Civil War sesquicentennial

[graybeard321]

Spend most of last week at the surrender grounds and the battle fields here in Appomattox, VA as we mourned the end of the War between the states. My sister was down with her grandkids and they spend hours at the firearms demo. The gentleman had over 20 different guns of the civil war. The really good part was the history they learned, they received the truth about the WAR not the garbage the liberal history tells us.

[OakRidgeStars]

I hope they learned that it should be called The War of Northern Aggression.

[0ne5hot]

The private EMS company I work for did the standby for it. I got to pickup +60hr of overtime this weekend. #nodaysoff

[Reverenddel]

What people don't remember, Virginia AND NEW YORK were gonna secede because they saw it as Federal Overreach...

Then someone bought off Tweed, and his Cronies in Albany, and there ya' go...

Could you have pictured what would have happened if NEW YORK left the union as well!?!? (shakes head) Dear GAWD!

[SHMIV]

New York would have been a game changer.

[ Post made via Mobile Device ]

[scott9050]

Having just traced 7 direct ancestors who fought in just about every major battle, the Civil War has a new importance to me. I have always been interested in it, but my family never talked about it for some reason. My great great great grandfather and his six sons served.
My Great Great grandfather was in the 16th North Carolina infantry and mustered in May 7 1861 at the age of 17. He and his brother who joined with him survived the war and were in Pender's brigade serving in the Army of Northern Virginia. According to pension records at least three of them were shot and one died. Two of them were taken prisoner in 1865. I live only a few miles from where my great great grandfather fought in 2nd Manassas.

[Reverenddel]

Dude! I think our ancestors served in the SAME UNIT! No kidding! 16th North Carolina infantry! Right on!

[dusterdude]

One of my ggg grandfathers was in a nc regiment too

[grumpyMSG]

I hope they learned that it should be called The War of Northern Aggression.

It was not the war of Northern Aggression. You can make the argument that it was about state's rights and there is validity to that. However, the biggest state's right that was being fought over was in fact, Slavery. Jump up and down scream about it if you want, but it is in black and white in several of the states various secession documents.

Virginia was peaceful slow and deliberate about what happened, and did it's best to avoid the conflict, but the various compromises dating all the way back to the Declaration of Independence and Constitutional conventions kept coming up. If you want to learn all that they did, research the the Virginia Convention of 1861.

http://www.civilwar.org/education/histo ... auses.html has Virgina's Secession Ordinance, and from it:

The people of Virginia, in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, adopted by them in Convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, having declared that the powers granted under the said Constitution were derived from the people of the United States, and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression; and the Federal Government, having perverted said powers, not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States.

The war was triggered by the election of Abraham Lincoln along regionally divided lines, several of the states seceded before he even took the oath of office. The truth is Virginia didn't even pick sides until the blockade and firing at Fort Sumter, SC.

[Viper21]

I hope they learned that it should be called The War of Northern Aggression.

It was not the war of Northern Aggression. You can make the argument that it was about state's rights and there is validity to that. However, the biggest state's right that was being fought over was in fact, Slavery. Jump up and down scream about it if you want, but it is in black and white in several of the states various secession documents.

Virginia was peaceful slow and deliberate about what happened, and did it's best to avoid the conflict, but the various compromises dating all the way back to the Declaration of Independence and Constitutional conventions kept coming up. If you want to learn all that they did, research the the Virginia Convention of 1861.

http://www.civilwar.org/education/histo ... auses.html has Virgina's Secession Ordinance, and from it:

The people of Virginia, in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, adopted by them in Convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, having declared that the powers granted under the said Constitution were derived from the people of the United States, and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression; and the Federal Government, having perverted said powers, not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States.

The war was triggered by the election of Abraham Lincoln along regionally divided lines, several of the states seceded before he even took the oath of office. The truth is Virginia didn't even pick sides until the blockade and firing at Fort Sumter, SC.

Not about Northern aggression...? Who invaded who...? Who left a swath of destruction military & civilian all over where ?

While there is no doubt, slavery was A catylyst, like most conflicts, it was about power, money, politics. Many places took up arms to protect themselves from federal invasion, much like their ancestors had done previously.

Lincoln himself had stated, If he could've not "freed a single slave, & preserved the union" he would have. If he could've "freed some but not others" he would have. Which in fact is what he did. No slaves were freed with the Emancipation Proclamation in Kentucky, Maryland, New York, or any other states not attempting to leave the union.

I bet you'd be hard pressed to find many Confederate soldiers who proclaimed they were fighting to protect slavery. Although, I bet you'd find the majority were fighting to protect their homes from a federal invasion from an over reaching federal government. I wonder what they'd think of todays government....lol.

[scott9050]

Dude! I think our ancestors served in the SAME UNIT! No kidding! 16th North Carolina infantry! Right on!

16th N.C. Company F. My Great Great grandfather:

http://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-sold ... AC6F5D926A
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cg ... d=66775641

His brother:

http://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-sold ... AC6F5D926A
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cg ... d=66910108

My family has been in western North Carolina since the early 1700's.

[grumpyMSG]

Not about Northern aggression...? Who invaded who...? Who left a swath of destruction military & civilian all over where ?

While there is no doubt, slavery was A catylyst, like most conflicts, it was about power, money, politics. Many places took up arms to protect themselves from federal invasion, much like their ancestors had done previously.

Lincoln himself had stated, If he could've not "freed a single slave, & preserved the union" he would have. If he could've "freed some but not others" he would have. Which in fact is what he did. No slaves were freed with the Emancipation Proclamation in Kentucky, Maryland, New York, or any other states not attempting to leave the union.

I bet you'd be hard pressed to find many Confederate soldiers who proclaimed they were fighting to protect slavery. Although, I bet you'd find the majority were fighting to protect their homes from a federal invasion from an over reaching federal government. I wonder what they'd think of todays government....lol.

On northern aggression, I will use a bar fight analogy, South Carolina fired the first shot at Fort Sumter. If somebody called your sister ugly and you punched them, who started the fight? Both sides would say the other did and both would have some validity in their statements.

On who invaded who, both sides invaded the other, While Virginia was the site of more of the bigger battlefields than any other state, there were a few notable battles to the north, Antietam in Maryland and Gettysburg in Pennsylvania to name a few.

As for the swath of destruction, most refer to Sherman's march is probably the one most commonly mentioned "Swath of Destruction".http://www.history.com/topics/american- ... mans-march explains the how and why of most of the destruction. What you may not know is that some of the destruction was caused by retreating Confederate forces attempting to prevent the seizure of supplies by the Union Army. In the end, to a southern civilian, it didn't matter whether it was a Confederate or Union Soldier that seized your grain, food stores and cows, they lost almost everything. Here in Virginia, Richmond's burning was actually done by retreating Confederate forces and put out by Union troops, thereby allowing the city to recover more quickly after the war.

Most Confederate Soldiers weren't fighting for slavery. It was a different time than today. People were Virginians first, then citizens of the US. Of the original 3,000+ Soldiers of the Stonewall Brigade only 17 were slaveholders and most of the farms in the Shenandoah Valley were small and had no slaves on them.

Fear drove some states to secession. They had a massive amount of fear of what life would be like after slavery ended. Folks who their whole life owned other people, would have suddenly become a minority in some areas. They grew up thinking blacks were animals to be treated and traded like livestock. If that were all of a sudden turned upside down, would there be retributions? For a modern equivalent, I will point you toward the African nations that were ruled by whites, yet had a more numerous black population and even Iraq's Sunni versus Shiite population. When you look at it from that perspective states like South Carolina wouldn't have been pretty.

[dorminWS]

Did you ever consider that, as technology advanced in the latter half of the 19th century, slavery would probably have become economically unviable and died a natural death by the turn of the century; without all that death and destruction? And, if the slaves had been voluntarily freed instead of as a result of brutal federal force and economic destruction of the slave holders, is it not reasonable to expect that the hate and resentment that gave rise to the abuses of the Jim Crow south would probably have been much less pronounced?

There are those who aver that the REAL benefit derived from the civil by those who prosecuted it for the north was not the dubious release into abject poverty of the black slaves, but (1) the continued subjugation of the south as captive market to the northern industrial interests, and (2) the establishment of a supreme and overreaching federal power.

Some will argue vehemently against any position taken on these subjects, but I do not doubt that there is no small amount of truth in the two propositions stated above. I also believe there were many atrocities and war crimes committed against the civilians of the south. The history we read today was sanitized by the victors of 1865 and their philosophical successors.

The one thing that IS beyond dispute is that it is all water under the bridge now.

[Ironbear]

Could you have pictured what would have happened if NEW YORK left the union as well!?!? (shakes head) Dear GAWD!

They did... just much later! Took California and Chicago with them....

[Reverenddel]

To Dorm's credit, he is Right.

Had Eli Whitney invented the Cotton Gin say 50 years ahead of 1864... we wouldn't have been able to say "Slavery' was a causation.

This "Sainthood" of Lincoln pisses me off. He was an invading Illinois tyrant that wanted to push his agenda, in direction violation of the Constitution.

Remind you of anyone?

[Swampman]

Wonder how many northern states didn't want any part of this war? Maybe it should have been called the war of "Federal" aggression.

Did you ever consider that, as technology advanced in the latter half of the 19th century, slavery would probably have become economically unviable and died a natural death by the turn of the century; without all that death and destruction? And, if the slaves had been voluntarily freed instead of as a result of brutal federal force and economic destruction of the slave holders, is it not reasonable to expect that the hate and resentment that gave rise to the abuses of the Jim Crow south would probably have been much less pronounced?

This is a very good point. By the turn of the century Standard Oil (JD Rockefeller) had survived the attempts to break his hold on the world oil market to regain his hold on that market by creating a holding company. That holding company owned all the conglomerate parts that he had been forced to release during the latter part of the 19th century. Railroads and shipping had converted from coal to oil and gasoline was no longer an unwanted by-product of the refining process. Manufacturing was blasting off.

Question is, how long would slavery have actually lasted, and what would it have taken to end it? Also makes you wonder where society would be today, had slavery lasted until the turn of the century.

[grumpyMSG]

DorminWS I have given much thought to it. I actually believe that the end of slavery may have hastened the the mechanization of the processes. Cyrus McCormick invented the Mechanical reaper in the 1830s, yet it was decades later before it's widespread acceptance. Reverenddel, It could also be said that Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin (1790s) may have helped cause the expansion of slavery because it meant green seed cotton became much more profitable and spurred it's expanded growth, because it was more than a century later (1940s) before mechanical harvesters were invented . The harvesters, whose development picked up speed in the '20s and showed glimmers in the '30s, had many terrified of how it would impact sharecropping in the south. Cotton picking was still labor intensive, but imagine adding even more unemployment during the great depression. As it World War II came along and a lot of the black migration to northern cities to work in factories happened after that.

At this point, 150 years later we are just speculating about what woulda, coulda , shoulda happened. We can all guessing about what might have happened if just one thing was done differently. It is always said hindsight is 20/20, The "what ifs" will never be able to be tested. What if South Carolina had never fired on Fort Sumter? Would it have ended with a USA and CSA? If so, Where would Virginia have ended up? Until Lincoln called for all states to provide troops, VA was leaning towards not seceding and some have speculated that Fort Sumter was fired on to knock other states off of the "fence". Where I find the umor in the whole discussion is the mention of New York seceding, it wasn't going to. The more interesting state to talk about seceding was Maryland, which was actually occupied before it could decide. If it had what would have become of DC?

dorminWS, in the end you are 100% right, it really is water under the bridge, some folks just won't let it go.

[Oakes]

My Grandfather was born in 1890 and remembered meeting the Civil war veterans. He saw the invention of the car and airplane and saw us land on the Moon.
What are we going to see that is as spectacular?

[scott9050]

From e-mail:

April was a big month in the American Civil War. Not only did the conflict begin in April 1861, but this year marks the 150th anniversary of Lee's surrender to Grant, as well as Lincoln's assassination, in April 1865. In commemoration of the Civil War and Confederate History Month, Fold3 invites you to explore all records in its Civil War Collection for free April 13th to 30th.

There are currently over 43 million records in the Civil War Collection, including everything from military records to personal accounts and historic writings.

Soldier records include (among others):

Service records and index cards
Pension index cards
"Widows' Pension" files
Navy survivors certificates
Army registers
Final statements
Rendezvous reports

Other record types include things like photographs, images of artifacts, and original war maps. Items such as the Lincoln Assassination Papers, Sultana Disaster documents, letters to the Adjutant General and Commission Branch, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies, and the 1860 census are also contained in the Civil War Collection.

Confederate-specific records in the collection include documents like:

Confederate service records and index cards
Confederate amnesty papers
Confederate casualty reports
Confederate citizens files
Confederate Navy subject files
Southern Claims Commission documents

Join Fold3 in its commemoration of the Civil War and Confederate History Month, and discover information on famous participants as well as your own Civil War ancestors through documents, photos, and images that capture the experiences of those involved in America's deadliest conflict. Get started searching the Civil War Collection

http://go.fold3.com/civilwar/?xid=1842& ... cw-apr2015

[graybeard321]

dorminWS, in the end you are 100% right, it really is water under the bridge, some folks just won't let it go

I disagree, It is not water under the bridge, we are still complaining and protesting the liberal polices that is being forced on us. Education is a great place to look, both the federal and state government force policies on us that the local governments use our tax money to pay for. States rights issue has not been resolved so no I will not let it go.