150th Anniversary of the Civil War

Anyone who thinks the Civil War wasn't about slavery should be considered an imbecile.

And I write that as a guy whose family home sits atop a key point in the Battle of Nashville, and has the graves of 2 Confederate soldiers in the back yard in unmarked graves unearthed when contractors were putting in our septic system, and who went to a prep school on the battle ground in Franklin -- where minie balls were routinely discovered on our football practice field after rain storms. So to say I was immersed in the war as a child would be an understatement.

Sure, my dad used to call it the War of Northern Aggression and WTS' noted campaign was "Sherman's Retreat Through Georgia," but his granddaddy fought in the war so I always gave him a pass for his tongue-in-cheekness.

Wanna learn more? Go straight to the source...


http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundation/the-civil-war.htm

This series of 3 podcasts were also very interesting and informative...

http://backstoryradio.org/three-civil-war-specials/

 

Meade could have broken the back of the Army of Northern Virginia after Gettysburg but didn't pursue Lee, much to Lincoln's dismay (a worse dismay than the girl from around the way jockin' Mike D).
Pickett fucked up huge at Gettysburg and that ultimately crushed the Rebels advance.
Grant and Sherman didn't give a damn about public opinion and knew they could wear down the South. But the losses and the fact that wealthy men could opt out of the draft led to the draft riots (funny ... lot of history books don't mention those).
I grew up in the South and have spent a great deal of my life in, on or around the March to the Sea. Sherman proclaimed he "would make Georgia howl." He camped soldiers and horses in churches and they took what they could from local plantations and estates. Compared to the treatment other local populaces have received from advancing opposition armies throughout history, it comes off as tame.
There's also the tragic and despicable act that led to the drowning of 400 freed slaves following the Union Army through a swollen creek.
But in the end ... the right side won. Time to move on.
I can't wait for the time when no one alive knew anyone who fought in the Civil War. I don't know it to be true, but I hope it's now.

 

That cannot go unacknowledged and unappreciated. Nicely done.

 

I know a lot about the Civil War; I certainly am not a Civil War scholar.

But as far as I know, George Pickett's division was not actively involved in the battle of Gettysburg until July 3, by which time the Rebels had no hope of winning the battle.

If it was lost, it was by Dick Ewell's refusal to take the high ground with the old Stonewall Brigade (I believe) in the early evening of July 1, when it was virtually undefended by remnants of O.O. Howard's division, which had been routed early in the fight. I think Lee's order was to attack "if at all practicable."

Early and Rodes had fresh tropps, but Ewell waited; conventional wisdom has always claimed Jackson, had he lived, would have pressed the issue and attacked immediately.

 

Now this is what I love about this place. Where else do you get a scholarly discussion of the Civil War with Beastie Boys references sprinkled in?

The drowning of the freed slaves at Ebenezer Creek is one of the more gut wrenching incidents to read about in the whole war, which is saying something. It was a racist Union general also named Jefferson Davis responsible. Sherman had no idea about it until well after the fact because he was with a different flank, far south of the creek if I remember correctly.

Davis wanted to cut loose the hundreds of freed slaves that had tagged along with the army, which made sense because at that point they had passed most of the plantations that had fed the soldiers on the march and there wasn't enough rations to go around. But Davis tricked the freed slaves into waiting for the soldiers to cross the creek first, saying it was for their safety, and then cut the pontoons before they could cross. That left the the freed slaves on the wrong side of the creek with Confederate troops coming after them. They were left with the choice of facing the Rebels unarmed or trying to cross the creek and many of them died trying to cross.

 

I took some Civil War courses in college and had to write a paper about Antietam. One of the books that I used to research it was by Bruce Catton.

The real funny thing about Antietam was that some Confederate was using Lee's battle plans as a cigar wrapper and had left them at a tree. Three Union soldiers came around, found the cigars, and the plans, and sent the plans up the chain of command.

The joke was that no one ever found out who ended up with the cigars. Whether the soliders who found them decided to have a smoke, or one of the higher-ups confiscated them, no one knows.

Makes you wonder how differently the battle, the war, and Lincoln's decision on the Emancipation Proclamation, would have gone had some sloppy Confederate not dropped his fucking cigars.

 

What this thread needs is Ilmago cutting and pasting 450 words about Lee from a Shelby Foote book.

Recently watched, again, CSA: The Confederate States of America. Definitely an interesting take.

 

Ewell refusing to advance at the close of July 1 was a major foul up for the Confederacy at Gettysburg, but not listening to Longstreet was Lee's biggest mistake of the war. The Confederate Army was coming into Gettysburg from the north while the Federal Army was to the south. After the first day, Longstreet wanted to wheel around and get between the Federal Army and Washington, pick a better place to fight or march to take Washington.

Also, the insistence that Hood try to take Little Round Top instead of riding around it and coming up from the back side was dumb.

 

Ewell - "It took a dozen blunders to lose the Battle of Gettysburg, and I committed a good number of them."

Ewell was a mediocre general, but he might also be the first and last general in the history of warfare to say "I fucked up" when the war was over.

 

Interesting take on Longstreet...the general perception in the South for decades was he was the one who screwed up at Gettysburg when in reality it was Lee who committed to a fight that was near impossible to win.

And I do agree with you on Longstreet, he also wrote treatises on trench warfare that later became gold for European generals.

 

From what I've pieced together on Longstreet (rightly or wrongly) he kinda took some unjust criticism because after the war he said "if Lee had listened to me" and by that time Lee had been canonized by everyone. Plus, he got along with Grant during the post-war years, so he took more heat for that.

 

You should really learn more about the Civil War and its causes before you spout off.