The Politically Incorrect Guide To The Civil War
 Illustrated, notes, index, 370 pp., 2008. Regnery Publishing Co., One Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, D.C., $19.95 plus shipping. H.W. Crocker III will not win any friends or accolades from those who see the war through the prism of the North. He will garner cheers and snickers from those who see it through the prism of the South with this new entry in the Politically Incorrect series. Crocker takes on the Confederacy’s critics directly and usually with a sense of humor. In two pages he addresses the oft-quoted politically correct charge that Confederates of 1860s and their modern-day defenders are nothing more than Nazis. Crocker points out that the South did not wage an aggressive war, did not commit a Holocaust against the Jews, and hated the idea of centralized government control – all Nazi ideas. “If they would not take orders from Abraham Lincoln, and often wondered why they should take them from Jefferson Davis, is it hard to imagine they would have had any interest in being harangued by a paper-hanging corporal with a toothbrush moustache?” writes Crocker. To the absurd charges often floated by those ignorant of history that the supposedly racist South would have joined with the Germans in World War I and II, Crocker suggests an independent South would have finished off the Germans in 1916 after naturally siding with Great Britain in both wars. By way of disclosure, I wrote The Politically Incorrect Guide To The South for Regnery. My book examines the 400-year history of The South while Crocker sticks just to the war years. Crocker will irritate some PC-leaning readers by defending the South’s traditional, if un-PC view, that the war was caused by a lot more issues than slavery. Crocker points out that Lincoln himself said the war was not about slavery, but about preserving the Union at all costs. Actually, Crocker’s evenhandedness may irritate some of his naturally pro-South readers, as well as those Union Forever readers. He defends Grant on the issuing of General Order 11, which expelled Jews from the Department of Tennessee. Crocker says Grant’s real object was getting rid of people he thought were putting commerce before country, and that he was not a real anti-Semite. Crocker also defends the PC crowd’s favorite devil, Nathan Bedford Forrest. He concludes that Forrest was not at fault for any supposed massacre at Fort Pillow, pointing out that William T. Sherman saw no need for retaliation. The book is fun to read and filled with little bits of humor and factoids that will irritate those who need to be irritated. Reviewer: Clint Johnson’s latest book is Pursuit: The Chase, Capture, Persecution and Surprising Release of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
|
