The Civil War is Over

Shelby Foote's Civil War trilogy is over, read, absorbed-ish. What a fantastic writer. He covers every battle, but it never becomes "then they went here, then they went there; 1500 killed, maimed, captured." He tells you all that stuff, but he tries to make the leading characters real. It helps that they were real. Another thing is that Foote is/was a Southerner. He understands the Southern point of view in this conflict. It is far to easy to look at them in a bad way, since they lost and all. And they supported slavery and all. And they attacked first and all.  

In fact, on that slavery issue, they had a really hard time at the end of the war. There were just not any men left to fight.  They'd already called on boys and old men. What they had left was slaves and the North was using free black men to fight.  The South had a dilemma. If the slaves were allowed to fight white Northerners, maybe they would come back and fight white Southerners. Oh what a tangled web we weave.

Another interesting story about black soldiers relates to an attack on a fort. One of the Northerners had a really good idea to build a tunnel under the impregnable fort then load it with explosives. The General wanted to send in the black troops first for a reason I don't remember. But the folks above him thought that would be seen as exploiting those troops. The problem was, the general had spent a lot of time instructing the troops on how to enter the damaged fort. One couldn't stay in the huge pit created by the blast, one had to rush out of the tunnel and fan out at the top. The white troops who eventually entered the fort first didn't know that. They stayed in the crater and the Southerners had time to regroup. By the time the black troops came through and tried their dispersing technique, they were killed just like all the white troops that went before them. And we still do silly stuff like that. That's how being politically correct gets such a bad name.

Did you see the concert on Sunday night?  Too cool. It was hard not to sing along with many of those old songs. I'm so happy that Eric and Cindy have HBO and DVR so I can watch it whenever I want. Loved Jamie Foxx's impersonation of Obama. He has him nailed. And Garth Brooks was crazy cool. Tomorrow is inauguration day. I wonder what those Southerners would have thought if they had only known.