The Concise Illustrated History Of The Civil War

The Civil War by James I. Robertson, Jr.

The Civil War was the most traumatic experience in the life of the United States. Neither North nor South in 1861 could have envisioned the scope, or the horror, of that conflict. Some 3,000,000 men served in the armies; more than 2,200 engagements, ranging from Vermont to the Arizona Territory, occurred; an average of 430 soldiers died each day of the four-year holocaust. In the end, almost as many Americans had perished as in all of the nation's other wars combined.

Cities were ravaged, farms were destroyed, and vast tracts of once-productive soil were laid waste by the indiscriminate appetites of war. Brothers opposed brothers; fathers and sons turned against one another. The continuing progress of the nation was delayed, if not set back, as almost an entire generation evaporated in the flames of battle. From the horror of that conflict emerged a new Union, plus freedom and the promise of equality for Negro slaves. America has never paid so high a price for a definition of its destiny.

Slavery was basically the cause of the Civil War.

To most northerners, the evil was callously compounded in the slave auction, where men and women were bid for like cattle, and families were broken up as their members were sold to separate buyers.

The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 made him a minority President and gave the "fire-eaters" of the South their excuse for secession. Like most Presidents, and more than most, he grew in stature as a man and a statesman during the four years of war that marked his administration. To the North he symbolize the cause for which it fought.