Your loyal blogger
recently finished Susannah Ural’s excellent book, “Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades,” an outstanding research piece about
the impact of war on the lives of people living during the Civil War era.
The book is very good but this is not
a book review. Perhaps this is a reflection prompted by reading the book.
The Civil War is a people story. All
wars are the same in that respect. In the case of the War Between the States,
the people are fascinating. Ural’s book is a classic example of that simple
fact.
When we forget that it was people who
had to fight the war or otherwise live through the era, we forget what really
mattered: People were freed from
enslavement because of the war. People
fought, bled and died on the battlefields. People
died of disease in the army. People
had to rebuild shattered lives and live with battered minds and bodies after
the war. People lost loved ones in
the fighting and many people lost
their livelihoods.
Of course, it was people who started the war and people
who went to war eagerly, expecting a short war with plenty of glory to go
around.
This writer took a history class in
college a few decades ago. Two fellow students, big fans of computerized war games
(such as they were at the time), approached the professor after a lecture and
gleefully explained how they had fought the same battle in their game that the
professor lectured about that day.
The losing general, they explained to
the professor, could have won the day by making some sort of movement. “He’d
have only lost a few thousand more men,” the war gamers said.
A few thousand lives, thought yours truly. A few thousand lives.
Your loyal blogger is fond of studying
the battlefield. What happened? Who made the key decision? Why was the decision reached? And how did those men, the ordinary grunts,
keep moving in the face of mortal danger?
When you have the answers to those
questions, you have a story about people. If you miss that central fact, then
you simply don’t understand history.
And you’ll never learn from it.
