Civil War Thread

Foote said on Ken Burns documentary that the North fought the war with one hand tied behind its back. Had the South won key battles at Gettysburg or Antietam, the North would have pulled the other hand out and finished the job eventually. If there was ever a case of poor kids fighting a rich man's war, it was the Southern plantation owners and politician decimating a generation, most of whom had no connection to slave ownership. They brainwashed these kids into thinking they were fighting for the Glorious Cause and this misguided notion of the North invading the South (which by definition wasn't possible ... you can't invade your own country, plus the South fired the first shots at a U.S. fort, which was nothing more than domestic terrorism).

 

We would hope. I think Lincoln showed his compassion when he didn't stand Lee and his division commanders up against a wall 10 minutes after the surrender at Appomattox and had them shot for high treason ... which he was within his rights to do. But he gets killed, a guy from Tennessee is the president and he just sits on his hands and lets the South rise again to all but enslave blacks under a different system -- Jim Crow, voter suppression, the KKK, a one-sided sharecropping model and various other abominations.

 

6.

 

From this photo, turn about 120 degrees to the right, walk about a block and a half, and you're standing in front of my house.

 

Cool. I'll be at your door in 10 minutes.

 

Man we've got a lot of Northern Virginia folks on this board ....

 

I'll wait for the rerun. It's coming soon enough. In color.

 

Fredericksburg is now considered NoVa? Where does the rest of the state start, Hanover County?

 

I’d say Fredericksburg is the cutoff for NoVa to the south. It’s where the 95 HOV lanes end.

 

OK, thanks. That area has exploded since I lived in the Commonwealth, and the DC southern burbs ended at Dumphries/Springfield/Quantico/Woodbridge. Once you got past there it was smooth sailing to the University of Three Chopt.

 

Doing genealogy, found a few lines on my father's side were in the Washington County Maryland area. One of my third great grandfathers lived in Sharpsburg in the mid-1800s. He was a cooper and it turns out his land was pretty much at the end of the Sunken/Bloody Lane. He was in his mid-40s during the war, did not fight. He died in April of 1863, about six months after the Battle of Antietam that was pretty much in his front yard. Mrs Fly found a flowery obit that said he was clearing shells and went through 99 safely but the 100th blew him apart. When we went through the area this summer, we spent a day there. Found a map re-creation in the bookstore on site, and discovered the information we uncovered about him was pretty much bang on correct.

We've found several folks in each of our lines who fought, including one who started with CSA before switching sides to the Union. Guess that happens when you have people who were in that Maryland/Virigina/West Virgina corridor in the 1860s.