Perhaps author Henry Freeman set an impossible task for himself when he set out to write a history covering the entire American Civil War in a book that can be read in one hour. Frankly, as someone who has an entire bookcase housing over 100 (long) books on the same war, I was skeptical that anyone could accomplish such a thing. As it turns out, I was correct, but I have to hand it to Mr. Freeman because he came closer to getting the job done than I imagined he could.

American Civil War is less a military history of the war than it is an overview of the causes of the war and what happened in its immediate aftermath to both the northern and southern regions of the United States. In fact, I want to emphasize that anyone looking for more than one or two sentences dedicated to the major battles of the war will be disappointed. This is not that kind of book. On the other hand, those wanting a brief history of how the United States found itself waging such a bloody internal war will find the book interesting.

In all fairness to the author, to expect much more than an overview of the war in 46-page book would be unreasonable.

What surprised me most about American Civil War is that it is written with such an obvious bias toward the righteousness of the North and the utter contemptibility of the South before and after the war – seemingly right up to the present day. There is, for instance, a chapter on “Women and Blacks in the War” that leaves the reader with the impression that completely unlike their northern counterparts, women in the South were completely dominated by the men in their world:

“Simply put, women (in the South) were at all times subordinate to the men in their lives, be they husbands, fathers, or sometimes even sons, cousins, uncles, et cetera. Taking an active role outside of the home was not acceptable for these women. What was more, doing so would not only have disgraced themselves, but these men in their lives as well; the obedience and deference of women was one place from which Southern men derived their status.”

Really? There were, of course, societal differences, but I submit that the women of the United States, regardless of region, had more in common than not, and that this generalization is a gross misrepresentation of Southern women of the day.

But it is in the book’s final chapter, “The Legacy of the Civil War” in which I believe that the author makes his biggest misstep by jumping to the conclusion that every problem in the black community today is caused by the racism directed at that community:

“While it is no longer acceptable in most places to express the kind of open hostility toward African Americans that was the norm into the 1950s and beyond, recent events like the Rodney King riots in the 1990s, attack on President Obama’s birth certificate, the shootings of unarmed black men by police officers, and the resulting Black Lives Matter movement, remind us that despite the loss of life in the Civil War, the legacy of slavery lives on.”

Yes, it does live on. But I submit that that legacy is not all the fault of the majority population, one that has made a concerted effort to make sure that the descendants of slaves have the same opportunities to better themselves that any other citizen of this country can claim.

American Civil War could have been a good primer for those just beginning their study of that conflict, but its political bias prevents it from achieving that goal. ( )