I don't wanna fight no civil war,

I like to read about American history. I like to read about parts of American history that are not usually part of the mainstream history. Recently I have read books on labor songwriter and martyr Joe Hill and one on Wisconsin's most significant senator Fighting Bob La Follette. My favorite revolutionary characters are not Washington or Jefferson, they are Aaron Burr and Thomas Paine. My next nonfiction book I am going to read is about General "Black Jack" Pershing pursuit of Pancho Villa. What I am trying to say is I think our country focuses a little too much on certain events and avoids others. Not me; WW 2 is interesting, but I want to know more about WW 1.

Anyways one part of American history I have never liked and have always avoided is the Civil war. To this day one hundred and forty years later it is still hard to find an honest objective book on the subject. One hundred and forty years later it is still the south verses the north. I have however recently started to get into the subject a little bit. Most recently I started reading War to the Knife by Thomas Goodrich. The book is about what seems very interesting event in the civil war, if not American history in general, Bleeding Kansas. Basically this is the prequel to the civil war. As Kansas was trying to become a state, free staters and pro slavery groups moved into the state and started killing each other. So I get this book and am very eager to read it. I very much didn't like his style. The book is pretty much just quotes of letters and newspaper article listed in a story type of format. I would of much rather the author use these quotes to create his own narrative, but at this point this is just a minor criticism of the book. Somewhere around page one hundred the author tries to make the point that the slaves in Missouri were better off as slaves. Now I understand that the cruelty of slavery varied depending on location and the type of job that needed to be done (for example the sugar cane fields in the Caribbean was basically a death sentence), but for anyone to say that a man is better in bondage than free is despicable. That was when I first started to notice his bias, the next chapter dealt with John Brown and the bias become blatant.

I debated skimming through the rest of the book, but in the end I decided to put it on the shelf. I got other books I can read and anyone who could publish a book in 1998 and have a pro slavery position just isn't worth my time. I checked Amazon for another book on the subject (since I still am interested in reading about Bleeding Kansas), but it seemed like everything was labeled either pro south or pro north. So, my avoidance of the civil war begins once again.