An Intellectual Diary

One of the coolest things about this list which Xin Jeisan has created is I get see how my thinking has evolved around the Civil War over the past few years. But I also get to see how my commenters' thinking has evolved. For instance, here's how commenter David White begins a comment eight months ago:

I generally don't follow the Civil War conversations here, so forgive me if this has been touched on before.

Here's David six months later having joined the Effette Liberal Book Club:

George McClellan. What an ass.

Well, yeah. But seriously one of the more gratifying things about these past couple of years has been watching other people share  the obsession. A few weeks ago, at a reading, an African-American woman came up to me to talk shop. She was obviously well read, but what she was most eager to talk about was David Blight and James MacPherson.

It was fascinating. I spent much of my college years discussing race with my peers, but the Civil War almost never came up--we were all about Kemit and the Dogon. One of the least realized successes of the Lost Cause is not simply how it's pushed its version of the war on the country, but how it's convinced African-Americans to accept themselves as marginal players.

I suspect there are a lot of reasons for this--some of them originating at home. The USCT, for instance, I think, present an important counterweight to the notion that black people's role in securing their freedom mainly consisted of nonviolent agitation. But as a college kid, I wouldn't have been interested in the USCT. I would have written them off as fighting for Lincoln, who I also would have written off as a rather pragmatic white supremacist.

I think it's good to get old.