NewsHour Extra will not use contact information for any purpose other than our own records. We do not share information with any other organization. Twitter Facebook Rss Tumblr. Related Stories Tooltip of related stories. More Videos Tooltip of more video block. Submit Your Student Voice. Americans went into the Civil War imagining glorious battle, not gruesome disease and dismemberment.
Disease, in fact, killed roughly twice as many soldiers as did combat; dysentery and diarrhea alone killed over 44, Union soldiers, more than ten times the Northern dead at Gettysburg.
Amputations were so routine, Faust notes, that soldiers and hospital workers frequently described severed limbs stacked "like cord wood," or heaps of feet, legs and arms being hauled off in carts, as if from "a human slaughterhouse. Other historians have exposed the savagery and extent of the war that raged far from the front lines, including guerrilla attacks, massacres of Indians, extra-judicial executions and atrocities against civilians, some 50, of whom may have died as a result of the conflict.
In other words, it looks rather like ongoing wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, which have influenced today's scholars and also their students. Brundage sees a growing number of returning veterans in his classes at the University of North Carolina, and new interest in previously neglected aspects of the Civil War era, such as military occupation, codes of justice, and the role of militias and insurgents. More broadly, he senses an opening to question the limits of war as a force for good.
Just as the fight against Nazism buttressed a moral vision of the Civil War, so too have the last decade's conflicts given us a fresh and cautionary viewpoint. It's very hard, however, to see how emancipation might have been achieved by means other than war. The last century's revisionists thought the war was avoidable because they didn't regard slavery as a defining issue or evil. Almost no one suggests that today. The evidence is overwhelming that slavery was the "cornerstone" of the Southern cause, as the Confederacy's vice-president stated, and the source of almost every aspect of sectional division.
Slaveholders also resisted any infringement of their right to human property. Lincoln, among many others, advocated the gradual and compensated emancipation of slaves. In theory it could have worked here.
But Lincoln's proposals for compensated emancipation fell on deaf ears, even in wartime Delaware, which was behind Union lines and clung to only 2, slaves, about 1. Nor is there much credible evidence that the South's "peculiar institution" would have peacefully waned on its own.
Slave-grown cotton was booming in , and slaves in non-cotton states like Virginia were being sold to Deep South planters at record prices, or put to work on railroads and in factories. Most historians believe that without the Civil War, slavery would have endured for decades, possibly generations.
Though emancipation was a byproduct of the war, not its aim, and white Americans clearly failed during Reconstruction to protect and guarantee the rights of freed slaves, the post-war amendments enshrined the promise of full citizenship and equality in the Constitution for later generations to fulfill. What this suggests is that the th anniversary of the Civil War is too narrow a lens through which to view the conflict.
We are commemorating the four years of combat that began in and ended with Union victory in But Iraq and Afghanistan remind us, yet again, that the aftermath of war matters as much as its initial outcome. Hallowed ground still occupied by a Domino's Pizza. It was recently purchased and is about to be torn down, to the delight of writer Robert Hicks, who helped found Franklin's Charge - dedicated to preserving the Franklin battlefield. Nearly 1, Confederate soldiers were dug up and moved to Carnton, the McGavock family plantation nearby.
Carrie McGavock tended their graves for almost 50 years. She is the subject of hicks' best-seller, "The Widow of the South. Hicks has this answer for anybody who asks, after years, why not just let the Civil War be forgotten?
Please enter email address to continue. Please enter valid email address to continue. Chrome Safari Continue. Be the first to know. Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting. The April , , battle that raged around Shiloh Church and Pittsburg Landing was the largest engagement in the Mississippi Valley campaign. Shiloh National Military Park will offer Ranger-led battlefield hikes and present a "Grand Illumination" on April 7, with luminaries placed around the battlefield to represent each casualty of the battle.
The bloodiest one day battle in American history saw 23, soldiers killed, wounded, or missing after 12 hours of savage combat on September 17, Antietam National Battlefield is planning tours, hikes, children's activities, living history, guest lecture, and memorial ceremonies, part of a regional effort to commemorate the entire Maryland Campaign of On July 21, , two armies clashed for the first time on the fields overlooking Bull Run.
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