Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Understanding The Civil War More Clearly

Still chipping away at Tindall and Shi's textbook America: A Narrative History, thank you for the recommendation.

Like most prob'ly most guys here when it comes to history I'm most interested in blood and guts ie. wars,tactics and weaponry. This book ain't about that.

Another interest of mine has long been the spread of Euro technology to the Indian side of the Frontier and reciprocal effects (for example the folks at Americanlongrifles.com have it that our iconic American longrifle was developed specifically for the mid-18th Cent. Indian trade). Tindall and Shi leave off the Indians all in bark longhouses of course which was actually largely out of date pretty early, and certainly was by the Rev. War.

However, where Tindall and Shi really start firing on all cylinders IMHO and the book steps up is Chapter Six entitled Shaping a Federal Union., detailing the initial Confederation of States and then the composing of the American Constitution in 1787.

It is interesting that the formal US ban on slavery in new territories that would later so rile the collective South actually precedes the US Constitution. The authors do not elaborate upon how that came to be.

Anyways, Chapter Six, some quotes:

Ben Franklin's opinion on the Constitution....

On October 10, 1788, the Confederation Congress transacted its last business and passed into history. "Our constitution is in actual operation." the elderly Ben Franklin wrote to a friend."Everything seems to promise it will last, but in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes."

I dunno if that is the origin of that popular saying.

George Washington hisself, who had rather distantly presided over the oppressively hot and uncomfortable four-month process at Independence Hall was notably pessimistic....

"I do not expect the Constitution to last for more than twenty years."

...and lending credence to recent "Constitution as a living document" arguments from the Left the authors state in their closing paragraph of the chapter...

The Constitution has been neither a static abstraction nor a "a machine that would go of itself" as the poet James Russell Lowell would later assert. Instead it has provided a flexible system of government that presidents, legislators, judges, and the people have modified to accord with a fallible human nature and changing social, economic and political circumstances.....

And, specifically relevant to this thread; here is the very last sentence of this excellent chapter where the authors close with this....

But the framers of the Constitution failed in one significant respect. In skirting the issue of slavery so as to cement the new union, they unknowingly allowed tensions over the "peculiar institution" to reach the point where there would be no political solution - only civil war.

Birdwatcher