Trotsky once defined a social revolution as one that transferred property from one social class to another. The property in slaves was transferred from the planters to themselves. The Civil War was a great revolution, the true foundation of our nation and its freedoms. All freedoms are ultimately traceable to revolutions (and wars of liberation against invaders,) not to the military and its absurd claims that our freedsome somehow depends on the dead bodies it leaves thousands of miles away. The ceaseless attempts to rewrite the history of the Civil War are attacks on freedom. Any handful of black men in the Confederate Army is nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands who fled and the hundreds of thousands who fought.
The black man fighting for the Confederacy was in the movie Ride with the Devil. The director Ang Lee depicted this as a personal friendship and the man was showed to immediately quit at the death of his friend. The Unionist North was treated very much like the Chinese Communists fighting agains the Nationalists. This was inadvertently appropriate as the Union was indeed fighting a revolutionary cause. As befit a Taiwanese/Hollywood director, however, his sympathies were with the South, even if not his better judgment. Firefly fans might be interested to catch this movie for an artistic treatment of Firefly's themes.
In the movie Gangs of New York, the draft riots (at the same time as Gettysburg) were treated as poor men rising up against oppressor. "A rich man's war, a poor man's fight!" The Southern fight for slavery was a rich man's war, but the Union fight was a fight against slavery. The slogan and its faux-populist outrage were cheap falsehoods. I've never understood why people admire Martin Scorsese.
Revolutions don't terminate neatly. The forces of reaction always take advantage of the exhaustion of the combatants to restore as much of the old ways as compatible with the fundamentally changed balance of forces. If this series is going to follow up post war, it needs to consider the impeachment of Andrew Johnson (a great lost opportunity!
) and the battles of Reconstruction. If on the other hand, like John Adams, it is primarily a biography, it should be written as such.
PS Mr. Coates probably would find the New York City draft riots unedifying, but the question of why the Federal government didn't seek and punish the perpetrators and break up the political base is a deeply fascinating one. This failure presaged the ultimate failure of Reconstruction, I think. Lincoln was in many respects a deeply conservative man (most clearly signalled I think in his long insistence that the key to victory was to kill off the rebel army,) a corporation lawyer in ruthless times. Despite his adamant commitment to ending slavery by strangling its territorial expansion, his legalism prevented him from contemplating other means, means that would have fundamentally changed things, until the exigencies of the situtation forced him too. Retroactively this has been dubbed political genius, the refusal to move until he had the support for victory.
The black man fighting for the Confederacy was in the movie Ride with the Devil. The director Ang Lee depicted this as a personal friendship and the man was showed to immediately quit at the death of his friend. The Unionist North was treated very much like the Chinese Communists fighting agains the Nationalists. This was inadvertently appropriate as the Union was indeed fighting a revolutionary cause. As befit a Taiwanese/Hollywood director, however, his sympathies were with the South, even if not his better judgment. Firefly fans might be interested to catch this movie for an artistic treatment of Firefly's themes.
In the movie Gangs of New York, the draft riots (at the same time as Gettysburg) were treated as poor men rising up against oppressor. "A rich man's war, a poor man's fight!" The Southern fight for slavery was a rich man's war, but the Union fight was a fight against slavery. The slogan and its faux-populist outrage were cheap falsehoods. I've never understood why people admire Martin Scorsese.
Revolutions don't terminate neatly. The forces of reaction always take advantage of the exhaustion of the combatants to restore as much of the old ways as compatible with the fundamentally changed balance of forces. If this series is going to follow up post war, it needs to consider the impeachment of Andrew Johnson (a great lost opportunity!
) and the battles of Reconstruction. If on the other hand, like John Adams, it is primarily a biography, it should be written as such.PS Mr. Coates probably would find the New York City draft riots unedifying, but the question of why the Federal government didn't seek and punish the perpetrators and break up the political base is a deeply fascinating one. This failure presaged the ultimate failure of Reconstruction, I think. Lincoln was in many respects a deeply conservative man (most clearly signalled I think in his long insistence that the key to victory was to kill off the rebel army,) a corporation lawyer in ruthless times. Despite his adamant commitment to ending slavery by strangling its territorial expansion, his legalism prevented him from contemplating other means, means that would have fundamentally changed things, until the exigencies of the situtation forced him too. Retroactively this has been dubbed political genius, the refusal to move until he had the support for victory.
Clearly a subject that people are very interested in and very passionate about.
