The reason the left is so mad and so upset enough to be taking their frustrations out on others who are not a failure or more perfect; is simple. They are forced to cooperate and we made sure they did this with complicity. The cyber and satellite warfare program made sure by giving the public the factors which we know the left must comply to. We have stated the nature of this disturbance was to form revolt. This is why they want to take out their frustrations on us and have done this willingly so. The left is forced to cooperate and comply where they once were very defiant and clandestinely revolting. So while we sit here and wait for their surrender to the authorities and this process of justice to take place by coming forth; the damages to our lives and the financial reparations are in limbo while we wait for this capitulation. This chapter is about the American Civil War during the 1860s. There is much more to the American Civil War then the simple issue of slavery or secession.
After the Civil War, the South and the armies of the South never fully recover. The process of reconstruction could not be fully accomplished because the southern culture was based on the textile industry and the hope for the return of the textile trade after the American Civil War. This hope to rejuvenate the economy of the South to Pre Civil war status did not take place and never did. Instead, it was replaced by something. This is because the value of slavery was just like the value of cotton; it was a natural resource and a commodity. When you took this away, the very backbone of the economy collapsed.
The North, on the other hand, saw the situation differently. The Union Generals saw the situation in the South as only temporary and destroyed their economy thinking reconstruction in the post antebellum period would only take a few years to complete. They were not prepared for what happened after 1865 and the collapse of the textile industry; the economic purpose of the South and the culture of slavery. This state of unpreparedness is the same disbelief which bred tremendous loss on the battlefield. This collapse did not assist to reintegrate former slaves to the culture which based their labors on the existence of slavery. Emancipation meant jobs but the Union Army could not fix the mechanism of culture left by slavery. There was no plan to fix the South beyond Emancipation or submission. This entire engine of slavery was meant to feed the cotton fields in the South while it provided bales of natural resources to free slaves working in textile factories in the North, both sides were affected by the economic loss.
Yeah well, what can we say? We are admired by the left more so then we care to be and are viewed with such talent, we are able to perfect socialism and figure out a way to fix fiscal irresponsibility and public debt. Like Russian roulette, if we do not, the next finger on the trigger could be our last. How convenient and how entertaining, the secret weapon against debt turns out to be the destruction of the left and their removal from power. The reason for this chapter is to present the historical struggles in American culture; these struggles are very turbulent and violent. These struggles in American culture determine the willingness of the American people to survive, what the individual must do and what the nation must do in order to survive.
It is not certain how many people in this world could foresee the dynamics of the Cold War back during the American Civil War. The American Civil War itself was very vague, but it also had meaning. If you grew up in Northern Virginia, then you have the rare opportunity to study the historic battlefields, the history of the Northern Virginia region and the history of Virginia. It is a local treasure trove of United States history. This chapter is a brief summary of the Ken Burn’s series on the American Civil War and some of the writings that emerged from it which haunt the memory of historians. Wikipedia has a very good explanation for the American Civil War, below is a brief summary.
The American Civil War
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was a civil war between the United States of America (the "Union") and the Southern slave states of the newly-formed Confederate States of America under Jefferson Davis. The Union included all of the free states and the five slaveholding border states and was led by Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party. Republicans opposed the expansion of slavery into territories owned by the United States, and their victory in the presidential election of 1860 resulted in seven Southern states declaring their secession from the Union even before Lincoln took office.[1] The Union rejected secession, regarding it as rebellion.
Hostilities began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces attacked a U.S. military installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Lincoln responded by calling for a large volunteer army, then four more Southern states declared their secession. In the war's first year, the Union assumed control of the Border States and established a naval blockade as both sides’ massed armies and resources. In 1862, battles such as Shiloh and Antietam caused massive casualties unprecedented in U.S. military history. In September 1862, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation made ending slavery in the South a war goal, which complicated the Confederacy's manpower shortages.
In the East, Confederate commander Robert E. Lee won a series of victories over Union armies, but Lee's reverse at Gettysburg in early July, 1863 proved the turning point. The capture of Vicksburg and Port Hudson by Ulysses S. Grant completed Union control of the Mississippi River. Grant fought bloody battles of attrition with Lee in 1864, forcing Lee to defend the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia. Union general William Sherman captured Atlanta, Georgia, and began his famous March to the Sea, devastating a hundred-mile-wide swath of Georgia. Confederate resistance collapsed after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House in April 1865.
The war, the deadliest in American history, caused 620,000 soldier deaths and an undetermined number of civilian casualties, ended slavery in the United States, restored the Union by settling the issues of nullification and secession and strengthened the role of the Federal government. However, issues affected by the war's unresolved social, political, economic and racial tensions continue to shape contemporary American thought.
Contents
Causes of the war
The coexistence of a slave-owning South with an increasingly anti-slavery North made secession inevitable. Lincoln did not propose federal laws against slavery where it already existed, but he had, in his 1858 House Divided Speech, expressed a desire to "arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction".[2] Much of the political battle in the 1850s focused on the expansion of slavery into the newly created territories.[3][4][5] All of the organized territories were likely to become free-soil states, which increased the Southern movement toward secession. Both North and South assumed that if slavery could not expand it would wither and die. [6][7][8]
Southern fears of losing control of the federal government to antislavery forces, and Northern fears that the slave power already controlled the government, brought the crisis to a head in the late 1850s. Sectional disagreements over the morality of slavery, the scope of democracy and the economic merits of free labor vs. slave plantations caused the Whig and "Know-Nothing" parties to collapse, and new ones to arise (the Free Soil Party in 1848, the Republicans in 1854, the Constitutional Union in 1860). In 1860, the last remaining national political party, the Democratic Party, split along sectional lines.
Both North and South were influenced by the ideas of Thomas Jefferson. Southerners emphasized the states' rights ideas mentioned in Jefferson's Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and the right of revolution mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. Northerners ranging from the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to the moderate Republican leader Abraham Lincoln [9] emphasized Jefferson's declaration that all men are created equal. Lincoln mentioned this proposition in his Gettysburg Address.
Historian Kenneth M. Stampp mentioned Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens' A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States as an example of a Southern leader who said that slavery was the "cornerstone of the Confederacy" when the war began and then said that the war was not about slavery but states' rights after Southern defeat. Stampp said that Stephens became one of the most ardent defenders of the Lost Cause. [10]
All but one inter-regional crisis involved slavery, starting with debates on the three-fifths clause in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Other factors include modernization in the rapidly industrializing North, sectionalism (caused by the growth of slavery in the deep South while slavery was gradually phased out in Northern states) and economic differences between North and South, although most modern historians disagree with the extreme economic determinism of historian Charles Beard.[11] The fact that seven immigrants out of eight settled in the North, plus the fact that twice as many whites left the South for the North as vice versa, contributed to the South's defensive-aggressive political behavior[12] There was controversy over adding the slave state of Missouri to the Union that led to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Nullification Crisis over the Tariff of 1828 (although the tariff was low after 1846[13]), the Gag rule that prevented discussion in Congress of petitions for ending slavery from 1835–1844, the acquisition of Texas as a slave state in 1845 and Manifest Destiny as an argument for gaining new territories where slavery would become an issue after the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), which resulted in the Compromise of 1850.[14] The Wilmot Proviso was an unsuccessful attempt by Northern politicians to exclude slavery from the territories conquered from Mexico. There were unsuccessful attempts to end controversy over slavery in the territories through popular sovereignty and Southern attempts to annex Cuba (including the Ostend Manifesto) and Nicaragua as slave states. The extremely popular antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe greatly increased Northern opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.[15][16]
There was the polarizing effect of slavery that split the largest religious denominations (the Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian churches) [17] and controversy caused by the worst cruelties of slavery (whippings, mutilations and families split apart). In Congress arguments over slavery became violent when Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina attacked Radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner with a cane after Sumner's "Crime against Kansas" speech. [18] Even rival plans for Northern vs. Southern routes for a transcontinental railroad became entangled in the Bleeding Kansas controversy over slavery. The old Second Party System broke down after passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The "Dred Scott Decision" of 1857, the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, John Brown's raid in 1859 and the split in the Democratic Party in 1860 polarized the nation between North and South. The election of Lincoln in 1860 was the final trigger for secession. During the secession crisis, many sought compromise—of these attempts, the best known was the "Crittenden Compromise"—but all failed.
Southern secession was triggered by the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln [19] because regional leaders feared that he would stop the expansion of slavery and put it on a course toward extinction. Many Southerners thought either Lincoln or another Northerner would abolish slavery, and that it was time to secede. The slave states, which had already become a minority in the House of Representatives, were now facing a future as a perpetual minority in the Senate and Electoral College against an increasingly powerful North. Deep South states with the most slavery seceded first, followed by the secession of four more states following the Battle of Fort Sumter and Lincoln's subsequent call for each remaining state to provide troops to retake forts and suppress the insurrection. Upper South states refused to send troops against their neighbors in what they considered an invasion.
Slavery
A strong correlation was shown between the degree of support for secession and the number of plantations in the region; states of the Deep South which had the greatest concentration of plantations were the first to secede. The upper South slave states of Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee had fewer plantations and rejected secession until the Fort Sumter crisis forced them to choose sides. Border States had fewer plantations still and never seceded. [20][21] The percentage of Southern whites living in families that owned slaves was 36.7 percent in the lower South, 25.3 percent in the upper South and 15.9 percent in the Border States that fought mostly for the Union. [22] Ninety-five percent of blacks lived in the South, comprising one third of the population there as opposed to one percent of the population of the North. Consequently, fears of eventual emancipation were much greater in the South than in the North. [23]
The Supreme Court decision of 1857 in Dred Scott v. Sandford added to the controversy. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's decision said that slaves were "so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect", [24] and that slaves could be taken to Free states and territories. Lincoln warned that "the next Dred Scott decision"[25] could threaten northern states with slavery.
Northern politician Abraham Lincoln said, "This question of Slavery was more important than any other; indeed, so much more important has it become that no other national question can even get a hearing just at present."[26] The slavery issue was related to sectional competition for control of the territories, [27] and the Southern demand for a slave code for the territories was the issue used by Southern politicians to split the Democratic Party in two, which all but guaranteed the election of Lincoln and secession. When secession was an issue, South Carolina planter and state Senator John Townsend said that "our enemies are about to take possession of the Government, that they intend to rule us according to the caprices of their fanatical theories, and according to the declared purposes of abolishing slavery."[28] Similar opinions were expressed throughout the South in editorials, political speeches and declarations of reasons for secession. Even though Lincoln had no plans to outlaw slavery where it existed, Southerners throughout the South expressed fears for the future of slavery.
Southern concerns included not only economic loss but also fears of racial equality. [29][30][31][32] The Texas Declaration of Causes for Secession [33] [34] said that the non-slave-holding states were "proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color", and that the African race "were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race". Alabama secessionist E. S. Dargan said that emancipation would make Southerners feel "demoralized and degraded". [35]
Beginning in the 1830s, the U.S. Postmaster General refused to allow mail which carried abolition pamphlets to the South. [36] Northern teachers suspected of any tinge of abolitionism were expelled from the South, and abolitionist literature was banned. Southerners rejected the denials of Republicans that they were abolitionists. [37] John Brown's raid on the federal Harpers Ferry Armory greatly increased Southern fears of slave insurrections.[38] The North felt threatened as well, for as Eric Foner concludes, "Northerners came to view slavery as the very antithesis of the good society, as well as a threat to their own fundamental values and interests".[39]
Secession begins
Secession of South Carolina
South Carolina adopted the "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union" on December 24, 1860. It argued for states' rights for slave owners in the South, but contained a complaint about states' rights in the North in the form of opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act, claiming that Northern states were not fulfilling their federal obligations under the Constitution. At issue were:
* The refusal of Northern states to enforce the fugitive slave code, violating Southern personal property rights;
* Agitation against slavery, which "denied the rights of property".
* Assisting "thousands of slaves to leave their homes" through the Underground Railroad.
* The election of Lincoln "because he has declared that 'Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,' and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction".
* "...elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens". Most Northerners opposed the Dred Scott decision, although only a few New England states allowed blacks an equal right to vote. [40]
Secession winter
Before Lincoln took office, seven states had declared their secession from the Union. They established a Southern government, the Confederate States of America on February 9, 1861. They took control of federal forts and other properties within their boundaries with little resistance from President Buchanan, whose term ended on March 4, 1861. Buchanan asserted, "The South has no right to secede, but I have no power to prevent them."[41] One quarter of the U.S. Army—the entire garrison in Texas—was surrendered to state forces by its commanding general, David E. Twiggs, who then joined the Confederacy.
As Southerners resigned their seats in the Senate and the House, secession later enabled Republicans to pass bills for projects that had been blocked by Southern Senators before the war, including the Morrill Tariff, land grant colleges (the Morill Act), a Homestead Act, a trans-continental railroad (the Pacific Railway Acts), the National Banking Act and the authorization of United States Notes by the Legal Tender Act of 1862. The Revenue Act of 1861 introduced the income tax to help finance the war.
The Confederacy
Seven Deep South cotton states seceded by February 1861, starting with South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. These seven states formed the Confederate States of America (February 4, 1861), with Jefferson Davis as president, and a governmental structure closely modeled on the U.S. Constitution. In April and May 1861, four more slave states seceded and joined the Confederacy: Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia. Virginia was split in two, with the eastern portion of that state seceding to the Confederacy and the northwestern part joining the Union as the new state of West Virginia on June 20, 1863.
State and territory boundaries, 1864–5. Union states Union territories Kansas, which entered the Union as a free state after the Bleeding Kansas crisis Union border states that permitted slavery The Confederacy Confederate claimed and sometimes held territories
State and territory boundaries, 1864–5.
Union states Union territories Kansas, which entered the Union as a free state after the Bleeding Kansas crisis Union border states that permitted slavery The Confederacy Confederate claimed and sometimes held territories
The Union states
Twenty-three states remained loyal to the Union: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin. During the war, Nevada and West Virginia joined as new states of the Union. Tennessee and Louisiana were returned to Union control early in the war.
The territories of Colorado, Dakota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Washington fought on the Union side. Several slave-holding Native American tribes supported the Confederacy, giving the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) a small bloody civil war.
Border States
The Border States in the Union were West Virginia (which was separated from Virginia and became a new state), and four of the five northernmost slave states (Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Kentucky).
Maryland had numerous pro-Confederate officials who tolerated anti-Union rioting in Baltimore and the burning of bridges. Lincoln responded with martial law and called for troops. Militia units that had been drilling in the North rushed toward Washington and Baltimore.[42] Before the Confederate government realized what was happening, Lincoln had seized firm control of Maryland (and the separate District of Columbia), by arresting all the Maryland government members and holding them without trial.
In Missouri, an elected convention on secession voted decisively to remain within the Union. When pro-Confederate Governor Claiborne F. Jackson called out the state militia, it was attacked by federal forces under General Nathaniel Lyon, who chased the governor and the rest of the State Guard to the southwestern corner of the state. (See also: Missouri secession). In the resulting vacuum, the convention on secession reconvened and took power as the Unionist provisional government of Missouri. [43]
Kentucky did not secede; for a time, it declared itself neutral. However, the Confederates broke the neutrality by seizing Columbus, Kentucky in September 1861. That turned opinion against the Confederacy, and the state reaffirmed its loyal status, while trying to maintain slavery. During a brief invasion by Confederate forces, Confederate sympathizers organized a secession convention, inaugurated a governor, and gained recognition from the Confederacy. The rebel government soon went into exile and never controlled the state. [44]
Union supporters in the far northwestern counties of Virginia opposed secession and formed a pro-Union government in Wheeling shortly after Virginia's 1861 declaration of secession from the U.S. They then organized a vote on October 24, 1861 to approve secession from Virginia, and were admitted to the Union as the new state of West Virginia on June 20, 1863, eventually composed of 50 former counties of Virginia. The vote was poorly attended and only token votes appeared in many counties that had supported Virginia's secession, some giving no vote at all,[45][46] and both before and after admission to statehood, there were disputes over the boundary between West Virginia and Virginia, and the legality of the vote.[47][48][49]
Similar Unionist secessions attempts appeared in East Tennessee, but were suppressed by the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis arrested over 3000 men suspected of being loyal to the Union and held them without trial. [50]
The war begins
Lincoln's victory in the presidential election of 1860 triggered South Carolina's declaration of secession from the Union. By February 1861, six more Southern states made similar declarations. On February 7, the seven states adopted a provisional constitution for the Confederate States of America and established their temporary capital at Montgomery, Alabama. A pre-war February Peace Conference of 1861 met in Washington in a failed attempt at resolving the crisis. The remaining eight slave states rejected pleas to join the Confederacy. Confederate forces seized most of the Federal forts within their boundaries (they did not take Fort Sumter); President Buchanan protested but made no military response aside from a failed attempt to resupply Fort Sumter via the ship Star of the West (the ship was fired upon by Citadel cadets), and no serious military preparations. [52] However, governors in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania quietly began buying weapons and training militia units.
On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as President. In his inaugural address, he argued that the Constitution was a more perfect union than the earlier Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, that it was a binding contract, and called any secession "legally void". [53] He stated he had no intent to invade Southern states, nor did he intend to end slavery where it existed, but that he would use force to maintain possession of federal property. His speech closed with a plea for restoration of the bonds of union. [54]
The South sent delegations to Washington and offered to pay for the federal properties and enter into a peace treaty with the United States. Lincoln rejected any negotiations with Confederate agents on the grounds that the Confederacy was not a legitimate government, and that making any treaty with it would be tantamount to recognition of it as a sovereign government.[55] However, Secretary of State William Seward engaged in unauthorized and indirect negotiations that failed.[55]
Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, Fort Monroe, Fort Pickens and Fort Taylor were the remaining Union-held forts in the Confederacy, and Lincoln was determined to hold Fort Sumter. Under orders from Confederate President Jefferson Davis, troops controlled by the Confederate government under P. G. T. Beauregard bombarded the fort with artillery on April 12, forcing the fort's capitulation. Northerners rallied behind Lincoln's call for all of the states to send troops to recapture the forts and to preserve the Union. With the scale of the rebellion apparently small so far, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers for 90 days. [56] For months before that, several Northern governors had discreetly readied their state militias; they began to move forces the next day. [57]
Four states in the upper South (Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Virginia), which had repeatedly rejected Confederate overtures, now refused to send forces against their neighbors, declared their secession, and joined the Confederacy. To reward Virginia, the Confederate capital was moved to Richmond. [58] The city was the symbol of the Confederacy; if it fell, the new nation would lose legitimacy. Richmond was in a highly vulnerable location at the end of a tortuous Confederate supply line. Although Richmond was heavily fortified, supplies for the city would be reduced by Sherman's capture of Atlanta and cut off almost entirely when Grant besieged Petersburg and its railroads that supplied the Southern capital.
Anaconda Plan and blockade, 1861
Winfield Scott, the commanding general of the U.S. Army, devised the Anaconda Plan [59] to win the war with as little bloodshed as possible. His idea was that a Union blockade of the main ports would weaken the Confederate economy; then the capture of the Mississippi River would split the South. Lincoln adopted the plan, but overruled Scott's warnings against an immediate attack on Richmond.
In May 1861, Lincoln enacted the Union blockade of all Southern ports, ending most international shipments to the Confederacy. Violators' ships and cargos could be seized and were often not covered by insurance. By late 1861, the blockade stopped most local port-to-port traffic. The blockade shut down King Cotton, ruining the Southern economy. British investors built small, fast "blockade runners" that traded arms and luxuries from Bermuda, Cuba and the Bahamas in return for high-priced cotton and tobacco. [60] When captured, the blockade runners and cargo were sold and the proceeds given to the Union sailors, but the British crews were released. Shortages of food and other goods triggered by the blockade, foraging by Northern armies, and the impressments of crops by Confederate armies combined to cause hyperinflation and bread riots in the South. [61]
On March 8, 1862, the Confederate Navy waged a fight against the Union Navy when the ironclad CSS Virginia attacked the blockade; it seemed unstoppable but the next day it had to fight the new Union warship USS Monitor in the Battle of the Ironclads. [62] The battle ended in a draw, which was a strategic victory for the Union in that the blockade was sustained. The Confederacy lost the CSS Virginia when the ship was scuttled to prevent capture, and the Union built many copies of the USS Monitor. Lacking the technology to build effective warships, the Confederacy attempted to obtain warships from Britain. The Union victory at the Second Battle of Fort Fisher in January 1865 closed the last useful Southern port and virtually ended blockade running.
Eastern Theater 1861–1863
Because of the fierce resistance of a few initial Confederate forces at Manassas, Virginia, in July 1861, a march by Union troops under the command of Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell on the Confederate forces there was halted in the First Battle of Bull Run, or First Manassas, [63] whereupon they were forced back to Washington, D.C., by Confederate troops under the command of Generals Joseph E. Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard. It was in this battle that Confederate General Thomas Jackson received the nickname of "Stonewall" because he stood like a stone wall against Union troops. [64] Alarmed at the loss, and in an attempt to prevent more slave states from leaving the Union, the U.S. Congress passed the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution on July 25 of that year, which stated that the war was being fought to preserve the Union and not to end slavery.
Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan took command of the Union Army of the Potomac on July 26 (he was briefly general-in-chief of all the Union armies, but was subsequently relieved of that post in favor of Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck), and the war began in earnest in 1862. Upon the strong urging of President Lincoln to begin offensive operations, McClellan attacked Virginia in the spring of 1862 by way of the peninsula between the York River and James River, southeast of Richmond. Although McClellan's army reached the gates of Richmond in the Peninsula Campaign,[65] Johnston halted his advance at the Battle of Seven Pines, then General Robert E. Lee and top subordinates James Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson[66] defeated McClellan in the Seven Days Battles and forced his retreat. The Northern Virginia Campaign, which included the Second Battle of Bull Run, ended in yet another victory for the South.[67] McClellan resisted General-in-Chief Halleck's orders to send reinforcements to John Pope's Union Army of Virginia, which made it easier for Lee's Confederates to defeat twice the number of combined enemy troops.
Emboldened by Second Bull Run, the Confederacy made its first invasion of the North, when General Lee led 45,000 men of the Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac River into Maryland on September 5. Lincoln then restored Pope's troops to McClellan. McClellan and Lee fought at the Battle of Antietam[68] near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862, the bloodiest single day in United States military history.[69] Lee's army, checked at last, returned to Virginia before McClellan could destroy it. Antietam is considered a Union victory because it halted Lee's invasion of the North and provided an opportunity for Lincoln to announce his Emancipation Proclamation.[70]
When the cautious McClellan failed to follow up on Antietam, he was replaced by Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside. Burnside was soon defeated at the Battle of Fredericksburg[71] on December 13, 1862, when over twelve thousand Union soldiers were killed or wounded during repeated futile frontal assaults against Marye's Heights. After the battle, Burnside was replaced by Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker. Hooker, too, proved unable to defeat Lee's army; despite outnumbering the Confederates by more than two to one, he was humiliated in the Battle of Chancellorsville[72] in May 1863. He was replaced by Maj. Gen. George Meade during Lee's second invasion of the North, in June. Meade defeated Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg[73] (July 1 to July 3, 1863), the bloodiest battle of the war, which is sometimes considered the war's turning point. Pickett's Charge on July 3 is often recalled as the high-water mark of the Confederacy, not just because it signaled the end of Lee's plan to pressure Washington from the north, but also because Vicksburg, Mississippi, the key stronghold to control of the Mississippi, fell the following day. Lee's army suffered 28,000 casualties (versus Meade's 23,000).[74] However, Lincoln was angry that Meade failed to intercept Lee's retreat, and after Meade's inconclusive Fall campaign, Lincoln decided to turn to the Western Theater for new leadership.
Western Theater 1861–1863
While the Confederate forces had numerous successes in the Eastern Theater, they were defeated many times in the West. They were driven from Missouri early in the war as a result of the Battle of Pea Ridge.[75] Leonidas Polk's invasion of Columbus, Kentucky ended Kentucky's policy of neutrality and turned that state against the Confederacy.
Nashville, Tennessee, fell to the Union early in 1862. Most of the Mississippi was opened with the taking of Island No. 10 and New Madrid, Missouri, and then Memphis, Tennessee. The Union Navy captured New Orléans[76] without a major fight in May 1862, allowing the Union forces to begin moving up the Mississippi as well. Only the fortress city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, prevented unchallenged Union control of the entire river.
General Braxton Bragg's second Confederate invasion of Kentucky ended with a meaningless victory over Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell at the Battle of Perryville,[77] although Bragg was forced to end his attempt at liberating Kentucky and retreat due to lack of support for the Confederacy in that state. Bragg was narrowly defeated by Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans at the Battle of Stones River[78] in Tennessee.
The one clear Confederate victory in the West was the Battle of Chickamauga. Bragg, reinforced by Lt. Gen. James Longstreet's corps (from Lee's army in the east), defeated Rosecrans, despite the heroic defensive stand of Maj. Gen. George Henry Thomas. Rosecrans retreated to Chattanooga, which Bragg then besieged.
The Union's key strategist and tactician in the West was Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who won victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, by which the Union seized control of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers; the Battle of Shiloh;[79] the Battle of Vicksburg,[80] cementing Union control of the Mississippi River and considered one of the turning points of the war. Grant marched to the relief of Rosecrans and defeated Bragg at the Third Battle of Chattanooga,[81] driving Confederate forces out of Tennessee and opening a route to Atlanta and the heart of the Confederacy.
Trans-Mississippi Theater 1861–1865
Guerrilla activity turned much of Missouri into a battleground. Missouri had, in total, the third most battles of any state during the war.[82] the other states of the west, though geographically isolated from the battles to the east, had a few small-scale military actions take place. Confederate incursions into Arizona and New Mexico were repulsed in 1862. Late in the war, the Union Red River Campaign was a failure. Texas remained in Confederate hands throughout the war, but was cut off from the rest of the Confederacy after the capture of Vicksburg in 1863 gave the Union control of the Mississippi River.
End of the war 1864–1865
At the beginning of 1864, Lincoln made Grant commander of all Union armies. Grant made his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac, and put Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman in command of most of the western armies. Grant understood the concept of total war and believed, along with Lincoln and Sherman, that only the utter defeat of Confederate forces and their economic base would bring an end to the war.[83] this was total war not in terms of killing civilians but rather in terms of destroying homes, farms and railroad tracks. Grant devised a coordinated strategy that would strike at the entire Confederacy from multiple directions: Generals George Meade and Benjamin Butler were ordered to move against Lee near Richmond; General Franz Sigel (and later Philip Sheridan) were to attack the Shenandoah Valley; General Sherman was to capture Atlanta and march to the sea (the Atlantic Ocean); Generals George Crook and William W. Averell were to operate against railroad supply lines in West Virginia; and Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks was to capture Mobile, Alabama.
Union forces in the East attempted to maneuver past Lee and fought several battles during that phase ("Grant's Overland Campaign") of the Eastern campaign. Grant's battles of attrition at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor[84] resulted in heavy Union losses, but forced Lee's Confederates to fall back again and again. An attempt to outflank Lee from the south failed under Butler, who was trapped inside the Bermuda Hundred river bend. Grant was tenacious and, despite astonishing losses (over 65,000 casualties in seven weeks),[85] kept pressing Lee's Army of Northern Virginia back to Richmond. He pinned down the Confederate army in the Siege of Petersburg, where the two armies engaged in trench warfare for over nine months.
Grant finally found a commander, General Philip Sheridan, aggressive enough to prevail in the Valley Campaigns of 1864. Sheridan defeated Maj. Gen. Jubal A. Early in a series of battles, including a final decisive defeat at the Battle of Cedar Creek. Sheridan then proceeded to destroy the agricultural base of the Shenandoah Valley,[86] a strategy similar to the tactics Sherman later employed in Georgia.
Meanwhile, Sherman marched from Chattanooga to Atlanta, defeating Confederate Generals Joseph E. Johnston and John Bell Hood along the way. The fall of Atlanta,[87] on September 2, 1864, was a significant factor in the reelection of Lincoln as president.[88] Hood left the Atlanta area to menace Sherman's supply lines and invade Tennessee in the Franklin-Nashville Campaign.[89] Union Maj. Gen. John M. Schofield defeated Hood at the Battle of Franklin, and George H. Thomas dealt Hood a massive defeat at the Battle of Nashville, effectively destroying Hood's army.
Leaving Atlanta, and his base of supplies, Sherman's army marched with an unknown destination, laying waste to about 20% of the farms in Georgia in his "March to the Sea". He reached the Atlantic Ocean at Savannah, Georgia in December 1864. Sherman's army was followed by thousands of freed slaves; there were no major battles along the March. Sherman turned north through South Carolina and North Carolina to approach the Confederate Virginia lines from the south,[90] increasing the pressure on Lee's army.
Lee's army, thinned by desertion and casualties, was now much smaller than Grant's. Union forces won a decisive victory at the Battle of Five Forks on April 1, forcing Lee to evacuate Petersburg and Richmond. The Confederate capital fell[91] to the Union XXV Corps, composed of black troops. The remaining Confederate units fled west and after a defeat at Sayler's Creek, it became clear to Robert E. Lee that continued fighting against the United States was both tactically and logistically impossible.
Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House.[92] In an untraditional gesture and as a sign of Grant's respect and anticipation of folding the Confederacy back into the Union with dignity and peace, Lee was permitted to keep his officer's saber and his horse, Traveller. Johnston surrendered his troops to Sherman on April 26, 1865, in Durham, North Carolina. On June 23, 1865, at Fort Towson in the Choctaw Nations' area of the Oklahoma Territory, Stand Waite signed a cease-fire agreement with Union representatives, becoming the last Confederate general in the field to stand down. The last Confederate naval force to surrender was the CSS Shenandoah on November 4, 1865, in Liverpool, England.
Aftermath
Since the war's end, it has been arguable whether the South could have really won the war or not. A significant number of scholars believe that the Union held an insurmountable advantage over the Confederacy in terms of industrial strength and population. Confederate actions, they argue, could only delay defeat. Southern historian Shelby Foote expressed this view succinctly in Ken Burns's television series on the Civil War: "I think that the North fought that war with one hand behind its back.… If there had been more Southern victories and a lot more, the North simply would have brought that other hand out from behind its back. I don't think the South ever had a chance to win that War."[112] The Confederacy sought to win independence by out-lasting Lincoln. However, after Atlanta fell and Lincoln defeated McClellan in the election of 1864, the hope for a political victory for the South ended. At that point, Lincoln had succeeded in getting the support of the Border States, War Democrats, emancipated slaves and Britain and France. By defeating the Democrats and McClellan, he also defeated the Copperheads and their peace platform.[113] Lincoln had also found military leaders like Grant and Sherman who would press the Union's numerical advantage in battle over the Confederate Armies. Generals who did not shy from bloodshed won the war, and from the end of 1864 onward there was no hope for the South.
On the other hand, James McPherson has argued that the North’s advantage in population and resources made Northern victory possible, but not inevitable. The American War of Independence and the Vietnam War are examples of wars won by the side with fewer numbers. Confederates did not need to invade and hold enemy territory in order to win, but only needed to fight a defensive war to convince the North that the cost of winning was too high. The North needed to conquer and hold vast stretches of enemy territory and defeat Confederate armies in order to win.[114]
The more industrialized economy of the North aided in the production of arms, munitions and supplies, as well as finances, and transportation. The table shows the relative advantage of the Union over the Confederate States of America (CSA) at the start of the war. The advantages widened rapidly during the war, as the Northern economy grew, and Confederate territory shrank and its economy weakened. The Union population was 22 million and the South 9 million in 1861; the Southern population included more than 3.5 million slaves and about 5.5 million whites, thus leaving the South's white population outnumbered by a ratio of more than four to one compared to that of the North. The disparity grew as the Union controlled more and more southern territory with garrisons, and cut off the trans-Mississippi part of the Confederacy. The Union at the start controlled over 80% of the shipyards, steamships, river boats, and the Navy. It augmented these by a massive shipbuilding program. This enabled the Union to control the river systems and to blockade the entire southern coastline.[117] Excellent railroad links between Union cities allowed for the quick and cheap movement of troops and supplies. Transportation was much slower and more difficult in the South which was unable to augment its much smaller rail system, repair damage, or even perform routine maintenance.[118] The failure of Davis to maintain positive and productive relationships with state governors (especially governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia and governor Zebulon Vance of North Carolina) damaged his ability to draw on regional resources.[119] The Confederacy's "King Cotton" misperception of the world economy led to bad diplomacy, such as the refusal to ship cotton before the blockade started.[120] The Emancipation Proclamation enabled African-Americans, both free blacks and escaped slaves, to join the Union Army. About 190,000 volunteered,[121] further enhancing the numerical advantage the Union armies enjoyed over the Confederates, who did not dare emulate the equivalent manpower source for fear of fundamentally undermining the legitimacy of slavery. Emancipated slaves fought in several key battles in the last two years of the war.[122] European immigrants joined the Union Army in large numbers too. 23.4% of all Union soldiers were German-Americans; about 216,000 were born in Germany.[123]
Reconstruction
Northern leaders agreed that victory would require more than the end of fighting. It had to encompass the two war goals: Secession had to be totally repudiated, and all forms of slavery had to be eliminated. They disagreed sharply on the criteria for these goals. They also disagreed on the degree of federal control that should be imposed on the South, and the process by which Southern states should be reintegrated into the Union.
Reconstruction, which began early in the war and ended in 1877, involved a complex and rapidly changing series of federal and state policies. The long-term result came in the three "Civil War" amendments to the Constitution (the XIII, which abolished slavery, the XIV, which extended federal legal protections to citizens regardless of race, and the XV, which abolished racial restrictions on voting). Reconstruction ended in the different states at different times, the last three by the Compromise of 1877. For details on why the Fourteenth Amendment and Fifteenth Amendment were largely ineffective until the American Civil Rights movement, see Jim Crow laws, Ku Klux Klan, Plessy v. Ferguson, United States v. Cruickshank, Civil Rights Cases and Reconstruction.[124]
Results
All slaves in the Confederacy were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, which stipulated that slaves in Confederate-held areas, but not in border states or in Washington, D.C., were free. Slaves in the border states and Union-controlled parts of the South were freed by state action or by the Thirteenth Amendment, although slavery effectively ended in the U.S. in the spring of 1865. The full restoration of the Union was the work of a highly contentious postwar era known as Reconstruction. The war produced about 970,000 casualties (3% of the population), including approximately 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease.[125] The war accounted for more casualties than all other U.S. wars combined.[126] The causes of the war, the reasons for its outcome, and even the name of the war itself are subjects of lingering controversy today. About 4 million black slaves were freed in 1865. Based on 1860 census figures, 8% of all white males aged 13 to 43 died in the war, including 6% in the North and an extraordinary 18% in the South.[127]
In 1861, the United States of America made a decision to bridge what was wrong with what is right. Maybe what was right was being defeated and maybe what was wrong deserved to be defeated. However, this bridge in history was used to create the history of human events for the next revolution in American history and several hundred years of history to come. The Civil War series by Ken Burns can be summed up in episode 8, “War is Hell” with the following quotes:
“The conduct of the Southern people appears many times truly noble as exemplified, for instance, in the defense of Petersburg. Old men with silver locks lay dead in the trenches side by side. With me are boys of thirteen or fourteen. It almost makes one sorry to have to fight against people who show such devotion for their homes and country.”
-Washington Augustus Roebling-
“We believe that it was most desirable that the North should win. We believe in the principle that the Union is indiscoverable. We, or many of us at least, also believe that the conflict was inevitable, and that slavery had lasted long enough. But we equally believe that those who stood against us, held just as sacred convictions that were opposite of ours, and we respected them as everyman with a heart must respect those who give all for their beliefs.”
-Oliver Wendell Holmes-
“As a southerner… southerners have a sense of defeat which the rest of the country does not have. The movie Patton… actor says, ‘We Americans have never lost a war.’ It is an amazing statement to make because his grandfather fought for the Confederacy.”
-Shelby Foote-
“My aim was to whip the rebels. To humble their pride, to follow them to their inner most recesses and to make them fear and dread us. War is cruelty, there is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
-General William Tecumseh Sherman-
“When Sherman saw how difficult war was, he was retired from service for suspicion of insanity. Then he was brought back when they realized he wasn’t crazy at all.”
-Shelby Foote-
“Sherman is probably the first true modern General. He was the first one to understand, in the present day world, that civilians were the backer up of things and if you went up against civilians, you deprived the army of what kept it going. So he quite purposely made war against civilians.”
-Shelby Foote
“Gentleman, we cannot change the hearts of these people of the South, but we can make war so terrible and make them so sick of war that generations will pass away before they again appeal to it.”
-William Tecumseh Sherman-
“I have been up to see the Congress and they do not seem able to do anything except eat peanuts and chew tobacco while my Army is starving.”
-General Robert E. Lee—
“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piles up by the bondsman two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toils shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword. As with said three thousand years ago, so still must be said, the judgments of the lord are true and righteous altogether. With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall of born the battle and for his widow and his orphan. To do all this may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations… I am a tired man, sometimes I think I am the tireless man on earth.”
-Abraham Lincoln-
Episode 8 of the Ken Burn’s series on the Civil War begins with Sherman’s March into Georgia. General Sherman led his men on a 425 mile march deep into Confederate territory and left 100 million dollars of destruction. The purpose of Sherman’s March was to raise hell and to destroy everything the Union Army could get their hands on, even burning down entire cities. There are quotes from all of the people who were involved in Sherman’s March which gives the audience an idea of how significant it was.
“I can make this march and make Georgia howl.”
-General William Tecumseh Sherman-
“This is probably the most gigantic pleasure excursion ever planned. It already beats everything I ever saw soldiering and promises to prove much richer yet.”
-Unknown Union soldier-
“I doubt if history affords a parallel to the deep and bitter enmity of the women of the South. No one who sees them and hears, but must feel the intensity of their hate.
-Mary Chestnut (Georgia native)-
“We were willing to go anywhere or follow anyone who would lead us. We were anxious to flee, fight or fortify. I have never seen an Army so confused and demoralized. The whole thing seemed to be tottering or trembling.”
-General Joe Johnston, Confederate forces-
Although many former slaves went to the North to enlist for the Union Army, there was a point where matters became precarious for the Confederacy. In an effort to keep up with developments, the Confederate forces began utilizing slave soldiers. This basically was a process where conscription would grant former slaves the status of free slaves. This process of using freed and non freed slaves to win their own freedom drew criticism.
“We must decide whether the negro shall fight for us or against us. Those willing to fight would be freed after the war.”
-President Jefferson Davis-
“You cannot make soldiers of slaves or slaves of soldiers. The day you make a soldier of them, is the beginning of the end of the Revolution. And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”
-Senator Howell Cog, Confederate Georgia-
In the final moments of the American Civil War, the defeat of the Confederacy began the process of becoming more obvious. Union Generals knew the Confederate Army was on the run and collapsing. Knowing this, the Union Generals began a large campaign of pursuit and the proposals for peace. Meanwhile, things began looking indicative for the Confederate forces. While attending Episcopalian service on a Sunday in March of 1865 in Richmond; President Jefferson Davis is slipped a note about the fall of Petersburg and advancing Union forces onto Richmond, the Confederate capital. Fearing looting and being outnumbered three to one, Jefferson Davis decides to move the capital south to Danville, Virginia. Richmond falls shortly after and black cavalryman surrounds the house of Mrs. Robert E. Lee who was unable to flee in April of 1865. After the fall of Richmond, General Robert E. Lee and his forces head west to Appomattox, Virginia. Outnumbered five to one, Appomattox will be the final battle and the final surrender at Appomattox Court House. During the final gasp of the Confederate Army, President Jefferson Davis makes a decree to fight on and to the end; this at the behest of military strategy which led General Robert E. Lee to surrender. After the fall of Richmond, General Lee lost all of his Generals and even his own son was captured. The men under Lee urge him to surrender before the battle at Appomattox; however, General Lee fears his public image will be tarnished. Lee will end up loosing one fifth of his men during the last battle at Appomattox before finally surrendering to General Grant
”President Davis, my lines are broken in three places. Richmond must be evacuated this evening.”
-General Robert E. Lee-
“Richmond has fallen; and I have no heart to write about it. They are too many for us. Everything lost in Richmond, even our archives. Bloom black is our horizon.”
-Mary Chestnut-
“The country be damned. There is no country; there has been no country for a year or more. You are the country to these men.”
-Confederate forces after the fall of the capital Richmond-
“Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities, but our Armies, free to move from point to point, nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain but our own unquenchable resolve. No peace will ever be made with the infamous invaders.”
-President Jefferson Davis-
“The results of last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance. I regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility to any further refusing of blood, by asking of you to surrender that portion of the Confederate States Army known as the Army of Northern Virginia.”
-Ulysses S. Grant-
“There is nothing left for me to do but to go and see General Grant and I would rather die a thousand deaths.”
-General Robert E. Lee-
“What General Lee’s feelings were, I do not know. As he is a man of much dignity with an impassable face, his feelings were entirely concealed from my observation, as my own feelings were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who fought so long and valiantly and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which people ever fought.”
-General Ulysses S. Grant-
At the end of the Civil War, the documentary says that John Wilkes Boothe, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln was in the audience when Lincoln was giving the speech to the nation. It was said that Boothe could have killed Lincoln at anytime. However, his deranged nature was the result of fervent beliefs in slavery and white supremacy. His desperation was furthered by the fact that he could not fight for the cause and saw himself as a coward who watched his beliefs crumble. In this deranged state, Boothe obsessed with the notion that Lincoln was behind the problems and troubles of the United States America, “viewing Lincoln with despise and tyranny.” Although it is documented how Boothe wanted to kidnap Lincoln and concocted a plan to do so, Lincoln would never show up when he went to search for the President’s carriage. Therefore, he and his plotters were never able to kidnap the President because they always missed the opportunity to intercept them or the President would never show up for their ambushes. Whatever opportunities John Wilkes Boothe and his plotters tried to attempt, Boothe eventually assassinates Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington D.C. shortly after the Civil War.
The most resounding words ever spoken about the American Civil War came at the behest of the battle of Gettysburg. Gettysburg is a quaint farming town in the lower eastern half of Pennsylvania. The Confederate forces under General Lee had to figure out a way to distract Union forces that were placing Vicksburg, Mississippi under siege to control the Mississippi River. Beginning in May of 1863, Confederate forces under General Lee marched into Pennsylvania. Union troops who were sent to intercept them and figure out what they were up to, surprised JEB Stuart and his men at Brandy Station, Virginia; the Union Army knew the South was planning a massive campaign. Gettysburg will be the invasion of the North, the farthest point the Confederate Army will ever reach, the first major defeat for the Confederate Army and the beginning of the end for the South which took place on the fourth of July. The total casualties at Gettysburg will total 51,000 men killed or wounded; of that 23,000 are Northern troops and 28,000 are Southern troops. The final battle at Gettysburg, called Pickett’s Charge, is described as a tactic by Union Major General G. George Meade to silence his guns and draw in the Confederates because he was sure of a final attack. Confederate Major General George Pickett, in the final moment, asked his commander, Lieutenant General James Longstreet, if his men should go forward and attack as intended. Longstreet, convinced his charge would be a disaster, was unable to speak or bring himself to words, so he simply nodded.
“I think Gettysburg will cure the rebels of any desire to invade the North again.”
-Elijah Hunt Rhodes-
“It was an incredible mistake and a scarcely trained soldier who didn’t know it was a mistake at the time it was done except possibly Pickett himself who was very happy he had a chance for glory. But everyman, who looked out over that field, whether it’s a sergeant or a Lieutenant General, saw it was a desperate endeavor and I’m sure known it should not have been made.”
-Shelby Foote-
This chapter contains some of the best syllogisms of the American Civil War and the quotes which have such broadening meaning to them even if they were written over a hundred years or five scores henceforth. Another important facet of the American Civil War is the significance of events. One example is the battle of Gettysburg. Gettysburg is the farthest point, besides Antietam and Sharpsburg; the Confederate Army could go before they were forced into near retreat by the advancing Union Army who drove them back to their homeland. It is the events like that which draw the significance of the problem when we speak about the dynamics of the Cold War in the American Civil War.
Another significant syllogism to the American Civil War is the Appomattox Court House and how the Confederate forces retreated to it and were forced to surrender in this retreat to the tiny court house on the banks of the serene Virginia countryside. There is nothing at the courthouse which is a strategic significance but General Grant chases General Lee to this point where he wants to place his last stand before resigning to a more powerful force and justified strength. He chooses Appomattox Court House for this final battle before surrendering to the authorities. This next section is about the Gettysburg Address, the most significant oratory speech ever given about the American Civil War.
The Gettysburg Address is the most famous speech of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and one of the most quoted speeches in United States history.[1] It was delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, during the American Civil War, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated the Confederates at the decisive Battle of Gettysburg.
Abraham Lincoln's carefully crafted address, secondary to other presentations that day, came to be regarded as one of the greatest speeches in American history. In just over two minutes, Lincoln invoked the principles of human equality espoused by the Declaration of Independence and redefined the Civil War as a struggle not merely for the Union, but as "a new birth of freedom" that would bring true equality to all of its citizens. It would also create a unified nation in which states' rights were no longer dominant, defined democracy in terms of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and defined republicanism in terms of freedom, equality and democracy.
In the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), over 160,000 soldiers clashed in what would prove to be the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War, causing a major impact on both the course of the Civil War[2] and on the small town of Gettysburg itself, which in the 1860s numbered only 2,400 inhabitants.[3] The battlefield contained the bodies of more than 7,500 dead soldiers and several thousand horses of the Union's Army of the Potomac and the Confederacy's Army of Northern Virginia, and the stench of rotting bodies in the humid July air was overpowering.[4] Interring the dead in a dignified and orderly manner became a high priority for the few thousand residents of Gettysburg. Initially, the town planned to buy land for a cemetery and then ask the families of the dead to pay for their burial. However, David Wills, a wealthy 32-year-old attorney, objected to this idea and wrote to the Governor of Pennsylvania, suggesting instead a National Cemetery to be funded by the States. Wills was authorized to purchase 17 acres (69,000 m²) for a cemetery to honor those lost in the summer's battle, paying $2475.87 for the land.[5]
Lincoln's sources
In a review of Garry Wills's book, Lincoln at Gettysburg, Civil War scholar James McPherson notes the parallels between Pericles' Funeral Oration during the Peloponnesian War as described by Thucydides and Lincoln's speech.[23] Pericles' speech, like Lincoln's, begins with an acknowledgment of revered predecessors: "I shall begin with our ancestors: it is both just and proper that they should have the honour of the first mention on an occasion like the present"; then praises the uniqueness of the State's commitment to democracy: "If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences"; honors the sacrifice of the slain, "Thus choosing to die resisting, rather than to live submitting, they fled only from dishonour, but met danger face to face"; and exhorts the living to continue the struggle: "You, their survivors, must determine to have as unfaltering a resolution in the field, though you may pray that it may have a happier issue."[24][25] In contrast, writer Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker, notes that while Everett's Oration was explicitly neoclassical, referring directly to Marathon and Pericles, "Lincoln’s rhetoric is, instead, deliberately Biblical. (It is difficult to find a single obviously classical reference in all of his speeches.) Lincoln had mastered the sound of the King James Bible so completely that he could recast abstract issues of constitutional law in Biblical terms, making the proposition that Texas and New Hampshire should be forever bound by a single post office sound like something right out of Genesis."[26]
Craig R. Smith, in "Criticism of Political Rhetoric and Disciplinary Integrity", also suggested the influence of Daniel Webster's famous speeches on the view of government expressed by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address, specifically, Webster's "Second Reply to Hayne", in which he states, "This government, Sir, is the independent offspring of the popular will. It is not the creature of State legislatures; nay, more, if the whole truth must be told, the people brought it into existence, established it, and have hitherto supported it, for the very purpose, amongst others, of imposing certain salutary restraints on State sovereignties." Elsewhere in his reply to Hayne, Webster described the Federal Government as: "made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people," foreshadowing Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people, for the people."[27][28]
Some have noted Lincoln's usage of the imagery of birth, life, and death in reference to a nation "brought forth," "conceived," and that shall not "perish." Others, including Allen C. Guelzo, the director of Civil War Era studies at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania,[29] suggested that Lincoln's formulation "four score and seven" was an allusion to the King James Version of the Bible's Psalms 90:10, in which man's lifespan is given as "threescore years and ten".[30][31]
-Wikipedia-
This book documents a very cruel and hateful attempt to dominate the world and to spread falsehoods and evil, something not innate and born into the human creature. What started out as simple immigration for profit or jobs, has turn into a mad scramble to find solutions for debt and fiscal irresponsibility. This is because this pursuit of profit, the cost of profit, exceeds the cost of security. Now you must figure out how to pay for something so basic such as security when profit is gone. Immigration is not as simple as freedom, immigration is about freedom and capitalism. In order to achieve those two goals, you must have capitalism built into freedom and the reverse. You have to respect the differences of others, whether they lived there before you or not; most of all, you have to be sustainable to breakdown and this greed of profit. Therefore, immigration was not about opportunism solely; it has turned into charity and trying to keep the machinery running in order to hold onto an image of superiority, imaginary or not.
There are only two answers for debt and fiscal irresponsibility, either you pay it or not. The third options can be dangerous and adventurous because you would have to remove the creditor or blow up the bank. You do not go around and kidnap people off the street, shoot them up and tell them to give you the solution to debt. Then turn around and claim there was a necessity and public interest in doing such. Why stop there when you can then turn around and try to win a Nobel Prize. However, the people in this book will hold you hostage and destroy your life until you either give them the answer to their problems or die trying to free yourself of it.
We do not understand why the left is so upset with perfect and truthful people. What possible business do they have with anyone who is not? Lori, the girl mentioned in this book was the most perfect creature we could find within our means. Why hate her and why care enough to go to her workplace? The only conclusion is to do something bad and to use her perfection as an instrument of hatred. These people are troubled and they also think human life is a social lab where they can invite or excuse themselves the minute something bad happens. The people in this book use human life and exploit it in order to win acclaim and awards, such as the Nobel Prize or the Freedom Award. The truth is, they are only socialists undermining the same goals.
We know what needs to happen and what needs to occur in order to avoid conflict. However, we have the same threat claiming they are being attacked and demand peace. What they are doing is gathering for an advance and calming the nerves of others so they can win the trust of the authorities. It is easy to take up arms and force others to accept your political will, but it is very difficult to win the trust of the real authorities if you cannot. This is a very cunning and manipulative creature we are dealing with whose sole intent is to profit. You can throw as many academic institutions you want at socialism, you can form all the charities you wish to dream of, you can create debt of a magnitude unimagined; but the threat of socialism will never go away. It cannot perfect itself. It will not get any less perfect. Even though the effort is enormous and the lies astronomical, the problems are not perfection, the problem is the pursuit of socialism with the intent of perfecting it, perhaps scientifically and intellectually. This is why we are hostages to the end of the Cold War.
They came to this nation to plunder and profit and they will make one big mess out of it when they are done. At some point, the profit is gone and you have to figure out a way to address the reason why these people came, for profit. They claim authority because they are so flawed and imperfect, they cannot profit any longer, not respectably that is. We are not charged with the duties of figuring out how best to surrender or how best to come forward if someone is a fugitive. We can only alert the authorities and ask for their cooperation, least to say we have gotten any cooperation. The ones who have come here strictly seeking profit have shown themselves to be and become outcasts when they fail. They have a tendency of taking out their frustrations on others because of having put so much effort and not fitting in with why others are here. So they came here to profit, frustration settles in and they take out on others. Lashing out is how to keep this machinery working or else be criticized for falsehoods and lies of profit. Charities now become an instrument of control and a mechanism to indoctrinate. If indoctrinating people to be perfect and to the truth is a bad thing, then this earth has slipped into the despair of imperfection and control. It is very suspicious why the left has to be clandestine and it is even more suspicious why they have to be forced to come forward or turn themselves in. It is with a little suspicious they would contact us so clandestinely and keep this clandestine level of operation while claiming to be good stewards of government. Is it the same wonder of Pickett’s charge that is so folly it can only nod in agreement to courageously mollify the situation?
Slavery was nothing more than a natural resource like Oil. It filled the minds of many who feared Europeans to be of socialist intent on acquiring valuable sources of labor to fuel the fields of agrarian societies. During the early twentieth century, this fear translated into scathing criticisms for those who pushed or advanced the need to seek short term gains in capitalism for the cost of long term security and irreparable harms. This voracious desire for labor has presented a larger problem with society as a whole. This book shows some of the level of desperation people often seek to achieve the smallest possible gain. Slavery in American history is similar to the present day War on Drugs. There are a lot of economic motives but the reincarnations of badness are within the culture it produces. The only thing people can do is nod in agreement while it exists.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
-Abraham Lincoln-
