The Killer Angels

I've been struggling through The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara for the past few weeks. A colleague at work loaned it to me. The social obligation this creates is probably the only reason I'm still attempting to finish this book.

The Killer Angels is about the Battle of Gettysburg. Three hundred and forty five pages of white men shooting rifles at each other. This isn't really my cup of tea. I generally like historical fiction, but military history bores me. If I'm going to read about a battle I prefer there to be some magical element to it. Dragons or giants or showers of sparks flying back and forth. If you take that away and just show men killing each other with ordinary metal, it gets to be a bit too real. It makes me uncomfortable.

Knowing that all of this actually happened doesn't help matters.

The thing I find most challenging about this book, though, is that it makes all of the characters real and sympathetic. Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, all of them. They're just men, fighting to preserve their way of life. And what's so wrong with that?

But this is at constant odds with everything I've learned, everything I believe. Their way of life wasn't worth preserving. Many of these men didn't own slaves, but they were fighting, in part, for the right to own slaves. For the idea that your humanity is, to some extent, determined by the color of your skin. I don't want to sympathize with these men. I don't want to be shown how human they were. They were the bad guys and I'm glad that they lost.

The worst part is discovering that not everyone feels the same way as me. I do most of my reading on the metro on the way to and from work. Some people think that, because I'm reading on the metro, they are invited to discuss the book with me. This can be annoying in and of itself. But it's even worse when they express opinions that I fundamentally disagree with. They agreed with the picture the book painted. They find the Southern Gentlemen sympathetic. They just wanted to preserve a way of life. The war wasn't about slavery. It was about independence. Was the Civil War really so different than the American Revolution? Barring the final outcome, of course. It bothers me that this way of thinking still exists, and that people feel comfortable expressing it.

I know that the Civil War wasn't just about slavery. There were many social and economic factors that led to it. I also know that the South was wrong. They were the bad guys. They were blatantly and extremely racist. They owned slaves. They had very strict class structure based on inheritance. The North was right and the North won. I really want this to stay black and white. The world is more comfortable when we're right and they're wrong.

That's really never the case, though, is it? We're all just human. No angels. No demons. Just people. But I like to think we're better now than we were 150 years ago. That we can understand that some ways of life aren't worth preserving, that some traditions are harmful and some values are immoral.

I don't know. Perhaps I should just finish the book and enjoy the North's inevitable victory.