Jan 9: First Stupid Day of the Stupid Civil War

January 9, 1861, the Civil War officially began when Confederates attacked the Star of the West, a steamer entering Charleston Harbor. It was struck three times but was able to retreat back to New York. Cadets at the South Carolina Military Academy (now, The Citadel) were the ones who fired these first shots of the American Civil War.

At this time, not all the Confederate states had yet seceded from the Union, so the American Civil War began before there were two officially engaged enemies.

On a subsequent mission, the ship was captured by the Confederates and was used in their war effort until it was wrecked defending Vicksburg in 1863. One of its recommissioned purposes was to serve as a hospital ship.

The Civil War had a political momentum, underscored by the fact that volunteers outnumberd the draftees 7:1 and 8:1 in the North and South, respectively. While the issue of slavery was the only thing agreed upon by everyone, there were also some subtle political realities, one of which being a state's right to not be part of the United States. Thus, Lincoln had a war on two philosophical fronts: 1) slavery and 2) preservation of the Union.

There were 623,000 deaths from both sides in the Civil War, but twice as many died from disease as from fatal wounds.

War, it seems, hangs around with a sordid crowd of malignant characters.

The science of amputation advanced tremendously, which is not a good thing. And when all was said and done...and fought and won... slavery was over as it should have been because, after all, it was slavery; and the Union perservered. How could it not, with no way to reconcile that all men were created equal with subset of those who were slaves?

Slavery, defended by Old Testament thinking, had no place in the New Testament universe. Equality, defined by the founding fathers, was pretty much figured out and in no need of convenient revision.

As such, the simplicity of the moral imperative, mixed with complexities in the politics, made for one very stupid war, from the reasons for it to the needless suffering and deaths incurred.