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Sponsor |  fredbear | Nov 29, 2005 10:33am | civilwargazette.faithsite.com [civilwargazette.faithsite.com]
The Civil War Gazette is a WebZine (non-commercial) dedicated to telling the story of the common soldier during the American Civil War. We do this through authentic and original letters, diaries, excerpts from historical records, photos, pictures, ambrotypes, tin types, dagguerotypes, CDVs, newspaper accounts, etc.
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web.archive.org/web/20010204025000/adams.patriot.net/~jcampi/welcome.htm [web.archive.org/web/20010204025000/adams.patriot.net/~jcampi/welcome.htm]
USA Today Hot Site Award
"Today, Gen. George G. Meade is largely forgotten. But not by Jim Campi, who thought that it was high time we remembered the prominent role played by the commander of the Army of the Potomac in one of the most dramatic Union victories of the Civil War." |
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|  |  214878 | Dec 14, 2005 2:51pm | There's a whole lot of Civil War articles here: historynet.com/cwti/articlearchive/ [historynet.com/cwti/articlearchive/]
# A Canadian Soldier Fights for the Union
# A Southern Boy Remembers Gettysburg
# A Tale of Two Hotels
# Ambrose Bierce's Civil War: One Man's Morbid Vision
# Baptism of Fire: War Comes to West Point
# Battle of Wilson's Creek *NEW*
# Betrayal at Ebenezer Creek
# Billy Yank and Johnny Reb on the Road to Atlanta
# Buckeyes Make a Stand
# Camp William Penn's Black Soldier's in Blue
# Coffee, Bibles and Wooden Legs: The YMCA Goes to War
# Dixie's Original One-Man Band
# Drones in the Great Hive: A Letter from an African-American Soldier
# E.P. Alexander and Pickett's Charge
# Eyewitness to the Battle of Atlanta
# Fall of a Confederate Commander
# Fall of Vicksburg
# Firebrand in a Powder Keg: Nathaniel Lyon in St. Louis
# Gettysburg: Remembering Pickett's Charge
# Harry McCarthy: Bob Hope of the Confederacy
# How Booth Saved Lincoln's Life
# J.E.B. Stuart's Revenge
# John Brown's Familiy: Living Legacies of Harpers Ferry
# John C. Calhoun: He Started the Civil War
# Keystone of Little Round Top, The
# Legend of Johnnie Ring, The
# Life at the Point
# Lincoln Takes the Heat
# Louis Zemmeht: Sheridan's Orderly
# Madame Loreta Janeta Velazquez: Heroine or Hoaxer?
# Major General J.E.B. Stuart: Last Stand of the Last Knight
# Mr. Smalls: A Slave No More
# Myth of the 5 Dead Rebel Generals
# Never Were Men So Brave
# Nurse Pember and the Whiskey War
# Odds of War
# One Man's Turning Point
# Petersburg: 'The Earth Shook and Quivered'
# Petersburg, Va.: Life in the Trap
# Proving Ground of Mexico
# Rebels in Pennsylvania!
# Robert Campbell: A Lone Star in Virginia
# Save the Constitution
# Stealing John Brown's Bell
# Stonewall Jackson's Other Grave
# Surrender at Appomattox
# The `Monitor Boys'
# The Texas Gold Shootout
# The Truth About Civil War Surgery
# The Uncivil War: Atrocity in the Tennessee Hills
# The Union's Irish Desert Fox
# Ulysses S. Grant's Lifelong Struggle with Alcohol
# Ulysses S. Grant: The Union's New Three-Star General
# Union General Judson Kilpatrick *NEW*
# William Woods Averell
# War Watchers at Bull Run
# Weaponry: The Rifle-Musket and the Minié Ball
# What If? The Stonewall Jackson Factor
# Who was the Common Soldier of the Civil War?
# Winchester: Va.: A Town Embattled
# Yellow Tavern |
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Sponsor | | fredbear | Dec 16, 2005 12:31pm | mapleleafshipwreck.com [mapleleafshipwreck.com]
Maple Leaf Shipwreck
An Extraordinary American Civil War Shipwreck
Jacksonville Florida 1864
the Wreck of the Maple Leaf is unsurpassed as a source for Civil War material culture. The site combines one of the largest ships sunk during the war, carrying all the worldly goods of more than a thousand soldiers, with a river bottom environment that perfectly preserved the ship and cargo. It is the most important repository of Civil War artifacts ever found and probably will remain so. Considered among Florida shipwrecks, Maple Leaf is probably the best preserved site in Florida.....
Edwin C. Bearss, Chief Historian |
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Sponsor | | Ogmin | Jan 21, 2006 5:11pm | Our national recollection of the American Civil War has become so frosted over with the gauze of romance, heroism, and idealism that it has become difficult to see what was really accomplished by it. The most obvious accomplishments were political. In the first place, the defeat of the Confederacy prevented the disintegration of the American Union. That was no small thing, even if it was an obvious thing.
Political pessimists, especially in Europe, had been predicting disintegration like this for a long time. Political regimes based on self-government by the people, rather than by the imposition of order by force by an aristocracy, tended to fall apart as soon as one person's notion of self-government differed from another person's.
'Must it always be the case,'asked Lincoln in 1861, 'that a government, of necessity, be either too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence? ... It forces us to ask: is there, in all republics, this inherent, fatal weakness?'In other words, are democracies just unstable by nature? Lincoln hoped not and hoped that the war and its outcome would allow Americans to reaffirm their dedication to 'government of the people, by the people, and for the people'without fearing that the people, the democracy, were always doomed to collapse in on themselves.
The second political result of the war was linked to the first. Not only would the government survive, but from now on there would be no question that the national government would be the majority player in American politics. The United States would no longer be a federation of regional interests or separate identities, each of which owned some form of veto power over the others. It was and would be a single nation of a single people with a paramount national government. The wishes of the majority of that whole people overrode the protests, no matter how legitimate, of individual sections or individual identities.
The political results of the war were scarcely more important than its social and economical ones. At the very front of these results were the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of 3.9 million black slaves. Unlike slave emancipations in the West Indies in the 1830s or in Russia in 1861, emancipation in the United States was immediate and uncompensated. Even more unlike these other emancipations in the 19th century, it conferred full citizenship rights on all the slaves it freed.
Moreover, while Lincoln waged war as a Republican, he shaped the republic's domestic policy agenda during the war as a Whig. 'I have always been an old-line Henry Clay Whig,'Lincoln explained in 1861, and he was fully prepared to 'administer this government as nearly upon the principles that he would have administered it as it is possible for one man to follow in the path of another'So while the war raged around his ears, Lincoln pushed through Congress very nearly all of Henry Clay's 'American System'-a national banking system, federal land grants to open the Western territories to settlement, new protective tariffs, and federal funding for a transcontinental railroad, which was not completed until 1867. So, there were great social and economic consequences as well as political consequences.
Yet all of these points had to be won at a staggering price. Americans had never experienced war on the scale upon which the Civil War was waged. The Civil War mobilized over 2.5 million soldiers and sailors for the federal forces and approximately 750,000 for the Confederacy for four years. Of that total of 3.5 million soldiers in the North and the South, roughly 640,000 died of wounds, disease, or were killed outright in battle. To put this in somewhat more human terms, we can say that one out of every three Confederate soldiers died in the war. A little less than one out every five federal soldiers died as well.
In economic and physical terms, the nation was pulverized. Emancipation erased the $2.4 billion in assets represented by the South's slaves, approximately a third of the South's net wealth and another 10 percent of the South's nonslave agricultural assets-livestock, cotton, tools. That disappeared in smoke too. In the North, the war slowed the economic growth rate while the national debt soared from $65 million in 1861 to $2.7 billion by 1865.
I suppose you could say that in the end, Lincoln was proven right about the desirability of gradual emancipation. If every dollar spent on the war could have been invested at six percent interest, then every slave in the United States could have been freed by federal buyout by 1890 with enough money left over to give every slave household its fabled '40 acres and a mule,'and still have $3.5 billion left over.
The sheer volume of destruction, human and economic, unhinged something in the national mind. Religious confidence was especially traumatized. For the first time, young males from rural, isolated America were thrown together in mass armies with abundant opportunities for violence, pillage and general hell-raising. This did nothing to improve the moral imperatives which were supposed to govern their lives. 'It is hard, very hard for one to retain his religious sentiments and feelings in this Soldier life,'admitted one New Jersey surgeon, 'Every thing seems to tend in a different direction. There seems to be no thought of God or of their souls, etc. among the soldiers'
But even more than ordinary camp immorality, it was the shock of Civil War combat and the apparent randomness of mass death on the battlefield which wrecked peacetime faith in an all-knowing, all-loving all-directing God. An Illinois surgeon named John Hostetter remarked, 'There is no God in war. It is merciless, cruel, vindictive, un-Christian, savage, and relentless. It is all that devils could wish for'
Allen C. Guelzo
Gettysburg College
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
The Failure of the Genteel Elite |
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Sponsor | | fredbear | Mar 3, 7:09am | New York Divided:Slavery and the Civil War Online Exhibit
nydivided.org/VirtualExhibit/ [nydivided.org/VirtualExhibit/]
Slavery ended in New York State in 1827, yet this victory did not sever the city's connections to enslaved labor. New York City capitalized on the expanding trade in southern cotton and sugar to become the leading American port, a global financial center, and a hotbed of pro-slavery politics. At the same time, it nurtured a determined anti-slavery movement. In less than half a century, abolitionists convinced many northerners that American slavery could not be reconciled with American freedom. Conflict between the two sides, one favorable to slavery and one opposed, was all but inevitable.
The conflict between North and South came right to the streets of New York. Local factories produced food, clothing, and other necessities for the army. Racial antagonism divided the city as it did the country, unleashing the 1863 draft riots, the worst civil unrest in the nation's history. A measure of resolution came when black regiments from New York were allowed to join the effort to end slavery. (See Gallery 5.)
After the war, New York was a city changed by immigration, prosperity, and the legal freedoms granted to black people by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments. Nevertheless, deep-seated racial prejudice remained. (See Gallery 6.)
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Sponsor | | Ogmin | Apr 22, 6:12am | Published: April 20, 2008
For more than a century, The Museum of the Confederacy's home was in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War.
Housed downtown in the White House of the Confederacy, President Jefferson Davis' home during the war, the museum, the institution has become the repository of all things relating to the Civil War. But its location in Richmond was also a problem, too: the nearby Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center kept growing and growing, literally engulfing the museum's home.
And as time went on, fewer and fewer visitors made the trek to downtown Richmond to view the world's premier collection of Civil War memorabilia. Last year, the museum's board of directors approved a unique plan to take the institution into the 21st century: split up the collection over four sites in the state and create a "distributed museum," in the jargon of the museum industry.
That was good news for Appomattox, the home of the Appomattox Court House National Historical Park where Gen. Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy's Army of Northern Virginia surrendered to Gen. U.S. Grant and the Army of the Potomac in April 1865. Officials soon announced that Appomattox would be the site of one of the four museum, along with Fort Monroe in Tidewater, the White House of the Confederacy in Richmond and the Fredericksburg area.
The museum owns the world's largest and most complete collection of Confederate artifacts, including 3,000 military items, 550 wartime flags (59 of them from the surrender at Appomattox), 250 uniform pieces and more than 100,000 manuscripts in its research library. More than 4,300 Virginia school students particated in the museum's SOL-based programs last year; a teachers' institute is held every summer; visitors come from across the country and from around the world.
Museum president Waite Rawls and two of his top staffers were in the area last week to update folks on the progress of the relocation process, and they are more than excited about the future.
The museum is now in the "silent phase" of its multimillion dollar fund drive, according to Rawls, who expects a public drive to begin sometime in the near future. Their goal is to have the three new sites, in addition to the Richmond headquarters, up and running in time for the 150th anniversary of the start of the war in 2011.
Anyone who thinks The Museum of the Confederacy is just one giant memorial to "The Lost Cause," the "War of Northern Aggression" or whatever hagiographic term you wish to use, would be woefully mistaken.
According to Rawls, the museum's purpose is simple and straightforward: to tell the story of the Civil War and its aftermath and to discern lessons current and future generations can learn from conflict.
One of those lessons -- how a nation split asunder by war can reunite peacefully after hostilities -- is what made Appomattox a "no-duh" site for a museum branch, Rawls said. Officials from countries all over the world that have undergone civil wars have journeyed to Richmond to try to glean lessons to take home about how America reunited in a small house in Appomattox.
When the Appomattox museum and the other three branches open, they'll be sites of learning and research, not sacred repositories of Confederate relics. They won't be telling the "Gone With the Wind" version of Southern history, but the truth, warts and all.
And every person -- black and white -- will feel welcome in the museum that celebrates the creation of the modern America.
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