The thing about this plaque which caught my eye is that America's war of 1861-1865 is properly called the "War Between the States."While on a trip to visit my grandchildren in Georgia over the Robert E. Lee/Martin Luther King Jr. long weekend, we stopped at a rest area on I-75 in Gordon County, north Georgia, where I saw the plaque honoring Georgia veterans, and all American soldiers who have been POWs (prisoners of war) or MIAs (missing in action). Interestingly, this rest area is directly on the route General William T. Sherman took when his invading Union army marched south on their way to plunder and burn Atlanta.
Most people nowadays call that darkest hour in the history of the United States the "Civil War." Few who do so realize they are parroting a bit of propaganda first used by Abraham Lincoln in an effort to put a better face on a brutal war of aggression which was both unnecessary and illegal.
A true civil war is one in which two or more opposing sides fight for control over the government of a single country. That was definitely not the case in the War Between the States. The South had no more desire to conquer Washington than the colonies wanted to rule London during the American Revolution. Believing that the United States had departed from the original intent of the Constitution, the people of the seceding states in the South saw themselves as fighting a war for indepencence -a Second American Revolution.
During and after the War Between the States, the government in Washington called it the "War of the Rebellion," which is reflected to this day on countless monuments throughout the northern states. "War Between the States" was a term popularized by Alexander H. Stephens, a constitutional authority, former Governor of Georgia, and Vice President of the Confederate States of America.
Abraham Lincoln, who was a master of political spin, used the term "civil war" during his Gettysburg Address, but it took many more decades of "politically correct" revisionism before the term came into general use. There has never been an American Civil War, and every time I see the term I cringe a bit at the erroneous message it sends.
Many other terms have been used to label America's war of 1861-1865. I'll talk about a few more of them in a later post.
Click on the photo above to enlarge it for much easier reading.
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Photo and Article by J. Stephen Conn
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