You might get to “live it” rather than read about it ?
THE
WAR OF THE REBELLION:
A COMPILATION OF THE OFFICIAL RECORDS OF THE UNION AND CONFEDERATE ARMIES PREPARED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE SECRETARY OF WAR, BY BVT. LIEUT. COL. ROBERT N. SCOTT, THIRD U.S. ARTILLERY AND PUBLISHED PURSUANT TO ACT OF CONGRESS APPROVED JUNE 16, 1880.
WASHINGTON: GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 1880
Just keep reading the current news...
FYI:Spoiler Alert: When you get to the part where Abe, after having won the war and gotten re-elected, gets into a carriage with Mrs Lincoln to head off to Fords Theater, just stop reading right there. A lot of people, to this day, are very upset about what happened next.
Rebel Rose.
Ok, this is probably just me. But does anyone notice that a thread about civil war writings has almost hit 700 posts?
If you ever get near my area halfway between Antietam and Gettysburg, my husband would be glad to give you a tour of the area and take you to both battlefields.
He once told my nephew while in high school to write about the Battle of Funkstown and the “teacher” gave an F on the paper stating a made up story. After research the teacher changed it to an A+, she had never heard of the battle. What great history teachers we have!!!
Bookmark
"By the time John Brown hung from the gallows for his crimes at Harper’s Ferry, Northern abolitionists had made him a “holy martyr” in their campaign against Southern slave owners.
"This Northern hatred for Southerners long predated their objections to slavery. They were convinced that New England, whose spokesmen had begun the American Revolution, should have been the leader of the new nation. Instead, they had been displaced by Southern “slavocrats” like Thomas Jefferson.
"This malevolent envy exacerbated the South’s greatest fear: a race war. Jefferson’s cry, “We are truly to be pitied,” summed up their dread. For decades, extremists in both regions flung insults and threats, creating intractable enmities.
"By 1861, only a civil war that would kill a million men could save the Union.
An Excerpt from A Disease in the Public Mind by Thomas Fleming:
'On April 18, 1861, Colonel Robert E. Lee rode across the “long bridge” that linked Virginia to Washington and tied his horse in front of Montgomery Blair’s house on Pennsylvania Avenue, opposite the building containing the State War and Navy Departments. It was an appropriate setting for one of the most crucial conversations in American history.
Waiting for him was balding seventy year old Francis Preston Blair. There is no record of the exact words, but we know that Blair, after the usual courtesies, grew solemn and told Lee that he had been authorized by President Lincoln to offer him command of the Northern Army that would assemble when the 75,000 volunteers reached Washington.
Here was a moment when history’s direction hung on the loyalties and beliefs and emotions of a single man. If Robert E. Lee had accepted this offer, there is at least a possibility that Virginia would have refused to secede. Even if she seceded, Lee’s prestige as a soldier, his links through his father and his wife to George Washington, would have had an enormous impact on the legitimacy of the South’s resistance. Northern newspapers would have trumpeted the significance of his decision. Deep divisive doubts would have been implanted in the souls of thousands of wavering southern Unionists, especially in Virginia. The duration of the war, its very nature, would have changed.
As Colonel Lee sat there, trying to absorb this astounding offer, what did he think and feel? What did he remember? From what we have seen of his life in this book, almost certainly the first memory was John Brown. That madman’s rant about sin of slavery and the blood that was required to wash it away, the pikes he had been prepared to put into the hands of enraged slaves, pikes that might have been thrust into the bodies of Lee’s daughters and wife, the letters in Brown’s carpetbag linking him to wealthy northern backers. Could he invade Virginia or any southern state at the head of an army composed of men who believed John Brown was as divine as Jesus Christ?
The one from 1861 through 1865 or the one from 2020 through 2022?
Killer Angels is a fun historical fiction. I Rode With Stonewall an excellent first person account. Battle Cry of Freedom by McPherson a very good overview of the causes and conduct of the war. Lee’s Lieutenants and R.E. Lee by Douglas Southall Freeman is the classic Lee authority. Bruce Catton books for the north’s perspective.
Henry Steele Commanger
Oh, Sorry, I thought you meant the one coming up.....
Will this be the most ignorant Freepers pipe up with answers they think will win attaboys
Or some decent posts
I’m wagering 80/20
Whoa! Over 700 replies...
Skip the ones that call it the War of Northern aggression.