(Part One of several to come)

“From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”

I have been thinking about the Civil War, lately; most particularly because I am plowing through a great tall pile of books about all aspects of that most bitter national division. I have just finished the first draft of the second book about the experiences of the German settlements in Texas, and am now sketching out the initial chapter of the third. On one hand I am hard at work filling in blanks and fact-checking, adding incidents, experiences and observations to fill out the general story. On the other, I am trying to put myself into the mind of a character who has come home from it all; weary, maimed and heartsick – to find upon arriving (on foot and with no fanfare) that everything has changed. His mother and stepfather are dead, his brothers have all fallen on various battlefields and his sister-in-law is a bitter last-stand Confederate. He isn’t fit enough to get work as a laborer, and being attainted as an ex-rebel soldier, can’t do the work he was schooled for, before the war began. Interesting work, this; putting myself into the minds of people who were seeing things as they developed, day by day and close up; without the comforting overview of hindsight

This, BTW is my way of advancing my story, of how great cattle baronies came to be established in Texas and in the West, after the war and before the spread of barbed wire, rail transport to practically every little town and several years of atrociously bad winters. So are legends born, but to me a close look at the real basis for the legends is totally fascinating and much more nuanced – the Civil War and the cattle ranching empires, both.

Nuance; now that’s a forty-dollar word, usually used to imply a reaction that is a great deal more complex than one might think at first glance. And at first glance the Civil War has only two sides, North and South, blue and grey, slavery and freedom, sectional agrarian interests against sectional industrial interests, rebels and… well, not. A closer look at it reveals as many sides as those dodecahedrons that they roll to determine Dungeons and Dragons outcomes.

There was the War that split border states like Kentucky and Virginia – which actually did split, so marked were the differences between the lowlands gentry and the hardscrabble mountaineers. There was the war between free-Soil settlers and pro-slavery factions in Missouri and in Kansas; Kansas which bled for years and contributed no small part to the split. There was even the war between factions of the Cherokee Indian nation, between classmates of various classes at West Point, between neighbors and yes, between members of families.

How that must have broken the hearts of men like Sam Houston, who refused to take a loyalty oath to the Confederacy, and Winfield Scott, the old soldier who commanded the Federal Army at the start of the war. His officers’ commission had been signed by Thomas Jefferson: he and Houston had both fought bravely for a fledgling United States. Indeed, at the time of the Civil war, there were those living still who could remember the Revolution, even a bare handful of centenarians who had supposedly fought in it. For every Southern fireater like Edmund Ruffin and Preston Brooks (famous for beating a anti-slave politician to unconsciousness in the US Senate) and every Northern critic of so-called ‘Slave power” like William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown… and every young spark on either side who could hardly wait to put on a uniform of whatever color, there were sober citizens who looked on the prospect of it all with dread and foreboding.

(next ; How they got to that point – some thoughts)

Also, the sample first chapter of Adelsverein, Vol. 3 is here