I Had Some Questions About The American Civil War

Was the American Civil War a funny war?

Your question is 'Is American civil war a funny war?' and then you add a statement, 'With all due respect to every one who fought in the war'. I find that contradictory. Can you elaborate why you asked this question; I mean asking if the American civil war was a funny war.There is no war that is a 'funny war'. A war results in a lot of lives and property destroyed. So there is nothing funny in a war. Let me quote a general of American Civil war, Gen William Tecumseh Sherman: "I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell". This was from a man who fought in the war for 4 years, who nearly went mad of the war time experiences, saw lot of blood, lost his friends in the war, burnt Atlanta to ashes (although he is not accused of it) and brought the South on its knees. The issue of the war was about slavery. It was not funny either. Or, if we take the argument of the South, 'States rights' wasn't funny either from their perspective. So no my friend, American Civil war was not at all a funny war.

What is the final conclusion of the American Civil War, or are there still unanswered problems?

I’m surprised at the shortsighted answers put forth thus far. Really, Quorans, your better than this.The end of the US Civil War left many unanswered questions, and in many ways we’re still feeling the effects of an unfinished reconstruction, and the loss of Lincoln’s leadership made sure it would go unfinished.At the end of the war you had 4 million Black Americans without recompense for theirs and generations of their family’s labor which built the wealth of the country. Given no land, no education, nothing. It became the principle question of the next 150 years. The 13th Amendment ended slavery, but today the Black population of the US is locked up at exponential rates, murdered by police, and suffering at the end of every demographic statistic.The South never quite recovered economically, and never became an industrial powerhouse as parts of the North or West did. Today, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama round out the bottom three in terms of infrastructure, income, education, disease, and whatever other malady you can think of. I live in a progressive New Orleans, and yet the running joke here how terribly things are run…but hey, at least we’re not Mississippi.But the biggest issue was and still is over how to break down white supremacy. That question went unanswered, and allowed the white supremacist power structure to simply morph into something else. That was a question that went went unanswered. Reconstruction was abandoned in the politics that followed, and the redistribution of wealth that was required to make up for 250 years of slavery was never accomplished. Every single plantation and slave owner should have had their land expropriated and distributed among the slaves who worked the land. Every financial profit from the slave trade should have been invested into public resources for the poor and formerly enslaved. Political power should have been (at least for a generation) stripped from the planter class and given in disproportionate quantity to the recently freed. This would have gone a long way in tying up the loose ends that slavery left. But the wound was never properly cleaned or dressed.

What do you think about the American Civil War?

An interesting episode in American history to say the least, but the most horrific time in American history to say the most. It was not only a time when there were divisions between states, but that of communities and even households. We had pushed off answering some difficult questions like, “Where all men free?” or “How much power derives from the federal government?”, for some time. We were a young nation that had high ideals and many saw we were not fulfilling them and being hypocritical about them.Some argue States’ Rights when it comes to the war other argue Slavery. Slavery did cause the war. The South feared the loss slavery due to being outnumbered by the North and the West, if slavery could not expand, would mean that they did not matter in the Union. That their voices would be silenced. Granted no one agrees with their so-called “peculiar institution” today, but for them, it was their living, in surrounded they Southern economy and way of life.So, in the end, it was about Slavery and we do have issues discussing this. Those in the South, I was born and raised in Texas, argue that their ancestors did not fight for slavery. Odds are they probably did not, Billy Yank and Johnny Reb were not focused on slavery their reason could stem from just wanting to fight, work, go on an adventure or anything. Attacks by both sides caused people to take up arms. Kentucky was neutral in the war until the Confederacy invaded then asking the Union for aid. Were they racist? Again, probably, anyone alive over 150 years before you most likely did not fit your form of civility, but that does not mean every action they did was because of it.I do think after going through a civil war the United States was able to come back together and make things work out. In this time of great political polarization, I believe the United States can do it once more without blood shed for things are not as tense then as they were now and we do have a better understanding of each other and more compassion.

How does the rest of the world learn about the American Civil War in school?

I learned about the Civil War in both American and French high schools. In American schools we learn about it practically every year. Some teachers told me it was all about slavery, some that it was about state’s rights. When I was 15 I had a teacher who gave a very convincing argument for the state’s rights argument, so that’s what I thought about it at the time.The next year in my french lycee, on the literature track for the baccalaureate (oui je suis un de ses branleurs), in what was equivalent to Junior year - we had a lesson about the American civil war, where I got into an argument with the teacher because he said it was caused by slavery. I wasn’t exactly convinced, but he did get some wheels to start turning in my head.It took another few years to realize I had bought into some parts of the Lost Cause mythology.