What's So Civil About War, Anyway?

My timing has been poor of late. Not many birds about when I am. Happens.

Several American kestrels recently. Always a pleasure to see our smallest falcon, overstuffed with a heart outsized and unmatched courage, enough for a small plane.

No red tails lately, a remonstrance against loving too much...

I was reading "The Lakotas and the Black Hills", by Jeffrey Ostler. The book is an examination of the Lakotas' claim to the Black Hills (South Dakota), based on the Treaty of 1868.

The first half of the book is Lakota history through Little Big Horn (June 24, 1876).

My eye isn't comfortable with the writing, but that's my problem.

One of the book's problems is that the Treaty of 1868 isn't included. References are cherry-picked, helter-skelter, incongruous.

For instance Article 12 of the 1868 pact is reported to contain the stipulation that any changes to the treaty would require 75% agreement from all adult male Sioux. But only 10% of said satisfied Congress, and in February 1877 they assumed ownership of the Black Hills.

The book would have benefited from an editor who actually read it, but Kevin Doughten maybe wanted to see his name in the acknowledgements for sitting around with his thumb up his ass.

It would seem both of Custer's forays into Lakota country, a reconnoiter of the Black Hills in search of minerals, primarily, and the attack on the massed camps along Greasy Grass Creek, the Little Big Horn, were in violation of that 1868 Treaty.

I have a special place, not in my heart but in my bowels, for Custer, and no matter my exertions, cannot seem to void him to the sewer where he belongs. More on this Vainglorious Ego Machine at another time.

What follows is all about the Civil War, focused on Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. If you are not interested, and that may be all of you, thanks for reading, and log off now.

With the problems I encountered in the much-anticipated book about the Lakotas, I dug out an old friend, Stephen W. Sears' "Landscape Turned Red", the Battle of Antietam.

Bruce Catton was an immensely popular and best-selling author of Civil War chronicles in the mid-20th Century. I never read any of them. I have read three books by Sears, on Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. There are new materials accessed by Sears, unavailable to Catton, and I tend to currency.

Gettysburg. Antietam. Spotsylvania Courthouse. The Wilderness. Chancellorsville. Fredricksburg. Manassas.

These are the some of the bloodiest battlefields in American history. The Civil War accounted for more casualties - 1,094,453, and more deaths (by far) - 623,026 - than any other conflict in our short, bellicose history. The mortality rate was horrific. In Viet Nahm, 1 in 120 subsequently died of battlefield wounds. In WW II, 1 in 50. In the Civil War 1 in 7 wounds later proved fatal.

And these battles: Antietam, 22,728 casualties on September 17, 1862, the bloodiest single day in US history. The 108th anniversary is Friday: fly your flags at half-mast, or burn them. For a tragedy like this, with everyone to blame, it's the same thing.

Second Manassas (Bull Run): 23,659 casualties in three days. This was a battle no one in Washington or the Union Army seems to have been aware of. There were 10, 100 Federal Troops who paid for a bona-fide FUBAR with their lives.

Chancellorsville, May 1 - 4, 1863. I can not at this moment recall what separates this battle from the Wilderness, as in my touring they seemed conjoined.

The Wilderness, May 5 & 6, 1863. Both sides stopped stumbling around lost long enough to inflict 25, 416 casualties.

The real mystery is that the two armies found each other, 10 miles west of Fredricksburg, with the only feature in the area, Chancellorsville, a large house, and still kill and wound 55,516 in five days.

And the granddaddy of mayhem, Gettysburg, with 51,112 casualties in 3 days.

The battle was done early, with Lee failing to realize that any Union weakness lay to the south and east.

The straight up (Pickett's Charge) attack was doomed before the advance order was issued.

Lee was totally out-of-sorts, with J.E.B. Stuart off God-knows-where. (In actuality, Stuart was engaged in his usual work, spreading havoc, fear and destruction on the Union supply line.)

Longstreet failed the General's order to advance, keeping his own counsel, and abetting the slaughter of tens of thousands, for with his refusal the day, in deep jeopardy, was surely lost.

My interest in these battlefields is not in the carnage.

Rather, these are battlefields I have visited: Gettysburg. Antietam. Spotsylvania Courthouse. The Wilderness. Chancellorsville. Bull Run (Manassas).

Only at Manassas did I spend the time to study the battles, tracing and retracing, walking the fields, reading and rereading the signs and the guide pamphlets.

There is an unfinished (then and now) railroad grade, with an approximately six foot bank, about 300 yards across a wheatfield from the road. I walked through the field to the grade.

Stonewall Jackson, a brilliant, driven military genius, had his entire division entrenched in the cut. To his left was withering, enfilading artillery fire 30 artillery pieces, paced by Lee.

There are markers in the field that record positions and quotations of Union survivors of that slaughter. The most moving is located barely 10 feet from the grade, where a soldier lay for "what seemed hours", too close to fire, to close to be fired upon, who, somehow, survived the uncoordinated, mass-stampede retreat of the few who survived this hell.

I was overawed.

Should anyone be interested, there will be more.