Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Civil War
More than the Revolution, more than the Constitutional Convention, it was the crucial test of the American nation. The author of Battle Cry of Freedom, the most successful recent book on the subject, explains why the issues that fired the Civil War are as urgent in 1990 as they were in 1861.
"Americans just can’t get enough of the Civil War.” So says a man who should know, Terry Winschel, historian of the Vicksburg National Military Park. Millions of visitors come to Vicksburg and to more than a dozen other Civil War national battlefield and millitary parks every year.
Wars are fought with silver bullets. While individual battles are decided by tactics, fire-power, courage, and, of course, luck, victory in the long haul of war has almost always gone to the side better able to turn the national wealth to military purposes.
Before the movie version of Robert E. Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois opened across the country in 1940, a special White House screening was arranged for Franklin Roosevelt, for whom Sherwood was then acting as speechwriter.
In September 1862, the New York Tribune ran a masterly account of the Battle of Antietam. Here were no vague claims of “Great and Glorious Victory” or “Great Slaughter of the Rebels.” Instead, the paper offered six columns of accurate, forceful prose, and got it to the readers less than 36 hours after the fight.
New York throbbed with the usual breakfast-hour bustle on September 19, 1862, apparently undisturbed by the recent Confederate invasion of Northern soil.
The storm broke over their small town and changed their lives forever.
James Alexander Wal
The bloodiest day’s fighting in our nation’s history took place on ground that has hardly changed since 1862. Antietam today offers a unique chance to grasp what a great Civil War battle was actually like.
During the recent Third Battle of Manassas—the struggle in northern Virginia between a shopping-mall developer and the Manassas National Battlefield Park—I noticed among the flying brickbats a letter to the Washington Post
The more fiercely the Confederacy fought for its independence, the more bitterly divided it became. To fully understand the vast changes which the war unleashed on the country, you must first understand the plight of the Southerners who didn’t want secession.
Americans tend to think of the Civil War as a titanic struggle between two regions of the country, one united in commitment to the Union, the other equally devoted to its own nationhood. Yet neither North nor South was truly unified.
In the republic’s direst hour, he took command. In the black days after Bull Run, he won West Virginia for the Union. He raised a magnificent army and led it forth to meet his “cautious & weak” opponent, Robert E. Lee. Why hasn’t history been kinder to George B. McClellan?
General George B. McClellan possessed a particular talent for dramatic gesture, and on the afternoon of September 14, 1862, at South Mountain in western Maryland, he surpassed himself.
The United States had promised black soldiers that they would be paid as much as whites. Sergeant Walker believed that promise.
This is in honor of Sergeant William Walker, of the 3d South Carolina Infantry Regiment, a young black soldier who believed in the United States government’s promises of equal rights.
Extraordinary correspondence, never published before, takes us inside the mind of a military genius. Here is William Tecumseh Sherman in the heat of action inventing modern warfare, grieving the death of his little boy, struggling to hold Kentucky with levies, rolling invincibly across Georgia, and—always—battling the newspapermen whose stories, he believes, are killing his soldiers.
William Tecumseh Sherman,” announced The New York Times near the end of the Civil War, “has surpassed all newspaper correspondents in writing about military affairs...for conciseness, perspicacity and comprehensiveness with brevity he is the perf
Oliver Wendell Holmes was wounded three times in some of the worst fighting of the Civil War. But, for him, the most terrible battles were the ones he had missed.
He was born in 1841, in a Boston that took its water from backyard wells and its light from whale-oil lamps. He died 94 years later in a nation that the army pilot James Doolittle had just crossed in twelve hours.
On the eve of the Civil War, a Mississippi plantation owner and Philadelphia architect set out to build a massive octagonal mansion in Natchez.
The Civil War ignited the basic conflict between a free press and the need for military security. By war’s end, the hard-won compromises between soldiers and journalists may not have provided all the answers, but they had raised all the modern questions.
General William Tecumseh Sherman was a good hater, and he hated few things more than newspapermen. His encounter with the correspondent Floras B.
Spurred by the story on military medicine in the October/November 1984 issue, Lester Huested, a doctor and a trustee of the Glens Falls (New York) historical society, retrieved from his attic a medical officer’s letter describing a particularly unwelcome duty.
Not long after the turn of this century, an enterprising man named Bender bought at auction some one hundred thousand glass negatives of Civil War scenes.
How our wartime experience conquered a wide range of problems from hemorrhagic shock to yellow fever
WHEN HIPPOCRATES wrote in the fifth century B.C. that “he who would learn surgery should join an army and follow it,” he illuminated the central irony of military medicine.
All this Florida boy wanted to do was rejoin his regiment. Instead they drafted him into the Confederate secret service.
A FTER HE WAS MUSTERED out of his beaten army in 1865, Charles Hemming went west to Texas and a highly successful career as a banker.
Whatever you were taught or thought you knew about the post-Civil War era is probably wrong in the light of recent study
Most surveys of American painting begin in New England in the eighteenth century, move westward to the Rockies in the nineteenth, and return to New York in the twentieth. Now we’ll have to redraw the map .
TAKING STOCK of painting in the South in 1859, a critic for the New Orleans Daily Cresent concluded glumly, “Artist roam the country of the North, turning out pictures by the hundred yearly, but none come to glean t
Charles Hopkins received the Congressional Medal of Honor for gallantry at the battle of Gaines’ Mill, but his toughest fight was trying to survive at the Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp. He left this never-before-published record.
Original documents tell the story of a Civil War steamboat captains sorrowful cruise with the most destructive cargo of all
How Juliette “Daisy” Low, an unwanted child, a miserable wife, a lonely widow, finally found happiness as the founder of the Girl Scouts of America
In 1911 Juliette “Daisy” Low taught her first seven female Girl Guides to raise chickens and to spin wool.
Henry Ware Lawton
He arrived in Manila on March 18, 1899, bearing his six-foot-four frame with such easy strength that it would have been natural to wonder how he could so recently have suffered the “ill health” for which he had been relieved of the military governorship of Santiago.
In the portfolio of Civil War photographs that ran in our June/July 1981 issue, we identified Colonel Joseph Plympton, on page 50, as a Northerner—which was true enough. What wasn’t true was the implication that he’d served in the Civil War.
Far from home and in the face of every kind of privation, the Civil War soldier did his best to re-create the world he left behind him
Here is the federal government’s own picture history of our times—and it tells us more than you might think
FEW ARE AWARE of a major publishing project that has been sponsored by the federal government and some of our leading citizens over the past eight decades.
A haunting portfolio of newly discovered Civil War photographs
Shortly after the turn of the century, the historian Francis Trevelyan Miller began writing collectors, photographers, historical societies, and retired military men asking for photographs of the Civil War. In many cases he asked too late; a Mr.
The Hundredth Anniversary of the American Red Cross
A black chaplain in the Union Army reports on the struggle to take Fort Fisher, North Carolina, in the winter of 1864–65
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