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As Emily noted in her post, The Civil war is one that everyone knows about, but not in detail. One of the things that might get overlooked about the civil war is how deadly it was on the whole. As we learned in class, many northern people died, and in the south 1/3rd of all the men were killed in war time. If the alarming numbers of the Civil War do not impact us, the qualitative side of things surely should. Davis talks about how much hate there was on both sides of the war–to the point of inhuman acts. For example he notes that there were some, “Confederate women who wore the teeth of dead Yankee soldiers.” These were the kinds of things that were going on on both sides.
What was more intriguing, though, was Davis’ illumination of how the people who lived during the war thought about it at the time. One aspect of the War that seemed both interesting, and a little bit confusing, to me was the religiousness that people assigned to it. Davids talks about the writings of a girl named Josephine Shaw Lowell, who looked at the war as a means of showing Americans that ‘riches, luxury and comfort are not the great end of life’. From this reasoning Josephine, and others looked at the war as a ‘direct work of God’. People, including Abe Lincoln himself, Believed that this War, despite how terrible it was, was serving as a part of the Christian God’s plan. There are to ways to look at this. One is that there were people taking a positive away from such a negative and devastating experience. The other is that religion at the time had such a stronghold on peoples lives, that even a war (something that is violent and therefore fundamentally violates the religious doctrine of the day) that was not based in religion, can be ascribed these religious tones and assignments. In this light, people on either side of the war can believe that their cause is “God’s cause”. These are both fascinating, and frightening realizations.