High life | 16 April 2011

New York

On Tuesday last, 12 April, 150 years ago, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces fired the first shots on Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbour, South Carolina. The bombardment lasted 36 hours, with Fort Sumter occasionally replying with fire of its own. Then the white flag went up and the Union troops within the fort surrendered. Not a single man had a scratch on either side. It looked as if both sides had gangs fighting that couldn’t shoot straight. If only.

In the next four years, 620,000 American lives were lost, from Bull Run to Petersburg, before the unequal contest came to an end at Appomattox, Virginia, in 1865. The figure 620,000 is a hell of a number of dead soldiers among an American population which stood at 31 million in total. Eleven slave-holding states withdrew from the Union to form the Confederate States of America over states’ rights, and Abe Lincoln pursued the war between brothers unrelentingly and in a sea of blood.

As a University of Virginia man — The University, as it’s called by native Virginians — I have always sided with the south, and not because of Gone with the Wind romanticism, either. What I learn as I get older is that, like most wars, the Civil War was pursued by so-called honest Abe because big northern business wanted to conduct big business in the Union. They wanted to build railroads and wanted interstate roads and access to markets. The south wished to remain sleepy and agricultural. Slavery did not become an issue until two years after the first shots over Fort Sumter. But that’s not what we were taught when we were young. No, siree, it was all about slavery, they told us, and woe to those who had actually been correctly taught and knew the true nature of the contest.