American History : The Civil War

Soldiers of the American Civil War were overwhelmed by a time where weaponry and technological developments were thriving. This brutal war changed the soldiers, both mentally and physically, and continued to have an impact throughout their entire lives. There were not only many deaths during the war, but also prior to the war as many soldiers took their own life. They would experience disturbing thoughts and events in their mind that could not be explained until they became known as mental illnesses. The exploration of psychological disorders following the Civil War improved medical diagnostic tools and the way patients were treated which transformed the treatment of mental illness by creating new ways of discovering illnesses, treating patients, and developing the foundation for the future of psychology throughout America.

A Civil War is a battle between the same citizens in a country. The American Civil War was fought from 1861 to 1865 to determine the independence for the Confederacy or the survival of the Union. By the time Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1861, in the mist of 34 states, the constant disagreement caused seven Southern slave states to their independence from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America. The Confederacy, generally known as the South, grew to include eleven states. The states that remained devoted to the US were known as the Union or the North. The number one question that is never completely understood about the Civil War is what caused the war. There were multiple events that led to the groundbreaking, bloody, and political war.

Abraham Lincoln once stated “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” Abraham Lincoln is a hero for the citizens of America because his determination and courage to ending slavery even if it meant war caused peace in this nation. Slavery was the vital cause of the American Civil War. The north and the south both had their differences on how to run the country. People in the North believed in unity and that slavery should not exist because “all men are created equally.” On the other hand, the South believed in continuing slavery. People tried to talk it out and come to a middle ground after both sides compromising, however that didn’t work and caused war. Ideological differences were a vital role to making the American Civil War an inevitable event.

When the American Civil War began in the spring of 1861, those flocking to enlistment stations in states both north and south chiefly defined their cause as one of preservation. From Maine to Minnesota, young men joined up to preserve the Union. From Virginia to Texas, their future foes on the battlefield enlisted to preserve a social order, a social order at its core built on the institution of slavery and racial superiority . Secession had not been framed by prominent Southerners like Robert Toombs as a defensive measure to retain the fruits of the revolution against King George, a fight against those who sought to “intrique insurrection with all its nameless horrors.” (Toombs Speech) On January 1, 1863, when Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect the war became a revolution. The Union, the soldiers in blue fought to preserve could no longer exist. On every mile of soil, they would return to the Stars and Stripes from that moment on, the fabric of society would be irrevocably changed. In May of 1865, with the abolition of slavery engrained into the Constitution with the passage of the 13th Amendment, the Confederate armies of Lee and Johnston disbanded, and Lincoln dead of an assassin’s bullet; this change was the only certainty the torn fabric of the newly reunited states was left to be resown. Andrew Johnson and Southern Democrats believed the revolution of 1863 had gone far enough. Radical Republicans and African-Americans sought instead to bring it to

Slavery is the main cause of the Civil War with other contributing factors. The north had already abolished slavery, but it was still present in the south. The start of the war was created by the north having abolishment of slavery and the south still using slaves. The concepts of the Constitution were based on the principles of freedom and liberty that all men were created equal.  The American revolutionaries had fought for independence, they had forgotten to think about

In the year 1864 the American Civil War was drawing to an end. The Confederate States of America was slowly running out of able bodied men and supplies to supply the army needed to ward off the Union’s invasion of the South. At this point in time the leader of the Union Army was Ulysses S. Grant. He devised a plan to escalate the process in which the Confederate Army was running out of supplies. Grant’s plan was to send Union troops to the West of the main conflict for them to loop around and cut off railroad lines, and burn farm lands. The greatest of these was the Army that burned thousands of acres in Georgia, yet another army led by General David Hunter might have been more decisive if it had not been stopped at the Battle of Lynchburg. General David Hunter was ordered by General Grant to make his way down the Shenandoah Valley and destroy as much farm land as possible along the way. On top of this General Hunter terrorized towns by pillaging stores and homes. The Southerners knew that a similar fate would become Lynchburg if they did not do anything to prevent Hunter’s advance. The people of Lynchburg worked hard at building up defenses protecting Lynchburg. They had to resort to using mostly young boys and elderly men since most able bodies men had already died in the War or were still fighting under General E. Lee. The boys and elderly men that maned the defenses did not have a good chance of warding of the large army led by General David Hunter; as a result, General

The American Civil War, also known as the Civil War, lasted from 1861 to 1865. The war was to determine the survival of the union, or independence for the confederate states. Some would argue that slavery was the principle cause of the war. After much research, I believe the war started because of the misunderstandings, and conflicts between the North and South. Slavery, however, was one of the main purposes. The North and South had economic and social differences causing many disagreements. They argued about state and federal rights, expansion of slave states, the Abolition Movement, and the election of Abraham Lincoln.

Guns fired, smoke lingering in the air, people dying. The American Civil War had a huge impact on the United States. Two compromises took place before the start of the Civil War. These compromises include the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850. The Missouri Compromise dealt with the crisis in 1819 over Missouri entering the Union as a slave state. The compromise was “the first major crisis over slavery, and it shattered a tacit agreement between the two regions that had been in place since the constitution. Under the terms of the agreement, the North would not interfere with slavery in the Southern States, and the South would recognize slavery as an evil that should be discouraged and eventually abolished whenever it was safe and feasible to do so” (Stauffer). The compromise showed the belief that was shared by most of the Founding Fathers and the framers of the Constitution: that slavery was wrong. Thirty-one years later, the Compromise of 1850 was created. This compromise “consisted of five basic parts, the most onerous of which was a stringent fugitive slave law that denied suspected fugitives the right to a jury by trial and virtually legislated slave stealing.The Fugitive Slave law converted countless northerners to the antislavery cause” (Stauffer). Although the Fugitive Slave law, one of the five parts of the Compromise of 1850, caused many northerners to start believing the antislavery cause, the compromise itself achieved the opposite of its intentions.

The Civil War brought the United States down to its knees. This blood-soaked conflict became one of the most brutal wars that this country has taken arms to and the destruction from the result of the war validates this view. Thus a period coined as Reconstruction started where the main objectives of the national government were to rebuild the southern confederate states and to protect the rights of the newly freed slaves. Throughout this tumultuous period, three significant court cases, US v. Cruikshank, US v. Reese, and US v. Anthony, used race and gender in the United States to shape and limit what it means to be a citizen with alleged “privileges and immunities.”

When Dred Scott decided to gives out a serious shock to the antislavery rules that hoped to keep slavery out of the Northern territories, particularly to Senator Stephen A. Douglas 's doctrine of popular sovereignty, and also acknowledged that no slave, nor offspring of a slave, could be a US citizen. As a noncitizen, the court stated, Scott did not have any rights at all; he could not sue anyone in a federal court so he just remained a slaved. So that decision had a major outcome in spreading the political and community gap between the North and the South, and conveyed the nation closer to the brink of civil war. The South celebrated, and therefore they felt a relief and justification, for at last the "Southern opinion upon the subject of

The American Civil War was arguably the most important war in the history of the country. The War of Independence may have allowed American to become its’ own country, but the Civil War resulted in something even more important than that, the end of slavery in the southern states. All of the issues that caused the Civil war were based around slavery, such as states’ rights that involved how slavery would be handled in each state, and trying to preserve the Union since the south seceded from the north due to their lust for slavery. The war ended up being the deadliest in the history of the country with over 700,000 people being killed as a result of battle or from diseases that were obtained during the war. The north was better prepared for the war than the south due to various reasons. One was the fact that the north was industrialized, while the south largely relied on agriculture. Being so heavily industrialized, the north was better equipped to fight the war since they could construct better guns, cannons or even ships to create blockades to prevent the south from getting help from other countries and not everyone in the south was supportive of the war. The north also had a much larger population than the south, and since African Americans were allowed to fight for the Union, their army was larger. Arguably the most important aspect of the northern victory was that it had superior leadership in the form of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln is widely held as one of the greatest

Georgia, Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, and South Carolina all felt the need to secede from the union. Within their Declaration of Causes, there was an overwhelming theme of tyrannical northern aggression against the South simply protecting their rights. Each of the seceding states believed their rights were no longer being protected and were constitutionally allowed to secede. Secession was also fear based. The southern states feared the possibility of their institution being taken away. The territories were yet to be settled, and the simple possibility of the territories being free threatened the expansion and life of the institution of slavery. Southerners were also fearful that the black republicans would encourage humanizing slaves, which would result in riots and insurrections among the slaves. In Mississippi’s Declaration of Causes, they laid out many reasons as to why they have put too much into the institution of slavery to give up on it. “It advocates negro equality, socially, and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst…It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our system” (Declaration of Causes of Seceding States 5). The reasons for secession were endless, however, the South strongly believed the absence of slavery would jeopardize their survival. The South had become dependent

Slavery may have been established as the catalyst of the American Civil War, but the beginning of the dispute began in the time of the Revolution with a weak decentralized government under the Articles of Confederation. Later gained momentum as territorial expansion set Americans against each other on debating whether the new states should be slave states or free states, it questioned the power of the Federal government regarding state rights, and brought about instability in the unity of the United States as a nation. The conflict of the American Civil War began with states’ rights being taken away and flourished with the decision on whether slavery should spread westward, or be equally distributed not only in the Louisiana Purchase territory, but in the rest of the westward territory.

The great American Civil War changed and shaped America back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but little do we know it still has a lasting effect on us today. The Civil War was so devastating back in the 1860s that it helped to develop many new technologies, ideals, and culture. Some of the effects still hang on around us today, and may even influence your everyday life without you even knowing it.

In 1861, a horrific war began. Nobody had any idea that this war would become the deadliest war in American history. It wasn’t a regular war, it was a civil war opposing the Union in the North and the Confederate States in the South.. The Civil War cost many people’s lives on the battlefield and beyond. In addition it cost an extreme amount of money for the nation which possibly could have been avoided if the war had turned to happen a little differently.