Faust also discusses the belief in salvation as a factor in nerving soldiers to face death with equanimity and as a source of comfort to their families. She cites the funeral sermon for a Massachusett...
Lincoln too considered secession the essence of anarchy. He branded state sovereignty a sophism. The Union is older than any of the States, Lincoln asserted, and, in fact, it created them as States. T...
This was a transformation from what the late Isaiah Berlin described as Negative Liberty to Positive Liberty.4 The idea of negative liberty is perhaps more familiar. It can be defined as the absence o...
The Civil War was pre-eminently a political war, a war of peoples rather than of professional armies.
By the latter part of 1861 the War Department had taken over from the states the responsibility for feeding, clothing, and arming Union soldiers. But this process was marred by inefficiency, profiteer...
In cities and factories, the vices of our nature are more fully displayed, declared James Hammond of South Carolina in 1829, while rural life promotes a generous hospitality, a high and perfect courte...
Although per capita income doubled during the half-century, not all sectors of society shared equally in this abundance. While both rich and poor enjoyed rising incomes, their inequality of wealth wid...
Governor Beriah Magoffin
His captors asked why he, a nonslaveholder, was fighting to uphold slavery. He replied: I’m fighting because you’re down here.7
The upper South, like the lower, went to war to defend the freedom of white men to own slaves and to take them into the territories as they saw fit, lest these white men be enslaved by Black Republica...
Secession was an unequivocal act which relieved the unbearable tension that had been building for years. It was a catharsis for pent-up fears and hostilities. It was a joyful act that caused people li...
As a Virginian, Scott deplored the cry of many Republican politicians and newspapers for an invasion to crush the rebels. Even if successful, he wrote, an invasion would produce fifteen devastated pro...
The casualties at Antietam numbered four times the total suffered by American soldiers at the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944. More than twice as many Americans lost their lives in one day at Sharpsb...
The truth is, when bullets are whacking against tree-trunks and solid shot are cracking skulls like egg-shells, the consuming passion in the breast of the average man is to get out of the way. Between...
In a sermon on a text from Proverbs—adversity kills only where there is a weakness to be killed—one of the North’s leading clergymen expressed this new mood of grim resolution.
More than twice as many Americans lost their lives in one day at Sharpsburg as fell in combat in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American war combined.
Not surprisingly, South Carolina acted first. There is nothing in all the dark caves of human passion so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees. wrote the corresp...