SCHOLAR ISLAND

Civil War

 

Throughout the world, the incidence of civil war has increased steadily since the end of World War II. Twenty-five separate civil wars, defined here as resulting 1,000 deaths or more in a nation where there is no peace accord in effect, are currently under way......

 

"The real war will never get in the books."

Walt Whitman  (nor in the movies. See: The REEL CIVIL WAR: Mythmaking in American Film" by Bruce Chadwick)

 

Lincoln and Whitman" by David Mark Epstein

 

 

"With a fury which seemed to be blind, with an energy which was irresistible, and with a purpose and determination which death only could restrain, on came the brave Confederates. "

" The Pictorial History of the Great Civil War

 

"Our new government is founded on the opposite idea of the equality of the races....Its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery...is his natural and normal condition...This government is the first in the history of the world, based upon this great physical and moral truth."

Alexander Stephens (Vice President of the Confederacy)

 

"Our wounded mingled with rebels, charred and blackened by the burning tents and grass, crawling about begging for some one to end their misery ,the bones of living men crushed beneath the cannon wheels coming left about. . .10,000 men lying in a field not more than a mile by half a mile."

Shiloh, Bloody Shiloh!

Lloyd Lewis

 

 

"War had now acquired the horrors associated with World War I, The wounded, unattended between the lines, died of thirst and loss of blood, corpses rotted on the ground. Sharpshooters kept up their deadly work. Officers and men fought mechanically, hopelessly. The war had begun so long ago that one could hardly imagine a state of peace. Would it continue until everyone on both sides was dead?

Samuel Eliot Morrison

The Oxford History of the American Peoples

 

"Neither party expected for the war the magnitude and duration which it has already attained...Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged, The prayers of both could not be answered-that of neither has been answered fully."

Abraham Lincoln

 

 

"The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever ends."

T.S. Eliot

 

"The existence of neighbors is the only guarantee a nation has against perpetual civil war."

Paul Valery

 

..."The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history. Put beside it, all the whoopings of the Websters, Sumners and Everetts seem gaudy and silly. It is eloquence brought to a pellucid and almost gem-like perfection- the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Nothing else precisely like it is to be found in the whole range of oratory. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous.

   But let us not forget that it is poetry, no logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination-"that government of the people, by the people, for the people,:" should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i.e. of the people of the States? The Confederates went into battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and veto of the rest of the country-and for nearly twenty years that veto was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many convicts in the penitentiary."

H.L. Mencken

(from the Smart Set ,1920)

 

"Obedience to law, absolute-yea, even abject-is the lesson that this war.....will teach the free and enlightened American citizen."

General Sherman

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Book: The South vs The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War" by William W. Freehing

Book: "The Civil War Bookshelf: 50 Must-Read Books About the War Between the States" by Robert Wooster

Book: "The Town That Started The Civil War" by Nat Brandt

Book: "Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant

Book: "Testament: A Soldier's Story of the Civil War" by Benson Bobrick

Book: "Lincoln's Little War" by webb Garrison

"The New Annals of the Civil War" Ed. by P. Cozzens & R.I. Girardi

Book: "The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865" by Alice Fahs

Book: "All That Makes A Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South" by Stephen W. Berry II

Book: "The Fate Of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War" by Michael F. Holt

Book: "Two Roads to Sumter: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis and the March to the Civil War" by William & Bruce Catton

Book: "Testament: A Soldier's Story of the Civil War" by Benson Bobrick

Book: 'Soldier Life in the Union and Confederate Armies" Ed. by Phillip Van Doren Stern

Book: "Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman:

Book: "With My Face To The Enemy: Perspectives on the Civil War" Ed. by Robert Cowley

Book: "Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America" by William C. Davis

Book: "Academy On The James: The Confederate Naval School" by R. Thomas Campbell

Book: "The Rebel Raiders: The Astonishing History of the Confederacy's Secret Navy" by James Tertius deKay

Book: Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole generals: Andrew A. Humphreys in the Army of the Potomac" 

Book: "Gettysburg" by Stephen W. Sears

Book: "One War At A Time: The International Dimensions of the American Civil War" by Dean B. Mahin

Book: The Civil War: An Illustrated History" by Geoffrey C. Ward, with Ric Burns and Ken Burns

Book: "The Lincoln No One Knows: The Mysterious Man Who Ran the Civil War" by Webb Garrison

Book: "American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles" by Thomas Keneally

Book: "Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History." Ed. by David S. Heidler et al

Book: "Intimate Strategies of the Civil War: Military Commanders and Their Wives" Ed. by C.K. Bieser & L.J. Gordon

Book: "Secret Yankees: The Union Circle in Confederate Atlanta" by Thomas G. Dyner

Book: "Leaders of the Lost Cause: New Perspectives on the Confederate High Command" Ed. by G.W. Gallagher & J.T. Glatthaar

Book: "The South Vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War" by William W. Freehing

Book: "In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863" by Edward L. Ayers

Book: "The Lincoln No One Knows: The Mysterious Man Who Ran the Civil War" by Webb Garrison

Book: "Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War" by T.J. Stiles

Book: "Civil War Extra, Vol I" from the collection of Eric C.Caren

Book: "Soldier Life in the Union and Confederate Armies" Ed. by Phillip Van Doren Stern

Book: "Submarine Warfare In the Civil War" by Mark K. Ragan

Book: "Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America" by William C. Davis

Book: "War for the Union" by Allan Nevins

 

© 2001

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