http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ivan-eland/wars-rarely-advance-freed_b_7153898.html

Ivan Eland Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty, The Independent Institute

Wars Rarely Advance Freedom: Baltimore Riot Hints that Applies Even to the Civil War

Posted: 04/27/2015

The tragic irony of the recent rioting in Baltimore after alleged police brutality on an African American man is that the violence is a legacy of the American Civil War, which had its first violent deaths in the same location 154 years before. Some of the rioting occurred near Camden Yards, which now is a sports complex, but which in 1861 housed one of Baltimore's train stations. Troops from the northeastern states were racing to get to Washington, D.C. to defend the North's capital, which was surrounded by many Southern sympathizing regions, including the city of Baltimore. The troops had to disembark from trains and march across the city to the Camden Yard station to transfer to trains taking them south to Washington. In Baltimore, they met angry southern resistance, which resulted in the first combat deaths of the Civil War.
The Civil War -- still the most deadly war in American history with 850,000 deaths, including civilians, seared already deep regional and racial cleavages in America into the permanent political landscape. Abraham Lincoln, the man who our high school history books tell us held the Union together and freed the slaves, receives adulation from historians and a stone temple today on the National Mall in the capital of the reunited nation. Nowadays, criticizing Lincoln, who has become almost the secular equivalent of Jesus, can raise suspicions that you are a closet racist who likes to manifest it publicly by supporting "Confederate heritage" or waving the Confederate battle flag.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ivan-eland/wars-rarely-advance-freed_b_7153898.html