The siege [of Fort Sumter] had been carried on in earnest, but it had been like a formalized ritual carried on between friends. ...Catton, The Coming Fury 304.

...

Late in March, Anderson and Beauregard had an odd exchange. It had been printed that the Yankees were going to withdraw the Sumter garrison and that Beauregard had said that he would not permit this unless Anderson first surrendered, and Anderson's feelings were hurt. [Lolol in margin] He wrote to Beauregard about it in protest, and both Beauregard and Governor Pickens replied politely that nothing of the sort had been said or contemplated. Anderson wrote back that he knew Beauregard could not have said such a thing, and the amenities were properly preserved.

It is odd and the exchange brings clarity to the post-war U.S.A.-C.S.A. "reunions" at Gettysburg, the mock charges by septuagenarian rebels at the Stone Wall, the real groans of poignancy by the septuagenarian Union soldiers behind the Stone Wall, the embraces rather than the bullets. It shows that the odd behavior was not confined to the long-after but extended to the immediately-before.

The oddity of the reunions and the odd behavior at the reunions is universally held up as a cardinal instance of American exceptionalism, of our generosity of spirit, of letting bygones-be-bygones, of our commitment to re-union. The pre-, and I don't know, maybe the during-, "polite relations while they got ready to kill each other" chalked up to a fight among brothers.

It's not true. 620,000-750,000 soldiers from both sides were killed during the Civil War. Killing is not polite. There were atrocities like the Andersonville Prison, a concentration camp. After the war, between Gettysburg reunions, the leaders and citizens of the former C.S.A. resisted Reconstruction and fight for "States Rights" to this day. A cold Civil War had to be fought in the 1960's just to integrate lunch counters. "And you lynch Negroes" went the Russian whataboutism. And we did! We lynch them to this day, albeit in more "polite" ways, usually by shooting them, but sometimes in "old fashioned" ways like dragging them to their deaths behind transports. 

It's all part of the American myth. Every goddamn soldier in the Civil War--on either side--is a hero; all our generals are plainly the best the world has ever known; the fight to preserve slavery is airbrushed as a nobel "Lost Cause." 

But I'm getting far afield. I have never read, or thought up on my own, a convincing explanation for the "formalized", "ritualized", "odd" behavior of Americans during the Civil War. I know that it is not exclusively American oddness. There was much of it during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Somehow the violence gets abstracted away from real life and real death. "Rationalized", like Justice Campbell's conversation with William Seward, "Yeah, right, what's a little 50 more years of enslaving Negroes between friends." Odd.