Budiansky's Views On The Civil War

The Civil War is one of the most notable events in American history. This war transformed into a struggle for the Union to eradicate slavery, leading to approximately 75,000 deaths. Locke, 14) As time progressed, many new and interesting perspectives about the Civil War arose. In this essay, two of many different perspectives will be analyzed: Budiansky’s perspective on how bloody and tragic the timeframe of the Civil War was for black people in the South, and McConnell’s perspective on how the Civil War was an avoidable tragedy. These perspectives are a few of many that paint the importance of the Civil War and its tragic history. In Budiansky’s perspective, there is a big focus on these tragedies, specifically the ones against black people.

The way it goes is a U.S. Army lieutenant recovered the bloody shirt Huggins wore and was used for passage of a bill that broke the Ku Klux Klan, creating the phrase “Waving a Bloody Shirt” (Budiansky, 2). This phrase was used to give Southerners a retort against the Northern politicians who mentioned any violent acts they had done (Budiansky, 2). This phrase is important because it shows how far Southerners have gone to justify and continue their assaults on people of color. With future assaults against black people that occurred in the South, they mention the bloody shirt, ignoring the truth and smoothing out claims that painted the Southerners in a bad light to the extent of blaming the victims which were the people they assaulted (Budiansky, 5). Some examples of tragedies of black people getting hurt by southerners that Budiansky mentions include shooting them just to feel relief and beating them to the verge of death (Budiansky, 5). The one main lesson to learn from the events of the bloody shirt and the terrible assaults such as beating and shootings against black people is that black people had to face many horrific hardships during and after the Civil War and how Southerners committing these acts showed no

In McConnell’s writing that served as a Civil War histography, he shed light on this perspective. In earlier histories of the Civil War, such as History of the Civil War by James Forde Rhode, they focused on the coming of war and how there were uncompromisable moral issues that made war inevitable (McConnell, 3). Progressive historians also found the economic conflict between the North and South to be inevitable (McConnell, 3). In the late 1930s, historians such as Avery Craven shared the same sentiment when questioning the inevitable theory, saying that it was brought by incompetent politicians and fanatic abolitionists (McConnell, 3). These points show the perspective of the war being inevitable due to the incompetence of parties and terms being non-negotiable between parties. If both the North and South had more experience with negotiating and the politicians representing each side were better trained, this tragedy could have been avoided. From the perspective of Budiansky, the monument titled Stone Mountain shows a clear illustration of these tragedies during the