The Civil War between the North and the South in America was not even a half year old when well-known Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote his article “Bread and the Newspaper” in prestigious Boston The Atlantic Monthly magazine, which he helped to found. He wrote in the magazine that war to preserve the union will bring the various citizens of the country together and needs to be fought on three fronts, one is the law, one is in the mind of the people and one requires the spilling of blood, all in the tradition of the Revolutionary War. Holmes starts his comments in the article with the headline, which he named “Bread and the Newspaper” (346), which he calls “the new version of the Panem et Circenses of the Roman populace” (Holmes 346). Panem et …show more content…
They cannot fight it off, since it is like an assailant, literally ready to kill them (in the battlefield?). They have no control over the situation, just as the average soldier of the North had probably no control over the inhumane slavery that was happening in the South and the later the “compromise” named the fugitive slave law. They had to break the law when they acted in a humane way and did not actively help a fugitive be arrested, and the young men he names had probably no control over the firing of the first shots upon Fort Sumter in Charleston. Yet, here they are, in the middle of a war that they want and need to join in order to fight for the continuation of the Union. Holmes continues to use legal terms to define the war as being illegal:
“This accounts for the ages we seem to have lived since the twelfth of April last, and , to state it more generally, for that ex post facto operation of a great calamity, or any very powerful impression, which we once illustrated by the image of a stain spreading backwards from the leaf of life open before us through all those which we have already turned “ (Holmes 347).
The “ex post facto law” is “law that retroactively makes criminal conduct that was not criminal when performed” (ex post facto law) and Holmes seems to say that at first while everybody knew the law was not on the side of the slave holding states, it will now going to be a criminal act. Those slave holding states
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.
Americans had been engaged in a Civil War which had been begun in April of 1861 with shots fired on a fort in South Carolina. In the summer of 1863 in a small town called Gettysburg, there would be a fierce battle fought between the Union Army of the Potomac led by General George G. Meade and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia led by General Robert E. Lee. The events of the battle would overcome the losses suffered by the Union and put the Confederacy on the run. “Over 165,000 men would converge, and before the fighting ended, the ground would run red with blood. The battle was fierce, and the casualties proved it. But the casualties that resulted would not be in vain, at least for the Union; the formidable power
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.
In the mid 1800’s the beliefs over slavery were colliding. The North believed slavery was unconstitutional, and African Americans were meant to be treated equally as Whites, while the South believed that White Men were meant to be above African Americans, and saw abolishing slavery as a threat to economy. This disagreement caused anger among the states, and began increasing rapidly which led to sectionalism, which can be represented as the crossroads in Foote’s statement. States started rebelling and started getting the idea of excluding themselves from the Union and began using principles of self-government functioning with their own laws without basing their government on the Constitution. In Document B, South
Stephens begins his argument by stating that the splitting of the Union has been a bloodless one (Stephens 1). The author views this fact as an accomplishment, and he believes the bloodless state will endure due to the current evidence he sees (Stephens 1). Stephens, however, does recognize that this split led to the South altering the Constitution. The Constitution of the North was based on the assumption that all races are created equal, and the South could not abide with this foundation (Stephens 1). Even though the South’s Constitution has changed, Stephens believes that all of the essential content has been preserved, like the protection of live liberty and property (Stephens 1). The author’s explanation and presentation of these changes are very factual and unbiased because he simply presents the facts and attempts to stay away from theorizing. For instance, he does not theorize that this split will lead to war because the split, so far, has not indicated or suggested that
The Civil war between the north and south was a fight sparked by conflicting ideologies. James McPherson detailed that honor, duty, patriotism and ideology formed the main sustaining motivations for the Civil War, while courage, self-respect and group cohesion kept men going in combat. Along with these McPherson In his book For Cause & Comrades McPherson describes soldiers initial motivations. The differences between the confederate and union soldiers’ motivations were more prominent than they were similar because their underlying goals for the future of America varied when it pertained to human rights.
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
The war produced about 1,030,000 casualties, including about 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease, and 50,000 civilians. The war accounted for roughly as many American deaths as all American deaths in other U.S. wars combined.
During the 1860s there were many issues and that the Southern and Northern states needed to work on. In 1861 hundreds of thousands of Americans volunteered to fight in the Civil War, also known as the First Modern War. The main causes of this war were the economic and social differences between the North and the South. These differences led to other fundamental issues such as slavery and its abolition. In addition to that as the war was coming to its end, federal authorities found themselves presiding over the transition from slavery to freedom.After the war, there was a 12-year period best known as the Reconstruction and the main goals that it had were to get the Confederate States back into the Union, to rebuilt the Southern economy
During the Civil War, there were two sides, the Confederate Army and the Union Army. While the Confederates fought for slavery, the Union fought for their freedom. While the
In the 1800s the Civil War, a war between the northern and southern states, erupted into a massive conflict after President Lincoln was elected and after eleven states seceded from the Union. Following the secession from the Union, The Ft. Sumer conflict erupted, and this four-year tragedy between the northern and southern United States began causing an innumerable amount of casualties. This immense number of casualties, reaching approximately 600,000, resulted from economic and social differences of the North and South, the Dred Scott Case, and the election of President Abraham Lincoln. These causes of the Civil War were all created on conflict rather than intervention. They led to the creation of the Confederacy, a league of confederate states that embodied various disadvantages: the creation of weapons manually, the lack of railroads, the small population, as well as various advantages: tough fighting, devastating the Union 's army and unity that brought people of the Southern states together. Alongside these advantages came devastation, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves, and led to the Confederacy 's defeat in 1865.
What they fought for is an analysis of a collection of nearly a thousand personal letters and journals entries written by the soldiers who fought America’s famous Civil War. This book seeks to define the ideology of what the soldiers understood they were fighting for, and their comprehension of the outcome of their service .Although counter arguments agree that most soldiers could not give a solid explanation of why they fought for, nor the real Constitutional issues that were at stake; the thoughts the soldiers recorded show that they fought for more than just masculine identity; they highly valued being at home safe with their loved ones, at any cost. This book gives an inside perception of the Civil War, and a
The Civil War of America has been discussed as the first modern war of the new industrial age. Army’s of such a large size had yet to meet head on, face to face in the battle field with weapons of such mass destruction and deadly force. America had not yet seen casualties of this magnitude to
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.