| Subject: |
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On the American Civil War (Sorry So Long) |
| Name: |
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Wayne W |
| Date Posted: |
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May 8, 08 - 7:29 AM |
| Message: |
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I’ve been reading the recent (and numerous) threads begging for new ACW sets with a bit of sadness and bemusement. As an avid Civil War buff (and Napoleonics and Medieval, and Ancients, and 20th Century and… IT’s ALL GOOD!) I would surely love some new sets to fill out and add to my already large armies. As every one of you collectors can attest, new figure sets are like money. Someone once asked John D. Rockefeller why he kept making more money when he already had so much. “How much is enough?” the fellow asked.
“Just a little more,” Rockefeller is said to have replied with a twinkle in his eye. I think the same can be said of a collector and his armies. Face it guys, if HaT was to come out with a new set of anything that was well done we would be sorely tempted to buy it – particularly if it was a favorite period. So don’t give me that “there are too many sets out there already” stuff, there are never too many good sets!
I also don’t believe that the hobby is a zero-sum-gain. I know resources have to be used to produce a set and that production of one set might delay the production of another set. I love all periods of history and particularly the figures, but as has been stated before, because of the sheer volume of product and new sets being produced and (my good friend Lemche ) there are only twenty-four hours to a day, my budget and time constraints have forced me to stick to a few time periods these past few years; thus my large Roman and Ancient Armies will have to wait for awhile before they expand, and I’ve forgone WWI and WWII in this scale because I don’t enjoy painting the drab colors as much as I do the colorful medieval and Nappies. Just a personal thing, but if I suddenly “caught up” on my eras, I would have no hesitation in snatching up some of the beautiful figures out there. As a matter of fact I have every intent of doing just that with WWI in a near future summer break. Pardon me if I think it’s selfish to deny other collectors their joy because I want more figures in my own particular era. I think there are more than enough sets to go around in just about every era and HaT are steadily churning out more.
I, for one, am personally tired of going to whatever local hobby stores I get to (again, the nearest one is almost two hundred miles away) and seeing the same old tired IMEX ACW sets on the shelves. I have some two thousand infantry in my Union Army and a like number in my Confederate Army, we won’t even talk about cavalry and artillery, how many more of the available sets do you think I need? Even with these huge numbers (I know they are probably dwarfed by some of your armies) I would love to have more figures available with variations of poses to add life and “spice” to my dioramas. I recently snatched up StreletsR’s ACW command sets, just to add something (as JDR said, “A little more”).
I am sure StreletsR would and could do an ACW set but would be concerned about the quality of the final product. The quality of their product has been uneven at best and sometimes downright awful (though I’ve seen real improvement recently); HaT, on the other hand, has with few exceptions produced figures of outstanding detail, quality, and historical accuracy. I would love to see them take a stab at the era and add to their Zouaves.
But it is a matter of marketing, ours is a world-wide hobby (as is shown by the participants on this forum); we, in the USA, for which the American Civil War was a pivotal event in our nations’ history; a tragedy from which we still haven’t quite fully recovered I can understand how someone from Europe might call it “insignificant.” Please forgive us in the USA if we appear to fail to understand the import of wars such as the 7YW and 30YW, much less show an interest here in the US. It appears ignorance of one another’s histories span the ocean.
The American Civil War was the pivotal event in US history. As American author Shelby Foote has said, “The Revolution did what it did [made us a country], the Civil War determined what kind of country we would be.” Before the Civil War Americans considered ourselves to be a collection of independent States joined together for mutual benefit. Built on the twin foundations of Adam Smith and John Locke, personal property rights were sacred, and when the government interfered with those rights the people had a right, even a duty to do away with the government and establish a new one. The Southerners’ right to secede was implicit in our founding documents. If the Confederacy had no right to leave the Union, then our country’s Declaration of Independence was null and void.
Lincoln disagreed, he feared that if the South were allowed to secede the entire experiment in popular sovereignty without benefit of monarch or tyrant would fail and mankind’s journey to liberty and equality would be set back by centuries. That is why he struggled so hard to keep the South in the Union, even though his struggle (and often his tactics) appeared to be in conflict with the very principles he was trying to preserve.
There is no time (nor do I believe this to be the place) to debate all the nuances of the causes of the war. I’m not going to argue with my fellow Southerners that the war had nothing to do with slavery because it did, but neither am I going to argue that the whole thing was caused by slavery, though it would appear that slavery was the match that lit the fuse, so to speak. But what I would want my European friends to understand is how important the war was to us. A recent poster to a thread where we refought the war mentioned that the war was still so controversial. Sad to say, it is. As Faulkner (a Southerner) said, “The past is not dead, it isn’t even past.”
The legacy of the Civil War lives on. It changed the way we viewed ourselves as Americans. Before the war, an American considered himself and Alabamian, Virginian, or New Yorker first, then an American; not any more. Before the war, official documents referred to our nation as “These United States of America.” After the war – “The United States of America.”
Our pledge of allegiance states “One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” I don’t think we could say that before the war. With a large portion of our population bound by slavery, we definitely couldn’t say there was liberty and justice for all. Indeed, with the bitterness of the war and the harsh reconstruction policies inflicted upon the South after Lincoln’s assassination, it has taken us over one hundred years to get beyond the racial injustice of slavery. But we are farther along than we once were to fulfilling the dream envisioned by Jefferson in 1776, and rekindled by King in the 50s and 60s.
As an historian I find the war a fascinating study (this in no way takes away from my interest in other eras, after all, my love of Southern Fried Chicken in no way diminishes my enthusiasm for a grilled T-bone steak); the concept of brother against brother, a cliché to be true, but aren’t most clichés true? Isn’t that true of most clichés? There is a cemetery in North Carolina that has the graves of a father and three sons, killed on different sides during the war. In the part of Missouri where my grandparents were raise, the Civil War took the form of partisan raiding; it is where the infamous James/Younger gang of outlaws got their basic training in outlawry. Indeed, many look upon the James/Younger gang’s criminal careers as a continuation of their war.
I could hardly call over 600,000 casualties in four years insignificant; particularly when every casualty was an American. Battles such as Gettysburg, lasting three days inflicting over forty thousand casualties can compete with any other war for scale and scope. Can any drama compete with scenes such as the Sunken Road at Antietam/Sharpsburg where two Maryland regiments from the same town but on different sides, faced one another from mere paces and fired into each other each unwilling to retreat before his neighbors (eventually the Northern unit broke).
And don’t forget the world watched as we battled it out. The powers of Europe sent observers to watch out tactics and weapons. Look at the innovations that came out of the war, the submarine, the Gatling gun (machine gun), the use of railroads and telegraphs for the first time in war (just to name a few). We also saw in the trenches surrounding Petersburg a preview of the Great War that would break out in 1914. The monarchies of Europe had much at stake in the outcome of the war. A united America was a competitor on the world stage, as my Diplomatic History professor used to say, “American Distresses equal Europe’s Successes.” A weakened USA at the time was good for Europe. We won’t even mention the fact that (as Abe Lincoln, referred to in his Gettysburg Address) that if the American experiment in democracy succeeded, the monarchies of Europe were in danger of their subjects getting the same bright idea of ruling themselves alone.
Imagine what the world would be like had the South succeeded. As a Southerner I have to (and hate to) admit it was a good thing we lost. I can’t say the world in the 20th Century would have been better off without a strong and powerful United States – for all our shortcomings (real and imagined). Had the South succeeded, there would not have been two mighty countries competing for control of this continent, rather both would have splintered into numerous smaller feuding factions. It was already beginning as the war was being fought. Georgia tried to secede from the Confederacy not six months into the conflict; Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, had a surprisingly large faction pushing for a “Western Confederacy.” It was well that Lincoln’s vision succeeded. I just find it sad he was assassinated before he could see it through, how different our history might have been.
I write this not to cause controversy or demean another nation or war or era, merely to show my European friends why we in the US appear to be obsessed with this war and its outcome. The South is only now beginning to achieve parity with the rest of the country in many socio-economic areas; this is largely due to the major setbacks caused by slavery, the war, and Reconstruction. We are recovering, I daresay, after having lived and travelled throughout the country and watching my interracial class working on their assignments, our race relations are better where I live in Alabama – the same Alabama where George C. Wallace made his stand in the schoolhouse steps- the same Alabama where there were bombings of black churches- where civil rights workers were attacked by police and dogs- is better here than any other part of the country. We have far to go, but have come so far.
As to ACW sets. Thought I forgot? Well, Caleb and the rest, I appreciate your asking and agree with you, I’d love to see HaT do the era. But they have their own preferences in eras, I respect that. We’ve made our wishes known. I’m just happy about the Pomeranian Piccolo Players!
Sorry so long on this one. |
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