Popular Front of Judea
10th November 2013, 10:44
Far from the Gone With The Wind version of the US Civil War.
It was not yet Grants or Shermans Civil War in the spring of 1861. During this opening act, the two future icons were fated to watch from the wings, restless understudies awaiting their turn onstage. Yet the story that unfolded around them that spring in St. Louis was a struggle as dramaticand perhaps even as decisiveas any that would play out at Shiloh or Chattanooga. It was also a struggle unlike what most Americans today imagine: columns of blue and gray troops clashing nobly on the field of battle. Instead, the fight for Missouri in the spring of 1861the first real military contest between Union and Confederacywas a civil war in the truest and rawest sense, resembling those fought in our own time in such places as Beirut and Belfast: gun battles in the streets, long-simmering ethnic hatreds boiling over, and wailing mothers cradling slain children in their arms. It was also quite literally an American revolutionbut with a cast of heroes largely forgotten to history, and with the Unionists, not the Confederates, as rebels.
...
Grant himself would believe for the rest of his life that but for Lyon and his Germans, the Arsenal, and with it St. Louis, would have been taken by the Confederacy. By seizing the initiativeby transforming the Wide Awakes into soldiers and moving against the secessionists before they could properly organizethe damn Dutchmen had sent their enemies reeling, never to regain their balance. In effect, a small band of German revolutionaries accomplished in St. Louis what they had failed to do in Vienna and Heidelberg: overthrow a reactionary state government. And they had done it in a matter of weeks, while in the East the armies were stumbling toward a war of attrition that would last almost four years. If Lincoln and his generals in 1861 had been more like Lyon and his Germans, the Unions conquest of the South might have played out very differently.
Civil Warfare in the Streets | The American Scholar (http://theamericanscholar.org/civil-warfare-in-the-streets/#.Un9EAEMWW-M)
It was not yet Grants or Shermans Civil War in the spring of 1861. During this opening act, the two future icons were fated to watch from the wings, restless understudies awaiting their turn onstage. Yet the story that unfolded around them that spring in St. Louis was a struggle as dramaticand perhaps even as decisiveas any that would play out at Shiloh or Chattanooga. It was also a struggle unlike what most Americans today imagine: columns of blue and gray troops clashing nobly on the field of battle. Instead, the fight for Missouri in the spring of 1861the first real military contest between Union and Confederacywas a civil war in the truest and rawest sense, resembling those fought in our own time in such places as Beirut and Belfast: gun battles in the streets, long-simmering ethnic hatreds boiling over, and wailing mothers cradling slain children in their arms. It was also quite literally an American revolutionbut with a cast of heroes largely forgotten to history, and with the Unionists, not the Confederates, as rebels.
...
Grant himself would believe for the rest of his life that but for Lyon and his Germans, the Arsenal, and with it St. Louis, would have been taken by the Confederacy. By seizing the initiativeby transforming the Wide Awakes into soldiers and moving against the secessionists before they could properly organizethe damn Dutchmen had sent their enemies reeling, never to regain their balance. In effect, a small band of German revolutionaries accomplished in St. Louis what they had failed to do in Vienna and Heidelberg: overthrow a reactionary state government. And they had done it in a matter of weeks, while in the East the armies were stumbling toward a war of attrition that would last almost four years. If Lincoln and his generals in 1861 had been more like Lyon and his Germans, the Unions conquest of the South might have played out very differently.
Civil Warfare in the Streets | The American Scholar (http://theamericanscholar.org/civil-warfare-in-the-streets/#.Un9EAEMWW-M)