His three books (approx. 2900 pages) is a well researched read. Humorous, filled with individuals stories`. This collection took twenty years to put together, in my opinion, well worth the time to read.

  20. DrD, I’m in agreement with your comment and I’m gratified that you don’t disagree with my previous comment.
    Sadly, this dumbing down you mention has been happening apace, having much to do with our neglect and forsaking of the faith of our forefathers and mothers. (I teach as well being a Christian and a regular church goer – they don’t always go hand in hand!)
    I make this point quite regularly, wherever I can, because religion – except for the protected Islam – has been downplayed, ridiculed, sidelined, and sent packing in Canada since the Trudeau regime. He and his francophone, atheistic/agnostic buddies attended the London School of Economics where they hatched the idea that Canada had to shed her British and Christian roots, in order to usher in a socialist society. This meant that Canada’s British and Christian heritage was relegated to the back of the bus, bringing all the others, Francophone and recently arrived visible minority immigrants, to the front.
    Forty years later we are witnessing the wasteland this scorch-earth policy, vis a vis our British and Christian past, has bequeathed to us. The dearth of Christianity in Canada (only 20% of Canadians attend church on a regular basis and the Christian God has been banned from the public educational system and the public square) is seldom cited as one of the reasons why there’s been a dumbing down of either educational or moral and ethical standards in: a definite intellectual deficit. If you don’t properly name or diagnose a malady, it continues to fester and, eventually, does great damage.

  21. happy infidel, years ago I became the grateful acquaintance of another book featuring Shelby Foote: The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy, both Southern gentlemen.
    From a review at Amazon.com: Mississippi has produced some of the nation’s finest literary voices, including Shelby Foote and Walker Percy.
    Foote spent much of his career reconstructing the Civil War in a 1.6 million-word trilogy (he was the smooth-drawling storyteller in Kenneth Burns’s television series on the conflict). Percy was a philosophical [Catholic Christian] novelist whose work includes The Moviegoer and The Thanatos Syndrome.
    Not only were the two friends, but they corresponded for years, leaving behind a series of letters unearthed by biographer Jay Tolson. Tolson, the author of an exhaustive book on Percy, Pilgrim in the Ruins, shows that, unlike other Southern writers such as William Faulkner, Foote and Percy always acted as quite decent fellows, Southerners with manners and brains.
    Well worth the read. I really liked the man Shelby Foote, quite apart from his talents as a writer!

  22. I earlier touched on the matter that THE WAR OF NORTHERN AGGRESSION was the first modern war. Industrialisation, especially in the north permitted the provision of the munitions neccessary to support the masses in the field and it was the first war in which railways played a major role.
    Note, many battles of THE WAR OF NORTHERN AGGRESSION involved much larger forces than THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO for example…..Napoleanic Armies survived largely by foraging,(living off the land) always only a day or less from starvation….’AN ARMY MARCHES ON IT’S STOMACH”…Napolean Bonoparte……
    Stonewall Jackson at the end of his successful Shenandoah Campaign withdrew to defend Richmond, on orders by means of rail.
    It is interesting to not that Jackson success, was largely due to his knowledge of the ground, settled early the general area had never been mapped, like areas further west. Outnumbered 3-1, with supply problems he none-the-less pined down and defeated 3 major armies.
    As far as Canadian involvement….note THE WAR OF NORTHERN AGGRESSION was the second civil war….the first being popularly titled the American Revolution. At that point in time, much of Canada was populated by UELs, which in principle were Americans.

  23. batb-
    PET and all other “progressives” always say they are in politics to usher in a “just” society, so labeling them as socialists actually does nothing to weaken them, politically. You have to expose the effects of their policies on individual persons,if you want to hurt them politically. Doing so always enrages them, because each of them is their own god,and infinitely superior in their own estimation, to those who disagree with them.

  24. sasquatch –
    You make some valid points about Jackson, and his fierceness as a general certainly helped the Confederacy, but Grant is considered by military historians as ( by far ) the most militarily important general of the war, being among other things, a supreme practitioner of maneuver warfare.
    He also was content to subordinate his judgement to that of Lincoln, unlike the monstrously egotistical McClellan, which, by his oath to defend the Constitution he was bound to do.
    The South was fortunate indeed to have chose Lee as their champion, because although he had a faulty view of war strategy that condemned the South to defeat, he had the grace and humility to sign a loyalty oath to the Union, once the war was over, which set an example that allowed his soldiers to do so without dishonor, and allowed them to move forward.

  25. batb & DrD:
    Another factor in the loss of eloquence has been the increased ease with which visual images can be produced and disseminated. Whether we like it or not, a single picture is indeed worth a thousand words, at least in most situations. This is demonstrated not only in film and TV but also in modern, image-based computer programs, where one can simply point at a desired action rather than having to describe it verbally from the keyboard.
    While an image-based culture acquires certain obvious efficiencies, I believe its citizens pay for that efficiency in the form of compromised brain development. Since I’m not a brain scientist, I could be seriously mistaken here, but intuitively I suspect that being forced to acquire and use language strengthens brain paths in ways that go far beyond mere verbalization.

  26. We should have retained all lands drained by the Great Lakes and by Hudson`s Bay. Canadian distrust was founded. Hoarfrost
    You are right that British war aims did not include the repatriation of the area formerly governed by the Quebec Act, or that the British used much scruple in colonial administration. ( The area ceded to Quebec under the Quebec act was originally granted to Virginia, New York, and Pennsylvania by their Royal charters, and the re-assignment of the territory to Quebec was done solely because it was felt expedient to British administration of Quebec.)
    Aside from their self-interestedness, the British actually weren’t in a good position to demand the territory described: The Battle of the Thames, the Battle of Plattsburgh, and the surrender of the British naval squadron on Lake Erie denied the British possession of those lands in the Great Lakes drainage basin, and general exhaustion with the war in Britain made a campaign to capture them unlikely.
    In international diplomacy of the time, lands generally were not ceded in peace treaties, unless they were under enemy occupation. As a practical matter, they could not have been regained the territory without a very big fight, which even the US Federalists, who opposed the war, would have joined with gusto.

  27. I suspect that you’re right, RSP. A perfect storm: Deprive children of hearing eloquent, articulate speech while, at the same time, introducing them to computers and all of the other technological gadgets they all want and mostly have and we rob them of speech and, into the bargain, their ability to think!
    Amazingly, I just opened the May edition of Vanity Fair (a failing of mine, I know), and there’s the old atheist, curmudgeon himself, Christopher Hitchens, agreeing with me about the Bible!
    For generations, the Tyndale/King James synthesis provided a common stock of allusions, rivaled only by Shakespeare in this respect.
    It’s near impossible to imagine our idiom and vernacular without phrasings such as “Eat, drink, and be merry,” “from strength to strength,” and “salt of the earth.”
    Most students these days have never heard anything from the Bible; they have no idea who the prodigal son is, let alone what prodigal means. A Good Samaritan? What’s that?

  28. Late to the conversation here but like many others, I find the Civil War to be a gripping topic.
    For me the civil wars begin with the 17th century British Civil Wars & the Glorious Revolution and include both the Revolutionary War & the Civil War.

  29. Too busy today to study the thread.
    ONLY to say, if you would like to de-romanticize the Civil War (aka The war between the states), check out two great revisionist history books by Thomas J. DiLorenzo: Hamilton’s Curse and The Real Lincoln which I have just finished reading. WOW.
    These offerings are not recommended for the myth-besotted; for the faint of heart! But if you’d like your history without the fairy tales, you’ll profit immensely from these.
    Here’s the link at mises.org showing the books.
    I shall now get Lincoln Unmasked, which I gather is much more detailed.

  30. Civil war is the worst kind. I pray God it never comes to that again in America or here.
    50,000 Canadians fought in that war.Considering Canada had a population of only 3,174,4429 (1861). The flower of our manhood fought. Most having relatives in the States, or for Black freedom, or states rights. Many authorities state that 29 Canadian-born men won the Medal of Honor in the US Civil War, but recent research has increased that number to 33. Undoubtedly, that number will increase as more attention is placed on the subject.In fact so many veterans coming home scared the English so bad, it wasn’t 2 years before Canada became a Nation. The Civil war has still made repercussions that still exist today.
    States rights for one are almost gone to fill a federal bottomless belly of power.
    The America of individual freedom with Constitutional Government they fought for, has mainly now ceased to exist. Sad.
    JMO

  31. I do agree with you Revnant Dream. A worse tragedy could never be foisted on any nation and in America, the Civil War undermined the Constitution. The only possible good accomplished was the freeing of slaves from ownership of another human. That abominable institution was destroying the idea of America. The war was not fought for the freedom of the enslaved; therein is the extended tragedy. Mid way through the war Lincoln freed the slaves in the Confederate states, later all slaves were granted freedom. The North had a huge population of starving Irish people to work to death and were not obligated to care for them if they could not work. Most southern and northern soldiers did not own slaves; northern soldiers were largely newly arrived conscripts and southern soldiers were defending their states from invaders.
    Slavery is the most evil of institutions, it should have never been tolerated. The Civil War was a terrible price to pay for turning a blind eye to such evil. Had it not been for the guilt, cooler heads would have solved the money issues and trade wars in a far less destructive manner, IMO. Slavery was the black mark on the glorious beginning and creation of The United States of America.

  32. As both an educator and observant Christian, I agree altogether with batb’s overall analysis here—and RSP’s observations re our visual, popular culture and the detrimental effects it’s had on spoken and written language.
    Re language acquisition and usage, I happened to have very much the same conversation, just yesterday, with a music educator. I said that the computer and TV age has definitely dumbed down our kids’ abilities to express coherent ideas in fluent language. In this regard, the contrast with the Civil War soldiers’ letters home—which my husband and I also noted—is striking. And the music educator, who is very young, seemed doubtful about my pessimistic diagnosis of our children’s language deficits: being right in the middle of the visual, computer age and knowing nothing different, this intelligent young person is, unfortunately, like the lobster in the pot that doesn’t notice the water getting hotter and hotter.
    Language is the vehicle of thought. As the language goes, so goes the culture. Woe are we!!

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