The Heritage of a Civl War /From History of The Civil War

One of every five participants in the Civil War died in service. While 126,000 Americans died in World War I and 407,000 in World War II, more than 618,000 Americans were victims of the Civil War. The north lost a total of 360,022 men, of whom 67,058 were killed in action and 43,012 died of battle wounds. Extant records for the Confederacy do not provide complete statistics, yet certainly about 258,000 Southern soldiers died of all causes in the war. Approximately 94,000 of these were battle fatalities.

The biggest killers of troops in the 1860's were not bullets and shells but sickness and disease. Some 400,000 men perished from such maladies as diarrhea, dysentery, measles, small pox, chicken pox, typhoid fever, pneumonia, and gangrene. Intestinal disorders alone killed more than 57,000 Federal soldiers. Since proper food and sanitation were even more lacking on the Confederate side, the number of deaths among Southern troops from diarrhea and associated illnesses was proportionately higher. But the suffering does not stop there. At least 1,000,000 men were seriously wounded or severly ill during the war. Unquestionably, lingering effects of these disablements continued in most cases for years after the fighting ceased.

Human loss cannot be measured in terms of dollars. Materially speaking, the war cost the United States more than $15,000,000,000 in property destroyed, fields burned bare, material expended, and institutions both created and eliminated. The price tags of America's legacy of such items as a ruined South, military occupation, years of political corruption directly attributable to the war, partisan excesses, discrimination, and intolerance can never be computed.

The heritage of hate that the Civil War engendered mellowed appreciably with the passage of time. Veterans on both sides periodically gathered at the great battle sites to relive deeds of daring and to exchange anecdotes and compliments with former enemies. Their ability to forgive was an inspiration to future generations. In time, the whole nation came to revere the final survivors of the struggle. The last "Billy Yank," Albert Woolson of Duluth, Minnesota, died August 2, 1956 at the age of 109. The last "Johnny Reb," 117 year old Walter Williams of Houston, Texas, died December 19,1959.

The Civil War holds undying fascinatin for people all over the world.

Americans have probably read more about the war than the rest of man's history combined. More than 60,000 books and articles have appeared since the gun smoke cleared, and the stream of literary works shows no sign of drying up. For the Civil War was "our" war. It pitted American against American, brother against brother, father against son. The deeds of valor and sacrifice performed countless times by either Blue or Gray are heroics in which al Americans can take pride.

Moreover, the lines of dissension were never quite clear. Contestants in most wars appear vividly as either black or white. Yet the whole Civil War seemed to hover in gray shadows. Each side maintained that is was fighting for the America envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Delaware, a slave state, remained in the Union; antislaveryites Robert E. Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson fought for the Confederacy. In 1861, future Confederate generals Joseph E. Johnston and James Longstreet were serving in the U.S. Army-while future general William T. Sherman was living in the South. Mrs. Abraham Lincoln had two brothers and a brother-in-law who gave their lives fighting under the Stars and Bars.

No nation has ever fought itself and, a scant 100 years later, been bound by so many ties of nationalism and brotherhood as now characterize America. The progress of the United States, after a war that would seem to have left wounds too deep for healing, is a memorial to Americans of every age and creed who were willing to bind up the nation's wounds and march ahead confidently into the future. A United States forged in the death and steel of Civil War battles continued its growth, developed its destiny, and ultimately fulfilled Lincoln's vision of an America that is "the last great hope of earth."

The Civil War by James I. Robertson, Jr.

Jefferson Davis

Jefferson Davis, first-and only-President of the Confederacy, faced the task of shaping a new nation while waging a defensive war. (Collections of the Library of Congress)

Shooting began because men grew tired of shouting. For forty years, Northerns and Southerners argued with increasing vehemence over such issues as slavery, state rights, the conflicting goals of a dynamic, industrializing North and a static agricultural South, and the falling from political power of the South that had since colonial days provided the national leadership. By the 1850's compromise, the necessary ingredient to American life, had vanished. Emotion replaced thought; sharp disagreements produced heat; and heat generated fire.

Historians still debate which spark actually produced the explosion. The oldest explanation for the coming of war is the "conspiracy thesis": an Abolitionist Conspiracy in the North, callous to the constituional designs of the Founding Fathers and interested only in its unrealistic goals, was arrayed against a Slave Power Conspiracy in the South,

diabolically resolved to spread slavery throughout the land until it enslaved all peoples, white, and black. by the turn of the century however, such historians as James Ford Rhodes had simplified the cause of the Civil War to a single ingredient: Slavery.

The 20th century has produced a rash of differing interpretations. Charles A. Beard regarded the war as a "second American Revolution" provoked by economic differences between North and South. Many Southern-based historians see the war as a climax to arguments over the supremacy of state rights. Others feel that "Southern nationalism" created a desire to preserve at all costs the South's way of life. Recent writers, such as James G. Randall, take a more psychological approach. To them the war came from the fanaticism of a group of hotheads on each side. The great mass of Americans succumbed to radicalism and therefore exhibited the traits of "a blundering generation." Such writers point to modern-day events in America as historical parallels to the coming of the Civil War.

Whatever the cause of war, the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States shattered the Union. Southerners were unwilling to live under a Republican administration dedicated to antislavery principles. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina officially severed its ties with the Union.

In turn, the states of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas quickly followed suit. A provisional capital was established at Montgomery, Alabama, and the newly elected Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, proclaimed to the world: "All we ask is to be left alone."

First state to secede from the Union was South Carolina. This placard appeared on December 20, 1860, on the streets of Charlston.

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.