150 Years

How far we have come since then.

How far we have yet to go.

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Heritage

Reading some Ta-Nehisi Coates, I am reminded that if Civil War rememberance in the South was more honestly about "heritage," as it should be, then we'd see an awful lot more events like this.

After all, hundreds of thousands of Southerners fought for the Union, and hundreds of thousands of those Southerners were black.

Though in complete honesty, it isn't just the South who has ignored the history of the USCT. That's why the event was held in Harrisburg in the first place, instead of Washington.

How powerful would it be to one day host a Civil War rememberance event in the South that honored the sacrifices of all her people, regardless of color or color of uniform, just an unvarnished realization of our shared regional and national tragedies? We've got 4 more Aprils to figure it out, and we can say it only took us 150 years.

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A Bad Situation Getting Worse

Georgia is ready to go. Louisiana's governor has asked to arm volunteer companies. That's all we need. "Volunteer" platoons of men running around Baton Rouge and New Orleans at night with guns, and secession fever on the mind. Who thinks this is a good idea?

Reasonable men I have known my whole life as conservative and humble have turned into gun-wearing, torch-waving lunatics.

A lot of folks up North seem to think this thing can be stopped. I did too, not so long ago. Some of them want to send Millard Filmore to argue for peace.

I hate to break it to y'all up in New Jersey and New York - the South isn't listening anymore. I hate to admit to myself that we haven't been listening for a long, long time.

This is how it feels, watching a nation that you loved die before your eyes, and with absolutely nothing that can be done about it.

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Secession Fever Throughout the South

Things are taking on a life of their own below the Mason-Dixon Line. My whole life, I can remember rumblings about how the South would be better off by going a seperate way. These were generally from the gruff old men, considered by curmudgeons mostly, or those individuals with the most at stake in the selling of human chattel. Or some politician looking to stir up some votes by appealing to emotion. Every now and then, you'd run into some shrewish woman who would demand disunion while those within earshot politely tried to change the subject or, failing that, made their excuses for the exit. For the most part, the teachers, the bankers, the businessmen, the papers - and the veterans and military men, these people never really spoke of secession in serious ways.

I'm starting to think they were all just being polite about their real opinions because I was around, changing the subject and politely making for the exits. What else am I to think now that the election of Lincoln has caused such insane ferver down South?

South Carolina and Florida look to leave any afternoon, and the fire-eaters in Charleston don't care to wait on other states to make any moves. They don't seem to care if they drag us into a shooting match.

Texas a state that cost this nation so dearly already seems poised to follow them out before the end of the month. That my beloved home state of Georgia is looking for ways to "dissolve the Union" peacefully, this tells me we're gearing up for a fight. Things aren't looking good down here in New Orleans, but all the activity and nightly meetings of this or that faction (combined with the amount of whiskey) threaten to burn the whole of the city down.

Hell, all this has caused even the Northern cities to start convening and adopting resolutions expressing their desire to remain in the Union.

How did it ever come to this?

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The Grand Army of Huntin' Season

Bush lied to me, they all lied to me: "We gotta go to Iraq because they're the most dangerous country on Earth. They're the most dangerous regime in the world." If they're so dangerous, how come it only took two weeks to take over the whole f****** country? S***. Man, you couldn't take over Baltimore in two weeks. - Chris Rock

While a bit oversimplified, here is a good look at why conquering the United States would be difficult. Chris Rock ain't wrong.

I wish [Machiavelli] was around today, if only to hear the praise he would have for a nation that every year assembles and then disbands the world’s largest army purely for the purpose of managing its deer population.

(HT: Daily Dish.)

Let me say first, that as a civil libertarian, I think one of the greatest guarantees of personal liberty is enshrined in the 2nd Amendment of the United States Constitution.

While the 600,000 armed individuals running around the Minnesota woodlands might not constitute a ready-and-willing Second Grand Army of the Republic in tactics, the sheer number is overwhelming. This is almost three times the number of Union and Confederate combatants at Gettysburg. As a matter of fact, if these numbers are true (and I have no doubt they are) than Michigan and Pennsylvania both had more armed individuals running around the woods this deer season than were combat deaths in the entire Civil War, to date this nation's bloodiest struggle.

But I make the Civil War comparisons for a reason. Though the author examines the difference in centralized force of arms vs. decentralization, this view should not be romanticized. Look through the comments section for some good points. To which I supplement the following:

We have an Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines to keep an invading horde from even reaching American shores, or bottle them up and annihilate them at whatever beachhead they are lucky enough to grab onto. Because of this, the United States will likely never have to face an external threat of invasion, but it is nice to know that, should that eventuality ever happen, our invaders are going to need the proverbial "bigger boat." There are a lot of us here in the USA. There are a lot of us who own guns. There are a lot of us who know how to use those guns.

Decentralized militia do make it very difficult to take and to hold territory by conquering. One commenter is exactly right - this is the exact kind of enemy we are facing in Afganistan, Iraq, and in Vietnam a generation ago.

Even with those numbers emerging from the woods of Pennsylvania, Michigan, West Virginia and Minnesota, the casualties on our side would be catastrophic. This is always the case when a more numerous, decentralized and lightly trained home guard faces off against whatever invaders could have come that far.

One commenter mentions that this is why the South thought they would be able to resist Union invasion during the Civil War. Before I get to the larger perspective, let me address the history. The South didn't have anywhere near these kind of numbers in the first place, while the North did. The South lasted as long as it did because of A) some brilliant tactical generalship, and B) because the Union didn't really get its numbers together with a strategy until almost 1864. Once that happened, it only depended on how fast Grant and Sherman wanted to lose men while winning battles.

Even then, the Union did not have the will to use that force of numbers and hold the South. This is why Reconstruction ended in 1877, and the South had to be effectively re-conquered in the 1960's.

And that's the larger point: there is no external threat of invasion to the United States of America. Our greatest threat to national destruction has always been and will always be ourselves. I don't worry that those 600K, 700K, or 750K deer hunters will be called up as volunteer militia against the screaming Canadian cavalry or airlifted Chinese tanks. I do worry that those hundreds of thousands of American guns will be turned on hundreds of thousands of other Americans with guns.

That is something we have seen before.

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