War and Myth I

People need to believe that wars are fought for some noble, even spiritual, cause. This is especially true if you are dealing with someone who has invested a son, a husband or some other relative or friend in the war in question.
The French with their wonderful, if somewhat cynical acuity, understood this perfectly when they created the Foreign Legion back in the 1840s. They were about to embark on a series of colonial wars in North Africa.
They had good and sufficient reason to do so—Algerian pirates, “Barbary pirates—named after the red bearded Muslim admiral who created them in the Sixteenth Century—had made shipping along the southern coast of France a misery for centuries.
Fleet units of several “Christian” nations had been stationed along North African shores for almost as long. We had a squadron there from 1800 to the 1840s ourselves. The French were finally ready to end it—and pick up any goodies lying around at the same time.
But the French knew that “colonial wars” (like Vietnam, Iraq, etc.) are a hard sell to the mothers of dead soldiers. It gets very messy when parents of maimed and wounded troops can vote. So the French created a foreign force with no mothers in France to grieve. Very, very smart.
American mothers are no different. During the Civil War, can you imagine how many American moms would have urged their sons to go down and fight to help New York bankers gain financial hegemony over the rest of the United States?
No, no, no, it would never work. So we created the mythology that we were fighting to free the slaves, a much more noble cause to die for. Problem: only a tiny percentage of northerners had ANY interest in that happening at all). When reality hit myth after the war, we backed out in a hurry and allowed southerners to impose Jim Crow laws that more accurately reflected what the nation felt.
But the myth worked for recruitment purposes.
It was more true that we were fighting to preserve the Union. After all, how could we compete with Britain and other industrialized nations if we split in two? But it still sounded better to sing, “As He died to make men holy let us die to make men free … .”
The Civil War made us money. Up until that war, we were basically a commodity producing economy—our biggest national source of income in 1860 was cotton. The war allowed industry and banking to develop. By the 1870s we were one of the largest industrial producers and exporters in the world—flooding European markets with admittedly shoddy goods.
(Both Japan and China would take a page out of that book in the Twentieth Century. Vietnam and Korea are coming on fast. At a dollar a day wages in the 1800s, we made ‘em cheap and dirty.)
So—we invested in the Civil War, and we WON it. The agricultural South and West would never have an effective veto over the economy again. At least if you’re from the industrialized part of the US, you won it.
But our history books prefer Julia War Howe’s version of events. It was all about “grapes of wrath”, “trampling”, and “terrible swift swords”—fighting to make men free. Certainly sounds better. But it flies in the face of a century of actual history.
Let’s look at a few more myths tomorrow.