What's in a name? Civil War, War of Rebellion, War Between the States & War of Southern Independence

E_just_E

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This is not meant to be an in-depth discussion on the subject by any means. More like sharing some data I thought interesting. Was at google books Ngram Viewer for something else this morning and the thought of checking out the prevalence of the different names of the ACW crossed my mind, so I did it.

If you are not familiar with the tool, the Ngram Viewer is an analytic tool that looks at different sets of books (preloaded) for different time periods, calculates the percentage a particular word or phase occurs in that data set, and graphs it. The data set I used was American English books from 1850 on. Here is the prevalence of each of the four descriptors (click to make bigger) :

20899591686_53cf24b506_o.jpg


Pretty fascinating that the term War of Rebellion was used actually more than the term Civil War, until about 1890 or so (caveat, these graphs describe all times those terms are used in a book and not exclusively to describe the ACW e.g. the Chinese Civil War and the Rebellion of Slaves in Rome, will also get hits, but I assume that a. the noise is the same for both terms and b. in the American English dataset shown, the term will primarily used for the ACW, so I assume noise <<< real data)

The volume of the War Between the States, and the War of Southern Independence is really low in comparison, but looks like there is a bump, so I searched just with those 2 terms to reduce the Y axis:

20739096409_474251a7d8_o.jpg


I think that the Southern Independence bump is very interesting in that it looks like the term was exclusively used contemporarily, during the War and then dropped. I suspect that the subsequent higher marks are for the publishing and republishing of memoirs and diaries of the War Era.

The Between the States curve is much more interesting and should that the term was really not much around until the 1920s and peaked during WWII. Hard to interpret this one, because I suspect that it catches up WWII and European States references, even in the American Sources...

Thought it was fun and wanted to share...
 
This is not meant to be an in-depth discussion on the subject by any means. More like sharing some data I thought interesting. Was at google books Ngram Viewer for something else this morning and the thought of checking out the prevalence of the different names of the ACW crossed my mind, so I did it.

If you are not familiar with the tool, the Ngram Viewer is an analytic tool that looks at different sets of books (preloaded) for different time periods, calculates the percentage a particular word or phase occurs in that data set, and graphs it. The data set I used was American English books from 1850 on. Here is the prevalence of each of the four descriptors (click to make bigger) :

20899591686_53cf24b506_o.jpg


Pretty fascinating that the term War of Rebellion was used actually more than the term Civil War, until about 1890 or so (caveat, these graphs describe all times those terms are used in a book and not exclusively to describe the ACW e.g. the Chinese Civil War and the Rebellion of Slaves in Rome, will also get hits, but I assume that a. the noise is the same for both terms and b. in the American English dataset shown, the term will primarily used for the ACW, so I assume noise <<< real data)

The volume of the War Between the States, and the War of Southern Independence is really low in comparison, but looks like there is a bump, so I searched just with those 2 terms to reduce the Y axis:

20739096409_474251a7d8_o.jpg


I think that the Southern Independence bump is very interesting in that it looks like the term was exclusively used contemporarily, during the War and then dropped. I suspect that the subsequent higher marks are for the publishing and republishing of memoirs and diaries of the War Era.

The Between the States curve is much more interesting and should that the term was really not much around until the 1920s and peaked during WWII. Hard to interpret this one, because I suspect that it catches up WWII and European States references, even in the American Sources...

Thought it was fun and wanted to share...

That is a very interesting post E. Several years ago, I was on vacation in Maine and saw a Civil War monument which used the term "War of Rebellion". There have been various names given to the conflict through the years which is very interesting. Even though the war concluded 150 years ago, there is still a debate about what the conflict should be called.
 
Not to mention that's what Lincoln called it (albeit uncapitalized) in the Gettysburg Address, probably the most-widely-known quote or short speech of the war.

"Civil War" would also have resounded with people with a classical education (i.e., most people with advanced education) as that was the standard term for the internal wars that rocked the late Roman Republic.
 
You are absolutely correct. Now that I'm thinking about it, it would be interesting to learn how that term came to be used, not just for the American CW but all others (Spanish CW, Russian CW).

Mark touched on it in post #5. In latin the expression bellum civile was used to describe war between 2 different fractions in the same "country". One of its first uses was here.

Civil War is its translation in English c16xx when lots of Latin texts were translated in English.

Nothing to do with "civil" as in "civil behavior", other than linguistic relations, sharing the same latin root (as does Civics and Civilization, of which this "civil" as in "civilized" derives)

As far as other old languages, in Greek the term that was used was emphylios that loosely translates as "between friends", to describe such wars (polemos) . In Chinese is nei jan which means "inside/inner war"
 
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Civilization - the art of living in cities. Civitas - the Latin equivalent of the Greek polis, 'city-state.' In this, a "civil war" is a "war between or among city-states"...
 
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