The History Buff's Guide to the Civil War: The best, the worst, the largest, and the most lethal top ten rankings of the Civil War
512
The History Buff's Guide to the Civil War: The best, the worst, the largest, and the most lethal top ten rankings of the Civil War
512eBook
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Overview
Do You Think You Know the Civil War?
The History Buff's Guide to the Civil War clears the powder smoke surrounding the war that changed America forever. The perfect guide for anyone looking for great history facts like:
- What were the best, the worst, the largest, and the most lethal aspects of the conflict?
- What are the top ten causes?
- The bloodiest battles?
With over thirty annotated top ten lists and unexpected new findings, author Thomas R. Flagel will have you debating the most intriguing questions of the Civil War in no time. This invaluable guide to the great war between the states will delight and inform you about one of the most crucial periods in American history. The perfect gift for any history fan, student, or expert!
"The single best kickoff to the American Civil War...I can't imagine a better guide for any of us, whether student or scholar." —Robert Hicks author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Widow of the South
"A detailed and enjoyable set of facts and stories that will engage every reader from the newest initiate to the Civil War saga to the most experienced historian. This book is a must have for any Civil War reading collection." — James Lewis,Park Ranger at Stones River National Battlefield
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781402254871 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Sourcebooks |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2010 |
| Series: | History Buff's Guides |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 512 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Thomas R. Flagel teaches American History at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, Tennessee. He holds degrees from Loras College, Kansas State University, Creighton University, and has studied at the University of Vienna. He currently lives in Franklin, Tennessee.
Read an Excerpt
From the Top Ten Causes of the Civil War
There was no single cause of the American Civil War. From its earliest years, the batch of English colonies that became the United States were never a uniform entity. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, the relationship between the states had become surprisingly and dangerously unstable.
In order to better understand why these states turned so violently upon each other, we can examine underlying differences between the warring parties and look for possible sources of those differences. The following are ten key circumstances contributing to the political, social, economic, and evolutionary division of the country. A few were centuries in the making; others were relatively new phenomena. All changed a relatively functional nation into two distinct and confrontational sections, where "e pluribus unum" devolved into "us versus them."(1)
1. Territorial Expansion
By 1820 it was well established which states would be free or slave. Territories, however, were open for debate, and there would be much to fight over. Less than a million square miles in 1800, the United States nearly doubled with the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and almost doubled again after the war with Mexico (1846-48).
Armed with the popular ideology of "Manifest Destiny," many citizens North and South considered the continent, if not the hemisphere, the divine right of the United States. This aggressive foreign policy against Spanish, British, French, and Native American holdings fed the ravenous appetite of an expanding population and economy. It also created a showdown of "winner take all" between slavery and free-soil sections.(2)
The contrived war with Mexico was a thinly veiled attempt by Southern statesmen to secure more slave states. In the same light, Northerners pushed for homestead bills to virtually pay people to settle the Midwest and cried "54-40 or Fight" in demanding all of the vast Oregon Territory from Britain.
The greed turned to warfare with the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act. The U.S. Constitution was not specific on whether the states or the federal government controlled the territories. With disputes escalating for and against either position, Illinois Sen. Stephen A. Douglas proposed a compromise: The residents of the territory in question would decide. Calling it "popular sovereignty," Douglas and many of the congressmen who passed the bill assumed antislavery settlers would choose Nebraska and proslavery settlers would move into Kansas.
Kansas, however, was north of the traditional 36? 30' line between free and slave soil. In a prequel to the larger version in 1861, the area devolved into civil war. In 1855 proslavery "Bushwackers" and antislavery "Jayhawkers" swarmed into the territory. Voter fraud turned into armed threats, and then open warfare. For five years, and well into the Civil War, the territory became aptly known as "Bleeding Kansas."(3)
On a national level, the conflict destroyed the Whig Party, cracked the dominant Democrats into North and South factions, and inspired a new party that would rise to the presidency in six years.(4)
__________________________________________
During the presidency of James K. Polk, the United States acquired more than five hundred thousand square miles of territory-more than the land area of France, Italy, and Germany combined.
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2. Southern Dependence on Slavery
To mention slavery as a primary cause of the Civil War is to invite arguments to the contrary. The reaction among many Americans is almost Pavlovian.
Incentives to resist the slavery theory are manifold, but the overlaying motivation may be to preserve a sense of-for lack of a better term-reunion. A characteristic outcome of many wars is an eventual desire for reconciliation, which in the case of a reunified country is almost a matter of necessity. To create an environment of cooperation requires a reconstruction of dignity for the vanquished and a reformation of the past for the victor.(5)
But the facts remain. Concerning the American Civil War, armed conflict erupted when one section split away and the other resisted. The departing section left to protect, among other things, a third of its wealth, over half of its cheap labor force, its primary vehicle for economic opportunity, and its fundamental definition of social structure-in other words, slavery.
When the Southern states seceded in 1860 and 1861, they did not leave in the order of their geographic location, economic standing, political qualities, or level of industrialization. They left in almost the exact order of their percentage of slaves.
True, just one in three families in the South owned slaves, but in the 1861 convention that formed the Confederacy, 98 percent of the delegates were slave owners. The constitution they formed mentioned slavery ten times, more than any other subject. Selected as the Confederacy's vice president, Alexander H. Stephens declared in a speech made soon after the convention: "African slavery as it exists among us-the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution." Robert H. Smith of Alabama concurred, adding, "We have dissolved the late Union chiefly because of the negro quarrel."(6)
The United States in 1860:
Total value of all capital investments in manufacturing = $1 billion in gold.
Total value of all capital investments in slaves = $2 billion in gold.
3. Growing Disparity in Population
Paralleling industry, the distribution of the national population between sections was relatively equal in the first years of the United States. Then high birth rates and immigration expanded the numbers quickly. In 1800 the national population stood at 5.3 million. By 1830 it had reached nearly 13 million. By 1860 the country climbed to 32 million people. Yet the sectional balance in the House of Representatives was long gone.
More than 22 million Americans lived in free states. Fewer than 10 million lived in slave states, and 4 million of those were the slaves themselves. Even with the constitutional measure of a slave as three-fifths of a person, Pennsylvania and New York had more seats in Congress than Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas put together. Early on, Southern lawmakers realized that to be as effective in national politics as they had been in earlier days, they would have to rely on concessions over consensus.(7)
In 1860 the largest city in the United States was New York, with nearly one million inhabitants. The twenty-seventh largest city was Richmond, Virginia, with thirty-seven thousand.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
Introduction to the Second Edition xi
Prologue xiii
1: Antebellum
Top Ten Causes of the Civil War 1
Top Ten States with the Highest Percentage of Slaves 13
Top Ten Abolitionists 22
Top Ten Fire-Eaters 33
2: Politics
Top Ten Similarities Between Lincoln and Davis 45
Top Ten Differences Between the Confederate and U.S. Constitutions 56
Top Ten Acts of Government 65
Top Ten Events in Foreign Affairs 75
3: Military Life
Top Ten Weapons 87
Top Ten Items in a Soldier's Diet 98
Top Ten Military Organizational Units 107
Top Ten Surgical Tools and Medicines 116
Top Ten Modes of Communication 125
Top Ten Causes of Military Deaths 137
4: The Home Front
Top Ten Hardships 147
Top Ten Acts of Dissent 158
Top Ten Newspapers 168
Top Ten Songs 180
5: In Retrospect
Top Ten Firsts 193
Top Ten Most Significant Battles 206
Top Ten Best Commanding Generals 218
Top Ten Worst Commanding Generals 235
Top Ten Bloodiest Battles 251
Top Ten Deadliest Military Prisons 264
Top Ten Military Blunders 274
Top Ten Heroines 288
6: Pursuing the War
Top Ten Civil War Films 301
Top Ten Ways to Be an Accurate Reenactor 312
Top Ten National Battlefield Sites 320
Top Ten Largest Cemeteries 334
Top Ten Ways to Get Involved 345
Epilogue 357
Time Line 363
Notes 367
Bibliography 451
Image Credits 477
Index 479
About the Author 487