What every American should know about American History
The Civil War breaks out.(1861)
The event: at 4:30 a.m. on April, 1861, hot-headed South Corolina rebels fired on Fort Sumter, beginning of four years of bloodshed and bitterness called the Civil War.
While the Gentry of Charleston watched from the city's fashinable Battery, Confederate aritllery bombarded the fort until Sumter commandant Major Robert Anderson, his ammunition exhausted, surrendered. He and his garrison were permitted to withdraw with full military honors. The first shot can be dated precisely, and so the first battle, but the war really began decades earlier, as economic, social, political, and geographical differences between the people of the North and those of the South heated to a boil. With each new state added to the Union, bitter debate ensued over whether the state would be admitted with or without slavery. Political compromises in 1820 (the Missouri Compromise) and 1850 only postponed the inevitable armed conflict. but nobody dreamed just how horrible and costly the war would be: at least a half-million battle deaths just many more lives shattered by disfiguring woulnds inflicted by the weapons of an indutrial age, untold by poverty, misery, anguish, illness, and finally the martyr's death of the Union's leader, Abraham Lincoln, the victicm of an egomaniacal actor.
Although the population and industrial might of the North far outweighted the technology and numbers of men in the South could muster, the cream of the U.S. Army officer corps fell allegiance to the southern states, and the Confederate forces were, in the main, more ably commanded than those of the North, especially early in the war. The Confederates stunned Union loyalists with victories at Bul Run (Manassas; July 21, 1861), the so-called Seven Days (during the Peninsular Campaign of Union commander George B. McClellan), the second battle of Bull Run (Second Manassas; August 29-30, 1862), Fredericksburg (December 13, 1862) and Chancellorswille (May 2-4, 1863).
It was not until Antietam (Sharpsburg), on September 17, 1862, that the Union was able to claim something approaching a victory-albeit one purchased at tremendous cost. The outcome of the battle gave the Union military effort, sufficient credibility to enable Lincoln to issue, from what he felt was a position of strength, preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which brought the slavery issue to the fore of the conflict. For the Union, the Civil War now took on an added moral dimension, officially becoming more than a struggle to save the Union. It was now a crusade to abolish slavery. After General Robert E. Lee invaded Pennsylvania, Union forces under General George Meade turned back the Confederate army at Gettysburg (July 1-2, 1863), also at great cost. Gettysburg is usually cited as the turning point of the war in favor the Union.
Not only was an invading army repulsed and northern morale lifted, the sourthern defeat discouraged England and France from supporting the Confederate cause. Still, the war ground on. Union General Ulysses S. Grant scored important trumphs in the war/s western theater, at Shiloh (April 6-7, 1862), Vicksburg (under siege from October 1862 to July 4, 1863) and Chattanooga (November 23-25, 1863). Union control of the lower Mississippi began with the victory of Admiral David Farragut, who captured New Orleans in April 1862. In 1864, after a series of medicore commanding generals, Lincoln finally appointed Grant at the Union's general-in-chief. Slowly, inexorably, he forced Lee's army back toward the Confederate capital of Richmond, fighting the bitter Wilderness Campagin through May and June of 1864.
Grant's chief lieutenant, General William Tecumseh Sherman, advanced, in the meantime, through burned (Septemer-November 1864) before continuing on his infamously destructive "march to the sea". Sherman, brilliant strategist, introduced a concept that would become a terrifying hallmark of modern warfare. He called it "total war" by which he meant taking the battle not just to the opposing army to support the fight.
Yet the will of the South was not easy to break, and the bloody conflict refused to end. General Philip Sheridan defeated Confederate general George E. Pickett as Five forts (April 1, 1865) and Grant took heavily fortified Petersburg after a long campaign that stretched from June 1864 to April 2, 1865, when Grant took at last Richmond. A week later, at Appomattox Courthause, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Grant, effectively ending the Civil War.
Healing the wounds of war and reuniting the nation were staggering tasks that would require the wise and charitable judgement and strong leadership of Abraham Lincoln. His assasination on April 14, 1865, was the crowning tragedy of the nighmarish conflict. The unpopular Andrew Johnson was thrust into office, and the process of Reconstruction became a vindictive and opporunistic struggle that greatly prolonged the suffering of the South, retarding well into the twentieth century the region's economic recovery and, even worse, breeding a vicious strain of racism that has proven nearly as great a curse to the United States as slavery itself.
(Source: "DELIVERED FROM EVIL The Saga of World War Ⅱ" by Robert Leckie)
Yep, there was still a feeling of resentment betweem the South and the North, when I visited Atlanta, Georgia in 1995. But in a way America was united because of the Civil War.
It is interesting to note that General Sherman, who brought on Atlanta the fire of the sea and eventually marched toward the Atlantic coast, put up already a slogan of "total war", which is likened to be Berlin Leiter Joseph Goebbels in World War Ⅱ who yelled at the German people "Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg!"
While I was staying at a resort hotel, I dropped in a coffee shop and ordered milk. The waitress shooked her head and shrugged off her shoulders. I thought maybe because of my bad accent. So, I just pointed at her breast. Then, she smiled at me and nodded. After a couple of minutes she brought me a glass of milk.
She was something! A real sourthern belle.
The event: at 4:30 a.m. on April, 1861, hot-headed South Corolina rebels fired on Fort Sumter, beginning of four years of bloodshed and bitterness called the Civil War.
While the Gentry of Charleston watched from the city's fashinable Battery, Confederate aritllery bombarded the fort until Sumter commandant Major Robert Anderson, his ammunition exhausted, surrendered. He and his garrison were permitted to withdraw with full military honors. The first shot can be dated precisely, and so the first battle, but the war really began decades earlier, as economic, social, political, and geographical differences between the people of the North and those of the South heated to a boil. With each new state added to the Union, bitter debate ensued over whether the state would be admitted with or without slavery. Political compromises in 1820 (the Missouri Compromise) and 1850 only postponed the inevitable armed conflict. but nobody dreamed just how horrible and costly the war would be: at least a half-million battle deaths just many more lives shattered by disfiguring woulnds inflicted by the weapons of an indutrial age, untold by poverty, misery, anguish, illness, and finally the martyr's death of the Union's leader, Abraham Lincoln, the victicm of an egomaniacal actor.
Although the population and industrial might of the North far outweighted the technology and numbers of men in the South could muster, the cream of the U.S. Army officer corps fell allegiance to the southern states, and the Confederate forces were, in the main, more ably commanded than those of the North, especially early in the war. The Confederates stunned Union loyalists with victories at Bul Run (Manassas; July 21, 1861), the so-called Seven Days (during the Peninsular Campaign of Union commander George B. McClellan), the second battle of Bull Run (Second Manassas; August 29-30, 1862), Fredericksburg (December 13, 1862) and Chancellorswille (May 2-4, 1863).
It was not until Antietam (Sharpsburg), on September 17, 1862, that the Union was able to claim something approaching a victory-albeit one purchased at tremendous cost. The outcome of the battle gave the Union military effort, sufficient credibility to enable Lincoln to issue, from what he felt was a position of strength, preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which brought the slavery issue to the fore of the conflict. For the Union, the Civil War now took on an added moral dimension, officially becoming more than a struggle to save the Union. It was now a crusade to abolish slavery. After General Robert E. Lee invaded Pennsylvania, Union forces under General George Meade turned back the Confederate army at Gettysburg (July 1-2, 1863), also at great cost. Gettysburg is usually cited as the turning point of the war in favor the Union.
Not only was an invading army repulsed and northern morale lifted, the sourthern defeat discouraged England and France from supporting the Confederate cause. Still, the war ground on. Union General Ulysses S. Grant scored important trumphs in the war/s western theater, at Shiloh (April 6-7, 1862), Vicksburg (under siege from October 1862 to July 4, 1863) and Chattanooga (November 23-25, 1863). Union control of the lower Mississippi began with the victory of Admiral David Farragut, who captured New Orleans in April 1862. In 1864, after a series of medicore commanding generals, Lincoln finally appointed Grant at the Union's general-in-chief. Slowly, inexorably, he forced Lee's army back toward the Confederate capital of Richmond, fighting the bitter Wilderness Campagin through May and June of 1864.
Grant's chief lieutenant, General William Tecumseh Sherman, advanced, in the meantime, through burned (Septemer-November 1864) before continuing on his infamously destructive "march to the sea". Sherman, brilliant strategist, introduced a concept that would become a terrifying hallmark of modern warfare. He called it "total war" by which he meant taking the battle not just to the opposing army to support the fight.
Yet the will of the South was not easy to break, and the bloody conflict refused to end. General Philip Sheridan defeated Confederate general George E. Pickett as Five forts (April 1, 1865) and Grant took heavily fortified Petersburg after a long campaign that stretched from June 1864 to April 2, 1865, when Grant took at last Richmond. A week later, at Appomattox Courthause, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Grant, effectively ending the Civil War.
Healing the wounds of war and reuniting the nation were staggering tasks that would require the wise and charitable judgement and strong leadership of Abraham Lincoln. His assasination on April 14, 1865, was the crowning tragedy of the nighmarish conflict. The unpopular Andrew Johnson was thrust into office, and the process of Reconstruction became a vindictive and opporunistic struggle that greatly prolonged the suffering of the South, retarding well into the twentieth century the region's economic recovery and, even worse, breeding a vicious strain of racism that has proven nearly as great a curse to the United States as slavery itself.
(Source: "DELIVERED FROM EVIL The Saga of World War Ⅱ" by Robert Leckie)
Yep, there was still a feeling of resentment betweem the South and the North, when I visited Atlanta, Georgia in 1995. But in a way America was united because of the Civil War.
It is interesting to note that General Sherman, who brought on Atlanta the fire of the sea and eventually marched toward the Atlantic coast, put up already a slogan of "total war", which is likened to be Berlin Leiter Joseph Goebbels in World War Ⅱ who yelled at the German people "Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg!"
While I was staying at a resort hotel, I dropped in a coffee shop and ordered milk. The waitress shooked her head and shrugged off her shoulders. I thought maybe because of my bad accent. So, I just pointed at her breast. Then, she smiled at me and nodded. After a couple of minutes she brought me a glass of milk.
She was something! A real sourthern belle.
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