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Course: US history > Unit 5
Lesson 2: The Civil War- Slavery and the Missouri Compromise
- Increasing political battles over slavery in the mid-1800s
- Start of the Civil War - secession and Fort Sumter
- Strategy of the Civil War
- Early phases of Civil War and Antietam
- The Emancipation Proclamation
- Significance of the battle of Antietam
- The battle of Gettysburg
- The Gettysburg Address - setting and context
- Photographing the Battle of Gettysburg, O'Sullivan's Harvest of Death
- The Gettysburg Address - full text and analysis
- Later stages of the Civil War - 1863
- Later stages of the Civil War - the election of 1864 and Sherman's March
- Later stages of the Civil War - Appomattox and Lincoln's assassination
- Big takeaways from the Civil War
- The Civil War
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Early phases of Civil War and Antietam
The Civil War began after Lincoln's inauguration and the Fort Sumter incident. The North used their industrial base and population to blockade the South, who relied on their home advantage and leadership. Surprisingly, the South initially outperformed the North, despite the North's resources. The turning point came at the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history.
Want to join the conversation?
- Did Lincoln own slaves?(7 votes)
- From the author:No, he did not. From an early age, he lived in free states that did not permit slavery, and he was morally opposed to slavery his entire life.(19 votes)
- Why did Mcclellan keep holding back? Why did it take him so long to go after the confederates?(8 votes)
- A lot of people have pondered this question! There are at least three plausible reasons that I know about: 1) McClellan knew his soldiers very well and they loved him; he probably dreaded actually having to send them into battle to fight and die. 2) McClellan, for whatever reason, always underestimated the strength of his own forces relative to his foes. He frequently imagined that the Confederate army was 2-10 times larger than it actually was. What prompted him to these delusions, since he had all of the facts, is unclear. 3) McClellan had political ambitions (he ran for president in 1864 against Lincoln) and it may have been to his political advantage for the war to be going badly. He also probably wanted to be sure that he could achieve a heroic victory so as to boost his popularity.
Hope that helps!(20 votes)
- Did McClellan actually win any battles?(6 votes)
- McClellan did win hundreds of battles and skirmishes, but he managed to lose most of the important ones. However, his military victories were often logistical losses due to McClellan's extreme sluggishness and uncalled-for caution.(16 votes)
- so interesting. why is it so interesting(7 votes)
- Betrayals, treason and treachery are some of the most interesting things in American history. This was among the biggest of them all.(5 votes)
- I believe there is a huge fact missed in this presentation - the Confedracy had many weapons and munitions in their possession as in the five months between Lincoln's winning the presidency and his inauguration, the southern states took possession of every weapon that was withing their boundaries. In contrast the northern states had few federal posts and stores of weapons.(7 votes)
- OK. The Confederates were first off the mark. But as Aesop's fable of the tortoise and the hare has taught us for millenia, "slow and steady wins the race."(0 votes)
- When did photographs first enter newspapers?(5 votes)
- Try this~
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photojournalism
Looks like Roger Fenton, 1854. Or Mathew Brady in this video, 1862.(4 votes)
- Did every soldier have a rifle? Were there other advances in technology that helped (well none really helped) in the Civil War(4 votes)
- I would say they would need a rifle to fight in the war but they did have cannons which as you said "helped."(4 votes)
- Why was George C. McClellan a very cautious man, who was always scared of messing with the South in battles?(5 votes)
- While he was in training at the South Hudson Institute of Technology (West Point), his closest friends were aristocratic southerners such as James Stuart, Dabney Maury, Cadmus Wilcox, and A. P. Hill. These associations gave McClellan what he considered to be an appreciation of the southern mind and an understanding of the political and military implications of the sectional differences in the United States that led to the Civil War.
Source: Rowland, Thomas J. "George Brinton McClellan." In Leaders of the American Civil War: A Biographical and Historiographical Dictionary. Edited by Charles F. Ritter and Jon L. Wakelyn. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. page 260.(1 vote)
- Who is blue and who is red on the map?(2 votes)
- Red is the color for the Confederate attacks, and blue is the color for the Union attacks. Red is the color typically used to represent the South, and blue is the color typically used to represent the North. Interestingly enough, the colors almost lined up so that red denoted Union victories and blue Confederate victories, so I can understand your confusion. Hope this helps.(7 votes)
- honestly a loss of 4000 in a day being your worst is a really really good statistic compared to other nation losses. That coming from a nation that also nuked a city... Hiroshima having peaked at 419,182 people in 1942...(4 votes)
- Where did you get your numbers and dates?
The Hiroshima bombing didn't happen in 1942, but in 1945.
I found the following paragraph in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, posted in 2020, and referring to a report from 1946: "The Manhattan Project report, issued in 1946, lamented that there had been “great difficulty” in doing this, owing to “the extensive destruction of civilian installations (hospitals, fire and police department, and government agencies), the state of utter confusion immediately following the explosion, [and] the uncertainty regarding the actual population before the bombing.” The report’s authors did not elaborate upon their methodology. At Hiroshima, they estimated that out of a pre-raid population of 255,000 people, 66,000 had died, and 69,000 were injured."(1 vote)
Video transcript
- [Voiceover] All right, Kim. So where we left off, Lincoln gets elected in November of 1860. He's not inaugurated
until we get into 1861. Shortly after his inauguration,
you have the whole situation at Fort Sumter, which is really
the start of the Civil War. We don't have the first major battle until we get to Bull Run. And the overall theaters of war, we have this corridor
here in the Northeast in Virginia and Maryland. And you also have it in the
west along the Mississippi. And the North, the strategy is well let's use our industrial base. Let's use our larger population. Let's use our navy to see if we can essentially blockade the South. Well the South says, "Hey
we have the home court. "We have better leadership. "We just need to outlast the North." And so what happens as we get started, we talked about Bull Run
being the first major battle. Who kind of comes out better in some
of these first engagements? - [Voiceover] Well I think
it's a surprise to everyone when the South does much
better in the first year of the war than the North. Knowing the major advantages
that the North has in industrial power, in railroads, and just in the sheer number of people, it's very surprising that the leadership in the South does such an incredible job of really blocking the North's advances. The North is attempting to take Richmond, and Lee repeatedly keeps General McClellan from
getting to Richmond. - [Voiceover] Right and
then Lee actually goes on the offensive to some degree. The South essentially wins in Bull Run, and they have a series of victories as you mentioned in year one. - [Voiceover] Right, so one
problem that the North has is that Lincoln's generals are just not nearly as skilled. George B. McClellan
that we've talked about, his idea of the South's power is perhaps considerably greater than
the South's actual power. As he is forever telling
Lincoln, "I need more troops. "I need more supplies. "Send me more things." He loves parading his army, but I think he was actually a little too close to the troops himself. He was really afraid to lose anyone, which made him very popular with the army, but drove Lincoln crazy
because the North comes out with this really strong numeric and industrial advantage. And as McClellan delays,
it gives the South time to build things up over and over again. In fact Lincoln, who we
often think of as being sort of this great-grandfatherly,
sweet character, who has so many words of
wisdom, his letters to McClellan are downright snarky. He says to McClellan, "If you're not using the army, "could I borrow it?"
(laughter) - [Voiceover] And is that
what historians believe too? It looks like Lincoln felt
that the reason why year one went in favor of the South. And what we talked
about in previous years, everyone thought this was
gonna be a fast engagement. The North had all of these advantages. Lincoln believed that maybe McClellan wasn't being aggressive enough. And do historians
- [Voiceover] Yes absolutely. - [Voiceover] believe that too? - [Voiceover] Yeah, no
I think that's true. It's really borne out by the numbers, that in many cases where
McClellan thought he was facing just thousands of troops,
he was really only facing a fraction of that. - [Voiceover] And so that
made him be a little bit more cautious?
- [Voiceover] He was very - [Voiceover] cautious. - [Voiceover] At what
point is the turning point, at least in these early
stages of the Civil War, as we have here in this timeline? We go from April 1861
to roughly April 1865. The first year, I can draw that. So the first year would be roughly this. We've had several battles after Bull Run, but then we get to Antietam. - [Voiceover] Right so Lee,
since he's done so well in Virginia, he decides that he's gonna take the army to the North. This is the first time that he heads up into the border state of Maryland, and he meets at Antietam
Creek with McClellan. - [Voiceover] And this goes
back to the naming conventions between the North and South. It's called Antietam,
that's the body of water, which the North does. This is Antietam right there. - [Voiceover] Right well
the South refers to it as the nearby town which
is Sharpsburg, Maryland. And once again,
- [Voiceover] I see. - [Voiceover] this is a big deal. This is the South invading the North now, taking the offensive. - [Voiceover] Right and this is the bloodiest day in American history when-- - [Voiceover] Let me make sure I digested what you just said. The bloodiest day? I imagine things like
Pearl Harbor and D-Day. - [Voiceover] Right,
so 4,000 Americans died on a single day, September 17th, 1862 when these two armies meet at Antietam. And on no other day in American history have so many Americans died, not even on September 11th did that many Americans die. - [Voiceover] And was
this a surprise to folks? - [Voiceover] Yeah, well I think one of the truisms, perhaps
about military strategy in general, is that
people are always planning for the last war. They're not planning for the
next war, and so they learn from their mistakes,
but what they don't know how to do always is anticipate what's going to be new about this war. And there were so many new inventions during this time period that
really made the Civil War an incredibly deadly war. - [Voiceover] Yeah and you can see. These are pictures. These are Antietam right here? - [Voiceover] This is Antietam, yes.
- [Voiceover] And this looks - [Voiceover] like Lincoln and McClellan. - [Voiceover] Right, meeting at Antietam. - [Voiceover] Which is incredibly bloody. And you talk about new
technologies or new weapons, this rifle here looks like one of 'em. - [Voiceover] (chuckles) Yes. So this is a war where
there's a transition from the musket to the rifle, and what's different about a rifle is that inside the barrel of a rifle, there is a sort of spiral-shaped groove. And the spiral-shaped
groove makes the rifle much more accurate at a
much farther distance. It's sort of the difference between just hurling a
football end over end and throwing a spiral,
so you can hit a target at 600 yards, which is much greater.
- [Voiceover] Was unheard of - [Voiceover] for a musket or
hard, very hard with a musket. So it gets the bullet spinning, which keeps it on its trajectory better. - [Voiceover] Exactly. So we have much more accurate technology and old military strategy. If you see paintings of, for example the Napoleonic Wars, just involved a whole
bunch of soldiers lining up and going toward each other. Well when you've got soldiers in a line and very accurate weapons-- - [Voiceover] I never got why that ever made sense though.
(Kim laughs) - [Voiceover] I'm not sure I do either to be perfectly
- [Voiceover] Yeah I don't - [Voiceover] honest.
- [Voiceover] consider myself - [Voiceover] a great military strategist, but wearing these
(Kim laughs) bright uniforms and marching in step in these kind of--
- [Voiceover] Yeah it does - [Voiceover] seem to make
you a very good target. - [Voiceover] Yes, yes, but
anyway, you have the rifle now, much more accurate and you end up with scenes like this, but what was the outcome of Antietam? - [Voiceover] There are two
very major outcomes of Antietam, I would say. One, on the negative side for the North, is this is a battle that
is widely photographed as you can see. Mathew Brady, who was the leading photography studio owner of his time, and it's one t. - [Voiceover] Mathew, okay. - [Voiceover] Yeah, very
important, only one t. - [Voiceover] Yes, a
(Kim laughs) nontraditional spelling of Matthew. - [Voiceover] He sends
out his photographer that works for him,
named Alexander Gardner, and they have roving
photographers for the first time. They have wagons. And they take--
- [Voiceover] 'Cause - [Voiceover] photography's
just becoming a used technology at this time.
- [Voiceover] Right and so - [Voiceover] they have
Alexander Gardner photograph the battlefields at Antietam. And as you can see. - [Voiceover] Like a E-R? - [Voiceover] That's right, yes. - [Voiceover] Gardner. - [Voiceover] As you can see, this is just about as far away from the kind of heroic paintings of what battles looked like that people had been used to
seeing up until this point. These don't look like the sort of heroes of the Revolutionary War,
like George Washington. This is, this is gruesome.
- [Voiceover] Gruesome. - [Voiceover] And this
is really fascinating 'cause we take it for granted
in today's day and age is that the effect of media
on people's perception of things like war. Before the camera, before photographs, if I'm a civilian, I just hear
about these great stories, and I see these paintings
that look very valiant and very heroic. But now with photographs,
you see the grim reality of war, people just shot in their tracks. And young men just kind of just piled up. It's just very dark. - [Voiceover] Yeah and
it's a real PR problem for the North because this is before we
can really put photography in newspapers. They don't have that technology yet, but these photographs were put on display in Brady's studios. He had one in Washington,
D.C. and one in New York City, and people would go and
look at these photographs, and it was very shocking to them. It was a level of detail
that they had never seen. In some cases, they
could make out the faces of the individual men who
were dead on the battlefield. And that just seemed beyond what was imaginable to these people. To think of some poor person
going into one of these studios and seeing their son dead
there on the battlefield made it very difficult for
the North to keep up morale. - [Voiceover] Fascinating.