Random fact about Antietam. So many corpses had teeth stolen so they could be made into dentures, that the cost of human teeth dentures went low enough for the working class to afford them, when they were mostly a wealthy person's luxury.
It was the last major incident of looting corpses for teeth to make dentures. By the end of the 1860s, the modern denture made of Porcelain became the go to.
Apparently there was a whole craze in the early 1800s in the UK for ~~both "Trafalgar" and~~ "Waterloo" denture sets (from the obvious sources). I guess the need to chew your food helps you get over using corpse teeth but it's still weird to me to consider them some kind of desirable collector's item.
EDIT:
I misremembered and it looks like it was just [Waterloo teeth](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33085031) that were the craze.
Emancipation Proclamation prevented France and Great Britain from joining the Confederacy and aiding them by making the war truly about slavery. So the Battle of Antietam was truly a turning point in the American civil war.
Yep, the rich folks wanted to protect the cheap cotton from the South, but the vast majority of British people had zero interest in supporting a nation founded in slavery.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Britains-Role-Ending-Slavery-Worldwide/
> So many nations reneged on their promises that Britain placed a naval squadron off the coasts of East Africa, looking to intercept slave ships: the West Africa Squadron. This patrol, sometimes just a handful of ships, sometimes as many as 20, patrolled the Atlantic from 1808 to 1870, landing their human cargo at Freetown in Sierra Leone, a colony set up for freed slaves. Over 62 years the Royal Navy captured hundreds of slave ships and freed some 160,000 captives. Several hundreds of thousands more were saved by diplomatic and naval pressure.
> In order to free some 800,000 slaves, Parliament paid a huge £20m – a third of the Treasury’s annual income at the time – in compensation to the slave owners in the Caribbean, South Africa and Canada. And in 1843 Britons were forbidden to own slaves anywhere in the world.
Kind of a little weird the people are so vehement about it being all about slavery and nothing else, when it took them a couple of years to actually make it about slavery.
(Not that I'm trying to justify the confederacy or anything, I have heard convincing arguments for why slavery was a big part of it for the south even if it wasn't for the North initially. I think it's one of those funny little parts of the American mythos, like being really angry about traitorous rebellions, while celebrating a traitorous rebellion on the 4th of July.)
Slavery was explicitly written into many state constitutions or secession proclamations as the reason why they rebelled, specifically (but not necessarily only, I haven't read all of them) Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas. And if you read them, they don't really call themselves Confederate states or freedom-loving states, but them and the other rebellion states as "slaveholding states" and the remaining Union as "non-slaveholding states". That was their main common identifier, the way they wanted to be known by the public and differentiated from the Union. The preservation of slavery was also directly written into the CSA's constitution.
Lincoln opposed slavery morally, but he wasn't really an abolitionist. He was generally more concerned with keeping the country together than outlawing slavery immediately (he opposed expansion of it through the territories, and thought that would naturally end slavery over time), so he tried to keep things as status quo as possible in hopes of a diplomatic end to the issue. His inauguration address was basically him pleading for the southern states to come back peacefully.
But the rebels rebelled from day 1 due to the fear that the federal government would outlaw slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation was the Union publicly changing tone for strategic reasons, but that wasn't the start of slavery being the reason for the war. The south were *very* clear what they were fighting for.
We aren't in agreement at all if you can read the documents from the southern states saying "we are rebelling to preseve slavery" and somehow come to the conclusion that the war didn't start due to slavery. Full stop.
His point that the North, the Union cause, was foremost to end the rebellion and reunite the country regardless of the fate of the slave is correct. Lincoln said as much when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
As I said it was an important reason *to the south*. Where are the corresponding declarations at the outset from the North saying 'we're fighting this war to abolish slavery'?
As you said Lincoln wasn't an abolitionist. The union was fighting for the same reason all governments fight against rebellions, to maintain control of the insubordinate part of its dominion. It's rather telling that it took them two years and the threat of Britain and France recognising the CSA to even bring slavery into the conversation.
You are changing your argument. You were clear.
>Kind of a little weird the people are so vehement about it being all about slavery and nothing else, when it took them a couple of years to actually make it about slavery.
Again, the south was *very clear* about why they rebelled. The war was about slavery from the start, even if the Union was not making a public moralistic argument around slavery at the time. It's not weird at all to call it how it was and say the reasons the south gave for rebelling were why they rebelled, and therefore was the reason for the war starting. After all, the south attacked first.
Every other explanation is simply mental gymnastics. What other explanation can *you* have about why the war started and what it was about, if not for the south's stated reason?
Yes I was clear
> it took them a couple of years to actually make it about slavery
There is no twisted argument, it's their in the first comment. The Union was at at war for two years before they censured slavery. The union did not go into the war intending to end slavery. The CSA paranoid idiots that they were brought it on themselves by declaring war about something that wasn't under threat.
The emancipation came later, and after the war was reinterpreted into this narrative of the righteous crusade against slavery, because that's more attractive then a government wanting their states back. The emancipation was a pragmatic political move.
Its no different then the idea that the Allies went into WWII to defeat the Holocaust. No they didn't, it was because Hitler invaded Poland.
Lincoln's government did care, they were just planning to go about it a different way. Their plan was to prevent the spread of slavery into new states in the West. That eventually would have led to enough power to get rid of slavery altogether. They were also against the Fugitive Slave Act, which required escaped slaves to be returned.
Just because the war was over slavery doesn't mean *ending slavery* was where the North started.
The war's immediate trigger as that the Fire Eaters in the South were convinced the Republicans would ban the expansion of slavery into the territories (they'd promised this in their platform, but it's doubtful they could have gotten it through Congress). The South seceded over slavery. The North only became invested in ending slavery later, at first attempting to reconcile with assurances that were both too weak for the radicals in the south, and would never have been enough anyway.
Tensions between the sections had reached the point that the Southern elite were just looking for a chance to break away. It probably would have happened one way or another even if Lincoln lost the 1860 election. It was all about slavery, but the South started there while the North's primary cause at the start was the preservation of the Union. The war became a crusade against slavery later, when it became clear that there would be no Union if slavery was not abolished.
To quote the Romans; Slavery must be destroyed (the Northern States, 1863).
If McClellan wasn’t so incompetent the war could’ve ended on that battle. The numbers shown for the Union was what was committed not his entire force. He even had the Souths campaign plans and still thought he was outnumbered.
McClellan was an excellent trainer and decent strategist, but a mediocre over cautious tactician.
Grant was a brutally effective strategist and logistician.
Basically, McClellan played not to lose.
Grant played to win.
The most masterful offensive campaign of the entire war was Grant's Vicksburg campaign.
I would have loved to see what could have happened with the Battle of the Crater if Grant hadn't been persuaded to switch out the attacking units. Perhaps his greatest error.
>I'm a damned sight smarter than Grant; I know more about organization, supply and administration and about everything else than he does; but I'll tell you where he beats me and where he beats the world. He don't care a damn for what the enemy does out of his sight but it scares me like hell.
-WT Sherman
Not counting the Confederates as American in the casualty count means that the Confederacy was in fact a legitimate sovereign nation; which it was not. Not a single foreign state recognized the Confederacy as an independent nation.
That’s a good point. Counterpoint/question, do people that commit treason and commit violence in order to secede from the USA (to essentially give up their citizenship in said country), still retain citizenship in the USA?
And, has there ever been any other cases where a person/people have been stripped of citizenship officially for convicted treason or is that even possible?
That’s a good question! I don’t know of any cases of natural citizenship being revoked due to an act of treason.
Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in an act of terrorism aimed at the government and he did not have his citizenship revoked. (Although he had to life revoked, so there is that.)
It was a civil war, both sides were US citizens and the commanders all graduated together at west point. A lot of them knew each other and were friends. IIRC Longstreet, one of the top confederate generals at the battle, was the best man at Ulysses Grant's wedding
>both sides were US citizens
No, no they weren't. Or at least the Confederates didn't want to be. Again, that was the whole point.
It seems pretty silly to count, as Americans, people who were willing to kill so that they could stop being Americans.
At the Battle of Antietam, the Confederate States of America was a functional government which exercised sovereignty over a large area. The soldiers in the Confederate Army were Confederates, not Americans.
It's the Confederate states of AMERICA. They are/were American. We don't go around calling ourselves United Staters. To differentiate during a civil war where citizens are the same. They go by the movement name for fighting. I.E. Unionists and Confederates are both still Americans. Just like the Bolsheviks and the Communists are still Russians.
What does the CSA stand for, again? I got some bad news for you, bud.
If we said that no one who is racist, bigoted, homophobic, or stupid could ever be an American, no 13 year old white suburban boy would ever grow to manhood, myself included.
Some people are just immature in other ways than other people. Some grow out of it, and some run for president a 3rd time after losing the popular vote twice before.
>What does the CSA stand for, again? I got some bad news for you, bud.
You realize how silly this is as a theoretical point, right? In the Confederate States of America, the America is, well, the same thing America means in the United States of America. That is, the geographic region. But when people say American, they mean a citizen of the United States of America. Someone who acknowledges they owe some allegiance to the United States of America.
>If we said that no one who is racist, bigoted, homophobic, or stupid could ever be an American, no 13 year old white suburban boy would ever grow to manhood, myself included.
I never said any of that. What I said is that people who were actively levying war against the United States so that they would no longer be part of the United States are not really Americans. Certainly not at the time they're actively levying war against the United States. Everyone in the leadership of the Confederacy made an active and informed choice to use violence to establish their independence from the United States of America. They stopped being Americans just like George Washington and Sam Adams and Ben Franklin and so on stopped being Britons when they decided to levy war against Great Britain.
The United States took the official position that they were merely traitors and not a legitimate state. That was a necessary step in order to keep everyone else out of the war, but I think it's entirely fair to call people who actively participated in the Confederate government or war apparatus *not Americans*.
And did piss all with the information. He had a 2:1 manpower superiority, more cannons, was fighting on his own territory in Maryland, AND knew Lee’s exact plan… and still only managed a draw. There’s a reason the Union kept going through top generals endlessly until the figured out Grant was the answer
Little known fact. Grant wasn’t the drunkard that the daughters of the confederacy made him out to be. I love that they rewrote history to have the gentleman Lee defeated by a drunkard. That makes the defeat more embarrassing to me.
It's accurate that the post-War era so Southern apologists and Lost Causers sully Grant as a drunk as a way to detract from his wartime achievements. Grant had a history of drinking and was apparently a sloppy drunk, but there's no evidence he drank at any point in the war where it mattered.
Grant's memoirs were specific on this point and are generally taken as truthful. He had his aids intervene on his behalf to control his access to alcohol while on campaign.
Lee was not defeated by a drunk.
Lee was defeated by a drunk who wanted to win the war enough he barely drank at all until it was over.
Though I agree, the myth of Lee being defeated by a bumbling drunkard is far more embarrassing, and kind of speaks to an older time when temperance was held in higher regard than it is now. It also factors directly into the Myth of the Lost Cause where it insists that southern leaders had higher moral character (because owning other people is 'kay, but heaven forbid you party too hardy).
It is accurate in the sense that the myth is presented that he was always drunk. That is completely false. He did have a problem with alcohol, but he was able to confine it to times when he had nothing to do. He wasn't getting drunk while making battle plans, fighting, etc. It was when there was nothing to do but sit around and miss his wife.
We did a thing in my US History class in high school where we were presented with the battle plans being found scenario, and maps showing the area, where the Union army was located at the time, and the terrain. We split into groups and had to decide whether to believe the battle plans falling into our lap, and what to do.
I remember our plan was pretty aggressively to bank on the plans being real, and try to force a Confederate retreat right into the teeth of bulk of the Union cavalry we sent around to cut them off.
I've walked most the battlefield, Dunker Church, the cornfield and Burnside's Bridge. Would highly recommend for visitors. Legend has it that the creeks and streams ran red with blood for days.
My gg grandfather was there…specifically Miller's cornfield. He was trying to reload when a bullet hit his rifle and broke it in half. Bullet still had enough poop left to hit him in the solar plexus and knock the wind out of him. So, for a while, he was laying on the ground trying to figure out how to breath again and no weapon left to fight with.
Gettysburg was a different story. Spent the next three months in a military hospital.
I wish it had come down through the family. But none of my relatives are the least bit interested in history. It was my interest in genealogy that lead me to discover connections, not only to the Civil War, but lots of other interesting things as well. I tend to like the scoundrels…the pirates and the horse thieves..and lord only knows I've got plenty of them…lol.
If you ever want to visit a civil war battle site, this is the one. Very little commercialization. You can stand at the top of the field and almost see the battle happening. Bonus: the oldest monument to George Washington is nearby.
"Brawl"? I'm picturing a bunch of Union soldiers and a bunch Confederates all in the same pub and one of the Confederates says something uncomplimentary about a Union soldier's mother and 12 hours later, well, that escalated quickly.
Deadliest day in the Civil War, but not the deadliest battle. The multi-day battles of Gettysburg (3,155), Spotsylvania (2,725) and Wilderness (2,246) were all deadlier.
I was going off of this page: [List of battles with most United States military fatalities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_with_most_United_States_military_fatalities)
Also, the numbers are actually only for Union soldiers, since that page doesn't consider Confederate soldiers as 'U.S Military'.
Confederate defeat was always inevitable from an economic and military perspective, this just ensured continued political support for the war and end to slavery.
The Lost Cause and Confederacy fetishists refuse to understand that an independent CSA would’ve withered away and disintegrated within 20 years.
Nonsense; a couple of additional battlefield defeats and Lincoln loses the 1864 election and the north potentially gives up.
Although the CSA would have had plenty of problems.
So you're agreeing that the Union had the manpower and economic might to win the war - it was just a matter of when and not if victory would be achieved? The only way they lose if they decide that victory is too expensive or politically unpopular.
The CSA had a few clever generals but it was crippled by terrible political leadership, a broken economic system, and dependence on the suffering of enslaved persons - something which would soon make them an impossible trade partner for the European powers.
A lack of political will is indeed profoundly damaging. Much of the South is still decades behind the rest of the country economically and socially. This is the legacy of the Union lacking the political will to implement a 19th century version of de-Nazification - the eradication of the conditions that led to a proto-fascist slave regime to emerge in Richmond.
Sure, if the north remained unfaillinging dedicated, it had the resources. It would have taken some extraordinary action (like the highly unlikely confederate capture of DC).
Anyway, Hanibal Hamlin should have stayed as VP.
Agree it was incredibly unlikely but perhaps not impossible. There could be a version of reality in which DC and Philadelphia get captured and - in the absence of coherent government - the NYC commercial interests effectively force a cessation of hostilities.
Even if they'd won they would have withered away because they were an agrarian society right next to one of the most industrialised countries back then. Either they would have become as unimportant as Central American countries in a desperate attempt to keep their slaves or they industrialise and realise they wouldn't need their slaves anymore and at that point the whole separatism thing wasn't needed either.
You just parroted one of the main points of the Lost Cause myth, that defeat was inevitable. Just look to the American Revolution to see that it was not. See also Dutch revolt, War of 1812, Greek War of Independence, ect.
Not really - in the case of the wars you cited, the great imperial power lost not because they lacked the economic or military resources to win, they simply no longer had the political will to continue the fight at such an enormous cost.
If Lincoln lost reelection it was unclear how McClellan was planning to proceed. If he decided that he no longer wished to fight the CSA, that would have been a calculated political choice and not a decision driven by the lack of men, money, or resources.
Like in World War 2, once the Axis found itself fighting both the US and the USSR, its defeat was inevitable so long as the Allied leadership decided on pursuing unconditional surrender.
Also, like the Axis, the CSA had built its economy on the oppression and exploitation of other human beings, a system that was unsustainable as it was cruel.
If McClellan had won he would have done everything in his power to hamstring the North, just as he had done as general. He would have been pushing for "peace" as soon as he walking in the door.
I think that's the battle where both sides for some reason just stood in static firing lines shooting at each other for hours until they were nearly wiped out, To the horror of European army observers?
Random fact about Antietam. So many corpses had teeth stolen so they could be made into dentures, that the cost of human teeth dentures went low enough for the working class to afford them, when they were mostly a wealthy person's luxury. It was the last major incident of looting corpses for teeth to make dentures. By the end of the 1860s, the modern denture made of Porcelain became the go to.
Apparently there was a whole craze in the early 1800s in the UK for ~~both "Trafalgar" and~~ "Waterloo" denture sets (from the obvious sources). I guess the need to chew your food helps you get over using corpse teeth but it's still weird to me to consider them some kind of desirable collector's item. EDIT: I misremembered and it looks like it was just [Waterloo teeth](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33085031) that were the craze.
Thanks for the info bro
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Emancipation Proclamation prevented France and Great Britain from joining the Confederacy and aiding them by making the war truly about slavery. So the Battle of Antietam was truly a turning point in the American civil war.
It ended any possible chance Britain might join, but neither Britain nor France were anywhere close to even officially supporting the CSA
Yep, the rich folks wanted to protect the cheap cotton from the South, but the vast majority of British people had zero interest in supporting a nation founded in slavery.
Pretty early in the war they started investing in ramping up Egyptian cotton.
Tell me, how do you think your royal family gained their $$??
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Britains-Role-Ending-Slavery-Worldwide/ > So many nations reneged on their promises that Britain placed a naval squadron off the coasts of East Africa, looking to intercept slave ships: the West Africa Squadron. This patrol, sometimes just a handful of ships, sometimes as many as 20, patrolled the Atlantic from 1808 to 1870, landing their human cargo at Freetown in Sierra Leone, a colony set up for freed slaves. Over 62 years the Royal Navy captured hundreds of slave ships and freed some 160,000 captives. Several hundreds of thousands more were saved by diplomatic and naval pressure. > In order to free some 800,000 slaves, Parliament paid a huge £20m – a third of the Treasury’s annual income at the time – in compensation to the slave owners in the Caribbean, South Africa and Canada. And in 1843 Britons were forbidden to own slaves anywhere in the world.
Mainly land
Great big tracts of land....
Something something slavery... Something something tea company
Are we talking about the British royal family? Because it is definitely due to land...
Imagine if France and Great Britain joined before. What a wild different society we would have
Henry Turtledove wrote some interesting and pretty gritty alternative history if you're interested.
*Harry Turtledove
Damn AK-47’s
If I’m Spain coming off a two hundred year L, I would prob throw some money at the south, maybe you get bama or something
Kind of a little weird the people are so vehement about it being all about slavery and nothing else, when it took them a couple of years to actually make it about slavery. (Not that I'm trying to justify the confederacy or anything, I have heard convincing arguments for why slavery was a big part of it for the south even if it wasn't for the North initially. I think it's one of those funny little parts of the American mythos, like being really angry about traitorous rebellions, while celebrating a traitorous rebellion on the 4th of July.)
Slavery was explicitly written into many state constitutions or secession proclamations as the reason why they rebelled, specifically (but not necessarily only, I haven't read all of them) Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas. And if you read them, they don't really call themselves Confederate states or freedom-loving states, but them and the other rebellion states as "slaveholding states" and the remaining Union as "non-slaveholding states". That was their main common identifier, the way they wanted to be known by the public and differentiated from the Union. The preservation of slavery was also directly written into the CSA's constitution. Lincoln opposed slavery morally, but he wasn't really an abolitionist. He was generally more concerned with keeping the country together than outlawing slavery immediately (he opposed expansion of it through the territories, and thought that would naturally end slavery over time), so he tried to keep things as status quo as possible in hopes of a diplomatic end to the issue. His inauguration address was basically him pleading for the southern states to come back peacefully. But the rebels rebelled from day 1 due to the fear that the federal government would outlaw slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation was the Union publicly changing tone for strategic reasons, but that wasn't the start of slavery being the reason for the war. The south were *very* clear what they were fighting for.
We are in agreement. As I said it was an important policy to the south, but the union Government didn't really care.
We aren't in agreement at all if you can read the documents from the southern states saying "we are rebelling to preseve slavery" and somehow come to the conclusion that the war didn't start due to slavery. Full stop.
His point that the North, the Union cause, was foremost to end the rebellion and reunite the country regardless of the fate of the slave is correct. Lincoln said as much when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
As I said it was an important reason *to the south*. Where are the corresponding declarations at the outset from the North saying 'we're fighting this war to abolish slavery'? As you said Lincoln wasn't an abolitionist. The union was fighting for the same reason all governments fight against rebellions, to maintain control of the insubordinate part of its dominion. It's rather telling that it took them two years and the threat of Britain and France recognising the CSA to even bring slavery into the conversation.
You are changing your argument. You were clear. >Kind of a little weird the people are so vehement about it being all about slavery and nothing else, when it took them a couple of years to actually make it about slavery. Again, the south was *very clear* about why they rebelled. The war was about slavery from the start, even if the Union was not making a public moralistic argument around slavery at the time. It's not weird at all to call it how it was and say the reasons the south gave for rebelling were why they rebelled, and therefore was the reason for the war starting. After all, the south attacked first. Every other explanation is simply mental gymnastics. What other explanation can *you* have about why the war started and what it was about, if not for the south's stated reason?
Yes I was clear > it took them a couple of years to actually make it about slavery There is no twisted argument, it's their in the first comment. The Union was at at war for two years before they censured slavery. The union did not go into the war intending to end slavery. The CSA paranoid idiots that they were brought it on themselves by declaring war about something that wasn't under threat. The emancipation came later, and after the war was reinterpreted into this narrative of the righteous crusade against slavery, because that's more attractive then a government wanting their states back. The emancipation was a pragmatic political move. Its no different then the idea that the Allies went into WWII to defeat the Holocaust. No they didn't, it was because Hitler invaded Poland.
Lincoln's government did care, they were just planning to go about it a different way. Their plan was to prevent the spread of slavery into new states in the West. That eventually would have led to enough power to get rid of slavery altogether. They were also against the Fugitive Slave Act, which required escaped slaves to be returned.
Just because the war was over slavery doesn't mean *ending slavery* was where the North started. The war's immediate trigger as that the Fire Eaters in the South were convinced the Republicans would ban the expansion of slavery into the territories (they'd promised this in their platform, but it's doubtful they could have gotten it through Congress). The South seceded over slavery. The North only became invested in ending slavery later, at first attempting to reconcile with assurances that were both too weak for the radicals in the south, and would never have been enough anyway. Tensions between the sections had reached the point that the Southern elite were just looking for a chance to break away. It probably would have happened one way or another even if Lincoln lost the 1860 election. It was all about slavery, but the South started there while the North's primary cause at the start was the preservation of the Union. The war became a crusade against slavery later, when it became clear that there would be no Union if slavery was not abolished. To quote the Romans; Slavery must be destroyed (the Northern States, 1863).
It was 100% about slavery for the south.
Never said wasn't. But it wasn't about that for the Union.
It was partly about slavery for the Union.
Lincoln held the Emancipation Proclamation in his pocket for quite some time waiting for a victory to announce it.
If McClellan wasn’t so incompetent the war could’ve ended on that battle. The numbers shown for the Union was what was committed not his entire force. He even had the Souths campaign plans and still thought he was outnumbered.
McClellan was the *worrrsst* Always afraid.
McClellan was an excellent trainer and decent strategist, but a mediocre over cautious tactician. Grant was a brutally effective strategist and logistician. Basically, McClellan played not to lose. Grant played to win.
The most masterful offensive campaign of the entire war was Grant's Vicksburg campaign. I would have loved to see what could have happened with the Battle of the Crater if Grant hadn't been persuaded to switch out the attacking units. Perhaps his greatest error. >I'm a damned sight smarter than Grant; I know more about organization, supply and administration and about everything else than he does; but I'll tell you where he beats me and where he beats the world. He don't care a damn for what the enemy does out of his sight but it scares me like hell. -WT Sherman
It is only the deadliest if you consider the Confederates as American.
Not counting the Confederates as American in the casualty count means that the Confederacy was in fact a legitimate sovereign nation; which it was not. Not a single foreign state recognized the Confederacy as an independent nation.
That’s a good point. Counterpoint/question, do people that commit treason and commit violence in order to secede from the USA (to essentially give up their citizenship in said country), still retain citizenship in the USA? And, has there ever been any other cases where a person/people have been stripped of citizenship officially for convicted treason or is that even possible?
That’s a good question! I don’t know of any cases of natural citizenship being revoked due to an act of treason. Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in an act of terrorism aimed at the government and he did not have his citizenship revoked. (Although he had to life revoked, so there is that.)
A house divided still makes them part of that American house, come on man.
They literally said they weren't American. That's what the whole war was about, remember?
It was a civil war, both sides were US citizens and the commanders all graduated together at west point. A lot of them knew each other and were friends. IIRC Longstreet, one of the top confederate generals at the battle, was the best man at Ulysses Grant's wedding
>both sides were US citizens No, no they weren't. Or at least the Confederates didn't want to be. Again, that was the whole point. It seems pretty silly to count, as Americans, people who were willing to kill so that they could stop being Americans.
You forget, they fought for the right to be separate BUT LOST THE FIGHT. Just because confederates suck ass doesn't mean they aren't Americans.
At the Battle of Antietam, the Confederate States of America was a functional government which exercised sovereignty over a large area. The soldiers in the Confederate Army were Confederates, not Americans.
It's the Confederate states of AMERICA. They are/were American. We don't go around calling ourselves United Staters. To differentiate during a civil war where citizens are the same. They go by the movement name for fighting. I.E. Unionists and Confederates are both still Americans. Just like the Bolsheviks and the Communists are still Russians.
What does the CSA stand for, again? I got some bad news for you, bud. If we said that no one who is racist, bigoted, homophobic, or stupid could ever be an American, no 13 year old white suburban boy would ever grow to manhood, myself included. Some people are just immature in other ways than other people. Some grow out of it, and some run for president a 3rd time after losing the popular vote twice before.
>What does the CSA stand for, again? I got some bad news for you, bud. You realize how silly this is as a theoretical point, right? In the Confederate States of America, the America is, well, the same thing America means in the United States of America. That is, the geographic region. But when people say American, they mean a citizen of the United States of America. Someone who acknowledges they owe some allegiance to the United States of America. >If we said that no one who is racist, bigoted, homophobic, or stupid could ever be an American, no 13 year old white suburban boy would ever grow to manhood, myself included. I never said any of that. What I said is that people who were actively levying war against the United States so that they would no longer be part of the United States are not really Americans. Certainly not at the time they're actively levying war against the United States. Everyone in the leadership of the Confederacy made an active and informed choice to use violence to establish their independence from the United States of America. They stopped being Americans just like George Washington and Sam Adams and Ben Franklin and so on stopped being Britons when they decided to levy war against Great Britain. The United States took the official position that they were merely traitors and not a legitimate state. That was a necessary step in order to keep everyone else out of the war, but I think it's entirely fair to call people who actively participated in the Confederate government or war apparatus *not Americans*.
And we do. Lincoln did. Read the Gettysburg address.
Fun fact :- Union commander McClellan found Robert E. Lee’s battle plans in a cigar wrapper before the Battle of Antietam.
And did piss all with the information. He had a 2:1 manpower superiority, more cannons, was fighting on his own territory in Maryland, AND knew Lee’s exact plan… and still only managed a draw. There’s a reason the Union kept going through top generals endlessly until the figured out Grant was the answer
100%. McClellan should have destroyed Lee’s army at Antietam. It was the smallest army Lee had put onto the field at that point.
North suffered 2k more casualties then the south also. Outnumbered 53k to 30k going into the battle.
Little known fact. Grant wasn’t the drunkard that the daughters of the confederacy made him out to be. I love that they rewrote history to have the gentleman Lee defeated by a drunkard. That makes the defeat more embarrassing to me.
It's accurate that the post-War era so Southern apologists and Lost Causers sully Grant as a drunk as a way to detract from his wartime achievements. Grant had a history of drinking and was apparently a sloppy drunk, but there's no evidence he drank at any point in the war where it mattered. Grant's memoirs were specific on this point and are generally taken as truthful. He had his aids intervene on his behalf to control his access to alcohol while on campaign. Lee was not defeated by a drunk. Lee was defeated by a drunk who wanted to win the war enough he barely drank at all until it was over. Though I agree, the myth of Lee being defeated by a bumbling drunkard is far more embarrassing, and kind of speaks to an older time when temperance was held in higher regard than it is now. It also factors directly into the Myth of the Lost Cause where it insists that southern leaders had higher moral character (because owning other people is 'kay, but heaven forbid you party too hardy).
That’s inaccurate. His contemporaries talked about it and he admitted it in his memoirs.
It is accurate in the sense that the myth is presented that he was always drunk. That is completely false. He did have a problem with alcohol, but he was able to confine it to times when he had nothing to do. He wasn't getting drunk while making battle plans, fighting, etc. It was when there was nothing to do but sit around and miss his wife.
We did a thing in my US History class in high school where we were presented with the battle plans being found scenario, and maps showing the area, where the Union army was located at the time, and the terrain. We split into groups and had to decide whether to believe the battle plans falling into our lap, and what to do. I remember our plan was pretty aggressively to bank on the plans being real, and try to force a Confederate retreat right into the teeth of bulk of the Union cavalry we sent around to cut them off.
How long ago was that?
A little less than 162 years. ... Seriously, 1993.
I've walked most the battlefield, Dunker Church, the cornfield and Burnside's Bridge. Would highly recommend for visitors. Legend has it that the creeks and streams ran red with blood for days.
Unfortunately this also attracted a number of vampires
My gg grandfather was there…specifically Miller's cornfield. He was trying to reload when a bullet hit his rifle and broke it in half. Bullet still had enough poop left to hit him in the solar plexus and knock the wind out of him. So, for a while, he was laying on the ground trying to figure out how to breath again and no weapon left to fight with. Gettysburg was a different story. Spent the next three months in a military hospital.
That is awesome that you have that story about your GG grandfather. Such a great connection to a pivotal moment in history
I wish it had come down through the family. But none of my relatives are the least bit interested in history. It was my interest in genealogy that lead me to discover connections, not only to the Civil War, but lots of other interesting things as well. I tend to like the scoundrels…the pirates and the horse thieves..and lord only knows I've got plenty of them…lol.
If you ever want to visit a civil war battle site, this is the one. Very little commercialization. You can stand at the top of the field and almost see the battle happening. Bonus: the oldest monument to George Washington is nearby.
"Brawl"? I'm picturing a bunch of Union soldiers and a bunch Confederates all in the same pub and one of the Confederates says something uncomplimentary about a Union soldier's mother and 12 hours later, well, that escalated quickly.
Yes, "brawl" kinda soft-peddles the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. "12-hour meat grinder" would have been more accurate.
It was just such an odd word choice. Like it involved soccer hooliganism or something.
"Brawl" makes it sound chaotic and disorganized, as opposed to a "duel".
I can see “brawl” in the context of “beating each other to death in hand to hand combat in Sunken Road”
Deadliest day in the Civil War, but not the deadliest battle. The multi-day battles of Gettysburg (3,155), Spotsylvania (2,725) and Wilderness (2,246) were all deadlier.
Shiloh has entered the chat.
I was going off of this page: [List of battles with most United States military fatalities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_with_most_United_States_military_fatalities) Also, the numbers are actually only for Union soldiers, since that page doesn't consider Confederate soldiers as 'U.S Military'.
Confederate defeat was always inevitable from an economic and military perspective, this just ensured continued political support for the war and end to slavery. The Lost Cause and Confederacy fetishists refuse to understand that an independent CSA would’ve withered away and disintegrated within 20 years.
Nonsense; a couple of additional battlefield defeats and Lincoln loses the 1864 election and the north potentially gives up. Although the CSA would have had plenty of problems.
So you're agreeing that the Union had the manpower and economic might to win the war - it was just a matter of when and not if victory would be achieved? The only way they lose if they decide that victory is too expensive or politically unpopular. The CSA had a few clever generals but it was crippled by terrible political leadership, a broken economic system, and dependence on the suffering of enslaved persons - something which would soon make them an impossible trade partner for the European powers. A lack of political will is indeed profoundly damaging. Much of the South is still decades behind the rest of the country economically and socially. This is the legacy of the Union lacking the political will to implement a 19th century version of de-Nazification - the eradication of the conditions that led to a proto-fascist slave regime to emerge in Richmond.
Sure, if the north remained unfaillinging dedicated, it had the resources. It would have taken some extraordinary action (like the highly unlikely confederate capture of DC). Anyway, Hanibal Hamlin should have stayed as VP.
Agree it was incredibly unlikely but perhaps not impossible. There could be a version of reality in which DC and Philadelphia get captured and - in the absence of coherent government - the NYC commercial interests effectively force a cessation of hostilities.
Even if they'd won they would have withered away because they were an agrarian society right next to one of the most industrialised countries back then. Either they would have become as unimportant as Central American countries in a desperate attempt to keep their slaves or they industrialise and realise they wouldn't need their slaves anymore and at that point the whole separatism thing wasn't needed either.
You just parroted one of the main points of the Lost Cause myth, that defeat was inevitable. Just look to the American Revolution to see that it was not. See also Dutch revolt, War of 1812, Greek War of Independence, ect.
Not really - in the case of the wars you cited, the great imperial power lost not because they lacked the economic or military resources to win, they simply no longer had the political will to continue the fight at such an enormous cost.
Which is exactly what would have happened in the American Civil War had the Confederacy had better leadership or strategy and Lincoln lost reelection.
If Lincoln lost reelection it was unclear how McClellan was planning to proceed. If he decided that he no longer wished to fight the CSA, that would have been a calculated political choice and not a decision driven by the lack of men, money, or resources. Like in World War 2, once the Axis found itself fighting both the US and the USSR, its defeat was inevitable so long as the Allied leadership decided on pursuing unconditional surrender. Also, like the Axis, the CSA had built its economy on the oppression and exploitation of other human beings, a system that was unsustainable as it was cruel.
If McClellan had won he would have done everything in his power to hamstring the North, just as he had done as general. He would have been pushing for "peace" as soon as he walking in the door.
And yet this looks like unfinished business.
We'll see how the latest battle goes this November. Register to vote or check your registration at www.vote.gov
Idk if many Americans realize how lucky they are that 22k casualties is the bloodiest day in their history.
The Union AKA the Republicans :) against the Confederates AKA the ...... 🤔
I think that's the battle where both sides for some reason just stood in static firing lines shooting at each other for hours until they were nearly wiped out, To the horror of European army observers?
No, there was a great deal of tactical movement, advances, and pushes.