Posted on 07/11/2004 7:17:56 PM PDT by SamAdams76
They had three decades to secede over tariffs and taxation, so it's odd that they never got around to it until the second the party of abolition came into power.
Yes that was Virginia as late as the '60s and in The Valley for sometime into the '70s. Now that culture is mostly gone with the wind.
Soon it will be only "King" day.
RE Lee, the noblest and sublimest American of them all.
You might want to amend Gettysburg to Sharpsburg and perhaps also admit that slavery played a part, a large part, as a cause of the war.
Never.
One of the most used treatments for chronic diarrhea was opium in pill form. People talk about how the Vietnam War helped cause drug addiction among our troops, but I've always wondered just how many Civil War vets had come back hooked on opium pills, laudenum, etc. The unsanitary conditions of camps and hospitals during the first years of the war were a major cause of the spread of diseases among the troops. When William Hammond took over as Surgeon General, he introduced many new policies and treatments that helped reduce the number of disease-related deaths as the war progressed. Hammond and Stanton clashed over the red-tape involved in trying to get medical supplies for the troops. When he refused to back down from Stanton, he was fired.
The Sanitary Commission, which was organized by wealthy citizens in New York City, pushed for better camp and hospital conditions. They hoped to prevent the losses experienced during the Crimean War.
Here's a link to a web page pertaining to Civil War Medicine. Check it out if you're interested in learning more:
Thanks for the tip on Footes history series on the CW . I'll go hit the B&N for a copy of the set.
Stay safe Sam !
Maryland is not at all Southern in its more urbanized or suburbanized areas, like the area around Baltimore and Washington. But in the countryside you will see many Confederate flags flying from private residences, and the rural lifestyle is very Southern.
Anyway, I'm living here under duress. My heart and ancestry as well as all my living kin are in Virginia.
I was brought up to refer to it as "The War," as if there had only been one, ever. But it's so close here that of course everyone understands that when one refers to "The War," the War Between the States, or the War of the Rebellion, is what is meant.
Yankees do not understand: when you can go to a kinsman's grave and see an inscription on his stone that says "June 6, 1862," that brings the War close. When you can go to the site of a family house that was burned by Phil Sheridan and pick up a blackened brick or two (and I have some of these bricks in my garage) it's even closer. When you can walk through the halls of family houses and see the marks of shot still there, it's hard to forget. The Yankees tell us to get over it, but as Faulkner noted, the past hasn't passed. It's around us all the time, still reverberating.
Thank you.
Mostly you're right, but where we live in New England, you can also go to the old church graveyards and find many graves from the Civil War and, in many cases, more from the Revolution. And, you'd be amazed how many towns still have their monuments to Union veterans, whether a particular local unit or the Grand Army of the Republic, in the town square or somewhere at what was a major intersection. I think the reason most yankees don't understand is that they're not really yankees, except by attitudinal assimilation: they feel no connection to The War because they have no connection to The War, their ancestors (or they themselves) having arrived anywhere from 25 to 140-odd years later. Remember, of the great ethnic immigrations to the US, only the Irish and the Germans arrived before The War. Both groups fought, often valiantly, for a cause they little understood, but associated with their own struggles in the Old Countries.
Well said, Capriole.
One of my best friends still lives in the horse country just east of Winchester. The suburbs approach, but for now, their farm (with a house Sheridan used for is headquarters briefly -- don't worry it's been fumigated) is a haven of graciousness. Her husband's family has been in the county since before the Revolution, good solid county people: the sort who've sent their sons to Virginia or Washington & Lee since Mr. Jefferson's time and their daughters to Sweet Briar or Randoph-Macon Women's College since The War, masters of the hounds for generations, someone in every generation taking their turn as masters of the hunt, two or three Cinncinati memberships in the family. You know people like this, you probably are people like this.
The "RevWar" (by which I assume that you mean the American Revolution) was just as much a "civil war" as the War Between the States -- more American Tories were killed in combat than British regulars. The staggering efficiency of the butcher's bill in the later war merely reflects the ongoing march of technological progress in killing people.
I too have always liked this work but was always unable to find a copy for my library. A few months I found a one volumne condensed version at Borders bookstore. This version is currently in print.
I would have to say that the best one volumne work of memoirs regarding the WBS is Edward Porter Alexander's "Fighting for the Confederacy". Alexander was the best artillary commander on either side during the war and fought in virtually every major battle in the Eastern theater of operations. The book is written in a narrative fashion and is very readable - Alexander doesn't focus on detailed orders of battle, rather he describes what he saw during the battles and also provides countless anecdotes of day to day life as a Southern soldier. I strongly recommend this book to any Civil War buff who has not read it.
At least 600,000 people died to keep people from going through customs. Seems fair to me.
I happen to agree.. I hope another Civil War does not happen.. One was enough..
And here, too, are people who can still see the results of the War in their own lives. When you can drive past the wreckage of a great house that once belonged to your family and know that it would have belonged to your children but for the War--this realization brings the War close, too. In some cases the house is a burned wreck (I have a few bricks from one of my family's burned wrecks, and thank you General Sheridan) while others have been preserved to show us the beauties of the past.
Now, in the North you have a lot of these things, too. The North also has thousands of historic structures, sites, battlefields, museums,and reenactments. But the orientation is not toward the Civil War at all, since it wasn't fought in Connecticut. The concentration of the North is, as you remark, on the Revolution. People in the North lost sons and brothers, but they didn't lose a lot of real estate so there are no ongoing reminders of the Civil War for people to obsess over.
Remember, I used to live quite near you, in Westchester, and my village wsa the site of a Revulationary War battle. While I lived there I was a passionate student of the Revolution, because that was what was available to study.
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