I’ve not blogged in a couple of days, but I have been busy researching the play, to the degree I’ve been less interested in most everything else. What has been most captivating is reading these materials and encountering so many place names that are right here.

I’ve always loved history and as a youngster was interested in the Civil War. Nevertheless, once I graduated college that interest waned because, for one thing, the Civil War seemed so trod over. After the Ken Burns PBS series, it had hit that saturation point for me, borne of my basic contrariness, where I don’t want to be part of what everyone is talking about. A contemporary example would be my current avoidance of anything to do with Game of Thrones–even though when I was younger I would have loved to have had more series of that genre to watch.

Going back to the Civil War, from my college course work and before, I knew that Tennessee was, after Virginia, the site of the most battles. I also remembered that the Army of Tennessee frequently fielded more soldiers than did Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Even so, it seemed that the Confederate generals in this theatre were (naturally) inferior to the genius of Lee so that more often than not, one could count on most battles here ending with a Union victory. Additionally, the fighting, aside from the Battle of Fort Sanders and a couple of other skirmishes, occurred in Middle and West Tennessee.

Ahh, but the political intrigue here had all kinds of interesting stories. And as I said, there’s something about reading location names that you actually drive through every day and realizing that some of these rural places that seem so inconsequential are deserving of historical plaques, were they in some population center.

Speaking of an urban historical  area, from the time I was seven until my wife died, I lived in Knoxville, but I’ve never visited the Old Gray Cemetery. That’s something I must soon rectify.

One final comment: When I was young, because of the influence of one of my older brothers and reading the Douglas Southall Freeman seven-part biography of Lee, I was a Southern sympathizer. Although East Tennessee was known for being pro Union, my ancestors were split, and my mother seemed more a Confederate than a Yank. One of the earliest movies I remember loving was Gone With the Wind, and we took a memorable vacation to Charleston when I was young that only reinforced my Southern sympathies.

As I grew older, however, my head grew more and more to see the necessity of the North’s victory. Whereas I’d grown up despising Lincoln, I came to admire him and appreciate his greatness–especially compared with most Presidents we’ve endured. I accepted that the war’s being fought over states’ rights was a secondary fiction and that slavery was the primary instigation.

Now, though, I see that both versions are comparable, say, to the abortion struggle or gun rights today as wedge issues between liberals and conservatives. That is, slavery served as a demarcation between the two sides, but many pulling for each cause had all sorts of other motives driving them–quite frequently, self interest. There were Charlie Crists and Arlen Specters in those days just as there are now.

Second, even the Ku Klux Klan had more complexity to it than is portrayed today. The consensus now, for example, is that Birth of a Nation is a highly racist film, yet in Tennessee, at least, whites did have justified fear after the war. You had the Freedman’s Bureaus and you had recently freed blacks armed as soldiers. Although contemporary culture would like to stereotype these groups as monolithically benign, human nature is human nature. Is it really so hard to believe–and the historical records show–that such groups would try to redress antebellum grievances? In Tennessee, unfortunately you also had a governor and thus the civil authority who wanted revenge rather than reconciliation. It’s not surprising that Tennessee, then, is where the Klan was born.