Al Murray
Sergeant
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2015
- Location
- West Virginia
From another thread "Secession and why the war happened":
When this started for me 21/2 years ago I thought hundreds of hours might do it. Not so interested in who was morally/legally right, the objective was to find out why the parties of 1861 (the "right" ones and the "wrong" ones) would take the positions that they did and why they would act as they did. They were operating in a context. It is not surprising that they were debating the Constitution and AOC, but there is more.
One of many surprises was during the arguments over Mexico people were saying that it was "going to go the way of Poland." That also goes back to the late 18th century, which they would have seen as we see the early 20th. "Jacobins" was another term they would throw about, again in reference to the 18th century. When conservatives used terms like "Puritan fanatics" it begs the question "what was a Puritan and why were they fanatics?" Now its back to the 17th century. People on both sides had read the Burke/Paine debates, and these refer back to the Glorious Revolution which grew out of the English Civil Wars which in turn grew partly out of struggles in England between these "Puritan fanatics" and the monarchy/ high church men. Without the Reformation there would have been no "Puritan fanatics" and when one reads the story of and declarations by the rebels in the Peasant's Revolt of 1525 in Germany (who Luther hated) some sound similar to those used in Antebellum America. Now back to the 16th century. People used the Bible to both condemn and justify slavery, but were they right? Hard to say when both sides at times could use the same passage and interpret it as they liked. Theological issues aside, the movement of Jesus of Nazareth was one of many at the time in resistance to Roman occupation of the eastern Mediterranean which occupation the people there saw as a usurpation of their rights.
I started this thinking that the ACW was some kind of struggle between labor systems, constitutional issues, or lifestyles between two sections of a single polity. And of course it was. But it seems also to be a chapter in a much larger struggle between what we might loosely term the "left" and "right" that started when feudalism began to crack (now back to the 15th century) and that we still grapple with today. Am I wrong on this?
I didn't count them as I went but I would bet I have some number of thousands of hours in this, and understand it better now, being left with a lot (maybe thousands of hours more) of learning ahead.
When this started for me 21/2 years ago I thought hundreds of hours might do it. Not so interested in who was morally/legally right, the objective was to find out why the parties of 1861 (the "right" ones and the "wrong" ones) would take the positions that they did and why they would act as they did. They were operating in a context. It is not surprising that they were debating the Constitution and AOC, but there is more.
One of many surprises was during the arguments over Mexico people were saying that it was "going to go the way of Poland." That also goes back to the late 18th century, which they would have seen as we see the early 20th. "Jacobins" was another term they would throw about, again in reference to the 18th century. When conservatives used terms like "Puritan fanatics" it begs the question "what was a Puritan and why were they fanatics?" Now its back to the 17th century. People on both sides had read the Burke/Paine debates, and these refer back to the Glorious Revolution which grew out of the English Civil Wars which in turn grew partly out of struggles in England between these "Puritan fanatics" and the monarchy/ high church men. Without the Reformation there would have been no "Puritan fanatics" and when one reads the story of and declarations by the rebels in the Peasant's Revolt of 1525 in Germany (who Luther hated) some sound similar to those used in Antebellum America. Now back to the 16th century. People used the Bible to both condemn and justify slavery, but were they right? Hard to say when both sides at times could use the same passage and interpret it as they liked. Theological issues aside, the movement of Jesus of Nazareth was one of many at the time in resistance to Roman occupation of the eastern Mediterranean which occupation the people there saw as a usurpation of their rights.
I started this thinking that the ACW was some kind of struggle between labor systems, constitutional issues, or lifestyles between two sections of a single polity. And of course it was. But it seems also to be a chapter in a much larger struggle between what we might loosely term the "left" and "right" that started when feudalism began to crack (now back to the 15th century) and that we still grapple with today. Am I wrong on this?
I didn't count them as I went but I would bet I have some number of thousands of hours in this, and understand it better now, being left with a lot (maybe thousands of hours more) of learning ahead.
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