Dan Minette wrote:
>
> IIRC, modern textbooks are now starting to call it the War Between the
> States. It�s called that in my kid�s textbooks, and they have national
> textbooks.
My text (copyright 1999) from last spring (I took a college course with my
son) refers to it as the Civil War. Published in Texas by the way, as many
(most?) texts are.
>
> It was certainly not a typical war between political factions. A number of
> states declared their intention to leave the Union. The state assemblies
> voted to succeed, and the states then formed a Confederation. Each state
> had its own standing militia. When the Union forces opposed the Confederate
> forces, it was the militia of the northern states fighting the militia of
> the southern states.
Huh? The opening salvo of the war was against a U.S. Army installation - Fort
Sumter. The war was fought between the Federal Army and the Confederate
Army. I can not recall any mention in all my reading of a clash between
militia units. Units of state militia may have been sent to join the Federal
army, but once they joined, they ceased to be militia.
>
> The clearest example of this is the case of Robert E. Lee. Lee was
> Lincoln's first choice for commander of the Union forces. Lee was opposed
> to secession. But, he considered himself a citizen of Virginia first and
> foremost, and when Virginia left the Union, he had no choice but to serve
> his state loyally.
>
> The war between 1860-65 was a war between States that had a certain
> independence, and at least some of the attributes of nation-states for a
> number of years. The United States was considered to be a union of
> autonomous states, with many people always seeing their first loyalty to
> their own state. I don�t see this as typical in a true civil war. I gave
> two examples of true modern civil wars, Russia and Spain, that fit the
> concept of civil war more closely.
>
As the war decided that the States were not individual nations that could
secede when they pleased, validating a definition of the war that recognizes
the inherent independence of the states is contradictory.
Doug
