Descent Into Inferno (Echoes, Part 1)

How the Civil War shaped our government today

This is Part 1 in a series of articles I’ve titled: Echoes.

These articles will look at the Civil War, the Vietnam War, and 9/11 to see how the United States has arrived at its current state, and how, through these three major events, Americans can trace their lineage to its roots.

Part 1 observes the Civil War, or more precisely, the America that existed before and after the Civil War. It attempts to digest how men blinded by partisanism and ambition descended into the worst catastrophe of America’s history, but came out the other side with a clearer vision of the future.

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My dad has a massive book filled with family trees and letters. It sits in a dusty drawer when he’s not poring over the family tree and deeds of sale to this or that property. Between he and my grandmother, hundreds of hours have been spent researching the comings and goings of our distant relations going back to the early 1800s.

He owns woodcuts and drawings of Hamburg (a product of his great-grandfather’s travels), a collection of spent Civil War-era Minie balls, a gigantic whalebone, and a clock he’s half convinced is the same age as the United States of America.

My childhood home is a museum.

Or a shrine, whatever you’d like to call it.

I harbor a quiet fear that I’ll let him down when I don’t pick up the reins of the family genealogy obsession. You’d think I’d be a shoo-in, being such a history nut. But the whale bones and minie balls in our house led me down a path of interest that spit me out near ancient Greek hoplites, Persian kings, and American marines.

I should hop into a therapist’s chair and unroll that ball of yarn, but who can justify that in this economy?

This interest in what has come before is not unique to my father, nor is it unique to Americans. We all, as humans, desire to know our place in the world, how our world was shaped, and how others have contended with life’s many struggles.

The modern American ethos, it seems to me, was formed not by one event, but three.¹ And if we are keeping up the family tree motif, it’s these three events that one might find written in the margins of our collective “family tree.”