1862

I have just finished reading the the Library of America’s The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It. It was a transforming experience to enter that year through their words.

Two things that remain with me from those letters, speeches, and documents:

First, how utterly righteous Confederates were in their perception of the world. That people might be so utterly blind to an obvious moral transgression is no longer unimaginable for me.

Secondly, and more enduring, those suspended moments reenacted again and again by common soldiers through their battlefield recollections; that curious time of fearlessness, terror, detachment, inevitability, and persistence that marked participation within the brutal mechanism of pitched battles.

As I drove around the state during our Spring recess, I could not keep the landscape from insisting on itself as the deadly hedgerows, knolls, gullies, and open fields of slaughter that were/are the otherwise innocuous farmlands of our nation.

P.S.
And then this tangential article and nugget from a NYTimes piece:
It is not simply that the labor of enslaved people underwrote 19th-century capitalism. Enslaved people were the capital: four million people worth at least $3 billion in 1860, which was more than all the capital invested in railroads and factories in the United States combined.