One hundred thirty-six years after General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Americans are still fascinated with the War for Southern Independence. The larger bookstores devote an inordinate amount of shelf space to books about the events and personalities of the war; Ken Burns’s “Civil War” television series and the movie “Gettysburg” were blockbuster hits; dozens of new books on the war are still published every year; and a monthly newspaper, Civil War News, lists literally hundreds of seminars, conferences, reenactments, and memorial events related to the war in all 50 states and the District of Columbia all year long. Indeed, many Northerners are “still fighting the war” in that they organize a political mob whenever anyone attempts to display a Confederate heritage symbol in any public place.
Americans are still fascinated by the war because many of us recognize it as the defining event in American history. Lincoln’s war established myriad precedents that have shaped the course of American government and society ever since: the centralization of governmental power, central banking, income taxation, protectionism, military conscription, the suspension of constitutional liberties, the “rewriting” of the Constitution by federal judges, “total war,” the quest for a worldwide empire, and the notion that government is one big “problem solver.”
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