Seven score and five years ago, We the People embarked on our bloodiest and most ironic armed conflict. A bid for independence, this time unsuccessful, that some knew as the Second American Revolution, but Ken Burns, and hence the known world, now call "the" Civil War. For what it's worth, the decision to start the war by firing on Fort Sumter, and the decision to end it by surrendering the Army of Northern Virginia to General Grant, both happened on my birthday.

Though the soldiers of both armies, especially in the early years of the conflict (and throughout the war in the South) actually wore whatever they could get their hands on, the Union armies were supposed to wear the two-toned blue uniforms of the regular Army of the United States, while the Confederate armies were supposed to wear cadet gray. Red was a color common to both armies, especially at Shiloh, Antietam, Chickamauga, Petersburg, Gettysburg ...

"The" Civil War was preceded by more than a decade of increasingly acrimonious and irresolvable debate over the principal issues of the day - a debate that progressively shoved the moderates aside (if this sounds familiar, you're getting the point; read on) and in the end, begging your pardon, was indeed settled by gunfire. Historians have produced several forests-worth of volumes debating what all this shoutin' and fightin' was about, but having read several of these groves, I think I can summarize as follows.

The Blue stood for capitalism (factories), social mobility (you could do anything your talents permitted), and wage labor.

The Gray stood for agrarianism (plantations), social stratification (where and what you were born, there you stayed), and slave labor.

The Gray were called "rebels", but, believe it or not, the Blue were the real revolutionaries, because capitalism was still new, and had been embraced only by northwestern Europe (Britain, France, the Netherlands - Germany didn't exist yet) and the American North. The Confederacy was conservative, preserving an earlier, and to many, more comfortable, form of society. The rest of Europe (including many in Britain and France) found in the Confederacy a more natural partner than the "vulgar, counter-jumping Yankees" of the North. At least one British Lord wrote that, if the Confederacy won its independence, "men now before me would see the establishment of an aristocracy in America". Imagine, calling a judge in this country (or at least the southeastern part of it) "My Lord" as in England, rather than "Your Honor" - because only the Lords, the nobility in an aristocracy, are "fit" to be judges. It could have happened.

Historian James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom, a one-volume Civil War account that's something of a doorstop but a good read for all that, wrote that "the" Civil War made armed independence movements within these United States an option "never to be resorted to again during the century and a quarter (the book was first published in 1988) since Appomattox".

I sometimes wonder if that period is coming to an end. To me, the tenor of the debate between the Blue and the Red is too much like that leading to the brawl between the Blue and the Gray. Just like seven score and five years ago, the debate seems to be more and more irreconcilable, and the moderates more and more marginalized. The Gang of 14 seems pitifully small to mediate between the likes of Jesse vs. Jerry, George vs. Hillary.

In this case it is the Red that are conservative, seeking social rigidity (the nobility of money) and a sense of caste, whereas the Blue are revolutionary (more or less), seeking social mobility and tolerance. Or (and here the satirist steps forward):

The Blue stand for Personal Irresponsibility (gender blurring, Bill and Jennifer/Monica/Andthelistgoesonica).

The Red stand for Corporate Thuggery (Halliburton, Christian Coalition, Abramoff, Libby, Iraq).

The Blue, one hopes, are learning, like Oscar Wilde, the cost of failing to be discreet, to permit tolerance to be confused with licentiousness.

The Red, one hopes, are learning the costs of making decisions by dogma and cronyism rather than by intelligence.

I sure wish I could interpose some other color, White or Green or Orange or something, that can promote Wit rather than Writ, Tolerance rather than Decadence. A Union Party to promote our Nation rather than one or other of the contending parties within it. A Gang of 535 rather than a Gang of 14.

But then I see what happened to the moderates of the 1850s. And I wonder what Fort Sumter, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Charleston to be bombed.

  - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.