Civil War Characters

Image via Wikipedia

One of the things I’ve discovered in reading about the Civil War is how many unique personalities there were involved in the war. Many of these personalities were leaders: politicians, generals, and others. It’s also interesting to note in regards to that how small their world was and how much they knew of each other.

As I’ve read what they’ve said about themselves and others and their actions, I often find myself puzzling over whether similar modern leaders would do such things, would be so candid, would undermine rivals to the point of jeopardizing the war effort. I can’t imagine it, but maybe I just haven’t read enough about war.

Finally, I’ve also noticed that the regular army members were not as respectful of their leaders as we would expect regular army members to be today. I’ve already written about Nelly but there are many other instances where a general doesn’t seem to get the respectful demour I would expect in today’s army.