What are you reading at the moment?

trysail said:

"...War had unmade the world. Four years of bloodshed had paved the American landscape with gravestones. At least 620,000 soldiers had died (360,000 Union, 260,000 Confederate), more than the combined total of all the nation's other wars, before and since. Were the United States to suffer an equivalent toll at the start of the twenty-first century, almost six million people would be dead.

The South lay in ruins. Farms and villages along the paths of the major armies had been wrecked. Cities ranging from Jackson, Mississippi, to Columbia, South Carolina, from Atlanta to Richmond, were smoldering ruins. Basic infrastructure such as levees, roads, and bridges had gone unrepaired or had been destroyed by raiders from both sides. The financial capital of the rebel states had been annihilated as well, spent on arms and supplies, or converted into now worthless-Confederate bonds and currency. Across the region land values fell, crops went unplanted, workshops were unmanned.

As for slavery, the great wheel that drove the South's economy, advancing Union armies and the Emancipation Proclamation had knocked it loose, and it would soon be smashed to pieces. On January 31, 1865, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution; once ratified by the states, it would abolish slavery completely, without compensation or qualification. An enormous portion of the South's wealth had once been measured in human bodies, and now it would disappear...

...The war drew out and exaggerated the personal aggressiveness of the South's culture of violence, but the gun shattered it formalized, ritual quality— specifically, the rapid-firing revolver invented by Samuel Colt. The war put weapons in the hands of millions of men, who were allowed to carry them home. The new custom of carrying firearms astonished contemporaries, who had seen nothing like it before the war. A Yankee in Mississippi noticed that 'a great majority of the country white people wore [pistols] strapped outside their pants, and many outside their coats.' In Richmond, Kentucky, 'all wear Navy revolvers strapped around their waist,' observed a reporter in 1866. 'This habit of wearing firearms is not confined alone to the men, but boys of scarcely fifteen years of age.'

In Missouri, mandatory militia service, guerilla warfare, and aggressive postwar marketing by firearms manufacturers had saturated the population with six-shooters. In October 1866, Lieutenant James Burbank went to investigate reports of 'an armed pistol company' in St. Clair and neighboring counties. 'Nearly every man I saw during my stay in these counties carried army revolvers,' Burbank reported, 'even men at work in their fields, and boys riding about town.' He described it as 'a habit which grew out of the unsettled condition of the country since the war.' Unsettled indeed. Given the omnipresence of pistols, the persistence of wartime hatreds, and a fresh familiarity with death, confrontations rapidly turned lethal. 'Fist and skull fighting has played out here,' wrote one Missourian in May 1866. 'They now do that business in a more prompt manner.'... "
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-T. J. Stiles
Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War
New York, N.Y. 2002.​

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I first stumbled on T. J. Stiles when I picked up his most recent book, The Trials of Custer, an unusual biography of the eponymous George Armstrong Custer. I'm glad I did.

Stiles' biography of Jesse James is the book that put him on the map— and with good reason. It is thoroughly researched, well documented and well written. The reader will gain insight into the ulcer that was Missouri from 1850-1876 and, for those unfamiliar with the Second Civil War (a/k/a Reconstruction), an understanding of that greatly neglected formative period.

Not many people are acquainted with the horrific atrocities and nearly unconstrained total war conducted by the guerillas/irregulars in Missouri both before and after the well-known conflict of 1861-1865. The successful resistance to Reconstruction resulted in what was essentially attainment of many Southern goals culminating in 1876.




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Kantarii said:

Paradise Lost by Milton & J.RR. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings

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