Had to watch the Civil War episode because I really do know quite a bit about the Civil War. I can use that as a way to gauge the historical accuracy. The program got the technology right, most of the time, and how it helped the Union war effort. Something they overlooked in talking about the "industrialized" North vs. the "agricultural" South (both were vastly more agricultural than industrial) is that the Yankees liked machines because in the North, labor was expensive. Not a problem in the slave South.
Wish I could say the battles and the significance of the Civil War were recounted with better accuracy. Seems that show's researchers spent some time poring over SCV (Sons of Confederate Veterans) web sites, actually read a little bit about Stonewall in the Valley and 2nd Manassas, then figured, "Oh to hell with it. That's enough to fill up 10 minutes."
Had to chuckle at the show's proclaiming that Ulysses S. Grant's major accomplishment as general of the Union Army was appointing W.T. Sherman to head up the Army of the West. I'm laughing at that right now, though Sherman is one of my favorite characters. And the show confused the Atlanta Campaign with the March to the Sea. Two different things employing two different tactics, driven by two different purposes.
What? No Peninsula Campaign? No Chancellorsville? No Gettysburg? No Vicksburg or Richmond Campaign? No. Only Sherman pillaging the countryside on the way to Atlanta -- which didn't happen, by the way. It's about 100 miles from Chattanooga to Atlanta, and it took Sherman something like five months to cross that ground. He built railroads and bridges as he went -- or rebuilt them after the rebs tore them up behind them as they retreated. Matter of fact, Sherman gave his engineers (not railroad engineers, but construction engineers) a large part of the credit for his survival en route to Atlanta. There's even a pretty famous joke:
"How'd Sherman get across the river?"The railroads between Atlanta and the sea were a different matter. That's where "Sherman"s hairpins" and "Sherman's bow-ties" came into play -- rails torn up and twisted around trees and so forth. And not just bent, because they could be straightened, but twisted, so they couldn't be used again for track. And without a railroad, Sherman licensed "living off the land." His army didn't burn crops in the field. First of all, it was November-December and there weren't any crops in the field. Second, he wouldn't burn the crops when he needed them to feed his army. His army left Atlanta (smoldering, so it couldn't serve as base for any rebs coming up behind him) with about a week's rations. It took about six weeks to get to Savannah, and then he had to win Savannah, or at least convince it to surrender.
"He took the bridge."
"Where'd he get a bridge? We burnt that bridge."
"He brought it with him."
And historian Al Sharpton commenting on how the Emancipation Proclamation made slaves equal? No, not really. Even with emancipation, slaves weren't quite citizens and couldn't vote except in a few states that allowed it. They were allowed to join the US Army, though, and did fight valiantly most of the time. For their "ingratitude," they were especially targeted by the Confederates, and if they survived capture, they were sold back into slavery. But believe it was the 15th Amendment, a few years after the Civil War, that granted citizenship to blacks and former slaves. That was part of Reconstruction, which doesn't seem to have occurred at all in "The Story of Us."
Then the thing about killing all the buffalo... Yeah, to make belts for weaving looms in Lowell, Mass. OK. But nothing at all said about Sherman and Sheridan regarding the deliberate anihilation of the buffalo herds as a very effective way of starving the Sioux and Cheyenne into dependency on the government. The show regarded that as a by-product of the buffalo slaughter, never mentioned it as one of its causes. I do believe it was Sheridan who said, "The only good Indian is a dead one," or something to that effect.
Custer got very short shrift, too, and he probably deserved it. But Custer was not quite as stupid as the program suggests. Nearly so, but not quite....
I'm glad they talked about the black cowboys, though. Wonder if they'll bring up the Buffalo Soldiers? And you know, the word "buckaroo," meaning "cowboy", comes from the Spanish "vacarro," which I probably didn't spell right, but that also means "cowboy". Just about everything the cowboys knew they learned from Mexican vacarros -- going way back to before the Mexican War.
I was rather peeved at this person named Jeanette Wall or Waller or something, who apologized for gun ownership in the New World by claiming it had something to do with a determination to take care of yourself. Just a silly kinda macho thing we don't need to take too seriously.
OK. Number One, if you couldn't take care of yourself in the New World, you didn't survive. That simple. It's not like you could order take-out. The New World, and especially the Great Plains, were way short of grocery stores. If you couldn't shoot or trap your dinner, you didn't get much to eat. Number Two, snakes, bears, and a range of other predators. Number Three, by the time the white settlers were moving west in droves, the Indians were a real threat, along with assorted bandits who took refuge from the law in the West, thieves and cutthroats of all kinds. People who wouldn't think twice about killing you for your horse.
And, hey, about horses. They keep showing these pioneer wagons being drawn by horses. The army didn't even use that many horses -- or not as many horses as mules. And the pioneers, if they brought a horse, it was a dray to pull the plow when and where they settled. Horses were too delicate and skittish and the Indians would steal them. For the Plains Indians, horses were like their bank accounts.
The pioneers used oxen. You tried to start with about a dozen oxen -- a couple of teams -- and most of them would be dead for one reason or another by the time you reached the Parting of the Ways, just the other side of the Rockies. Horses would never survive that trip hauling the cargo the pioneers were carrying. And you don't sit on the wagon box to drive oxen. You walk beside them with a long bull whip. Only the sick, the feeble, maybe little kids and pregnant women near the time of birth rode in the wagons. The wagons were for hauling food, tools, and furniture, and you didn't exhaust the animals by loading them up with people who could move on their own. Didn't carry much water, either -- way too heavy. You had to follow the rivers.
They didn't use Conestogas, which were the 18-wheelers of the day, used mainly on the Santa Fe and Cimarron and other southern trails, initially to supply the US Army during the Mexican War. The Conestogas were way too big and heavy to negotiate the mountains and river crossings on the Oregon-California Trail. You needed like ten or twelve mules to pull a Conestoga, and that livestock had to eat. The pioneers used plain old farm wagons most of the time. The Reeds, one family in the Donner Party, had a special double-decker wagon made for the trip, but most people just used farm wagons. Many people, especially during the Gold Rush, abandoned their wagons at Fort Laramie when most of their supplies were gone, and packed mules the rest of the way, through the mountains.
And you left in May, April was too early for the grass you needed to support your stock, and you tried to arrive early September at the latest. Think you could walk from around Kansas City to the Pacific Coast in that time? With no McDonalds or Applebee's, no Holiday Inns or Motel Sixes.
If you want to know about the real history, you've got to dig a little deeper. All I'm saying is there's a lot more to "The Story of Us" than has been included so far. It's missing all the texture.
One pretty positive thing about the show -- it makes it plain that building the USA was not a federal project. It was done by individuals. Some pretty tough and sometimes pretty goofy individuals who just wanted to be free, or rich, or something. In the first wave of immigration across the Mississippi in the 1840s, there was a saying that if you could go to your farthest field and scream and anyone could hear you, the neighborhood was just getting too crowded. Apart from establishing the borders, and holding the whole thing together during the Civil War, the government didn't have much to do with the actual hands-on building of the USA at all.
The most beneficial thing the feds did for the nation was to stay out of the way of citizens as much as possible. Just about every time the feds got involved, there was corruption and fraud -- like Credit Mobile, which "The Story of Us" didn't mention. It was a scheme to raise money to fund the transcontinental railway. Certain people were authorized by the feds to form a corporation and sell stock and such; mostly those in charge spent whatever they got on big cigars and lobbying, then absconded with whatever was left. It was a huge scandal. A precursor to Modern Times.
Anyway, it was limited government and the resulting personal liberty -- hungry people free to get a living the best way they could -- that built this country from zippo to the most developed and prosperous in the world.
The mind-boggling advantages of just letting people do things for themselves is one of history's best lessons. Ambition, imagination, starvation -- that's what the USA is made on. And all of that is largely shoved aside as anti-social in the eat-your-brother syndrome of the welfare state. So if "The Story of Us" does anything to promote the amazing value of personal liberty, it's not all bad. It's a start, anyway.
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