Thanks to Michael Rozeff for injecting some much-needed nuance into the debate over whether or not the American Civil War was, in fact, a civil war or simply a secession movement. As Rozeff notes, things were not nearly so simple as many attempt to portray them. This is immediately evident in any analysis of the border states, and in the case of Missouri and Kentucky especially, where competing regimes presented themselves as the “real” governments of their respective states.
Moreover, most people who write about the Civil War are easterners who have a bias for their own region and ignore the realities out west where the picture is also quite muddled. Kansas, of course, is famous for its conflicts among competing guerrilla groups even before the war began, in so-called Bleeding Kansas. Certainly, Kansas was in a state of civil war.
And then there was the South’s New Mexico Campaign in which the Confederacy invaded New Mexico and Colorado as part of an attempt to seize western gold supplies. Southern armies were not simply in the business of waging a defensive war, as is often implied.
When the South invaded Colorado, Denverites sent a volunteer regiment South and defeated the invaders at Glorieta Pass. This further complicates matters since in the case of the New Mexico campaign, it was the Confederates who were the invaders, attempting to seize Colorado property far from any Southern State. In this case, the Northerners were the ones performing the morally legitimate role as defenders against a military invasion.
As a final note, we might also point out that in a similar way, the American Revolutionary War was also a civil war. After all, American colonists fought fiercely over control of local governmental institutions. It wasn’t a simple matter of expelling the British from the colonies. Bloody conflicts between Patriots and Loyalists were common, and certainly fall well within what one might label a “civil war” as well.
10:09 am on April 25, 2016
