Paid Advertisement  Irreconcilable Differences  By Winston
Groom  Originally published by America's Civil War magazine.
Published Online: June 24, 2011  Print Friendly 3 comments FONT
+  FONT -  Simmering animosities between North and South
signaled an American apocalypse   "The worst are full of
passionate intensity"  It is probably safe to say that the
original impetus of the Civil War was set in motion when a Dutch
trader offloaded a cargo of African slaves at Jamestown, Va., in
1619. It took nearly 250 eventful years longer for it to boil
into a war, but that Dutchman's boatload was at the bottom of
it—a fact that needs to be fixed in the reader's mind from the
start.    Southerners on the other hand, or so the theory went,
were the hereditary offspring of Cromwell's enemies, the "gay
cavaliers" of King Charles II and his glorious Restoration, who
had imbued the South with their easygoing, chivalrous and honest
ways. Whereas, according to Semmes, the people of the North had
evolved accordingly into "gloom