[AtlasStalled]

Thanks for posting.

The battlefield photo with the dead soldiers which accompanies the story just broke my heart.

As much as I try to wrap my head around what the Civil War must have been like I just don’t think — particularly as someone with no military or war experience — what those soldiers (and the rest of the country, for that matter) went through.

[SkyDancer]

The Lincoln Library in Springfield, Illinois has a display on the Civil War and there’s a running counter of the daily deaths that cover the war years and I remember it was around 700,000 on both sides. The war covered an area equivalent of the distance from Oslo, Norway to Athens, Greece. Greece being the same size as Arkansas or Alabama. On the same note, you can almost fit two and a half Europe’s in the US.

[laweeks]

I’ll never forget a statistic that Pat Buchanan (why oh why didn’t he run for pres?) mentioned years ago: The number of Negroes brought to the U.S. in the slave trade numbered approx. 675,000 . . . the number of deaths in combat in the Civil War were approx. 660,000.

The similarity in these two numbers is almost too coincidental . . . almost 1 to 1 that God made us pay for the tragedy that was the slave trade and the Civil War.

I do a lecture here at my medical vocational school about Civil War Medicine. I start my lecture with asking the students for the years that the Civil War was fought, and very, very seldom do any of the students get within 60 years . . . thank you, public screwl systems!

Of course, you can argue that quite a few war deaths were from the slave-holding South, but virtually none of the southern combatants were slave holders.

[grumpa]

The Civil War makes me sick. Every other civilized country got rid of slavery without such bloodshed. Just don’t tell me Lincoln was a great President.

[Nifster]

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Lest we forget. Lest we forget

[Yollopoliuhqui]

Why is it that very few histories of the Civil War state the degree to which the European oligarchs aided the South, both in the years leading up to and during war, with money, war material, diplomacy and espionage? The installation of Maximillian in Mexico by the French was designed to open a southern flank against the western US and Canada as a British asset was a base for spy networks and agitation of the Indians in the US frontier regions. America’s enemies list needs to include this neo-aristocracy element that continues to operate as a global financial oligarchy today.

[ricmc2175]

All because the Democrats decided to push slavery west. Sound familiar?

[robowombat]

Note the dismissive contemptuous comments from Marxist propagandist posing as an academician Eric Foner;

In any case, Columbia University historian Eric Foner questions the values of focusing on the death toll of such a horrific period in US history.

“A numbers game gets us only so far in understanding the war’s impact on American life,” he says.

“There is an ongoing debate about the number of slaves brought from Africa to the New World during the slave trade era - nine million, 12 million, 14 million. Does it really matter when we are assessing the morality of the slave trade?”

The function of this is to dismiss the numbers of mostly white men who died in this conflict compared to the ‘irredeemable original sin’ of slave holding. These termites are busy at work destroying as much of our collective memory as possible. Calling the casualty estimate ‘a numbers game’ means it is an unimportant detail whether 600,000 or 750,000 or a million white men died
compared to the ‘sin of slavery’. Now pay close attention. Here is the real message from Mr. Foner and the rest of the cultural marxists. The United States and the colonial society it preceded from is a basically evil and corrupt enterprise founded upon racism, classism, sexism, homophobia and genocidism. The deaths of white men or Americans in general in its wars are unimportant as these conflicts were either fought for or caused by the basic evil nature of our social order. History is merely a tool to unmask these sins and discredit the United States so that the process of destruction of our social and economic order can be advanced so that a new ‘socialist’ synthesis can replace and eliminate the inherently racist capitalist order. That is what this feculent little remark means. Foner and all his ilk are the enemies of all true Americans.

[robowombat]

Union General Schofield, who may have been the most intellectual of all the Federal high command, wrote after the war that the real toll was probably nearer to a million counting the thousands who both died after returning home of disease or wounds and those whose lives were dramatically shortened by effects of wounds or disease, as well as significant undercounting of casualties during the war. An example of the first sort would be Private B. W. Mitchell of the 27th Indiana, the man who found Lee's ‘Lost Order’ at Frederick on 13 Sep 1862. Private Mitchell was severely wounded at Antietam/Sharpsburg on 17 Sept and was discharged after spending eight months in hospital partially recovering from his wounds. Mitchell was never able to work in any real fashion again and died in 1866 at his home in Bartholomew, Indiana. Mitchell's family became charity cases (he had several young children) as a result. The details of this one case can be easily found in ‘Battles and Leaders’ Vol. II, pg. 603. Who can doubt that there were tens of thousands of cases such as Private Mitchell's on both sides.

I have noted gravestones of men described as CSA that show many dates of death in 1866 to 1869. Many of these men likely had their lives shortened directly due to wounds and disease incurred in service. Furthermore Confederate records, especially here in the west, are very spotty. Virtually all of the Alabama state service records are missing as they were burnt with much of the state archives by Auger's people in April 1865. Militia records are also very spotty and in states such as Mississippi the militia was regularly embodied to support combat operations such as dealing with the many federal raids launched from west Tennessee and Louisiana. In the Atlanta campaign the Georgia militia was fully mobilized and many were used in combat operations. All of this goes to say even a century and a half after the fact the the US has yet to come to terms with how really large and destructive the WBTS/CW was. This is especially true for the South where the impact was incalculable. I note this article appears in a British not American publication. Perhaps there is a reason for that. I leave that to your speculation. I do call your attention to the belittling remarks of Marxist PC propagandist disguised as an academician Eric Foner.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

***The US Civil War was incontrovertibly the bloodiest, most devastating conflict in American history,***

Next time someone demands reparations for their ancestors being in slavery remind them that reparations were paid for in blood.

[Fiji Hill]

We got 300,000
Before they conquered us.
They died of Southern fever
And Southern steel and shot.
And I wish it was three million
Instead of what we got.

—Maj. James I. Randolph, CSA, 1914

[kalee]

ping