There will be two required papers of pages each. Choices of topics and readings will be provided in each of two broad categories or sections of the course: 1) antebellum society and Civil War causation; and, 2) the military, political, and social meanings of the Civil War itself About million soldiers fought in the Civil War — 2 million for the North and , for the South. The Average Soldier According to historian Bell I. Wiley, who pioneered the study of the Civil War common soldier, the average Yank or Reb was a ‘white, native-born, farmer, protestant, single, between 18 A civil war, also known as an intrastate war in polemology, is a war between organized groups within the same state (or country).The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies. The term is a calque of Latin bellum civile which was used to refer to the various civil wars of the Roman Republic in the
History: American Civil War for Kids
Union Cavalry Soldier. How Many Fought About 2. The Average Soldier According to historian Bell I. Most soldiers were between the ages of 18 and 39 with an average age just under Making a Living The majority of soldiers North and South had been farmers before the war. Union rosters contained references to more than different careers, including accountant, surveyor, locksmith, teacher, carpenter, shoemaker, black- smith, painter, mason, teamster, and civil war paper. Southerners who had not farmed included carpenters, mechanics, merchants, machinists, lawyers, teachers, blacksmiths, and dentists.
Rifle, Carbine, or Cannon? In the Union army, 80 percent of the men were in the infantry, 14 percent in the cavalry, and 6 percent in artillery. In the Confederate army, 75 percent of the men served in the infantry, 20 percent in the cavalry, and 5 percent in artillery. The Odds Against Them Of every 1, Feder-als, were wounded; of every 1, Confederates were civil war paper. A Yankee stood a 1 in 8 chance of dying due to illness and a 1 in 18 chance of dying in battle.
A Rebel faced a 1 in 5 chance of succumbing to disease and a 1 in 8 chance of dying in combat. Some recent estimates claim the totals were actually higher, civil war paper. Prisoners of War RoughlyUnion soldiers were captured; 17, were paroled in the field; 30, or about Why They Fought Men on both sides were inspired civil war paper fight by patriotism, state pride, the chance for adventure, civil war paper, steady pay.
Union soldiers fought to preserve the Union; the common Confederate fought to defend his home. Later in the war, increasing numbers of Federal soldiers fought to abolish slavery, if for no other reason than to end the war quickly. Confederate soldiers sometimes fought because they feared Union victory would result in a society where black people were placed on an even footing with whites.
Army Melting Pots The large majority of Civil War soldiers were native born. Nonetheless, large numbers of stout-hearted newcomers to the country also volunteered to fight—especially in the North. Exact figures for the South are sketchy, but tens of thousands of Irish, Germans, British, French, civil war paper, Canadians, Dutch, and Austrians entered Confederate ranks.
Approximatelyblack soldiers wore the blue; 37, lost their lives. In Marchthe Confederate congress authorized the army to recruitblack troops. Some units were raised, but it civil war paper too late for them to make a difference. Soothing the Savage Breast Johnny Reb and Billy Yank loved to sing—on the march, in camp, and sometimes even in battle.
Confederates were supposed to be supplied but seldom were with 12 ounces of bacon or 20 ounces of beef usually salted along with 18 ounces of flour or 20 ounces of corn meal or hard bread. Vegetables such as beans and peas often proved hard to come by, especially for the Rebs. Usually, civil war paper, Yankees banked on hardtack and coffee, while their counterparts tried to get by on corn bread and coffee. Men on both sides got what they could from sutlers or foraging.
Coffee and tobacco were common cravings. Passing the Time Soldiers had to deal with much boredom. To fill the hours, Yanks and Rebels wrote letter after letter to family, friends, and sweethearts. In spite of the warnings of officers, bouts of drinking and especially gambling broke out. Soldiers played checkers, chess, and baseball, whittled and civil war paper, and if they were feeling particularly creative, would even put on plays. Many thousands of men were engaged in a snow ball battle.
Confederates read Southern Illustrated News, Southern Literary Messenger, and Field civil war paper Fireside. Both sides loved dime novels and the Bible. Dirt and Disease Whenever armies remained settled in camp, sanitary conditions worsened. For starters, civil war paper, until later in the war, latrines were often built upwind or even upstream from camps. Accumulation over time created an unpleasant and unhealthy civil war paper. Eventually, refuse from cooking and slaughtered animals began to cover the ground, and the local water source often became fouled.
Disease spread rapidly. Most of the men were Christian, civil war paper, though 7, Jews fought for the Union and 3, for the South. This article was written by Eric Either and originally appeared in the December issue of Civil War Times. Some data has been edited due to new research civil war paper the original article was published. Total numbers of the Union armies are estimated to be between 1. The bulk of these men were volunteers, though estimates say that 5 to 6 percent were conscripts.
Read more about Union Soldiers. Estimates of the total number of confederate soldiers is difficult, and range betweento 1 million soldiers fought during the Civil War, civil war paper.
Learn more about Confederate Soldiers, civil war paper. For every soldier killed in battle, two died of disease. During their first summer of service in the Confederate army, William C. Oates and his comrades of the 15th Alabama Infantry Regiment watched as the first casualties dropped from their ranks, not from wounds inflicted by their Federal foes but from the deadlier onslaught of microbes and viruses in their camp, civil war paper.
The Alabamians learned before they ever fired a single shot in anger that war often brought suffering and death where they were least expected, and that this particular war would seldom show mercy to anyone caught in the civil war paper of its deadly scythe. The 15th Alabama Infantry fell victim to an enemy more powerful than any Union army in the summer and autumn of Oates was a lawyer, newspaper publisher and editor, as well as a former fugitive from justice who had spent part of his youth as a gambler in Texas.
Oates was named captain of Company G. From Fort Mitchell on civil war paper Chattahoochee River, Cantey moved his regiment—about 1, men strong—north by train to Richmond, civil war paper, where the 15th Alabama spent a few weeks drilling and training.
Then, on August 21, the regiment received orders to proceed to the front. When they heard the news, the men cheered and sang all through the night. The next morning, Cantey led the regiment through the streets of Richmond to the railroad depot, where President Jefferson Davis reviewed the troops and complimented Cantey on their fine appearance.
The newly elected governor of Alabama, John Gill Shorter, a prominent Democrat from Eufaula with whom Oates was politically allied, was also civil war paper to see the 15th off, and he delivered a short address before the men boarded the cars.
All around Centreville and Manassas, near where the Confederates had won their first major victory in a battle fought on July 21, Brigadier General Joseph E.
Johnston had extended the Southern lines. Reinforcements from all over the South were being rushed to the Manassas defenses as recruits poured into the army in the wake of the fighting along Bull Run.
As the train carrying the 15th Alabama passed through little hamlets—places no bigger or even smaller than Abbeville, the county seat where Oates had mustered in the Henry Pioneers—on its ambling journey north, Virginians stood by the tracks cheering the soldiers and waving their hats and handkerchiefs, civil war paper.
It took all day for the train to reach Civil war paper Junction, where the men of the 15th Alabama got off the cars, formed ranks, and marched about five miles from the station to an old field called Pageland, a flat open plain just north of Warrenton Turnpike where civil war paper Page family had intended to build a mansion and develop a plantation.
On the march, Captain Benjamin Gardner of Company I led his men while he held a great umbrella over his head. The 15th Alabama went into camp beside the 21st North Carolina, the 16th Mississippi, and the 21st Georgia Regiments. Across the broad expanse of field, practically nothing but row upon row of tents could be seen. The noise of camp—officers shouting, feet plodding on dry sod, bugles blowing, drums tapping—echoed over Pageland in one vast discord of sound.
Although the water in the camp was bad, the weather was hot, and many thirsty soldiers decided to drink the tainted water rather than suffer from dehydration. Colonel Cantey saw to it that his companies drilled hard every day, civil war paper, and from miles around one could see the dust rising from Pageland like the billowing smoke of a forest civil war paper. Despite the arduous regularity of drilling every day for at least four hours, the men did have some respite and moments of gaiety and laughter, civil war paper.
With the camp less than two miles from the fields where the Battle of Manassas had been fought, Oates decided to take Company G and some other men from the regiment on a tour of the ground. It had just been a month since the Confederate victory, and the Alabamians were all curious to see what a battlefield really looked like. At first, the terrain matched their own romantic conceptions of the battle and the heroes who had fallen fighting for their righteous cause.
The men walked over the ground with expressions of awe and wonder on their faces. Caspar W. Boyd and his comrades even discovered severed hands and feet on the ground. The carcasses of dead horses still littered the field. Oates distinctly remembered, almost 45 civil war paper later, the pungent smell of fennel and pennyroyal—weeds growing on the battlefield that had been mashed down during the fight and still gave off their recognizable aromas. A few of the Alabamians reacted to the battlefield with less solemnity than did Oates or Caspar Boyd.
The trees had been chopped to pieces by musket volleys. If nothing else, the excursion to the Manassas battlefield gave civil war paper Alabama civil war paper reason to ponder war and its grim realities. Oates and his men roamed fields where the grass was still stained red with dried blood, where unexploded shells lay exposed to view, and where minié balls covered patches of ground in a thick lead carpet, civil war paper.
They had no idea of the far worse horrors yet to come. Those horrors began at Pageland. When the 15th Alabama had first arrived at Pageland, its closest neighbor in the camp, the 21st North Carolina, was already struggling with an epidemic of measles and serious outbreaks of mumps and typhoid. All of these diseases were—and still are—highly contagious, although in our modern times we have grown accustomed to dealing with them during childhood and have vaccines that prevent their spread and other medicines that quickly wipe them out.
Measles cut through the ranks of the 15th Alabama at the encampment like a biblical plague or the medieval Black Death. No one, including the small number of surgeons assigned to the army, knew that the disease was carried on droplets through the air and that proximity to the virus meant almost certain infection. In this respect, it is somewhat miraculous that civil war paper entire Confederate camp at Pageland was not stricken with the disease.
Infected soldiers experienced high fever, rash, runny noses, watery eyes, and coughing. Due to the lack of a vaccine and effective treatments, few men who were infected survived the illness. After the initial symptoms, their condition generally worsened. Some soldiers came down with pneumonia and encephalitis brain inflammation as a result of measles; others suffered middle-ear infections, severe diarrhea, and convulsions.
The worst cases—and there were hundreds of them among the troops of the 15th Alabama—resulted in death.
Civil War Era Kids Craft: Paper Boats - How To
, time: 3:52Michigan in the Civil War
The Civil War was the deadliest war in American history. Over , soldiers died in the war. The fighting started at Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 12, The Civil War ended on April 9, when General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia About million soldiers fought in the Civil War — 2 million for the North and , for the South. The Average Soldier According to historian Bell I. Wiley, who pioneered the study of the Civil War common soldier, the average Yank or Reb was a ‘white, native-born, farmer, protestant, single, between 18 There will be two required papers of pages each. Choices of topics and readings will be provided in each of two broad categories or sections of the course: 1) antebellum society and Civil War causation; and, 2) the military, political, and social meanings of the Civil War itself
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