The Civil War: 150 years later

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, the War of Northern Aggression, the Late Unpleasantness -- whatever you want to call it. In short, it was an ugly period in American history. Fortunately, some VERY good things came from it.

Yahoo News has put together a slideshow of rare photos from the time. You can view it here. After all, it was probably the first war to be documented with film.

The war, writes Yahoo News, "is so often described in battles — the Battle of Gettysburg, the Battle of Bull Run, the Battle of Fort Sumter — that it may be easy to forget that the soldiers who fought in the four-year war had a lot of time between fighting."

North Carolina was late to "the game" (actually, the latest of the southern states to get involved) of the War.

"Many North Carolinians, especially yeoman farmers who owned few or no slaves, felt ambivalently about the Confederacy; draft-dodging, desertion, and tax evasion were common during the Civil War years," writes Wikipedia. "However, North Carolina contributed more troops to the Confederacy than any other state. The Union's naval blockade of Southern ports and the breakdown of the Confederate transportation system took a heavy toll on North Carolina residents, as did the runaway inflation of the war years. In the spring of 1863, there were food riots in North Carolina."

In the end, North Carolina gave more resources and men to the Confederate cause than any other state. (That includes you, Virginny.)

Also from Wikipedia: North Carolina "provided an important source of soldiers, supplies, and war materiel to the Confederate States of America ... The city of Wilmington was among the leading ports of the Confederacy, providing a vital lifeline of trade with England and other countries, especially after the Union blockade choked off most other Confederate ports. Large supplies of weapons, ammunition, accoutrements, and military supplies flowed from Wilmington throughout the South.

"Troops from North Carolina played a major role in dozens of major battles, including the Battle of Gettysburg, where Tar Heels were prominent in Pickett's Charge. One of the last remaining major Confederate armies, that of Joseph E. Johnston, surrendered near Bennett Place in North Carolina after the Carolinas Campaign."

As the famous memorial states, North Carolina's troops are remembered as such: "First at Bethel, Farthest at Gettysburg and last at Appomattox."

N.C. historian Tweets the Civil War

Two months before the start of the Civil War, a North Carolina belle named Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston tapped out a frustrated message about her secession-opposing sibling in a tweet to her followers: “Sister Frances is a terrible Unionist!”

She might have tweeted, that is, if Twitter had existed in 1861, writes the Washington Post.

Instead, Edmondston and other long-dead North Carolinians from a bygone era are having their social networking done for them posthumously. A Raleigh-based historian is using the popular service to bring the home front of a war to modern day audiences nearly a century and a half later.

“We’re not imposing any of our words. This is purely from men, women, and even teenagers who stayed at home and fought the war in their own ways,” said LeRae Umfleet, the historian who manages the collections at the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources.

A very interesting read. If you want to follow Umfleet, follow @CivilianWartime. The tweets are the words of an escaped slave, a woman whose husband owned a plantation and others. The tweets are moving roughly in chronological order along with the war, meaning that so far the messages mostly express the foreboding and uncertainty of people in North Carolina as they watched war clouds build.

“I have just seen the President’s message,” Umfleet tweeted in the March 11, 1861 words of Mary Bethell. “Mr. Lincoln, I think he intends to coerce those seceding States.”

The Twitter account is part of the ongoing effort of the cultural resources department’s ongoing effort to mark the 150th anniversary of the bloodiest conflict in American history. It seeks to highlight the experiences of those who remained at home while others went off to war — a conflict ever more dire as the battles drag on.

“By the end of the war, we will have seen conflict on North Carolina soil, and we’ll have heard from people with firsthand knowledge of that,” Umfleet said.

Utah lawmakers take shots at N.C., other Southern states

I realize that it's sort of second nature for Americans from one state to make fun of other states. Virginians pick on North Carolinians; North Carolinians pick on South Carolinians. (Do North Dakotans and South Dakotans go at each other as well?) There are, of course, those states that seemingly everyone picks on in one form or another: West Virginia. Mississippi. New Jersey. California.

The most embarrassed I've ever felt for another state, though, was at a national conference for local government associations when folks from Pennsylvania were describing their state as "Pittsburgh in the west, Philly in the east, and Alabama up the middle." That was not a compliment to the good people of Alabama (some of whom were in the audience).

I say all this to illustrate that it is common practice to rib one another about our respective states. Nothing wrong with that ... unless you're an elected state government official who happens to do this in public. For no good reason, mind you.

That's what has happened lately in the great state of Utah, according to the Associated Press.

If "any state should be sensitive to the problem of bashing another's reputation based on stereotypes, it ought to be Utah," writes the AP.

"But three weeks into their legislative session, lawmakers here have questioned the patriotism of Alabama and North Carolina on the floor of the House and have mocked Arkansas as an illiterate state on the Senate floor."

Utah state Sen. Darin Peterson, R-Nephi, "couldn't resist taking a seemingly irrelevant shot at Arkansas on Jan. 31 as he summed up discussion on a bill about the use of vehicles by Department of Corrections employees.

"Peterson was being corrected by Senate President John Valentine, R-Orem, that his bill had a fiscal note, but no fiscal impact.

" 'Thank you for that. But you know, as they say in Arkansas, literacy ain't everything,' Peterson said as several of his colleagues nervously laughed along."

Arkansas' education system was not the only education system in the South to come under attack from Utah lawmakers, though.

In a debate Friday over whether the House should pass a resolution encouraging school districts to give students Veterans Day off, Rep. Ken Sumsion, R-American Fork, suggested Utah's schools were more patriotic than their Southern counterparts.

Sumsion said that when he lived in Alabama and North Carolina, he was offended that school districts there didn't give students Memorial Day off, suggesting they declined to do so because of lingering resentment from the Civil War.

"Having been raised in Utah and kind of taught by my family to respect that day for what it stands for, I was really offended and taken back," Sumsion said. "Well, if you understand the history of where Memorial Day comes from, then you might understand what the issue was in these districts."

Memorial Day was declared an official holiday in May 1868, three years after the war ended and more than two years before the last Southern states were readmitted to the Union. ...

Still, it's not uncommon for Southern school districts to recognize Memorial Day as a holiday. That includes many districts in North Carolina, a state with some of the nation's largest military bases and numerous Memorial Day observances.

I, for one, am pleased that the AP pointed out the vast amount of support that North Carolina provides to the nation's military. Should we pay more attention to Memorial Day? Perhaps. But that's not for someone in Utah to decide.