Of course it's relevant!

I have been asked several times why I believe the study of the American Civil War is really relevant to Americans today. The questioners usually emphasize that the war happened 150 years ago and like to challenge my idea that history can teach us if we listen.

It would be easy to lean on the old (and accurate) lecture about the importance of learning from the past. That’s what I was told when I was a kid and it is as true now as it was when my parents recited that same lecture to me. There are lessons to be learned from the study of history.

Every grade school student has to study history sooner or later, but nobody ever seems to learn from it.

But, and here I return to the original premise of the blog, I have a very personal reason for studying the Civil War. The reasoning is so flawless that I am amazed that nobody else has thought of this before.

The reasoning here is a wad of stunning simplicity: Had the Civil War concluded differently in any way than the way it did, I would not have been born.

We will not debate here whether a SpeedyLee-less world would be a bad thing or not, although I am sure you can understand that my point of view is clear on the matter.

All of us have 16 great, great grandparents. Of the 16, eight must be great, great grandfathers. Check your biology books. You’ll see it’s true. You’ll also see that, without any one of your eight great, great grandfathers, you wouldn’t be here. That’s bad news because I’d hate to lose your readership.

Statistics in hand, we now turn to genealogy. Of my eight great, great grandfathers, three served in the military during the Civil War. All three survived the war, though two suffered severe wounds.

Further, one of my parents was born in the Deep South, a former Confederate state. For a variety of reasons that are unimportant here, it is reasonable to assume that my parents would not have met if the Confederate states had won independence from the Union.

I would challenge anyone that doubts the value of the continued study of the Civil War to do a simple self test: Check into your own family history. Discover whether you have an ancestor that fought in the Civil War. How might your family tree have changed with a different ending to the war?

And when you finish with all that, ask yourself if the study of the American Civil War is relevant today.

Thanks for reading.