… The Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War".
""How Did People Experience the American Civil War?"
So begins Mark Smith's original if shocking history of the Civil War's smells, tastes, sounds. So many books have been written about the war from almost every angle but virtually none from Smith's approach save the eloquent histories by Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote, for example. Yes, every year, thousands try to re-enact the famous battles but it is impossible to recreate what happened in the war. Whatever re-enactors playing soldier say or think, Mark Smith, Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, says "cannot be understood with the same or even similar meaning today…What sounded loud or smelled rancid or tasted foul is different or even irretrievable." Or, put it this way: If a contemporary writer mentioned that the battlefield at Gettysburg smelled of death, what could that have actually meant to both the warriors and civilians in 1863?
Smith opens with the Holy City—Charleston, South Carolina,--so-called because of its many churches. A quiet and prosperous southern city, obsessed with keeping order and preserving the rights and privileges of a parasitic slave owning upper white class who were always fixated on fears that their slaves might rise up and destroy everything they held dear. The eerie silence of nighttime was especially worrisome. Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey and many lesser known rebels did not go unnoticed and it is hardly surprising that many secessionist firebrands came from Charleston. Charleston was then a city of 70,000, with 2,800 owning 37,000 slaves plus about 3,000 free blacks. Its slave trade was the largest in the country. "Slavery built this city," Smith writes, " and the culture that built slavery defined how people behaved"…It all came down to one word: order." (In Tsarist Russia the rural nobility lived among the peasantry, the cherni cheloveki or black peasants, as some called them, and they too dreaded a peasant uprising, certainly one reason why serfdom was abolished in 1861),.."
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Amicalement
Armand
bases them up.
