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Bob’s Books – Shelfie #10 (The US Civil War)

Bob’s Books – Shelfie #10 (The US Civil War)

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It’s installment number ten in Bob’s Books Shelfie series. Links to the prior shelfie posts can be found at the end of this one. If you’re new to this column, I posted shelfies of over a thousand of my books, in the r/bookshelf subreddit. The mods got too annoying for me, and I quit the group. I already did a post with my shelves related to the American Constitutional Convention of 1787 and that Era. I’m a man of many layers – you just have to keep peeling the onion. I’m also a big US Civil War buff – especially the ironclad battle at Hampton Roads.

CIVIL WAR SHELFIE #1

I’ve got three shelves of a pretty nice US Civil War collection. This is the main ‘general’ shelf.

I like map books of CW battlefields, and I’ve got two on the left. Plus that floppy one laying across the top.

The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War is a nice-looking, slipcase set. Kind of like CW coffee table books. Thick ones…

Those three blue ones are part of a six-volume Battle Chronicles of the Civil War, edited by James McPherson. McPherson (whose classic one-volume history is at the end of this shelf) is one of America’s finest ever CW historians. If I didn’t own so many books not yet read, I’d get the other three of these. Neat series.

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Yes, The Civil War Was About Slavery (The Confederates Said So)

Yes, The Civil War Was About Slavery (The Confederates Said So)

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John Singleton Mosby
John Singleton Mosby

In June of 1902, former Confederate cavalry raider John Singleton Mosby wrote to his friend Judge Reuben Page about the war that had given him his fame, bemoaning the fact that the causes of that war were already being lost in the public’s consciousness.

In retrospect, slavery seems such a monstrous thing that some are now trying to prove that slavery was not the Cause of the War. Then what was the cause? I always thought that the South fought about the thing that it quarreled with the North about.

Mosby, whose family had owned slaves, was talking about an increasing trend among Confederate veterans and former Confederate politicians to whitewash the reasons for the war. In a letter five years later to another friend, Sam Chapman, he wrote,

I wrote you about my disgust at reading the Reunion speeches: It has since been increased by reading Christian’s report. I am certainly glad I wasn’t there. According to Christian the Virginia people were the abolitionists & the Northern people were pro-slavery. He says slavery was ‘a patriarchal’ institution – So were polygamy & circumcision. Ask Hugh if he has been circumcised.

Christian quotes what the Old Virginians said against slavery. True; but why didn’t he quote what the modern Virginians said in favor of it – Mason, Hunter, Wise &c. Why didn’t he state that a Virginia Senator (Mason) was the author of the Fugitive Slave law – & why didn’t he quote The Virginia Code (1860) that made it a crime to speak against slavery, or to teach a negro to read the Lord’s prayer.

I have written two military history books on the Civil War, as well as two novels and numerous shorter works, and I constantly come up against the notion that the war was fought for “states rights.” As a political science professor friend of mine rebuts, “The right to do what?” The answer, of course, was the right to own other people. Confederate documents at the time make this abundantly clear, but after the war many rebels were embarrassed that they ripped the nation apart over slavery and sought to bury that idea.

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