#The American Civil War

[wilde-shit-posting]

Someone needs to make an alignment chart with:

-the frev people

-the Victorian author nerds (*cough* oscar wilde stans)

-the American Civil War people

-the hippie culture people who make silly jokes about how The Beatles, The Monkees, Elton John, David Bowie, and The Rolling Stones were all in some kind of unspoken polycule.

Because we're all some kind of unhinged I just can't put my thumb on it

[ckc4me]

LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD: ROMANCE IN TIME OF CIVIL WAR

A Union soldier returns home for the Holidays on furlough, greeted by his loving wife. Harpers Weekly. In Art, Literature and Music, the 1860’s were the very pinnacle of the Age of Romanticism. The spirit of the times allowed free rein to a whole host of human emotions, and men were not thought weak or effeminate if they dared express their emotions freely in public. In the Age of Romanticism,…

[moonmausoleum]

Pegue’s Ghost in the Abandoned Antebellum Cahawba Town

The ghost town of Cahawba is a remnant of southern antebellum life that died with the Civil War. It is said that the former state capital still has some ghosts living in Cahawba Town the rest of the world abandoned.

The ghost town of Cahawba is a remnant of southern antebellum life that died with the Civil War. It is said that the former state capital still has some ghosts living in Cahawba Town the rest of the world abandoned. Along the confluence of the Cahaba and Alabama rivers lies Cahawba, Alabama’s first state capital and one of its most haunted places if we are to believe the legends. Established in…

[the-random-sentence-library]

"He became president of the Selma, Marion, & Memphis Railroad, which failed."

Quote selected at random from page 392 of Neil Kagan and Stephen G. Hyslop's nonfiction book Eyewitness to the Civil War: The Complete History from Secession to Reconstruction.

Additional notes: "He" refers to former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Quote was selected at random from a book chosen at random from my local library.

[liberty1776]

Nikki Haley was right, poor soul. The “Civil War” was not about slavery, until Lincoln in his Gettysburg address tried to make it so. Why not believe Lincoln in his first Inaugural Address in 1861, where he says that he had “no right…and no inclination” to end slavery”—in fact he supported an amendment passed by Congress in 1861 that said the  Federal government should never have “the power to abolish or interfere” with slavery where it existed.  His only interest was in making sure the country stayed whole and undivided, and seeing that “the Union of these states is perpetual” … Continue reading →

[originalleftist]

This is a subject which is very close to my heart, as my user name probably suggests.

The terms "Left" and "Right" in politics originated in Revolutionary France, where the left side of the National Assembly opposed the monarchy, and the right side supported it. I would say, therefore, that the political Left, while as full of contradictions and hypocrisies as any other large ideology or movement from its inception, originated in the French Revolution as anti-monarchist, while the Right was pro-monarchist. More broadly, the Left is sometimes defined as opposition to hierarchy, and I would say especially hereditary privilege-to aristocracy, or aristocracy by another name-while the Right supports the maintenance of such privilege.

Thus, while support for violence is perhaps not inherently contradictory for a Leftist (though there have always been disagreements on how widely it should be employed, despite the French Revolution now being remembered mainly for the guillotine and the Reign of Terror), placing some people above others, particularly on the basis of what they were born as, or born into, absolutely is- at least if "Leftist" is to have any meaning at all.

Anti-Semitism on the Left, therefore, is like any form of racism inherently a contradiction in my view- it divides people into classes, and places some people above others based on their ethnicity/heritage.

Support for non-Western authoritarian regimes (ie the "tankies") is contradictory as well, in that those regimes frequently uphold a ruling class, and engage in imperialist ventures against other nations- again, placing some people above others on the basis of their origins.

The use of violent revolution is, I would say, not inherently a contradiction for a Leftist, but in practice often becomes so. The reason for this is that contrary to the fantasies of "The Revolution", the reality through history is that the horror of war tends to fall disproportionately not on the rich and powerful, but on those who are already vulnerable, and also to result in entire groups of people being targeted for collective punishment or destruction. Thus, warfare in any form tends to reinforce, not alleviate, class hierarchies, at least in the short term. Examples of warfare overturning such hierarchies may be found, of course, such as the abolition of slavery due to the American Civil War, though even these results, as positive as the are, are likely to be mixed success, or see one form of oppression replaced with another (such as the replacement of chattel slavery with Jim Crow and the modern prison-industrial complex).

Just to be extra clear—when I talk about how raging antisemites/bloodthirsty tankies/Glorious Revolution LARPers etc are "supposed leftists" or "shitty progressives", I don't mean it in a No True Scotsman way. I mean that our movement is, unfortunately, beset with members who claim to espouse certain views (compassion, truth, justice, kindness, the bettering of the human condition) and then act in a way that is vicious, conspiratorial, unjust and cruel and explicitly crow about their desire to make things worse for humans (but it's okay because they're the BAD humans, see)

It's not that shitty leftists aren't really leftists. It's that shitty leftists' actions contradict their stated morals and they're really, really bad at furthering the goals they claim they want to further.

[dandelion-de-deus]

W O W

[dosesofcommonsense]

[reasonsforhope]

"South Carolina is preparing to put up its first individual statue for an African American on its Statehouse lawn, honoring a man who put on Confederate clothes in order to steal a slaveholder’s ship and sail his family and a dozen others to freedom during the Civil War.

But Robert Smalls isn’t just being honored for his audacious escape. He spent a decade in the US House, helped rewrite South Carolina’s constitution to allow Black men equality after the Civil War and then put up a valiant but doomed fight when racists returned to power and eliminated nearly all of the gains Smalls fought for.

State Rep. Jermaine Johnson can’t wait to bring his children to the Statehouse to finally see someone who is Black like them being honored.

“The man has done so many great things, it’s just a travesty he has not been honored until now. Heck, it’s also a travesty there isn’t some big Hollywood movie out there about his life,” said Johnson, a Democrat from a district just a few miles from the Statehouse.

The idea for a statue to Smalls has been percolating for years. But there was always quiet opposition preventing a bill from getting a hearing. That changed in 2024 as the proposal made it unanimously through the state House and Senate on the back of Republican Rep. Brandon Cox of Goose Creek.

“South Carolina is a great state. We’ve got a lot of history, good and bad. This is our good history,” Cox said.

What will the Robert Smalls memorial look like?

The bill created a special committee that has until January 15 to come up with a design, a location on the Statehouse lawn and the money to pay for whatever memorial they choose.

But supporters face a challenging question: What best honors Smalls?

If it’s just one statue, is it best to honor the steel-nerved ship pilot who waited for all the white crew to leave, then mimicked hand signals and whistle toots to get through Confederate checkpoints, while hoping Confederate soldiers didn’t notice a Black man under the hat in the pale moonlight in May 1862?

Or would a more fitting tribute to Smalls be to recognize the statesman who served in the South Carolina House and Senate and the US House after the Civil War? Smalls bought his master’s house in Beaufort in part with money made for turning the Confederate ship over to Union forces, then allowed the man’s penniless wife to live there when she was widowed.

Or is the elder Smalls who fought for education for all and to keep the gains African Americans made during the Civil War the man most worth publicly memorializing? Smalls would see a new constitution in 1895 wipe out African Americans’ right to vote. He was fired from his federal customs collector job in 1913 when then President Woodrow Wilson purged a large number of Black men out of government jobs.

Or would it be best to combine them all in some way? That’s how Republican Rep. Chip Campsen, an occasional ship pilot himself, sees honoring one of his favorite South Carolinians.

“The best way to sum up Robert Smalls’ life is it was a fight for freedom as a slave, as a pilot and as a statesman,” Campsen said."

-via AP, Octtober 23, 2024

[alwaysbewoke]

wow. "chiquita" and "death squads" are not things i expected to see in the same sentence.

[kornwulf]

If you know me, you know one of my favorite things is low stakes historical mysteries. The one I'm currently enamoured with is this thing

It's referred to as the Bayou St. John Submarine. We know it was found by a dredge deepening Bayou St. John outside of New Orleans in 1878, and then dragged out of the water... And that's pretty much it. For about a century it was thought to be a different submarine named the Pioneer, which was a prototype for the infamous, ill fated Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley.

However, it's features do not square in the slightest with the surviving documentation we have on the Pioneer, which, when combined with period newspaper reports that the Pioneer was scrapped in 1868, means it's now widely held that it's an *entirely different* Confederate submarine *also* built in New Orleans during the civil war, which as far as anyone can find doesn't appear in the historical record anywhere prior to its (re?)discovery in 1878.

So what we're left with is an intriguing shipwreck, with absolutely no knowledge as to how, when, and why it was built, or by whom.

[baebeylik]

Afternoon Dress. American. 1865.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

[moonmausoleum]

Bloody Lane's Ghostly Echoes at Antietam National Battlefield

The Battle of Antietam was one of the bloodiest battles during the American Civil War and has been made into a memorial place called Antietam National Battlefield thought to be haunted by the fallen soldiers.

The Battle of Antietam was one of the bloodiest battles during the American Civil War and has been made into a memorial place called Antietam National Battlefield. Ever since that bloody day it has been said to have been haunted by the ghosts of the fallen soldiers. There are many spots said to be haunted, but none more than the Bloody Lane.  In the quiet expanse of Antietam National Battlefield…

[daguerreotyping]

Carte de visite of a dashing young Union soldier with pomade in his hair and worry in his eyes, c. 1861-65