The US Civil War

Last year was the 150^th anniversary of the start of the US Civil war and we visited Shiloh, Gettysburg and Bull Run, scenes of some of the war’s most famous battles.  There is something deeply disturbing about a civil war where a nation turns upon itself, often with terrifying savagery, and so it was with the US Civil war that began in 1861. Yet, it stands part from so many other such wars, not so much for how it was conducted, but how it concluded and how that shaped not just the future of the USA, but arguably the entire world.

 Unlike so many civil wars that leave their bitter legacies and hates to be transmitted down through future generations, occasionally even bubbling to the surface in renewed conflict (the Balkans), the US civil war concluded in a quite remarkable fashion considering the virtual charnel house of death and slaughter it had become, with over 620 000 soldiers dying and untold havoc being wreaked upon the citizens of the affected states.  That this remarkable ending was possible at all was down to President Lincoln’s overwhelming desire, even during the darkest days of the conflict, for national reconciliation (certainly not shared by all those in his own Gov’t). In this Lincoln was fully supported by two key Union generals, namely US Grant, himself a future president, and WT Sherman (who had terrorised Georgia and the Carolinas in 1865 with his march through those states), both of whom who concluded quite dramatically generous surrenders with their southern opponents. In the case of Sherman this was at great political risk to himself when he accepted Confederate General Joe Johnson’s surrender after Lincoln’s assassination by John Wilkes Booth, a Southern sympathiser. Such was the bond between Sherman and Johnson that 26 years later Johnson was a pallbearer at Sherman’s funeral, one month before his own death.

But this remarkably sane, far-sighted approach was matched by key figures in the South, who took their lead from their iconic hero, General Lee. The scourge of many Northern armies in war, at the critical moment it was Lee who, against the wishes of the Confederate President (Davis), prevented his  Army of Northern Virginia leading the South into years of guerrilla warfare, which could have had devastating implications for the future unity of the entire USA. Instead he matched Lincoln’s desire for reconciliation in deed, both in the manner of the surrender and the peaceful disarming of his army (and with it any real Southern prospect of a continuing guerrilla struggle) and thereafter by personal example in how he then lived out the few remaining years of his life.

Such dramatically reconciled endings to wars of great savagery are very rare. That it happened as it did, now looking back 150 years, conceals from us just how improbable such a scenario was at the time, and how it all turned on the enlightened outlooks and actions of such a frighteningly small handful of individuals. This is even more remarkable given that the most important figure in all this, Lincoln, was assassinated before all the Southern armies had even surrendered, which left the hopes for a reconciled peace hanging by the barest of threads in the chaotic, febrile atmosphere of the last few weeks of the war in 1865.

This is not to deny there was terrible post war hardship in the South and great mourning across the entire country for the loss of life. Likewise, Southern resentment at the wars’ outcome even today is not completely absent. Yet, within a few decades, the US was fighting as a single, united nation in the 1^st World War, and thereafter in the 2^nd World War, where such involvement was ultimately pivotal to the future of a free western Europe. Thereafter the USA went on to become the world’s most powerful country and one of its greatest democracies. Had the South won, or, more likely, been able to force a bitter, resentful truce, a deeply wounded, highly polarised nation and a dramatically weakened country split in two would probably have emerged, unable to realise its potential or wield the strength it does today. This would inevitably have affected its involvement, even its participation, in both world wars. Conceivably, it could have meant an Imperial Japan dominating Asia today, no D-Day invasion and the Iron Curtain quite probably being drawn across Europe along the coast of France.

Perhaps, nearly 150 years on, we are yet to appreciate the impact that the civil war in America had on the world in which we find ourselves today and the lives we lead within in it.

  Visit civil war photo gallery