By Todd Hatton/Seth Helton
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkms/local-wkms-947023.mp3
Murray, KY – UPDATE: From the Jackson Purchase Historical Society:
Due to quite low temperatures and uncertain roads/streets, Jackson Purchase regrets having to cancel today's meeting at Murray State. We will ask Dr. Mulligan if he can make his Civil War presentation at the end of July.
The Jackson Purchase Historical Society holds its first meeting of 2011 Saturday at Wrather Museum on Murray State's campus. And in honor of the U.S. Civil War Sesquicentennial, the speaker will be MSU history professor, Civil War historian, and Fulbright scholar Dr. William Mulligan. He sits down with us first to talk about the war's relevance and the role the Jackson Purchase played in the conflict.
The Civil War still holds importance in today's culture, says Mulligan. "It has never not been of interest to the American public." He credits Ken Burns' series The Civil War, broadcast on PBS, for stimulating a new interest in the conflict and bringing it to the TV generation. The series powerfully humanized the war, and made the events and faces of the Civil War familiar with a new audience.
Still, there are misunderstandings among the public of the real causes of the war, he says. He hopes that during the Sesquicentennial that these misunderstandings can be cleared up. He also hopes to draw attention to the importance of our region in conflict.
The Battle of Fort Donelson in Stewart County, Tennessee, was an important victory for the North. Mulligan says this battle is "where the South lost the war."
"The strategy of the South during the war was very similar to that of the American revolutionaries." The South intended to draw out the conflict until the North, which had far more men and resources, eventually got tired of supporting the war financially and public opinion declined. Lincoln understood this, and knew that if the war dragged on long enough that the North would lose valuable public support.
When the northern forces led by Grant captured the fort, they changed the direction of the war. The South's longevity was seriously injured by the loss of access to resources in the Jackson Purchase. They lost access to the horses, men, and iron in western Kentucky. Without access to these materials, the South would find it much harder to outlast the North. Mulligan says the battle was pivotal in the success of the Union and the downfall of the Confederacy.
The implications of battles fought in the Jackson Purchase for the war are easy to understand in comparison to the political causes of the war itself. The exact causes of the war are much more nuanced than states rights or slavery, and because of this are often misunderstood, Mulligan argues.
"Our self-image as a nation is at such odds with slavery. That is why we latch onto it. It was a brutal institution physically and physiologically. Not every ethnic group was welcomed warmly in American history, and slavery is the prime example. The war wasn't really about the equality of slavery, but the economic implications."
Slavery, as a motivator, is misunderstood by the modern public. The war was not fought on moral grounds. Economically, people in the North knew that they could not compete with slave labor.
He thinks that the issue of states rights obscures the real causes of the war. "States weren't fighting for the future rights to issue drivers licenses, he says, they were fighting for the right to control their labor systems," he says. It is difficult to see how important slavery was to the way people lived during this time. He makes a comparison saying that questioning slavery (as an economic institution) would be the equivalent to asking "should we keep capitalism?"
"The state right that mattered is how they controlled their labor. No non-slave state joined the confederacy over states rights."
The world we live in is not the same as the one our ancestors lived in. This prevents us from seeing the conflict the same way they did. "The world has moved on," he says, "if we want to understand the situation leading to the Civil War, we must approach the mindset that was prevalent during that time empathetically."
Dr. William Mulligan is professor of history at Murray State University. He will speak about the Civil War in Western Kentucky and West Tennessee at the winter meeting of the Jackson Purchase Historical Society tomorrow morning at 10:30. The meeting is at the Wrather Museum on Murray State's campus and is free and open to the public.