Apollonian
Guest Columnist
re: “Civil War” Terminology
Thomas DiLorenzo
Link: https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/re-civil-war-terminology/
Ryan’s discussion (see below-copied) of the “Civil War” battles in Colorado and New Mexico is correct: The Confederates did try to take over some Union territory during the war. This is yet another thing that apparently never entered Lincoln’s mind as a possibility when he launched an invasion of his own country in 1861 in a war that he thought would be over in a few weeks. By that time the U.S. government had killed tens of thousands of Southerners, including thousands of civilians, and bombed numerous cities and towns into a smoldering ruin (Over 4,000 artillery shells exploded in civilian-occupied Charleston in a single day). It should surprise no one that the Confederates would have responded to this by attempting to bring the war to the enemy, just as Stalin would later respond to Hitler’s invasion of his country by eventually invading and occupying Germany.
Of course had Lincoln not declared that he was “saving the union” by forcing the South to remain in it at gunpoint (after endorsing the Corwin Amendment in his first inaugural address, promising to never interfere with slavery) there never would have been a Confederate Army or an invasion of a tiny part of Colorado.
The South believed that the union of the founders was voluntary and that the founders would never have ratified a constitution that forced everyone to remain a part of it forever, or have their cities bombed, burned and plundered and their civilian populations massacred. A “one-way venus fly trap,” as Murray Rothbard once sarcastically described Lincoln’s constitutional theory. The Party of Lincoln disagreed. This is what the war was about.
By the way, the correct terminology is “War to Prevent Southern Independence.”
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Re: The Civil War as a civil war
Ryan McMaken
Link: https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/re-civil-war-civil-war/
Thanks to Michael Rozeff (see below-copied) for injecting some much-needed nuance into the debate over whether or not the American Civil War was, in fact, a civil war or simply a secession movement. As Rozeff notes, things were not nearly so simple as many attempt to portray them. This is immediately evident in any analysis of the border states, and in the case of Missouri and Kentucky especially, where competing regimes presented themselves as the “real” governments of their respective states.
Moreover, most people who write about the Civil War are easterners who have a bias for their own region and ignore the realities out west where the picture is also quite muddled. Kansas, of course, is famous for its conflicts among competing guerrilla groups even before the war began, in so-called Bleeding Kansas. Certainly, Kansas was in a state of civil war.
And then there was the South’s New Mexico Campaign in which the Confederacy invaded New Mexico and Colorado as part of an attempt to seize western gold supplies. Southern armies were not simply in the business of waging a defensive war, as is often implied.
When the South invaded Colorado, Denverites sent a volunteer regiment South and defeated the invaders at Glorieta Pass. This further complicates matters since in the case of the New Mexico campaign, it was the Confederates who were the invaders, attempting to seize Colorado property far from any Southern State. In this case, the Northerners were the ones performing the morally legitimate role as defenders against a military invasion.
As a final note, we might also point out that in a similar way, the American Revolutionary War was also a civil war. After all, American colonists fought fiercely over control of local governmental institutions. It wasn’t a simple matter of expelling the British from the colonies. Bloody conflicts between Patriots and Loyalists were common, and certainly fall well within what one might label a “civil war” as well.
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Was the Civil War a “civil war”?
Michael S. Rozeff
Link: https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/civil-war-civil-war/
What’s a “civil war”? I searched using Google on civil war definition. The first heading read “a war between citizens of the same country.” There was a war. That’s for sure. The war began on April 12, 1861. Seven states had seceded before the war began (South Carolina December 20, 1860, Mississippi January 9, 1861, Florida January 10, 1861, Alabama January 11, 1861, Georgia January 19, 1861, Louisiana January 26, 1861, Texas February 1, 1861.) Were their citizens in the “same country” as the other states? That’s what the war was about. Secession as a political act to form a new political entity doesn’t automatically create that entity as a separate country. Most often, secession is contested by the mother country. Force usually or very often decides the issue. In 1861, we would not know whether or not the citizens of the seceding states were in the same country until after the war had been fought and the issue decided by force of arms. Now we know. The victory of the North determined that the seceding states were in the same country. While the war was being waged, southerners may have thought they were in a different country but within a few years they found that they were not. After the war was over, it could be termed a civil war because the North made it such by making the southerners remain as citizens of the U.S.A.
As a footnote, 4 states didn’t secede until after the war began, so that for a short period they were surely involved in a civil war. In addition, 4 states in the war never seceded: Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware. They were surely involved in civil warfare.
The fact that the Civil War was a civil war doesn’t preclude other possible names for the war or descriptions of it. There is no claim that such names are mutually exclusive or that calling the war the Civil War rules out calling it by another name.