150th Anniversary of the Civil War

And for some reason in a window at the caretaker's cabin of a nearby cemetery in northeast Pennsylvania.

 

A lot of people don't realize that a lot of the worst atrocities of the march were Union troops making unauthorized retaliation for what they discovered at Andersonville. Women in Georgia who asked Sherman for a guard for their homes were almost always accommodated.

Sherman wasn't perfect and some awful things happened on the march (against his orders, though sometimes somewhat tolerated for a variety of reasons), but he's a legendary villain in the South, which is too simplistic and unfair.

The Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy who curse Sherman are like a man who walks over and punches his neighbor in the face and then whines and calls the neighbor a jerk after he beats him up.

 

It was realistically never going to happen, but interesting to consider the what if had Lee accepted Lincoln's offer. Probably a much, much shorter war if he running the show for the Union as opposed to how he and Jackson were basically kicking McClellan's ass all over the eastern seaboard.

 

Lincoln: "If General McClellan does not want to use the army, I would like to borrow it for a time."

 

Some of the pictures of 14-year-old shoeless boys with Confederate rifles, dead in ditches, really hit home as to how terrible this war was. Read "Andersonville," then read "Against All Hope" by Armondo Valladares about Castro's political prisons. The similarities are frightening. The fact that they still hold political prisoners in Cuba, in these kinds of conditions, boggles the mind.

 

Too bad that's not what happened.

As has been pointed out, McClellan always found an excuse to delay attacking. In fact, barring a complete catastrophe, it would have been better for the North if McClellan had sucked more early on. Then a change would have been made sooner.

I like to think of this war as the bid to transfer civilization from an area that had it to an area that did not. Unfortunately, that effort failed.

 

While I agree that McClellan was an idiot and a coward, I don't think he was running the show at Fredericksburg. That was Ambrose Burnside, who made the genius decision to send most of his forces on a suicidal charge across open ground toward the Confederates, who were safely arranged in the heights above town.

I think you mean Antietam. McClellan was in charge there, and could have stomped Lee. But he froze up and let Lee escape.

 

At what point does the USA get past the Civil War? Do the English still celebrate — and argue about — their Civil War from the 1650s?

Of course, it would help if a certain segment of our population accepted the fact the war is over, and not at halftime.

 

Yeah, Fredericksburg was Burnside. That catastrophe and some backstabbing within the army led to Hooker taking over and the battle of Chancellorsville.

 

I'm calling Howard Zinn to settle this, but for some reason he's not answering his phone.

 

I believe McClellan's major issue was by 1862, he was already more concerned with wanting to be president in 1864 than the actual job at hand.