military history

I know, as soon as I said I was going to post more often, I hit a 60-odd hour workweek and couldn't find the time to read, much less post. Hopefully this week will calm down a little. Afterall, it's a month tomorrow that I push off.

Before I started planning this trip, most of what I knew of the war was political. I knew Lincoln and his administration, I knew the series of failed Congressional compromises and the shifting of the major parties that led to secession and war. I knew the political strategies Lincoln employed in conducting the war. And I knew some of the economic and international considerations both the Union government and that of the Confederacy had to take into account.

And to be sure, I knew Grant, McClellan, Sherman and Lee and Jackson. But I didn't know what they did. And though I knew it was considered the first modern war due to its timing at the birth of the Industrial Revolution, I didn't know what that meant. Now, through Ken Burns and Shelby Foote and Stephen Oates, I'm starting to understand the military operations of the war, the way it was conducted, the maneuvers, and the people who fought it.

Ever since college I've studied American history from Washington and the homefront. I've been intrigued by war, but only by the personal narrative of the grunt because it's social and cultural history that I fall for, which is afterall only the collective personal history of the everyman. I follow the most basic movements in Washington insofar as they have effect on the average American's life. And I follow war because it moves people and it changes the way people live and the things they live for. Recently I decided that studying the history of American wars from a military standpoint might be interesting and provide new perspective. I decided to start with this war, the Civil War, because it's the war I know best to begin. And it is interesting, afterall. It's terrifying and it's fascinating and although it's very technical, it's also much more personal than I'd imagined it would be. To understand a man's battle strategy is to understand his nature. These commanders are a study in everything that is human about a human being, everything base and everything academic. Robert E. Lee, for example, grieved every death in his army but never ceased to throw more divisions into the front, even as the odds were most often against him. If that doesn't encompass the full breadth of human capability, instinct, emotion, and intellect all working together, then I don't know what does.