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[ { "body": "I gave a short answer to this question [here a few years ago.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/30ugyl/why_didnt_the_japanese_invade_macau_in_world_war/)\n\nEssentially, Macau was controlled by Portugal, which was a neutral party to WWII. Japan honored that neutrality. That neutrality didn't stop Japan from having *de facto* control over Macau anyway, however... Portugal had no way of stopping Japan from stationing \"advisors\" there, for example.", "created_utc": 1612412320, "distinguished": null, "id": "gly8unk", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/lbxbuo/what_was_the_status_of_macau_during_the_second/gly8unk/", "score": 4 }, { "body": "Greetings! Alongside u/When_Ducks_Attack's excellent overview and linked response, this comment will go a tad more in-depth on *why* Japan (for the most part) respected Portugal's neutrality in the war. This sub-question is particularly interesting when you consider that the Japanese ***did*** **occupy** **Portuguese Timor,** going so far as to actively land troops there in 1942 (though the two nations did eventually come to an agreement of Japanese occupation being *temporary* and in-line with the defense of the nation). Let's begin.\n\n**Main Question** \n\nThe first thing we have to note is the actual status of the mother country to which Macau belonged: **Portugal.** At the time of the Second World War, Portugal was under the fascist dictatorship of **António de Oliveira Salazar**, who simultaneously held the posts of premier, foreign minister, *and* war minister (a most impressive and practically all-powerful trio in regards to foreign policy). Salazar did not wish for Portugal to become an active combatant in the Second World War, though he did allow the country to become a \"key interest\" for both the Axis and Allies. For one, Portugal represented a key \"**listening post**\" for all of the nations involved, and a center of intelligence operations for all of them. In 1943 for example, the officially listed missions to Portugal (made up of various embassies and legations) from the belligerent states was far out of proportion to the actual size of the country: \n\n* Great Britain: 281\n* Nazi Germany and the USA: 161 staff\n* Italy: 106\n* Vichy France: 68\n* Japan: 23\n\nThe Portuguese authorities were in close contact with the Axis legations, though all of foreign contingents were monitored through clandestine means in one way or another. Salazar also had a key asset in the form of **wolframite**, otherwise known as **wolfram ore**, a major source of tungsten required in the steel-hardening process which forged all manner of weapons. The key sources of this rare material, other than neighbouring Spain, was the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. With all of these cards to play, the Japanese were acutely aware that angering Salazar by occupying Macau would lead to consequences which no diplomat was willing to endure. \n\nThen again, by nature of Macau's situation in 1942, it was not in a position to exert neutrality that much either. The fall of Hong Kong and the progress of the Second-Sino Japanese war meant that it was a literal and metaphorical European island in a sea of Japanese interests. Historian Geofrrey C. Gunn on what this meant for the tiny colony: \n\n>\"Virtually an island surrounded by Japanese land and naval forces, and served with a series of ultimatums, Macau was utterly beholden \\[reliant on\\] to Japanese permissions for all its external needs, including the movement of goods as well as people—which included Portuguese and other “neutral” or third-country nationals, especially those arriving from Hong Kong\"^(1)\n\nThe Japanese were not willing to escalate matters further, though they did station soldiers s at the border gates of the colony, and *Kempeitai* (the fearsome Japanese equivalent of the Gestapo secret police) staff as well as IJA officers were common visitors to the city. At the official level, Portugal's colony governor **Gabriel Teixeira** often had to deal with the ultimatums and diplomatic moves of the Japanese consul **Fukui Yasumitsu**, whose assassination in February 1945 led to a debacle in relations between the two countries, but Tokyo received the clear signal that an occupation of Macau would lead to an unraveling in the Portugal-Japan relations. \n\nEconomically, Macau also served as a convenient middleman for Portugal to extract \"hard currency\" with which to pay for the movement of tungsten from interior parts of China for export to the home islands. Japan also had a stake in the aviation gasoline exported from Macau, as well as rice supplies which led to serious starvation and shortage in the colony from 1943 onwards. \n\nSo in conclusion, Macau's status during the Second World War can best be described as a \"useful neutral\", or to use the more historiographical term, \"collaborating neutrality\". Although the Japanese government respected Portuguese sovereignty over the island in formal protocols and agreements, fearing the loss of Lisbon as an intelligence center, Macau served as a conduit for economic efforts as well as a compliant bit of land where communication and transport were heavily regulated by the Japanese control of southeast China's waterways. \n\nPart 1 of 2", "created_utc": 1612442889, "distinguished": null, "id": "glzcvas", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/lbxbuo/what_was_the_status_of_macau_during_the_second/glzcvas/", "score": 2 }, { "body": "Followup question answer: \n\n>During the first part of the Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1941, did Japan try to institute a blockade against China? If so, did the US/UK respect that blockade? What role, if any did Macau (and Hong Kong) have in the import of fuel and arms to the Chinese during this period? And thus I presume any such imports to Macau would have been shut down in December 1941, if not earlier.\n\nThe simple answer, in three parts, is: \n\n1. **Yes**, the Japanese did impose a blockade on the entire coast of China during the early stages of the Second Sino-Japanese War. \n2. The British and Americans were **generally** compliant with the terms of the blockade, although the former was more concerned over the security of Hong Kong and its connection to the rest of the world in a war-torn region. \n3. Hong Kong was a critical **refuge** for Chinese businesses and economic assets, but due to Britain's reluctance to commit to aid in China it could not serve as the critical conduit for trade. Macau was even less involved, owing mostly to its neutrality as Portuguese territory. \n\nIn more drawn out and comprehensive terms: \n\n**1:** Very shortly after the Marco Polo bridge incident which sparked the Second-Sino Japanese War **Hasegawa Kiyoshi,** Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy's Third Fleet, announced a blockade of China's coast from Shanghai to Swatow (dated August 25th, 1937). On September 3rd, this blockade was later expanded to include the entire Chinese coastal region. In swift succession, the IJN began to secure its lines of communication by occupying and bombarding (in order) the Pratas Reef, Hainan Island, and Quemoy Island. By December of 1937, the entire north of the South China Sea (Taiwan to the entrance of the Gulf of Tonkin), was under the firm control of the IJN. Although France, Britain, and the US would later protest (though weekly and with some delay) the occupation of the Spratly Islands and the potential invasion of Hainan Island, the IJN retained practical control over the flow of goods into and out of China until the war expanded to include Britain and America.\n\n**2:** The British and American governments did comply with the Japanese blockade for the most part, realising that the war in Asia between the two powers was a commitment that neither of them wished to get too deep into (fearing of course, that such movements would lead to direct war). The British were actually trying to get the United States to add their weight behind appeals for diplomatic negotiations between China and Japan (most notably when Shanghai fell on the 14th of August). The American government however, was unwilling to to do, as Historian Andrew Kelly notes: \n\n>\"It was more apparent than ever before that the United States was not willing to become directly involved in the Sino-Japanese War. Indeed, the United States seemed to believe that unilateral action - or rather - unilateral **inaction -** was more effective in addressing the Far Eastern Crisis than was cooperation with the British.\"^(2)\n\nThe crisis of the Second-Sino Japanese War for both powers took place on the 12th of December 1937, when Japanese planes attacked and sunk the **USS Panay** and damaged **HMS Ladybird** along the Yangtze River. There was a brief debacle in diplomatic correspondence between both countries and Japan, the main question being over whether the attacks had been accidental or not (the Japanese pilots claimed that the American flags on the deck were not visible from their altitude, a questionable claim). The matter quickly settled itself with the Japanese formally apologising and agreeing to pay an indemnity to the American government. \n\n**3.** Hong Kong was a key refuge not just for civilians fleeing the war in China, but also for Chinese industry and businesses. Before the Japanese invasion in December 1941, there were 1,250 factories with over 90,000 workers (many of them having fled from Chinese cities as the war neared). Exports rose likewise, but the Japanese occupation brought a swift end to all that. \n\nHope this answers your followup somewhat, and feel free to ask any follow-ups!\n\n**Quotations**\n\n\\[1\\]: KELLY, ANDREW. \"THE SINO-JAPANESE WAR AND THE ANGLO-AMERICAN RESPONSE.\" *Australasian Journal of American Studies* 32, no. 2 (2013): 27-43. Accessed February 4, 2021. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/43863854](http://www.jstor.org/stable/43863854).\n\n**Sources**\n\nGRANADOS, ULISES. \"JAPANESE EXPANSION INTO THE SOUTH CHINA SEA: COLONIZATION AND CONFLICT, 1902—1939.\" *Journal of Asian History* 42, no. 2 (2008): 117-42. Accessed February 4, 2021. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/41933494](http://www.jstor.org/stable/41933494).\n\nMeng, Chih. \"Some Economic Aspects of the Sino-Japanese Conflict.\" *The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science* 199 (1938): 233-42. Accessed February 4, 2021. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1021044](http://www.jstor.org/stable/1021044).\n\nShuyong, Liu. \"Hong Kong: A Survey of Its Political and Economic Development over the Past 150 Years.\" *The China Quarterly*, no. 151 (1997): 583-92. Accessed February 4, 2021. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/655255](http://www.jstor.org/stable/655255).\n\nBayly, Christopher and Harper, Tim. *Forgotten Armies: Britain's Asian Empire & The War with Japan.* Penguin Books, 2004.", "created_utc": 1612446379, "distinguished": null, "id": "glzimvl", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/lbxbuo/what_was_the_status_of_macau_during_the_second/glzimvl/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "For most landing craft, the trip to the beach was not a one-way journey. Landing craft crews were ordered to keep their craft afloat, and able to 'retract' from the beach, once the troops had disembarked. Typical practice for a landing was to release a kedge anchor as the craft approached the beach - for the British Landing Craft Assault, this was released 120 feet from the beach. Once the troops had disembarked, the craft could be pulled off the beach by hauling in on the anchor cable. It would then go about and return to the ship that carried it, likely to pick up another load of troops. If the kedge was not used, due to lack of space or a desire for speed, members of the crew would have to disembark and push the boat off after the troops had left. If the boat fully grounded on a sandbank, then the entire crew would have to jump off the craft and push it off the obstruction. \n\nWhere craft were damaged by obstacles, or fully grounded and could not be recovered, standard practice for the crew was to stay with the craft. They were neither trained, nor armed, for fighting ashore. However, there were exceptions to this rule. Many British landing craft were manned by members of the Royal Marines. They appear to have had a tendency to join in the land battle. A beachmaster from Juno Beach, during the Normandy Landings, complained that Royal Marine crews in his sector were neglecting their craft and heading inshore. Elsewhere during D-Day, all of the craft from No. 544 LCA flotilla were lost. Their commander, a Captain Miers, formed the crews into a scratch platoon. However, they found no way to join the fighting, and wound up returning to their parent ship. Commando operations required flexibility from those participating in them, and this included landing craft crews. During an action in support of Yugoslav partisans, Lieutenant Peter Davis won the Distinguished Service Cross for forming a search party from his landing craft crews, and setting out to locate and support a party of Commandos that had been ambushed.", "created_utc": 1585041939, "distinguished": null, "id": "flcqee7", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/fo1qyp/what_happened_to_the_drivers_of_landing_crafts/flcqee7/", "score": 182 } ]

[ { "body": "Japan's military had been involved in China in some fashion since 1931, but the Second Sino-Japanese War began in earnest in 1937. By 1940, the war had bogged down and the Japanese were struggling to regain momentum. On the far side of the world, the Germans invaded France in May 1940 and the French had surrendered by the end of June.\n\nIndochina was a French colony at the time, and the fall of the French government more or less orphaned the colonial government in Indochina. The Japanese quickly swooped in and made a request to the colonial government that Japanese troops be stationed in northern Indochina. Officially, the Japanese wanted to be able to cut off the supplies being delivered to the Chinese that were being used in the war. But of course, Japan was also pursuing greater economic self-sufficiency through expansionism also. The colonial government in Indochina wasn't agreeable to Japanese demands, but also had little to bargain with against Japanese pressure. Several thousand Japanese troops entered northern Indochina in September 1940 without a fight.\n\nThe United States had imposed an unofficial \"moral embargo\" on exports of airplanes and airplane parts on Japan in 1938 as a result of its use of airplanes against civilians in China, but as the name implies, it wasn't an official embargo. The US Congress quietly passed the Export Control Act on July 2, 1940, which would allow Roosevelt to embargo materials to other countries as he saw necessary. In response to the Japanese occupation of northern Indochina, the United States cut off exports of scrap iron, steel, and aviation fuel to Japan. This was the first \"oil embargo,\" though it is not the one that most people discuss.\n\nNegotiations proceeded between the Japanese and Americans without much progress through late 1940 and into early 1941. The Japanese signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in September 1940, formally establishing what we now remember as the Axis. The alliance was another troubling development for the Americans. The Japanese government had miscalculated the American response to the Tripartite Pact; they considered it a defensive alliance and never fully came to terms with the damage it did to US-Japanese negotiations.\n\nAll of this was troubling, but the event that led most directly to the oil embargo was Japan's invasion into southern Indochina. Another user might be able to provide background to how the Japanese made their decision. I've seen some sources that assert that it was a decision from the Japanese government, and others that the move into southern Indochina was done by mid-level commanders in the area: Army colonels and the like. I'm not sure which it was. In any event, the Japanese moved into southern Indochina in July 1941.\n\nThe United States was infuriated. The US and Japanese were supposed to be conducting negotiations to de-escalate the situation, and now Japan had expanded its war even further. There were materials and resources that could aid the Japanese war effort in southern Indochina, but also airbases that could threaten British colonial holdings in Singapore and the Malay peninsula, the Dutch East Indies, and the US-controlled Philippines. Japan was now in position to launch a large-scale offensive throughout the area (these bases were indeed useful in the fighting in late 1941 and early 1942).\n\nRoosevelt huddled with his advisers. Some of the more hawkish, like Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, were in favor of embargoing all oil exports to Japan. Interestingly, some of his top military commanders advised against it. They believed --correctly -- that cutting off Japanese oil supplies would be an ultimatum. Japan didn't have its own supply of oil, so cutting off exports would force them to use their reserves. It would back the Japanese into a corner and force them to either seize oil fields (likely in the Dutch East Indies; the Dutch had also fallen to Germany in 1940) by force, slowly watch their war machine choke and die without oil, or capitulate to American demands. US-Japan relations were falling apart and the decision had the potential to make them even worse.\n\nAs is often the case, Roosevelt tried to appease all sides and give himself some breathing room. He wouldn't cut off oil supplies to Japan, but he wanted his response to be flexible enough to allow him to do so later, if he so chose, without taking any further official action. Roosevelt did order Japanese financial assets in the United States to be frozen. Secretary of State Cordell Hull seems to have taken Roosevelt's order, then delegated it to Under Secretary Sumner Welles, who in turn delegated it to an Assistant Secretary named Dean Acheson (yes, that Dean Acheson). Acheson either misunderstood Roosevelt's order or took it upon himself to apply it in the strictest possible sense. The result was that Japanese requests for oil were buried in paperwork and red tape to the point where oil flows to Japan ceased.\n\nRoosevelt departed Washington for a secret conference with Winston Churchill aboard the USS Augusta. By the time he returned, the de facto embargo had taken hold. Hull apparently learned what had happened when the Japanese ambassador mentioned it in one of their meetings. The Americans considered whether to reverse course, but decided that doing so would make them appear as though they had bowed to Japanese pressure. The embargo stood.", "created_utc": 1625537348, "distinguished": null, "id": "h46z1pi", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/oejg7i/why_did_the_united_states_stop_supplying_japan/h46z1pi/", "score": 13 } ]

[ { "body": "Part 1 (of 5)\n\n\nI’m going to split my answer into two parts. The first will detail the operational details of the Battle of Manila, and the second will discuss American fighting practices, primarily examining how firepower was utilized to obtain a decision in engagements.\n\n Although the ultimate decision to return to the Philippine Islands was a military one, from the outset of the campaign American efforts in the archipelago were partially motivated by feelings that the United States had a duty to the Filipino people as well as its own prestige. In 1943 and 1944, as the final approach to Japan was being determined, the question of whether it would be easier to bypass the island of Luzon in the Philippines, or even the entire archipelago itself, and seize Formosa was raised. This internal debate was entirely focused on operational planning- the primary goal of attacking into the area of the South China Sea revolved around future B-29 basing, cutting Japanese supply lines to Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, and southern China, and establishing Allied supply lines into southern China. Most of the proponents of bypassing the entire archipelago held staff positions at the upper reaches of the Army and Navy; most field commanders favored at least obtaining basing in the southern or central Philippines, regardless of whether the next step was Luzon or Formosa. Both General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief, Southwest Pacific Area, and Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Ocean Areas as well as Commander-in-Chief, US Pacific Fleet, respectively, fell into the category of the latter. Although they split on whether an assault on Luzon or Formosa should follow the establishment of bases in the southern or central Philippines, with MacArthur arguing for Luzon and Nimitz for Formosa, their subordinates favored striking northward into Luzon.1 The argument was one based around operational concerns, but political and moral opinions bled through as well. MacArthur, for instance, was rock-solid in his devotion to the Filipino people, arguing that not only did the nation have a moral obligation to liberate its former possession and protégé but that failure to do so would result in the further suffering of its population, which he described as remaining overwhelmingly loyal to the United States, as well as the deaths of thousands of prisoners held there in Japanese camps. In short, MacArthur pointed out, to bypass or make a secondary objective of Luzon would be to abandon the Filipino people at a point in time where the United States possessed the ability to act.2 General George Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, for his part rebutted MacArthur by arguing that bypassing the Philippines in favor of Formosa or even Kyushu in southern Japan would expedite the liberation of the archipelago by bringing about a more rapid conclusion of the war. President Roosevelt eventually assumed the role of ultimate arbiter in the discussion, and after consultation with MacArthur finally decided that the United States would return to Luzon- whether this was a result of MacArthur’s military or moral argument, it is not known. The fact that Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff, Admiral William Leahy, also supported going to Luzon and held opinions similar to those of MacArthur, may have had an impact as well.3 Although we don’t quite know how much the moral factor influenced Roosevelt’s decision to instruct the military to liberate Luzon, it should be pointed out that the Philippines lay within MacArthur’s zone of command. Thus, given MacArthur’s affection for and sense of duty to the Filipino people, it is clear that from the outset of the campaign the wellbeing of the islands’ civilian population would influence American military operations in the archipelago. \n\nOrders to invade Luzon were handed down by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 3 October 1944. By this point the decision had already been made to occupy basing in the southern or central Philippines, with the result that the island of Leyte, in the central Philippines, was invaded on 20 October. Mindoro, just south of Luzon, followed on 15 December, and, with the requisite basing to support the campaign on Luzon established, Lieutenant General Walter Krueger’s Sixth US Army came ashore at Lingayen Gulf on 9 January 1945. Over the next three weeks Sixth Army advanced southeasterly across the Luzon plain toward Manila. Spurred on by MacArthur, Krueger, whose army now comprised three corps, instructed Major General Oscar Griswold’s XIV Corps to drive on the city while I Corps and XI Corps, to the left and right of XIV Corps respectively, held the flanks of the Sixth Army front. With two “flying columns” of the 1stCavalry Division in the van and the 37th Infantry Division, on the corps’ right, close behind, XIV Corps reached Manila on 3 February 1945.4\n\nDuring the Japanese invasion in 1942, MacArthur had declared Manila an open city and left it undefended. Thus the city had been spared destruction. Under General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commander of the Japanese *14th* *Area Army*, this was supposed to be the case again in 1945. Yamashita’s overall plan for the defense of Luzon was to withdraw into the mountains and hold out for as long as possible, thereby subjecting American troops to a protracted campaign of attrition in rough terrain. In this scenario Manila factored in only as a supply base, and Yamashita’s orders were to defend its approaches long enough to move as much bulk supply out of it and into the mountains as was possible. From the outset of the campaign, however, Yamashita had serious difficulty in exerting control over several of his subordinates within Manila due to a dysfunctional chain of command and the personalities of several of the commanders involved. The classic Army-Navy dysfunction reared its head as the commander of the *Southwestern Area Fleet*, Vice Admiral Denshichi Okochi, reinforced Manila with 4,000 naval troops on his own accord following the Allied seizure of Mindoro in December. This set off a cascade of events that ultimately resulted in Okochi’s subordinate, Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi of the *31st* *Naval Special Base Force,* taking charge of approximately 16,000 men (both naval *and* army troops) in and around Manila. Iwabuchi answered to Army control by his attachment to Lieutenant General Shizuo Yokoyama’s *Shimbu Group,* but under the Japanese concept of unity of command this meant little in the long run- Iwabuchi had orders from Okochi to, among other things, destroy Japanese supplies and installations in and around Manila, and these took precedent over any orders that Yokoyama might issue. The list of tasks assigned to Iwabuchi was extensive and ambitious, and this resulted in a clash of staffs in a series of meetings over 8-13 January in which Iwabuchi’s headquarters more or less told Yokoyama that they planned to defend the city. This decision was based on the desire to fully carry out Okochi’s orders, dissatisfaction for the dispositions that Yokoyama had assigned the naval forces in the mountains, and the simple fact that Iwabuchi felt that the city was highly defensible. Yokoyama, unable to do much about this (which in other militaries would have constituted outright insubordination) due to the aforementioned nature of Japanese unity of command, reluctantly placed those army troops still in Manila under Iwabuchi’s command on the condition that once the destruction of the city’s installations had been accomplished he would withdraw. Therefore, as early as the second week of January the fate of Manila was more or less sealed barring a change in Okochi’s orders to Iwabuchi.5", "created_utc": 1604880506, "distinguished": null, "id": "gbo2zdj", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/jpks9w/how_reckless_were_the_american_soldiers_in_the/gbo2zdj/", "score": 13 } ]

[ { "body": "Hi there friend,\nSo what you’re asking here is really two questions: (1) when did Jewish persecution in Europe start and (2) when did large numbers of Jews flee Europe (and I assume you mean here the great exodus to the New World in the late 19th and early 20th centuries).\n\nOn the first question, I imagine there are longer answers in the FAQ, but for our purposes and the sake of brevity I can tell you that the persecution started more or less the moment Jews arrived in Europe. Much of Jewish culture up until the late Middle Ages was found throughout the Middle East, North Africa, parts of mediterranean Europe, and Muslim Spain, but there were Jewish settlements in France, Germany, England, and some other spots earlier. I won’t launch into a fully detailed summary of all anti-Jewish violence in Europe, but you asked when it started so I’ll give you some early ones.\n\nDuring the First Crusade, Christian crusaders were making their way down to the Holy Land to fight some “heretics” (Muslims) but realized that there were “heretics” along their way in the Jewish communities that dotted the landscapes. Jews were thought to have killed God, after all. Guibert of Nogent reported the sentiment at the time:\n\n>After traversing great distances, we desire to attack the enemies of God in the East, although the Jews, of all races the worst foes of God, are before our eyes. That’s doing our work backwards.\n\nDuring the Second Crusade, we encounter more of the same. The Benedictine abbot Peter the Venerable of Cluny wrote to King Louis VII of France,\n\n>Why should we pursue the enemies of the Christian faith in far and distant lands while vile blasphemers far worse than any Muslims, namely the Jews, who are not far away from us but who live in our midst, blaspheme, abuse, and trample on Christ and the Christian sacraments so freely and insolently and with impunity?\n\nIn other episodes, Jews were blamed for the Black Death; they were falsely rumoured to be murdering young boys and using their blood for Passover (look up the case of William of Norwich); they were rumoured to steal the eucharist from the local church and stab it.\n\nMoving towards Eastern Europe, which had become a massive centre of Jewish Culture in the early modern period (and I imagine might be where your family came from), the 1648 Chmielnitsky Uprising resulted in the deaths of 40k-100k Jewish deaths. The massacres were so devastating that there was a ban on merrymaking in the Jewish community for several years in its wake, including a ban on dancing and singing, and restrictions on weddings.\n\nTwo centuries later, anti-Jewish violence was quite common in the Ashkenazi (European) Jewish world, resulting in further pogroms (mass riots with racist/religious overtones; for reference, the famous 1921 Tulsa Massacre is considered a pogrom against the black community of Tulsa). Now we’re getting into the critical years, when I imagine your family escaped: in his book The Magnitude of Genocide, Colin Tatz writes that, between 1881 and 1920, there were 1,326 individual pogrom-style attacks in the Ukraine alone, causing 70k-250k Jewish deaths and leaving half a million Jews homeless.\n\nJews had been migrating to the Americas since the very beginning of colonization. For the most part in those early years, it was wealthy Sephardic Jewish merchants. In the early-to-mid 19th century, though, wealthy German Jews started coming to the United States for economic opportunity. It was only around 1880 until 1910 that the massive exodus of Easter European Jews made their way to the Americas, not for economic opportunity but to escape violence. \n\nThese Jewish folk, some two million arriving in New York during those years, were extremely poor and were actually looked down upon by the wealthy German Jews who had been there already and developed vibrant communities. \n\nTens of thousands came to Canada (including my family) in that era, and many went to South America. The situation in New York got so packed that philanthropists started trying to find other places for escaping Jews to live, including colonizing the West of both the United States and Canada, as well as building agricultural colonies in Argentina, South Africa, and of course Palestine.\n\nThis was actually the huge exodus that resulted in the North American Jewish community that we see today; it happened long before the Holocaust. The years leading up to the Holocaust were actually marked by closed borders. In Canada, virtually no Jews were allowed into the country between 1933 and 1945, obviously critical years. You can look up the MS St Louis for an individual story related to that.\n\nI hope this shed some light on your family history! I’ve been having fun learning about my own.\n\nSources:\n\nDiner, Hasia R. New Promised Land, A: A History of Jews in America. Oxford University Press USA, 2003.\n\nDollinger, Marc editor, Gary Phillip Zola, and Project Muse. American Jewish History: a Primary Source Reader. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2014.\n\nRischin, Moses. The Promised City: New Yorks Jews 1870-1914. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.\n\nTulchinsky, Gerald J. J. Canada’s Jews a People’s Journey. Toronto [Ont.] ; Buffalo [N.Y.], Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. \n\nLipinsky, Jack. “Immigration Opportunity or Organizational Oxymoron? The Canadian Jewish Farm School and the Department of Immigration, 1925-1946.” Canadian Jewish Studies / Études Juives Canadiennes 21 (2013).", "created_utc": 1604539519, "distinguished": null, "id": "gb6ix5u", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/jo3bvr/when_did_jewish_people_actually_start_leaving/gb6ix5u/", "score": 17 } ]

[ { "body": "Something not mentioned here, but I'm curious about: was there much of a nightlife? Did wartime rationing mean a shortage of alcohol for example?", "created_utc": 1360121421, "distinguished": null, "id": "c8a5cco", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/17yut3/what_was_nightlife_like_for_young_men_who_stayed/c8a5cco/", "score": 95 }, { "body": "My grandfather was in high school at the time and the local bar encouraged the older high school boys to come and drink; this bar mainly serviced college students and with the men in the war, the college girls were drinking by themselves, so the high school boys were invited to drink there by the owners. Grandpa wouldn't discuss what went on there (or what happened in Hawaii while stationed there in the 1950s during Korea), but his smile when describing being encouraged to underage drink with college girls from Northwestern College tells me that the girls were probably lonely and willing to look to younger guys for company.", "created_utc": 1360125218, "distinguished": null, "id": "c8a6jrx", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/17yut3/what_was_nightlife_like_for_young_men_who_stayed/c8a6jrx/", "score": 179 }, { "body": "I'd like to point out to the people who keep reporting some of the answers in this thread: personal reminiscences by people *who were actually at the time and place being discussed* count as primary historical sources.\n\n\"Anecdotal\" is not always a bad thing - if the anecdote comes from an eyewitness.\n", "created_utc": 1360148430, "distinguished": "moderator", "id": "c8aalha", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/17yut3/what_was_nightlife_like_for_young_men_who_stayed/c8aalha/", "score": 56 } ]

[ { "body": "I'm going to focus on Episode 2: Lightning War. \n\nI wouldn't say that both of these are 100% false, but they are inaccuracies that play into pretty standard tropes of the war that remove some of the nuance that I think is necessary in studying the conflict.\n\n The episode details what it calls Blitzkrieg doctrine and it is the usual score. Tanks mass in their own formations, combine with air and artillery to strike at vulnerable points in a line, bypass strong points, and encircle formations on an operational level and not just a tactical one. While Operation Barbarossa in 1941 and later campaigns in the USSR certainly called for this, Blitzkrieg was more of a development of the older German \"Bewegungskrieg\" or \"war of movement.\" Going back to the Prussians and Frederick the Great, the doctrine was to encircle enemies and do concentric attacks. The way popular media, including this documentary portrays the German Army makes it seem like the 1941 Wehrmacht was the 1939 Wehrmacht. Even in 1941, most of the Wehrmacht was powered by horse and not internal combustion. For Poland, Max Hastings gives the number at 400,000 horses and 200,000 overall vehicles in the invasion. Hastings even uses the word \"blitzkrieg,\" and while the new type of fighting was formidable, I really believe it is important to stress that was a doctrine in development and would not reach its full capacity until later.\n\nThe second is the nature of Polish cavalry. While detailing the state of the Polish military situation, it shows clips of Polish Uhlans with lances, yes... but notice those rifles slung across their backs and grenades and other modern weapons? Everyone loves the lances and the legend is the legend. This documentary certainly isn’t the only one. Heinz Guderian in his memoirs mentions it and claims that the Polish cavalry had \"in ignorance of the nature of our tanks, [the Poles] had charged them with swords and lances and suffered tremendous losses.\" The same Poles who had the 7TP and multiple tankettes, though they did not mass them in the German manner. \n\nWilliam Shirer claims to have seen the results of the \"Horses against tanks, the cavalryman's long lance against the tank's long barrel.\" \n\nWhen actually discussing it, the documentary does say \"legend has it\" that cavalry attacked tanks. That could be worse, I'll give it that. Max Hastings does argue that there are two occasions where Polish cavalry and German Panzers fought, though his account is jumbled. He states that \"a squadron hurled itself at full gallop at the village of Kaluszyn, strongly held by the Germans\" and that \"out of 85 horsemen who attacked, only 33 afterwards rallied.\"\n\nHe finds an account mentioning lances from a distance from a Lance-Corporal Hornes who says \"we saw new unfamiliar contours... agile horses with bobbing heads, ridden by Polish Uhlans in their khaki uniforms, long lances held with one end in the stirrup and the other slung from the shoulder... our machine guns opened fire.\" The film footage shows that this was riding formation and not necessarily attack formation since we can also see the carbines and grenades. It is also from a German account, and while we can't discount those, we have to take it as a grain of salt considering the nature of Nazi views on any Eastern enemies.\n\nSo, at best, relying on German sources, there were two times where this happened, and one was a small attack of fewer than 100 men on a town. \n\nThe most likely origin of this myth/exaggeration is the famous account of Krojanty on September 1st.\n\nAt Krojanty, Polish Uhlans in the number of 250 men were indeed ordered to charge in desperation... against infantry... AND THEY WON. They scattered a German battalion, only to be ambushed by German armored cars as they pursued. The armored cars cut down and scattered the charge, which again, was already in progress and was proving successful. News crews, famously Italian in one case, saw parked mechanized vehicles, dead horses with sabers and lances, and filled in the blanks.\n\nSo to sum up, was \"blitzkrieg\" and the 1939 Wehrmacht impressive for its time... well obviously. It beat Poland in a month! Does the documentary summarize Blitzkrieg into something that is a bit of an exaggeration without making connections to earlier or later developments... I would argue it does.\n\nIt isn't the worst source in how it covers Polish cavalry, but \"legend says\" and then regurgitating an old myth isn't ideal. \n\nSources:\n\nMax Hastings \"Inferno: The World at War\"\n\nHeinz Guderian \"Panzer Leader\"\n\nWilliam Shirer \"Rise and Fall of the Third Reich\"\n\n", "created_utc": 1552268480, "distinguished": null, "id": "ei8xzyg", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/azhytg/world_war_ii_in_colour_is_amongst_the_most_famous/ei8xzyg/", "score": 71 } ]

[ { "body": "Hiya! I've answered a similar question [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/me1w85/why_is_the_second_sinojapanese_war_viewed_as/gsff9ej?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). \n\nTLDR: \n\n>Is it because it only became a true world war in 1939 since previously combat was limited to Asia\n\nThis.", "created_utc": 1618723683, "distinguished": null, "id": "guxw0sh", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/msv56v/the_second_sinojapanese_war_and_the_starting_date/guxw0sh/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "The article you linked to says it is more like 580,344 sorties over 9 years (see Table 1). It is also worth noting that what are being discussed specifically are cluster bombs: bombs that contain lots of small \"bomblets.\" Each bomb can release 600-700 bomblets. The counts of unexploded munitions are bomblets. [This video gives you a sense of how these looked when being released](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHB8N_XIXF4). In this video, you have one plane releasing too many bombs for me to count — I started counting the large releases from the first plane and got to over 20 of them. Each of them then breaks into what could be hundreds of bomblets.\n\nSo I think your overriding assumption, that this is a WWII-style \"many planes, many bombs\" approach, is entirely wrong. This is likely a \"few planes, stupendous number of bombs per plane\" situation. \n\nI suspect that the poor failure-to-detonate rate is related to the cluster munition itself. They were crude little mass-produced devices, being scattered (as the footage makes clear) over a large area at high speed.", "created_utc": 1583248988, "distinguished": null, "id": "fjda0kr", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/fcvc6m/us_aircraft_dropped_more_ordnance_on_laos_than_on/fjda0kr/", "score": 56 } ]

[ { "body": "Japan came out of WWII in an excellent position to grow economically. This position resulted from factors internal and external to Japan. The external factors are, to my mind, the more interesting: a former enemy (the USA) becoming invested in Japan's economic success. \n\nLet's start with the internal ones though: Japan had a well educated workforce and a history of industrialization. Without those, the rebuilding would have just been building, and, as your question recognizes, that's not easy to do. Japan additionally had the benefit of its bureaucracy. The people who managed its economy before the war were, by and large, still around and still doing pretty much the same jobs after the war (more on that later). So there was a lot of institutional knowledge left in place despite American attempts to liberalize Japanese government. Finally, and somewhat paradoxically, they didn't have much in the way of natural resources. This meant that reindustrialization was effectively the only strategy available to Japanese elites looking to create a tax base. \n\nSo Japan had people who knew what they're doing running things, those people had a motivation to reindustrialize, and there was a history of industrialization and an educated workforce to support industrialization. That's all well and good, but might not have been enough without postwar Japan's geopolitical situation. \n\nIn the immediate aftermath of the war, the US planned to remake Japan as part of a broader attempt to liberalize the world order. Alongside the creation of institutions like the UN, World Bank, and IMF, Japan was to be demilitarized and democratized so that it would fit into this new system. In pursuit of this goal, occupation forces wrote the current, extremely liberal, Japanese constitution. It's hard to overemphasize just how far the constitution goes. It's most famous for Article 9, which renounces military force as a tool of the state and forbids maintenance of a military, but I'd recommend taking a look at the entirety of chapter 3 sometime: it makes the American Bill of Rights look downright authoritarian. This attempted remaking of Japanese society by and large ignored the bureaucracy, contributing to its postwar leadership and undermining the goal of democratizing the country. \n\nSoon after the war, however, the US realized that the world was not going to be the liberal paradise it had hoped for. As the Cold War began and Chinese nationalists lost the civil war to the communists, Japan's strategic importance increased. The US began to view Japan less as a strategic threat that needed to be kept in check and more as a potential ally against the USSR. This meant that the US had an interest in Japan's economy. A strong Japan would check Soviet and Chinese influence in Asia in addition to offering a convenient and easily defended military base in Asia. \n\nThe treaty of San Fransisco, which officially ended the war in 1951, reflects the American desire to make Japan its ally (the USSR did not sign). Reparations happened, but Japan got a pretty good deal on them, both in terms of the amount that had to be paid and the manner in which the payment was to happen. In addition to explicitly recognizing that Japan couldn't afford to make the countries it invaded whole, the treaty allowed for reparations to be negotiated bilaterally between occupied countries and Japan. Since many of the occupied countries were small, poor, and weak, this put them at a disadvantage and meant a lower price tag for Japan. Contrast this with the Treaty of Versailles ending World War 1, which established a commission that would impose reparations. \n\nFurthermore, the treaty allowed for Japan to pay reparations in kind. So instead of paying the Burmese government cash and then the Burmese spending that to build a dam or a railroad, the Japanese could build the dam or railroad themselves. This meant that the money could be spent in ways that stimulated the Japanese economy. Sure Burma gets a dam or a railroad either way, but if a Japanese company does the building much of that money (along with the experience associated with having built a dam or a railroad) is going to flow right back into the Japanese economy. Japan benefited from the creation of economic linkages too. The Japanese government was effectively able to use reparations to introduce Japanese companies as suppliers to its former colonies, creating a market for its exports. \n\nThe reasons for Japan's postwar economic growth are bigger than what I've written here. I hope that I have given a little bit of helpful information on the subject though. ", "created_utc": 1550741838, "distinguished": null, "id": "egxzpts", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/aswqd9/why_did_japans_economy_see_massive_growth/egxzpts/", "score": 19 }, { "body": "Explaining the economic outcomes of a particular country at a particular time is extremely hard to do rigorously: whatever explanation you can find there will be another country at a similar time, or the same country at a different time, which had the opposite outcome. (The Republic of Ireland is a particular headache for simple economic development theories.) Luckily, economic growth following defeat in wars is not unique to Japan: Germany and Italy also had economic golden ages post WWII. (As did France.) So we can talk about some commonalities with a bit of confidence that we're not just making spurious correlations. \n\nJapan's economic growth was not unique to the post WWII era: Japan saw rapid economic growth and industrialisation from the Meiji restoration in the 1850s. Even before the Meiji restoration, Japan was comparatively politically stable, as an island it was relatively protected against outside military invasions but it was also close to other major civilisations, like the UK where the Industrial Revolution started. Japan had a market economy and following the Meiji restoration governments eager to support industrialisation. Similarly, Germany and Italy had started to industrialise in the 19th century and grow their economies. \n\n\nSo Japan, like my European comparators, had an existing set of knowledge and experience with industrialision that they could fall back on, admist the ruins of WWII. \n\n\nOn top of that, post WWII, while Japan and Germany's industrial capacity was devastated, the USA and, to a smaller extent, the UK, Canada, Australia and NZ were relatively unaffected wealthy countries, making large markets for Japanese goods which the Japanese could then trade for suppliers of industrial equipment and raw resources, which said wealthy countries were good at producing cheaply compared to earlier centuries.  Increased sea transport and airplanes made trade even cheaper: having rich neighbours near by is a good thing. \n\n\nJapan, like other western countries at the time, also benefited from the spread of technologies like the internal combustion engine, building motorways, and electrification, which of course all improved internal markets. \n\n\nThe Japanese and German governments also pursued market economies, with private property and liberalisation of price controls in the late 1940s, although of course neither government was laissez-faire and the relative impacts of that versus government interventions is still highly debated. \n\n\nFinally there was probably a measure of luck. \n\n\nWe can also compare Japan's economic take off to that of the other Asian tiger economies: Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore all saw strong growth post WWII, starting from very low bases.\n\n\nIn summary, Japan's economic recovery post WWII is part of a broader pattern of economic take offs during this period, and was also for Japan, like Germany and Italy, to some extent a return to pre-fascist rule economic growth and policies. \n\n\nMain Source:\n\n\nKenichi Ono, *The Economic Development of Japan: The Path Traveled by Japan as a Developing Country*,  GRIPS Economic Development Forum, 2006. \n\n", "created_utc": 1550726412, "distinguished": null, "id": "egxog0a", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/aswqd9/why_did_japans_economy_see_massive_growth/egxog0a/", "score": 42 }, { "body": "It was the result of reforms and financial policy. The Bank of Japan and government developed a great strategy that gave their businesses a technological edge.\n\nFirst I’d like to note that there are a lot of answers in this thread that imply or directly state that postwar Japanese growth was just a continuation of pre-war growth. That Japan already had a good system in place and returned to normal.\n\nThese arguments are absolutely not correct. During the Taisho and early Showa periods, Japanese economic growth averaged a respectable but not rapid 3 percent a year. After the war, they averaged anywhere between 6 and 10 percent depending on the decade. In short, something changed in Japan after the end of WW2 that allowed the country to grow more rapidly and consistently than any country before it.\n\nDuring the American occupation, many of the regressive institutions in the Japanese economy were destroyed. SCAP, the occupation authority, deregulated small business and broke up the family held zaibatsu corporate dynasties. Many of SCAP’s other reforms were overturned after the occupation ended, but these two changes were permanent.\n\nWithin a decade, massive corporations once again rose in the form of the keiretsu, but the keiretsu were vastly superior to the zaibatsu. Both vertically integrated their production and had internal banking divisions to provide financial support, but they differed in management. Zaibatsu were owned and run by families and shareholders, while keiretsu were beholden to their managers with little influence from shareholders in decision making, when compared to Western corporations.\n\nThis was at least partially by government design. The Japanese government established the innovative Ministry of Trade and Industry, which forced a highly regulated banking sector to provide low interest loans to industrial development projects. Meanwhile, it held round table discussions of industrial groups where it negotiated territory and marks share between them before plants were built, in order to minimize domestic competition.\n\nUnderstanding that the real competition was with foreign producers, the government took this counter intuitive approach to maximize economies of scale. While in a closed market, separating factories geographically and negotiating between numerous keiretsu would have created an oligopoly, in an export-driven market with foreign competition, this approach meant owners could safely invest in large factories without fear of “cutthroat competition” reducing their profits and making the investment uncertain.\n\nThis coupled with the guarantee of government backed loans to make investment an extremely safe proposition for the keiretsu. Insulated from shareholders, the keiretsu based their economic planning on interest rates - instead of maximizing short term profits, they invested the maximum that they could and borrowed the maximum that they could until expected profits were less than interest rates.\n\nIn economic terms, Japan, through this system, had achieved “theoretical perfection”. In economic theory, general investment in the economy occurs until profits do not exceed interest rates, but the wild card is where investments take place. Japan concentrates it’s lending power in the area where they thought profits would last the longest and have the most number of consumers - in other words, exportable industrial products. In most other countries, investments were branching out into the services sector, which generally produced far less exportable goods, and therefore have a smaller “accessible market”.\n\nWhat this meant was that *it would take far longer for Japanese corporate profits to drop to the level of interest rates than it would for those in any other country*. More simply, Japan could continue a high level of investment far longer than any other country. Some very brilliant people figured this out.\n\nCredit was cheap enough in Japan that the government and industry focused on building anew instead of rounding out. The former industrial approach involves tearing down factories and building entirely new ones, giving you a gradual technological edge as entirely new plants can integrate many new changes to technology. The second approach, rounding out, involves replacing only a few machines close to their expiration date, but not all advancements can be integrated. Even a 10% increase in expected output was sometimes enough to justify entirely tearing down a plant for Japanese industrial groups.\n\nAs a result, by the 1970s and 1980s, many of Japan’s industrial products were vastly superior to those produced by any other country and Japanese industry was the most advanced in the world.\n\nAll of this was enabled by the advent of international free trade in the postwar world. All of Japan’s economic actions contradicted prevailing economic theory at the time, because they tended to assume a closed market. Japan found a loophole by realizing that world markets were more open than ever. Their goal was to gain every possible technological and competitive advantage over a period of several decades by throwing cheap money at any industrial renovation, and ensuring maximum industrial profits by limiting domestic competition. Other countries went through cycles of cheap money, but it was generally directed at the services sector and other less exportable products.\n\nI’ll close by saying that the Japanese miracle permanently changed the fields of economics and economic history. Earlier economic historians (and by this I mean 80s and prior) took an extremely deterministic view on growth, where geography and the past determined how much a country could grow and the government could do little about it in the long term.\n\nToday, there is a general awareness in the field that Central Banks are staffed by bright people who are developing strategies and competing against eachother. Japan proved that geography was far less important than economic strategy and institutions in creating growth.\n\nTakada, Masahiro. Japan’s Economic Miracle.\n\nTakatoshi, Ito. A Miracle in Transition.\n\nWeede, Erich. Comparative Economic Development in China and Japan.", "created_utc": 1550782245, "distinguished": null, "id": "egzb7mu", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/aswqd9/why_did_japans_economy_see_massive_growth/egzb7mu/", "score": 9 } ]

[ { "body": "Most certainly. Squadron Leader Tom Neil of the RAF was posted as a liaison officer to the 100th Fighter Wing of the USAAF when they started operating from England. In *The Silver Spitfire* he recounts his first morning there:\n\n\"When my breakfast was finally put before me, I probably looked a little dismayed. First, there appeared a small mountain of butter that was possibly equivalent to my parents' fat ration for two years, a pile of pancakes about five inches high, surmounted by four strips of bacon and several eggs, hovering about which was my talkative GI companion, waving a tall jug of maple syrup. I head myself protesting faintly, 'Steady on! You're not going to pour that over my eggs and bacon, are you?' But he was, and he did!\"\n\n\"Overfed, overpaid, oversexed and over here\" was a common epithet for US forces in Britain. Starting with the first, food was rationed in the UK from 1940, and though Tom Neil is obviously exaggerating slightly you can see from [a photograph of the **weekly** rations for an adult in 1942] (http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205195859) that the meal he describes would be unthinkably luxurious for the vast majority of the population. As Juliet Gardiner puts it in *Wartime: Britain 1939-1945* \"... there were allegations that an average-sized British family could live for a month on what was scraped into the garbage can after a single meal at a US base.\" \"If you are invited to eat with a family don't eat too much. Otherwise you may eat up their weekly rations.\" warned [Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain] (http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/tips-for-american-servicemen-in-britain-during-the-second-world-war).\n\nIn addition to food, clothing was rationed in the UK from 1941, and other luxuries were rare. \"From the P.X. came in profusion things which, in Britain, were scarce, ersatz, rationed or unobtainable. There were razor blades. There were Lucky Strike cigarettes at threepence for twenty. There were such choice sweets (or candies, as the occupying force insisted on calling them) as Life Savers and Hershey bars. There was soap of peacetime standard. There were fascinating items known as nylons, which soon drove out memories of the silk stockings which had been banned in Britain at the end of 1940.\" (*The People's War*, Angus Calder). \n\nIn terms of pay, a British private was on 14 shillings a week (around £20 in 2005 money); his US counterpart was almost five times better off with basic pay and overseas allowance coming to £3 8s 9d (about £99 in 2005 terms). This, and the ready access to previously mentioned luxuries, allowed GIs to be flamboyantly generous, particularly with young British women, in no small part leading to the \"oversexed\" part of the epithet. With cases of VD running almost twice as high among US troops in Britain as those back at home there were efforts to clamp down on prostitution and warn of the dangers of 'good-time girls' who may not have explicitly demanded money but welcomed gifts. Organisations such as the Women's Voluntary Service encouraged more 'proper' interactions such as tea with British families (GIs were encouraged to take 'hospitality rations' with them), and prepared lists of 'suitable' girls for attending dances on US bases, but of course there was still extensive 'fraternisation' (not just with young women; Quentin Crisp wrote very fondly of the uniforms \"so tight that their owners could fight for nothing but their honour\").", "created_utc": 1510054940, "distinguished": null, "id": "dpgwkdp", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/7bbzh0/theres_a_cliche_of_american_gis_courting_british/dpgwkdp/", "score": 437 } ]

[ { "body": "Hey I figured I'd organize all the answers and add a few more of the ones that are left out.\n\nThe first medal is an [Iron Cross Second Class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Cross#Iron_Cross) given out to German soldiers for bravery in combat.\n\nThe second medal is a [War Merit Cross](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Merit_Cross) given to German soldiers or civilians for merit off the battlefield.\n\nThe First two pins are [Parachutist Badges](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachutist_Badge_%28United_States%29) given out to US Army soldiers who complete Airborne Training School.\n\nThe multicolored ribbon is for the [European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European-African-Middle_Eastern_Campaign_Medal) for US Soldiers who had performed duty in the European Theater during World War II. (Btw, in the US Army, when a soldier receives a medal he also gets a ribbon to wear on the uniform. Ribbons are worn during more \"casual\" situations, whereas medals are worn during more formal situations. 95% of the time, the ribbons are worn. If you haven't found the medals yet, keep an eye out, since he would have received both!)\n\nThe stars on the multicolored ribbon are [Service Stars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_stars#Service_stars) indicating the many phases that he went through the campaign, and the [Arrowhead Device](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrowhead_device) at the end represents that he was part of an amphibious landing, airborne assault, or glider assault.\n\nThe red ribbon is for receiving the [Army Good Conduct medal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Conduct_Medal_%28United_States%29). This medal is given to anyone who completes three consecutive years with \"Honorable and Faithful Service\", ie, without getting into any serious trouble.\n\nThe Purple ribbon is for receiving the [Purple Heart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Heart), and the oak leaf indicates that he received two.\n\nAfter scouring the internet, I couldn't find any information on the metal airborne clasp, so I assume it isn't anything official. It is an image of the 82nd Airborne Division which served in World War II.\n\nThe last badge is actually a [Coastal Artillery Fez Hat Badge](http://gothiclinemilitaria.wordpress.com/italian-headgear/for-sale-010/) used by Italian Coastal Artillery officers on their hats stationed in African. Pretty neat and pretty rare!", "created_utc": 1413141735, "distinguished": null, "id": "cl7jprx", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2j186x/my_uncle_served_in_world_war_ii_when_he_died_we/cl7jprx/", "score": 478 }, { "body": "Hi, thanks for posting these! It seems that your uncle served in the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division by the looks of the pins and ribbons. During the war, the 82nd jumped into Italy and later the Netherlands to liberate both.\n\nThe two German medals are an Iron Cross (a fairly common medal for Germans in WWII) and another medal for bravery. Both are very valuable today and iconic symbols of the Second World War. From the look of it, it seems that these were taken as souvenirs, which is pretty nifty.", "created_utc": 1413130559, "distinguished": null, "id": "cl7e49y", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2j186x/my_uncle_served_in_world_war_ii_when_he_died_we/cl7e49y/", "score": 223 }, { "body": "I can help a little. [This one](https://i.imgur.com/p5oUaQa.jpg) is the ribbon for the Purple Heart with an [Oak Leaf Cluster](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Heart#Devices) indicating a second award of the medal. \n\n[This one](http://i.imgur.com/v9zTKre.jpg) is known as a [Parachutist Badge](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachutist_Badge_\\(United_States\\)), also commonly referred to as \"Jump Wings,\" it is a qualification award. \n\n~~I ***think*** [this one](http://i.imgur.com/v5JNYm3.jpg) is the ribbon for the Combat Jump Device. You need to follow up on this one. But, if I'm right *(and I think I am)*, this shows the Combat Jump Ribbon with the arrow head denoting a second combat jump, and the stars denoting five more wartime jumps.~~ See /u/TeamRedRocket 's reply for the correct info on this one. \n\nTry taking these by a recruiter's office for more info, but whatever you do, don't let anyone \"borrow\" them to check them out. They can take pictures. If those belonged to your great granduncle, the man was a big time badass. \n\nSeven combat jump awards and two purple hearts?!! This guy had Stainless Steel balls. \n\n*^Edit: ^Corrections.*", "created_utc": 1413136300, "distinguished": null, "id": "cl7gwpv", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/2j186x/my_uncle_served_in_world_war_ii_when_he_died_we/cl7gwpv/", "score": 116 } ]

[ { "body": "I am not an expert, but I wanted to share a few of the resources I've found while trying to learn about this area and the events that followed WWII, since I haven't gotten any responses, and I know similar questions have been asked and gone unanswered. \n\n\nThis article speaks generally about the expulsion of ethic Germans from the eastern border countries of Germany. \n[https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/brutal-peace-postwar-expulsions-germans/](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/brutal-peace-postwar-expulsions-germans/) \n\n\nAnd this wiki (includes references) that included a detailed page about the explusion of Germans from Czechoslavakia. NSFW, includes picture of people being forced to leave, the path is lined with a row of the bodies of Jews killed by Nazis. \n[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Expulsion\\_of\\_Germans\\_from\\_Czechoslovakia?fbclid=IwAR2AXTwPO7o3AtVXHyII6NoPMFuclZSm7lPcLH\\_9sWXmydCAis\\_VtHJvVGA](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Expulsion_of_Germans_from_Czechoslovakia?fbclid=IwAR2AXTwPO7o3AtVXHyII6NoPMFuclZSm7lPcLH_9sWXmydCAis_VtHJvVGA)", "created_utc": 1620194533, "distinguished": null, "id": "gwzwaz9", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/n4do8k/i_would_like_to_know_more_about_what_it_was_like/gwzwaz9/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "The end of the US/Soviet alliance was caused by the radical realignment of world power in 1945 which left two major global power blocs: a European/Anglophone one dominated by the US, and a communist one dominated by the USSR. Their unlikely wartime partnership had transpired, after all, *not* through shared values or even overlapping geopolitical interests but rather solely due to a common enemy in the form of Hitler. The defeat of Nazi Germany not only removed the only foundation of their alliance but it left both sides in dramatically stronger military & geographic positions relative to before the war. \n\nWW2 inflicted enormous damage on the Soviet Union, but it also provided an opportunity to become a world power. This aligned perfectly with Stalin’s own ambition as well as the desires of many, both inside and outside of the Soviet Union, for the USSR to serve as communism’s muscular standard-bearer on the world stage. As the tide turned against Hitler after the end of 1942, the Soviets forces fought their way westward toward Berlin and evicted German forces from the territory they had conquered. This territory included both Soviet land like Ukraine, but also that of other states like Poland & Hungary. \n\nOnce the Soviets arrived in formerly independent states, however, they tended not to leave. Countries which the Red Army entered in 1944-1945 such as Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia were not restored to their pre-war sovereignty but instead made into Soviet client states. The same occurred in Korea as well, which the Soviets rolled into during their brief campaign against Japan near the war’s end. It was clear to the United States and its partners even before WW2 had been won that the Soviets were exploiting the opportunity to create their own empire. Complementing this was the existence of communist insurrectionary activity in places like China who were not expected to shelve their political ambitions after the defeat of Germany & Japan. \n\nThe American power trajectory from 1941 to 1945 was not totally unlike that of the Soviets. In only four years the US went from being a hemispheric power to a truly global one, with America’s newly generated massive military power now abutting the Soviets’ own forces on two continents. While the US-led bloc did not turn its conquered nations into puppets as nakedly & unambiguously as the Soviets did, those states that US forces entered from 1943 onward all remained well within the American orbit and some hosted tens of thousands of US troops (some of which are still there.) \n\nAs WW2 unfolded and it became increasingly clear that the combined power of the Allies would eventually crush the Axis powers, it also became increasingly apparent that the alliance between the US/UK-dominated bloc and the Soviet bloc would not long outlive the war. These concerns were very real, but tended to be pushed aside since the more urgent priority was beating Hitler & Japan and the leaders of the Western Allies- FDR & Churchill- rightly realized that harmony between their nations and the USSR was imperative to achieve victory. The implications of Allied victory and the post-war global situation remained, however, an elephant in the room. Though FDR and Churchill have both been heavily criticized for being too trusting of Stalin during the war (i.e. “betraying” Poland and generally failing to anticipate his long-term plans for Eastern Europe), the east/west rivalry that arose almost before the ruins of Berlin had stopped smoking surprised few political or military leaders on either side of what Churchill would soon dub the “Iron Curtain”. \n\nMost of the major participants of WW2 ended the war far weaker than they began. The former Axis powers lay in ruins and even the Allied nations of Western Europe, formerly great empires, began a collective decline in global influence. The only two players who emerged from this brawl *more* politically & militarily powerful than before were America & the Soviet Union...two guys who would *never* have teamed up in the first place if they hadn’t both been jumped by the same gang. Hitler inadvertently set the prerequisites for the US & Soviet rises to global power, but he was also the only thing preventing them from becoming rivals.", "created_utc": 1615594587, "distinguished": null, "id": "gqqzuch", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/m3r61n/what_was_the_main_causes_of_the_usa_and_ussr/gqqzuch/", "score": 5 } ]

[ { "body": "Anti-aircraft guns can be broadly grouped into light and heavy weapons. Light AA guns (LAA) were typically automatic weapons with a calibre of 20-40mm for engaging targets at lower altitude, heavy AA guns (HAA) were larger calibre, 75mm+, for engaging targets at higher altitude. As aircraft performance dramatically improved in the inter-war years, they became increasingly difficult targets - if an aircraft was flying at 200 mph at 20,000 feet it would take an artillery shell around 20 seconds to reach that height, during which time the aircraft would have travelled more than a mile. To judge where to aim mechanical or electro-mechanical analogue computers called directors (in US service) or predictors (in UK service) predicted the position of an aircraft and directed anti-aircraft guns accordingly. They were supplied with inputs such as range and height from other instruments; in [this picture of a British 3.7\" AA battery](https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205199060) you can see a gun in the background and predictor in the foreground with stereoscopic height and range finders behind it. Pinning down exact numbers to judge effectiveness is difficult, but from July to September AA Command claimed 337 destroyed enemy aircraft, Luftwaffe losses were around 1,500 aircraft.\n\nEven with sophisticated fire control systems considerable weight of fire was needed. A major difficulty was the need to see the target aircraft to accurately predict its path; easy enough on a fine day, difficult in cloud, almost impossible at night. Against strategic bombing conducted at night anti-aircraft fire was generally ineffective until the widespread use of radar, either to control searchlights allowing for visual acquisition of the target or to directly control the guns. During The Blitz AA guns were sometimes fired as a barrage, just throwing shells up in the rough path of bombers, more for morale purposes (civilians understandably complained if AA guns were silent during raids) than in genuine hope of hitting a target. 6th AA Division in the south-east claimed 221 aircraft between July and October, but only 18 of those at night.\n\nThe value of flak wasn't only in destroying aircraft, though. Bombing was most accurate at lower altitude, where flak was most effective, so the higher you could force the enemy to fly the less accurate their bombing. Predictors could be defeated by aircraft performing evasive manoeuvres, changing direction in the time it took shells to reach their altitude, but that wasn't always straightforward, especially in large formations. It was especially disruptive when bombers were trying to line up their bombing run, precise bombing needed straight and level flight, flak again reducing bombing accuracy. The damage caused by shell fragments might not always be fatal to an aircraft but could break up formations and force stragglers to lag behind, assisting fighter defences. Anti-aircraft fire also had a psychological effect, even greater than fighters - at least gunners could fire back at fighters. Not for nothing was the expression \"flak happy\" coined.\n\nThe fundamentals of anti-aircraft defences didn't really change over the war, the primary heavy (e.g. German 8.8cm, British 3.7 in) and light (e.g. German 2cm and 3.7cm guns, 40mm Bofors) weapons were in service pre-war and continued with incremental improvements. Improvements in radar and electronics allowed for more sophisticated fire control, and combined with the radar proximity fuse meant that AA guns were as effective, if not slightly more so, than fighters against the V-1 flying bombs from 1944.\n\nSome further reading & watching: \n\n[FLAK! - a USAAF training film](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtkJHT_HUnA) \n[Ack-Ack - a British Ministry of Information film](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M10k-t73-s) \n*Archie, Flak, AAA and SAM*, Kenneth P. Werrell - a brief general overview \n*Flak: German Anti-aircraft Defenses 1914-1945*, Edward B. Westermann \n*Britain's Air Defences 1939-45*, Alfred Price \n*Courage and Air Warfare: The Aircrew Experience in World War II*, Mark K. Wells - on the psychological aspect", "created_utc": 1592385025, "distinguished": null, "id": "fv3ttjv", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/hacf27/how_effective_were_antiaircraft_weapons_in_world/fv3ttjv/", "score": 22 }, { "body": "Just a reminder that there was a whole other part of the War not mentioned, over in the Pacific. [I talk about flak from US and Japanese ships in this answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/33sa2x/effectiveness_of_shipborne_antiair_in_wwii/) from a few years ago.", "created_utc": 1592451471, "distinguished": null, "id": "fv745m3", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/hacf27/how_effective_were_antiaircraft_weapons_in_world/fv745m3/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "This raises tons of demographics related questions for me as well. Did the war create a clearer \"generational\" divide in politics? Did the agricultural/economic disruption make a lasting impact on children's development? We're generational cycles of poverty/abuse broken/begun?", "created_utc": 1442015350, "distinguished": null, "id": "cuyhy00", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kl6p7/after_world_war_ii_did_men_from_nations_that/cuyhy00/", "score": 346 }, { "body": "Here is an old thread that might answer your question.\n\nhttp://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/244oc4/how_much_percentage_of_the_german_male_population/ch3r3au", "created_utc": 1442026771, "distinguished": null, "id": "cuyne8b", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kl6p7/after_world_war_ii_did_men_from_nations_that/cuyne8b/", "score": 88 }, { "body": "As a follow up question (is that allowed?) has anyone ever studied the genetics of Germans or Russians born during or right after the war? I have read that rape was rampant on both sides, especially once the Russians invaded Eastern Germany. How did this affect the genetic makeup of East Germans, and was their any noticeable societal effect afterwards?", "created_utc": 1442089272, "distinguished": null, "id": "cuzb3f9", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kl6p7/after_world_war_ii_did_men_from_nations_that/cuzb3f9/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "Every country Germany invaded, they invaded for a good reason (at least in their own mind).\n\nPoland held territory that had been German before 1918 and a substantial Germany minority. Polish territory also cut in between German East Prussia and Germany proper, something Germany resented. Poland was also invaded because they were a staunch French ally and a potentially dangerous cause of a two-front war, something Germany had bad experiences with in ww1 and wanted to avoid dealing with in the next war.\n\nNorway was invaded to protect the iron ore trade with Sweden, to gain naval bases (especially for submarines) to make sure the German navy was not bottled up in the North Sea as it was in ww1. The Germans were worried about a potential British landing in Norway and decided they needed to be there first after the Altmark incident, where the Norwegians did nothing when a British destroyer captured the German ship Altmark (carrying British sailors captured by the pocket battleship Graf Spee) in Norwegian waters. The Germans used the Altmark incident as evidence that the Norwegians were either unwilling or unable to uphold their neutrality and invaded.\n\nDenmark was invaded as a stepping stone to Norway, as the Germans needed the Aalborg airfield to provide air support for their landings in southern Norway.\n\nBelgium and Luxembourg were invaded to go around the French defences in Alsace-Lorraine (primarily the Maginot line) and the Netherlands was invaded to protect the flank of that advance and to gain access to Dutch infrastructure to help supply the forces pushing through Belgium, as the lmits of the infrastructure on the Germano-Belgian border had proven a problem in ww1.\n\nYugoslavia was invaded when it overthrew the axis-friendly government that was about to allow the German troops into the country to cross it in order to help the Italian invasion of Greece, which was floundering - the Germans wanted to secure the Balkans and their southern flank from British influence and potential enemies before going to war with the Soviet Union and pressured Yugoslavia to join the axis and allow German troops to pass through. However, a coup overthrew the government and issued a general mobilisation of the Yugoslav army, and Germany invaded.\n\nGreece was likewise invaded to help the Italians and secure the Balkans before the war against the Soviets.\n\nThe Soviet Union was invaded as part of the nazi's idea of a grand war between ideologies, where communism and nazism were opposites and because they considered the Soviet Union a prime area for colonisation by the \"superior\" aryan/germanic race over the \"inferior\" slavs.\n\nPortugal, Switzerland, Turkey, Sweden and Spain had the good fortune (and/or sense) of not getting in the way of Germany and not allying with it.\n\nThat said, I will try to explain the German options for taking Sweden.\n\nBefore April 1940, the German options for taking Sweden were small. September-October 1939 they were heavily engaged in Poland and spent a lot of their reserves of fuel and ammunition there. Winter 1939-1940 was extremely hard, and the Baltic ice situation made any kind of naval operation against Sweden impossible. [See here how Öresund (the waters between Malmö and Copenhagen) looked in February 1940](http://bilderisyd.se/var/resizes/1940/KrigV011.jpg?m=1315818529).\n\nThe Germans did not have the naval capacity to invade Sweden, Denmark and Norway at the same time. The invasion of Norway was a huge gamble which paid off due to German audacity, the element of surprise and a lot of luck. There's no way for the Germans to invade Sweden at the same time.\n\nA naval invasion against Sweden also faces a lot of problems - most important Swedish cities - Karlskrona (the main naval base), Stockholm, Göteborg, Norrköping that are on the coast are behind extensive archipelagos, which cannot be quickly navigated, which unlike the German landings in Norway means that the defenders will have some warning. Unlike Norway as well, Sweden has many larger industrial and population centras inland, such as Västerås, Linköping, Jönköping, Karlstad, Örebro, Östersund and so on, which cannot be taken by surprise and naval landing as the Norwegian cities were.\n\nPlease note that the Germans did not transit troops through Sweden to invade Norway and Sweden denied repeated requests from the Germans to reinforce and resupply the hard-pressed mountain troops of General Dietl in Narvik over Sweden as long as the war was going on in Norway. The last Allied troops left on the morning of the 8th of June 1940.\n\nAfter the invasion of Norway and Denmark, the Germans had France to deal with, and any larger effort agains Sweden would require them to weaken or delay their attack on France and the Low Countries, which was probably deemed unacceptable.\n\nThere's a window between August 1940 and June 1941, when the majority of the Heer and parts of the Luftwaffe are not otherwise engaged and Germany could comfortably take on Sweden. This is also the time when Sweden is as compliant as possible, allowing the Germans to transport a fully armed infantry division from Norway to Finland (weapons and personell on separate trains, closely guarded by the Swedish army), to buy all the iron ore and ball bearings they want, to transport (unarmed) troops on leave from Norway and back as well as some special arms (such as heavy guns for their fortifications in Narvik) on the Swedish railway network.\n\nAfter the Germans invade the Soviet Union they are again in a situation where they can take on Sweden if they really want to, but that it would require moving Heer and Luftwaffe elements from the primary front in the Soviet Union, which was probably deemed unacceptable.\n\nSweden ended the transit agreement allowing the Germans to move food, tobacco and medical supplies and troops on leave on the Swedish railway netwrok in August 1943 and stopped selling iron ore to the Germans in October 1944, after feeling that German defeats had weakened them and the continued re-armament of the Swedish armed forces had progressed to an extent that Sweden felt that the Germans would deem it too difficult to take on Sweden.\n\nUntil August 1943, the Germans kept the 25. Panzer-division in Norway, and its commander, Generalmajor von Schell, developed a plan to capture Sweden, called 'Fall Schweden'. The plan was mostly concieved as a way to quickly neutralise Sweden should the allies land in Norway and Sweden mobilise to support them. It called for landings against the northern Swedish Baltic coast from Finland, diversionary action on the Swedo-Finnish border and along the ore railroad between Narvik and Kiruna and attacks by 3-5 infantry divisions against the Swedish fortifications in Värmland and Bohuslän from the Oslo area. The main thrust was to be by 1-2 Panzer divisions (including the 25.) and 1-2 infantry divisions, supported by heavy tanks and pinpoint air landings from Trondheim över Östersund, to Sundsvall and south towards Uppsala and Västerås.\n\nThe Finns refused to have anything to do with the plan, and according to a source I have been unable to confirm, Mannerheim supposedly replied when inquired on Finnish participation in the plan that \"be wary of the Swedes, they are as good soldiers as the Finns, but twice as many and much better equipped\".\n\nWhen interviewed after the war, von Schell himself said the plan was not realistic, as he never had the troops specified in the plan (only one panzer division, very little air support, no paratroopers, no divisionary forces from Finland, only 2-3 infantry divisions, no heavy tanks or heavy artillery). Swedish staff officers condiered the plan, while based on some real weaknesses in the Swedish defence, to be a pipe dream as it was mostly based on experiences against the Norwegians in April 1940 and the Swedish army was an entirely different beast compared to the Norwegian one in 1940, not even speaking of 1943.", "created_utc": 1487076655, "distinguished": null, "id": "ddq986c", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ty46r/why_do_hitler_choose_not_to_take_sweden_in_world/ddq986c/", "score": 493 }, { "body": "As a follow up question; I've always heard that Sweden's geography makes it hard to invade. Is this accurate and backed by facts or is it just anecdotal?", "created_utc": 1487076083, "distinguished": null, "id": "ddq8ykn", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ty46r/why_do_hitler_choose_not_to_take_sweden_in_world/ddq8ykn/", "score": 11 }, { "body": "Related, did the Nazi Navy have plans in place for a potential invasion?", "created_utc": 1487068390, "distinguished": null, "id": "ddq67hy", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/5ty46r/why_do_hitler_choose_not_to_take_sweden_in_world/ddq67hy/", "score": 10 } ]

[ { "body": "This is a great question, but I want to clear up a mischaracterization; saying that the US authorized an operation to kill a high-level official *isn't exactly right.* In the case of (aptly named) *Operation Vengeance*, the target was an enemy military commander - the equivalent of Chester Nimitz, perhaps. Your question makes it sound like a targeted assassination of someone in the Japanese government - the line is thin, but it's there. Also, his interception and death was more opportunistic than it was deliberate. He died April 18; the intelligence that he'd be conducting a morale tour was only picked up four days prior by Magic stations. According to Maffeo, there's some confusion as to whether or not President Roosevelt gave the order to execute the operations, though he was certainly aware. Ultimately the decision came down to the military commanders - Nimitz made the choice after conferring with Bull Halsey.\n\nIt's probably more apt to look at the death of Yamamoto as a military operation carried out to kill an important field commander, and I can't imagine any military in any war not *jumping* at the chance to decapitate enemy command and control.\n\nSource:\n Steven Maffeo, U.S. Navy codebreakers, linguists, and \n intelligence officers against Japan, 1910-1941", "created_utc": 1566496789, "distinguished": null, "id": "exq1ibl", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/ctxxoq/during_late_world_war_ii_the_us_authorized_an/exq1ibl/", "score": 59 } ]

[ { "body": "Have a look at [How were ex-German soldiers treated after WW2?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/lrt69n/how_were_exgerman_soldiers_treated_after_ww2/gootwhk/?context=3), the most recent version of this question I have answered.\n\nThanks to /u/justcoffeeok, /u/kieslowskifan, /u/Abrytan, et al. If someone else can answer this question to the subreddit's standards, please do so.\n\nEDIT: See below. Also fixed a link.", "created_utc": 1615201836, "distinguished": null, "id": "gq76fzo", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/m028s6/how_did_german_citizens_react_to_the_end_of_the/gq76fzo/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "The question as always comes down to \"make a difference\" and \"important\" and other terms which imply that one is going to run a kind of hypothetical simulation in which history might have been different if you tweak a few variables. And for obvious reasons that is rather hard to do convincingly!\n\nObviously there are very few people who one can point to and say, \"if this person hadn't arrived, then the Allies wouldn't have been able to do X!\" That isn't really the nature of scientific and technological development, despite for it making good fiction, where a single person saves the day, etc. \n\nThat being said, there are a few of these emigres who had an outsized influence, to the degree that it is possible to imagine that they would not have been so easily replaced. Enrico Fermi and John Von Neumann, for example, both made contributions to the American nuclear and defense programs that are in league with that level of support. They were both considered by their (very smart) peers to be an entirely different level of genius in their respective fields of expertise. \n\nProgrammatically, one can point to places where Jewish emigres had a very large influence. The most obvious is on the atomic bomb question. In both the US and the UK, it was Jewish emigres who pushed for work on this topic, to a degree that the \"native\" American and British scientists thought was premature. Notably Leo Szilard in the USA (who enlisted Einstein to write to FDR to start government funding into fission research), and Otto Frisch and Rudolph Peierls (_note to self: this is the first time I've spelled his name right on the first try_) in the UK, who authored the Frisch-Peierls Report on the feasibility of an all-enriched uranium bomb, were important in getting these programs off the ground when they did. In the case of Szilard, the committee that FDR created might not have been enough to launch a full weapons program if not for a British report, spurred by the work of Frisch and Peierls, on the feasibility of a weapon, so one might be able to say that the Manhattan Project would have been successful without Szilard or Einstein (but it would have been different, in any event). But without Frisch-Peierls, you don't really get a workable bomb in time for the end of the war; it would have just delayed things too much. \n\nI sometimes get asked, by half-embarrassed colleagues, _why_ there are so many Jewish people involved in the bomb work in particular. And part of that is the standard answer about why there ended up being so many Jewish people in theoretical physics in the 1930s — because they were excluded from experimental physics on the Continent, which was seen as the \"real work\" of physics. But part of the answer is that these emigres in particular were the most likely to assume the worst when it came to the Nazis' capabilities and intent. American-born and British-born physicists were more inclined to say, well, the odds are very long that atomic bombs will be feasible, we should concentrate on more \"safe\" bets. The Jewish refugees were more likely to say, if there is any chance that the Nazis will end up with nuclear weapons, we need to beat them, because they have very good people over there, and thoroughly malicious intent. Their fear was as potent a factor as their scientific talents. \n\nWhether the Germans could have made a bomb in time for it to matter is a different question (and you can find a lot on in the FAQ). The short answer is that the main obstacle to a German bomb was not that they did not have competent people, but that they did not invest in making a bomb. You need both competence and investment. The Germans did not fear an American or British bomb as much as the Americans and British feared a German bomb — the role of fear is again crucial here, and the fact that there was an asymmetry is part of why the Germans got nowhere (because they didn't invest in a bomb program) and the Americans built one (because they did). The Germans did have many brilliant scientists... but they were assigned to other tasks, like the V-1s and V-2s. \n\nFor the Manhattan Project, I find it an easier claim to make that if, somehow, the Manhattan Project started, it could have been likely successful without the participation of the refugee scientists. It might have made some errors or gone in some wrong directions, or at least different directions. They were involved at very high levels in the technical decisions and those do matter. But the US had a large \"native\" talent pool as well, and its industrial capabilities were most of the reason it accomplished its task in the given amount of time. That is not to say that those who participated did not make important contributions, it is only to say that in our hypothetical counterhistorical world, someone else would have had to have risen to the challenge of making those same contributions, and it is not impossible to imagine that they would, with the exception of the fews cases already noted (Fermi, von Neumann, maybe a few others). \n\nObviously all of the above should be taken with a grain of salt, as it is interpretive and impressionistic rather than a real historical \"calculation.\"", "created_utc": 1613511772, "distinguished": null, "id": "gnoz9j8", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/ll4532/how_important_to_the_course_of_world_war_ii_were/gnoz9j8/", "score": 9 } ]

[ { "body": "If you want to read something good about \"collective memory\" and Americans in WWII you have to change the terminology.\n\n\"Collective memory\" just isn't a phrase many American academics who specialize in 20th century history use.\n\nSome of the best big books about American experiences in WWII weren't written by academics.\n\nIf you are interested in the subject and haven't read it you should get a copy of Studs Terkel's book, \"The Good War.\"\n\n The buzz words American academics use are \"oral history\" or \"historical trends\" or \"common man experience.\" \n\nThe other thing you need to realize is that the United States fought a war on two fronts. (It was actually a global war for the United States...) but that means that for millions of Americans their war was the Pacific, not the European theatre.", "created_utc": 1585575242, "distinguished": null, "id": "flx4yix", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/frqr0s/is_collective_memory_of_world_war_ii_a_subject/flx4yix/", "score": 7 }, { "body": "I agree, I think there's a terminology, and even methodological, difference at play. I've seen collective memory used as a frame of reference more in Latin American or early American history, but not much in 20th century studies. There's of course Tom Brokaw's book The Greatest Generation, which certainly would represent how some Americans remember the generation that went through WWII. \n\nI also just did a quick search on my university's (I'm in the U.S.) library website, and there was a dissertation on ProQuest Central called [Remembering World War II in the late 1990s: A case of prosthetic memory](https://rutgers.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=proquest1880157257&context=PC&vid=01RUT_INST:01RUT&lang=en&adaptor=Primo%20Central&tab=Everything&query=any,contains,collective%20memory%20american%20world%20war%20II&offset=0), by Bullinger, Jonathan. It looks interesting if you are able to see it.\n\nI think most of the work on WWII might focus more on the experiences of soldiers, rather than on the memories of civilians. I'm sure there's also been significant study around collective memory of Americans who were put in Japanese internment camps during the war. Hope that helps a bit and best of luck!", "created_utc": 1585604532, "distinguished": null, "id": "flylrgk", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/frqr0s/is_collective_memory_of_world_war_ii_a_subject/flylrgk/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "For all his faults (and there were many) Franco was a dedicated anti-communist. He was also a consummate survivor, and was smart enough to position himself as useful after the war. The US wasn't worried about fascism as WWII drew to a close, they were worried about communism. There were a great many other concerns. Since Franco hadn't the means to undertake any expansionist dreams, the US could concentrate on those other concerns (such as rebuilding western Europe, resisting communism in the rest of Europe, dealing with Japan and China, and a host of other issues). \n\nAlso, it would have been a difficult sell to the American people to invade Spain after such a devastating conflict as WWII. For good or ill, many Americans were sympathetic to Franco. There was little in the way of a *casus belli* beyond Franco's fascism.", "created_utc": 1386035687, "distinguished": null, "id": "cds5zw1", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rygz8/was_there_ever_any_consideration_at_the_end_of/cds5zw1/", "score": 404 }, { "body": "Related question. Was there ever any thought of using spain as a beach head on the continent (welcome or otherwise)? Spain was, presumably, relatively weak/poorly defended and the allies had control of north africa by then. Were the pyranees considered to defensible?", "created_utc": 1386045104, "distinguished": null, "id": "cdsaabw", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rygz8/was_there_ever_any_consideration_at_the_end_of/cdsaabw/", "score": 49 }, { "body": "On a related note since /u/Domini_canes covered most of it, there were attempts by Republican sympathisers to provoke an Allied invasion of Spain to overthrow Franco with the Spanish Maquis (Republican guerrillas who had fled into France after the Republic's defeat and had joined the French Resistance at the outbreak of WW2). \n\nThe maquis, based in France, attempted to invade Spain through the Aran Valley in the Pyrenees with some 7,000 guerrillas in October 1944, with the hopes of prompting the Allies to liberate Spain from Franco as they had done France from the Nazis, as well as a general uprising against Franco throughout Spain. Ultimately, though, the attempt failed as such a reaction failed to occur in the hopes of the Republican government in exile, and the maquis were pushed out of the valley by the Spanish Army and Guardia Civil. \n\nEdit: formatting, cleared up wording", "created_utc": 1386051185, "distinguished": null, "id": "cdscku3", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rygz8/was_there_ever_any_consideration_at_the_end_of/cdscku3/", "score": 21 } ]

[ { "body": "You may be interested in [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gm7pr7/why_was_it_official_us_policy_not_to_use_the_word/) regarding how American soldiers might have viewed the various prisoners in the camps. This doesn't answer many of your questions, but it might provide a base of understanding for future answers provided by others.", "created_utc": 1618939740, "distinguished": null, "id": "gv83zku", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/muvaol/how_did_american_soldiers_treat_the_jewish/gv83zku/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "Many countries did actually declare neutrality during WWII but several of them were not allowed to preserve that status and were occupied. In particular, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia all declared their neutrality but were occupied by both German and Russian forces on several occasions throughout the war.\n\nBy contrast, Switzerland aggressively defended its border and remained neutral throughout the war although it famously still offered banking services to the Nazis and continued to trade with them.\n\nSo neutral status was a combination of desire to remain out of the war and the ability to do so. Countries in non-strategic locations like Ireland and Chile were able to do so simply because they chose not to enter the war (although Ireland was bombed several times ostensibly by German accident) while countries like Portugal, Switzerland and Sweden were aggressive in maintaining their neutrality as they were in close proximity to territory held by the Nazis.\n\nAdditionally, many nations (chief amongst them the USA) were initially neutral and only entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbour. These nations included almost all of Central & Southern America.\n\nAlso, nations like Czechoslovakia, Austria, Greece, Poland and ~~France~~, China and the Phillipines were given no choice in neutrality as they were invaded or annexed very early on in the war. Those actions by Germany, Italy and Japan forced more nations into the war as they each attempted to extend their own spheres of control.\n\nTo summarise, nations needed both the desire and the ability to maintain neutrality. That combination was quite rare and therefore WWII expanded to include virtually every nation on the planet.\n\nEDIT: My mistake, France did actually declare war on Germany prior to being invaded.", "created_utc": 1523512557, "distinguished": null, "id": "dx8a15r", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/8bn9dj/given_the_horrors_experienced_in_world_war_i_and/dx8a15r/", "score": 82 } ]

[ { "body": "Music was a vitally important element to keeping up morale on both sides during the Second World War – so much so that some songs – *Lili Marlene* is the best known example – were popular, and sung, on both sides of the lines. For the Nazis, however, music did pose a particular problem; by far the most popular varieties were the different forms of dance music, whose forms and rhythms not only ran counter to what Goebbels and his propaganda teams considered to be 'true Aryan musicality,' but whose most exceptional performers were often black or Jewish musicians who, Nazi race theory suggested, ought to be excluded from the airwaves.\n\nGoebbels understood that his ministry needed to do more than merely hammer home the messages of Hitler’s ideology. He needed to engage—with an increasingly war-weary German public, and with the Allied servicemen whose morale he sought to undermine. This clear-eyed determination to deal with reality, not fantasy, led him to some curious accommodations, and from that perspective I have a story for you that is several degrees stranger than the one you already have in mind, and which I'll adapt from an earlier essay of mine. It concerns Goebbels's attempts to harness the dangerous attractions of dance music to Hitler’s cause. It was an effort that led directly to the creation of that oxymoron in four-bar form: a Nazi-approved, state-sponsored hot jazz band known as Charlie and His Orchestra.\n\nBy the late 1930s, swing and jazz were by far the most popular music of the day, for dancing and for listening. But, originating as they did in the United States, with minimal contributions from Aryan musicians, the Nazis loathed them. The official party line was that these forms were e*ntartete musik* (“degenerate music”), and that their improvised breaks and pounding rhythms risked undermining German purity and discipline. In public speeches, the Nazis put it more harshly than that. Jazz, Goebbels insisted, was nothing but “jungle music.”\n\nThroughout the war years, it was German policy to suppress the music, or at least tame it. This resulted in some remarkable decrees, among them the clauses of a ban promulgated by a Nazi *gauleiter* in Bohemia that were recalled (we only have his word for it, but [faithfully, he assures us—“they had engraved themselves deeply on my mind”](http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/01/josef-skvorecky-on-the-nazis-control-freak-hatred-of-jazz/250837/)) by the Czech dissident Josef Skvorecky in the introduction to his novella *The Bass Saxophone.* They are worth quoting in full:\n\n>*1.* *Pieces in foxtrot rhythm (so-called swing) are not to exceed 20% of the repertoire of light orchestras and dance bands.* \n> \n>*2. In this so-called jazz type repertoire, preference is to be given to compositions in a major key and to lyrics expressing joy in life rather than Jewishly gloomy lyrics* \n> \n>*3. As to tempo, preference is also to be given to brisk compositions over slow ones (so-called blues); however, the pace must not exceed a certain degree of allegro, commensurate with the Aryan sense of discipline and moderation. On no account will Negroid excesses in tempo (so-called hot jazz) or in solo performances (so-called breaks) be tolerated* \n> \n>*4. So-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10% syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs)* \n> \n>*5. Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit (so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc.) as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl (so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.)* \n> \n>*6. Also prohibited are so-called drum breaks longer than half a bar in four-quarter beat (except in stylized military marches)* \n> \n>*7. The double bass must be played solely with the bow in so-called jazz compositions* \n> \n>*8. Plucking of the strings is prohibited, since it is damaging to the instrument and detrimental to Aryan musicality; if a so-called pizzicato effect is absolutely desirable for the character of the composition, strict care must be taken lest the string be allowed to patter on the sordine, which is henceforth forbidden* \n> \n>*9. Musicians are likewise forbidden to make vocal improvisations (so-called scat)* \n> \n>*10. All light orchestras and dance bands are advised to restrict the use of saxophones of all keys and to substitute for them the violin-cello, the viola or possibly a suitable folk instrument.*\n\nIt is possible to trace the Nazi’s fear of jazz and swing back at least as far as the [radical nightclubs of Weimar Germany](http://www.cabaret-berlin.com/) (setting for the musical *Cabaret*), which Goebbels described in his diary as “a Babylon of sin.” But the *Reichsminister* also recognized, Horst Bergmeier and Rainer Lotz note, that “National Socialism set to music was not what most listeners wanted when switching on their radio sets,” and as the war years bit into German morale and bombs rained down on German cities, he began to make compromises that would have been inconceivable before 1939.\n\nThere was still reluctance to allow real American swing and jazz to be heard on the home front; Dr. Fritz Pauli of German state radio sketched the criteria for a “model dance band” that would have seemed alien to Glen Miller: twelve violins, four violas, brass, bass, drums–and a zither. Goebbels went further; he ordained that jazz be banned from the airwaves altogether, and all radio dance programs be prefaced by “a neutral march or overture.”\n\nBehind the scenes, though, Hitler’s propaganda chief was hatching a plot: music deemed unsuitable for decent Germans was to be harnessed to help drive the Nazi war effort. Here Goebbels’s catspaw was a jazz fanatic named Lutz “Stumpie” Templin, a fine tenor saxophonist who had led one of the best German swing bands before the war.\n\nTemplin was an equivocal character; no Nazi himself, he had nonetheless taken full advantage of the opportunities that opened under Hitler’s regime. As early as 1935, what would become the nucleus of the Lutz Templin Orchestra ousted its Jewish leader, James Kok, in order to secure a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon. By the autumn of 1939, Templin’s reputation as a sax player and his links to the Nazis were strong enough for the Propaganda Ministry to turn to him when it took the decision to begin piping musical propaganda to British troops.\n\nLurking in the shadow of the new initiative were William Joyce, the notorious “[Lord Haw Haw](http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/hawhaw/),” an Irish-American employed by Goebbels to broadcast propaganda to Britain, and [Norman Baillie-Stewart](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4131696.stm), another fascist turncoat whose chief claim to fame was being the last Englishman to be imprisoned in the [Tower of London](http://www.hrp.org.uk/toweroflondon/). They provided ideas, and perhaps some lyrics, to a former civil servant named Karl Schwedler, the man hired to front the crack jazz musicians who made up Templin’s band.", "created_utc": 1590833948, "distinguished": null, "id": "fsam7wf", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/gt4p79/i_know_about_famous_allied_entertainers_during/fsam7wf/", "score": 19 } ]

[ { "body": "Before 1939, Swedish conscripts trained 240 days, including when called back as reservists for repeat training. Specialists, NCOs and junior officers trained for 365 days. Training was increased with the addition of extra reservist training and \"readiness service from 1939 to 1945\".\n\nBy 1945, a normal Swedish pirvate infantryman would have served 365 days of conscrioption, 60 days of reservist training and about 60-180 days of readiness service, some of which was spent training, building fortifications and partaking in large exercises and training manouvres.", "created_utc": 1378564192, "distinguished": null, "id": "cc3jyml", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lwo07/how_long_did_it_take_for_a_world_war_ii_soldier/cc3jyml/", "score": 242 }, { "body": "I have a follow up question: I've often heard that at the height of the battle of Britain some pilots were sent into dogfights after just 10 hours training, but when I Google it now I can't find any evidence to support that, is it true?", "created_utc": 1378566509, "distinguished": null, "id": "cc3khuw", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lwo07/how_long_did_it_take_for_a_world_war_ii_soldier/cc3khuw/", "score": 66 }, { "body": "Since no one has given this answer, how long for an American infantry? ( not sure how to make it more specific than that - so feel free to go in whatever direction you wish)", "created_utc": 1378585558, "distinguished": null, "id": "cc3q5ih", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1lwo07/how_long_did_it_take_for_a_world_war_ii_soldier/cc3q5ih/", "score": 23 } ]

[ { "body": "> is it realistic?\n\nNo. The Army, the Army Air Corps/Army Air Forces, and the Marines were quite thoroughly segregated. The Navy and Coast Guard were a little less segregated - African-Americans served on the same ships as other sailors. However, in the years shortly before the war, and early in the war, they only served as mess-men, in the Steward's Branch. It was absolutely not acceptable for white soldiers to serve under African-American NCOs or officers. It was not acceptable to the Army for African-American enlisted men to serve side-by-side, either. James Daugherty, African-American veteran of the 92nd Infantry Division, which saw heavy combat in Italy, noted that the division was short of replacements. He asked a fellow soldier why they couldn't get enough replacements. The answer: \"Look, bud, they don’t train colored soldiers to fight . . . they train them to load ships, and you don’t expect them to put white boys in a Negro outfit, do you? What do you think this is, a democracy or something?\" (J. H. Daugherty, *The Buffalo Saga*, Xlibris, 2009).\n\nIn a long tradition going back to the Civil War and WWI, most African-American soldiers and sailors worked in non-combat positions, especially in labour units. This wasn't done for the safety of the men - for example, the Port Chicago disaster of 17th July 1944, when 2,000 tons of ammunition exploded while being loaded onto a cargo ship at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in Port Chicago, California, was partly due to poor safety precautions in the interests of haste. The explosion killed over 300 workers and sailors, most of them African-American. The usual excuses for keeping African-Americans from combat were that African-Americans were, on average, worse educated and therefore harder to train, and the problems that maintaining segregation in combat conditions would cause (African-American combat units in WWI had fought under French command rather than alongside other American units for this last reason). During WWI (in 1917), Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi had openly stated other reasons: one was to teach the African-American \"that he is defending the flag, inflate his untutored soul with military airs, teach him that it is his duty to keep the emblem of the Nation flying triumphantly in the air, it is but a short step to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.\" Labour duties, serving as mess-men in the Navy, and orderlies and janitors cleaning latrines for white officers wouldn't give them \"wrong\" ideas. (Both WWI and WWII were followed by multiple cases of lynchings of black veterans in the South, to \"keep them in their place\".)\n\nIn the Navy, African-American mess-men could and did sail into harm's way. Perhaps the best known is Doris Miller, who was awarded a Navy Cross for his actions during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Miller was a cook third class on USS *West Virginia*, and fired an anti-aircraft machine-gun at the Japanese planes until he ran out of ammunition, and then helped rescue the wounded captain and other crew members under fire. He was killed in 1943, serving on the escort carrier USS *Liscome Bay* which was sunk during the Battle of Makin. His memory was honoured by the navy, with USS *Miller*, FF-1091, in service 1973-1991, named after him, and the future CVN-81 is scheduled to be named USS *Doris Miller*.\n\n> highest rank he could achieve in World War II?\n\nVery few reached high rank. Some of the African-American combat units in WWI had black NCOs and some company-grade officers (Second Lieutenant, First Lieutenant, Captain) and some white company-grade officers and all-white field-grade officers; these were the 366th Infantry Regiment and the 369th Infantry Regiment (the Harlem Hellfighters). Others had all-white officers. This meant that few African-Americans finished the war with high ranks, and inter-war advancement was limited. In 1935, there was only one black officer in the Army who was not a chaplain - this was Benjamin O. Davis Sr. In 1936, his son, Benjamin O. Davis Jr., became the second black non-chaplain officer. In 1941, there were under 4,000 African-Americans in the armed forces, and only 12 of them were officers.\n\nWith a head start over later recruits and conscripts, Benjamin O. Davis Sr. and Benjamin O. Davis Jr. finished the war as the two highest-ranking African-American servicemen. Benjamin O. Davis Sr. had joined the army in 1898, in response to the Spanish-American War. His unit was demobilised, and Davis was mustered out in March 1899. He re-enlisted in June in the 9th Cavalry Regiment, and reached the position of squadron sergeant major in 1900. He was ambitious, and aimed for a commission (perhaps inspired by his commander, Lieutenant Charles Young, the Army's only African-American officer at the time), achieving it in 1901. He served as a cavalry, as a military attache, many years as a professor of military science and tactics, and as a squadron (i.e., cavalry battalion) commander with the 9th Cavalry in the Philippines in 1917-1920, with the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel and permanent rank of captain. He became commander of the 369th Regiment in 1938, and was promoted to brigadier general in 1940. His son finished the war as a colonel (temporary), and commander of the 477th Bombardment Group, all-black, and training to be ready for combat at the end of August 1945 (the end of the war kept them from combat service). Prior to commanding the 477th, he had commanded the 332d Fighter Group, the famous Tuskegee Airmen. He reached the (permanent) rank of colonel in 1950, and Brigadier General in 1954. He retired in 1970 as a Lieutenant General (3 star general), and was promoted to General (4 star general) in 1988.\n\nOther black officers finished the war as company commanders. For example, Frederic E. Davison, who was commissioned as an ROTC Second lieutenant in 1939, became an active-service platoon commander in 1941, finishing the war as a captain and company commander. After the war, he became the 3rd African-American general (after Davis Sr. and Jr.) and the first African American United States Army Major General (Davis Jr. having reached Major General in the Air Force) and division commander (commanding the 199th Light Infantry Brigade in Vietnam).", "created_utc": 1613825310, "distinguished": null, "id": "go45ebb", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/lnoyp7/what_was_the_role_of_an_afroamerican_soldier_or/go45ebb/", "score": 7 } ]

[ { "body": "As you rightfully pointed out, people's religion is not written on their face. Despite the fact that Nazi propaganda relied heavily on physical attributes of Jewish people.\n\nThe areas in which such pogroms existed (so mostly axis occupied areas, though it seems Italians were not really enforcing such law despite several German requests) usually forced Jewish people to declare themselves by showing it: By law Jewish people had to wear a yellow david star woven on their clothes to be easily identified when on the street.\n[Example of Star](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.nLndLGMIgPnnqTBtGdcXxAHaIG%26pid%3DApi&f=1)\n\n\n[Example of people wearing the said star](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.cwu77lLcDqH5mzdJEeyKFAHaD2%26pid%3DApi&f=1)\n\nAside from this sign, the religion was written on the [ID card](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.rnGwCHymhSEGDP4G4VuCAgHaFj%26pid%3DApi&f=1) of each citizen. Carrying the ID was mandatory and failing to produce it upon request by a german soldier in France could earn you a few days in jail.\n\nFinally, word was getting out easily and denouncing was unfortunately common, whether it was true or not. In that case, (and if people were lucky) an inquiry was launched to figure out the religion of the person. If they were not Jewish, they must have been Christians and they should have been able to produce a baptism certificate. The forgery of such certificate was possible and often offered by priests opposed to the nazis. Several authors mentioned it in their autobiography. Joseph Joffo (Jewish French author) mentioned being saved this way in his autobiography: A bag of Marbles.\nA failure to produce such certificate without proper excuse would not play in your favor.\n\nBecause of the mention of the religion on the ID and the existence of records of people's religions during WWII, creating such records today in Europe is still a very hot and delicate topic. This is why you can easily find stats based on race and religion in the US but not in France or Germany (I'm not saying they don't exist, but they are note as common).\n\nEdit: I failed to mention it, but if Jewish people were to be caught, they would usually face dire consequences (jail until deportation). So eventhough many hid their religion and try or went under the radar, others were too afraid to do so.\n\nEdit II: misspellings and minor details added.", "created_utc": 1592994554, "distinguished": null, "id": "fvu7bl3", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/heu1vv/during_world_war_ii_how_could_people_tell_jews/fvu7bl3/", "score": 17 } ]

[ { "body": "Well I can add something small from family experience. My grandfather was a member of the [Army Reserve](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Reserve_\\(Ireland\\)#The_Emergency) during The Emergency as it was known in Ireland. I didn't know this until my grandmother's death when I found his reserve badge in what was his bedside table.\n\nGenerally Ireland (the republic) wanted to stay neutral, despite alleged and possibly misleading claims (from the Earl of Longford) that Churchill would unite Ireland if the republic joined the war ([here](http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1755&dat=19701101&id=0eUhAAAAIBAJ&sjid=TWYEAAAAIBAJ&pg=7154,40322) and [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland#cite_ref-21)).\n\nAs an Irishman I can imagine it would be very difficult for some Irish men at the time to fight along side the British in a war, considering the wounds from the [Black and Tans](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_Tans) and the war of [Irish Independence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_War_of_Independence) would have been very fresh. That being said [Irish men could fight in the British Army](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participants_in_World_War_II#Ireland) and many did ([history ireland](http://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/the-forgotten-volunteers-of-world-war-ii/)).\n\nThe government was a Fianna Fáil lead one by Éamon de Valera, who is seen as a mixed figure in Ireland, some people praising him standing up to Churchill in his [post war speech](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emergency_\\(Ireland\\)#The_Emergency_after_the_end_of_World_War_II) ([listen here](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isNOQ3zQ2F0))\nand his role in Irish Independence, while others were still bitter after the [Irish Civil war](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Civil_War) and blamed him for the death of [Michael Collins](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Collins_\\(Irish_leader\\)) who is seen as a national hero.\n\nThere were a few events which could have threatened Irish Neutraility such as [bombings of Dublin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dublin_in_World_War_II).\n\nNorthern Ireland was of course in a state of war as it is part of the UK, here's the [Belfast Cenotaph](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Remembrance_Belfast.jpg) remembering the dead from the two world wars.\n\nThere are claims that the IRA helped German bombers by turning on lights during blackouts to guide German bombers looking to bomb Belfast. From the sources provided it seems more likely that poor blackout discipline is to blame.\n\n[Harland and Wolff](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harland_and_Wolff) provided vital ship building of Aircraft Carriers and other ships. While [Short Brothers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Brothers#First_moves_to_Belfast) provided aircraft. Emergency services from the Republic were sent to Belfast in the aftermath of the [Belfast Blitz](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belfast_blitz) (also see [BBC](http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/yourplaceandmine/topics/war/belfastblitz//context.shtml)). It might seem a trivial loss in comparsion with others but my Great Grandfather's (other side of the family) Chip shop was destroyed during the Blitz, which was the only source of income for his large family.\n\nThe Germans did formulate a plan for the invasion of Ireland known as [Fall Grün](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Green_\\(Ireland\\)) which would have no doubt resulted in the British lead [Plan W](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_W), the counter invasion of Ireland. Also see [Plan Kathleen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Kathleen) ([BBC](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/3268463.stm))(perhaps named for [Kathleen Ni Houlihan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Ni_Houlihan), the spirit of Irish nationalism), an IRA sanctioned plan for invasion of Northern Ireland.\n\nEdit: sorry my grammar and punctuation is terrible\n\nMore Links:\n\nQUB: The IRA and Nazi Germany links: [1](http://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/frankryan/InterpretativeSources/Historicalcontext/TheIRAslinkswithNaziGermany/) [2](http://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/frankryan/InterpretativeSources/Historicalcontext/IrishRepublicanismandNaziGermany/)\n\nJust to be clear: I have friends in both communities (in NI) and parents from both sides of the border.", "created_utc": 1369321301, "distinguished": null, "id": "ca4h5ng", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ewj2w/what_was_going_on_in_ireland_during_world_war_ii/ca4h5ng/", "score": 313 }, { "body": "There are still a few grudges held because during the Belfast Blitz many in the South did not observe the lighting black out. German bombers just followed the lights from Dublin all the way up to the border and then on to Belfast where the worst Blitz outside of London occurred. In the following days Fire Fighters and other emergency aid was provided by the South to help repair the damage. There is a good write up on wikipedia about it:\n\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belfast_blitz", "created_utc": 1369327303, "distinguished": null, "id": "ca4je6f", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ewj2w/what_was_going_on_in_ireland_during_world_war_ii/ca4je6f/", "score": 25 }, { "body": "/u/Clarkyisafox has a good answer on this, but I thought I might add a little more! \n\nSouthern Ireland (what would become the Republic of Ireland, also known as Éire, also known as plain Ireland) was neutral during the war, something that then-Taoiseach de Valera was very adamant about. Traditionally, Ireland had been pretty ambivalent with respect to Britain's foreign engagements, so it's not like they were doing something terribly new here, but de Valera was invoking a very particular strategy in declaring neutrality. Remember, at this point Ireland was still part of the Commonwealth, and as such, Britain sort of *assumed* Ireland would go to war, just as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and the rest were going. So, when de Valera bucked the trend and declared neutrality, he was in effect declaring an independent foreign policy (which was a further continuation of his policy to get rid of the trappings of the commonwealth, anyways) and making a bid for Irish sovereignty.\n\nThe downside to this was immense pressure from the US and the UK to join the war. Northern Ireland, being part of the UK, obviously joined, and Churchill made comments to the effect of \"if you join the war, we'll give you Northern Ireland.\" This was an untenable solution for a lot of reasons (northern unionists would have had a fit), but the important thing is that de Valera picked neutrality and an independent policy *over* unity with Northern Ireland. \n\nHowever, even though the British got hurt feelings about Ireland's refusal to join the war (seriously, Churchill made some snarky comments), historian Trevor Salmon has noted that in reality Ireland was saying neutrality and doing \"non-belligerence\" - Ireland's security policy was very much tipped towards Britain (for example, you could join the British Army but were expressly forbidden from joining the German Army) but not symbolically, which was what got the British upset. (For example, in the interests of neutrality, de Valera offered condolences to the German minister in Dublin upon news of Hitler's death - that went over really well in London.) \n\nAs for Northern Ireland, they were bombed extensively in spring of 1941. Belfast industry made NI an attractive target for German bombing raids, but Northern Ireland did not have the same wartime/home front experience as either Great Britain or Éire. Leanne McCormick has a really interesting case study on American soldiers stationed in Derry - if you can get your hands on her book, *Regulating Sexuality,* you can read more about it. As for the government, Stormont basically floundered about for the first four years of the war, until Basil Brooke, who was vastly more competent, took power - either way, the British regarded them as more of a nuisance than anything else.\n\nI'm in the middle of making dinner, so I'm going to put a stop to this for now, but feel free to ask any more questions, and here are some books you can try reading:\n\n* *The Emergency 1939-1945*, Brian Girvin\n\n* *That Unnatural Island*, Claire Willis\n\n* *Northern Ireland in the Second World War*, Brian Barton\n\n\n", "created_utc": 1369329077, "distinguished": null, "id": "ca4k34e", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ewj2w/what_was_going_on_in_ireland_during_world_war_ii/ca4k34e/", "score": 52 } ]

[ { "body": "I wrote a thesis on policies with regard to minorities, which included times before II World War (unfortunately it's in Polish but if you know the language then I can send it to you). Germans were mistreated in multiple different voivodeships. They were blamed for the I World War and the years before the I World War when Poland did not exist. Their belonging were taken from them and they were stripped of many civil laws. I wish I had some sources in English but unfortunately all I have is in Polish. However, there were no need for propaganda because there was a widespread mistreatment of the German minority in Poland.\n\nEDIT I: I recommend reading about Polish voivode Michał Grażyński, who was in charge of the Silesian Voivodeship before the II World War and his policy was basically about mistreating Germans.\n\nEDIT II: Browarek Tomasz, Henryk Chałupczak Mniejszości narodowe w Polsce 1918-1995,\n\nWydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, Lublin 1998. This is the book which describes the Polish policies regarding minorities including the German minority. The part about the German minority before the II World War is written on the pages 274-277. Unfortunately the book is in Polish but I'm sure that there are references in other languages or maybe someone quoted this book in some paper written in English. I will upload a piece of my paper and it's translation later today and if someone is interested in reading my thesis on policies regarding minorities in USSR 1917-1956 and Poland 1918-1956 then please pm me but keep in mind that the paper is in Polish.", "created_utc": 1544984403, "distinguished": null, "id": "ebx8cxj", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/a6o8q8/were_ethnic_germans_in_poland_subject_to/ebx8cxj/", "score": 25 } ]

[ { "body": "More can always be said, but [this older answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/67fvaf/was_the_average_confederate_soldier_a_strong/dgq8tn2/) might be of interest for you.", "created_utc": 1684631217, "distinguished": null, "id": "jkz20jh", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/13nekn2/the_american_civil_war_was_about_slavery_but_why/jkz20jh/", "score": 734 } ]

[ { "body": "You might be interested in [this recent thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/uvg2fp/was_karl_marx_really_popular_amongst_cowboys/) by u/question-asker-4678, on almost precisely this topic!", "created_utc": 1680538430, "distinguished": null, "id": "jesv46s", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/12ahulu/karl_marx_published_the_first_volume_of_capital/jesv46s/", "score": 420 } ]

[ { "body": "*\"I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I had my choice, I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast.\"* \\- Attributed to Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, US\n\nThere's a lot out there on the role of newspapers in the American Civil War by some very eminently respected historians. I'll attempt to focus and distill down as much of that work as I can to what relates to your questions in particular.\n\nMore or less, with some exemptions of misinformation, both sides had decently accurate views of what was going on in the home front of the other. This was the era of the penny press, after all: cheap, easily produced newspapers for just about every village and town across North and South. Most major metropolitan areas had at least two papers - one affiliated with the Democratic Party, one affiliated with the Republican Party - but oftentimes had more: socialist newspapers, foreign-language newspapers, society papers, legislative newspapers in state or national capitals. This, of course, meant that there were roughly infinite ways that the news of anything could be interpreted by editorial staffs across the country. This massive growth in newspapers was supported by the Post Office, which allowed them to be shipped *en masse* at steeply discounted rates, and even extended the franking privilege to newspaper editors.^(1)\n\nFor an example of the sharply divergent newspaper coverage, I can draw on my own research regarding presentations of Southern secession in newspapers in Ohio's Western Reserve in the winter and spring of 1860-1861.\n\nThe Cleveland *Plain Dealer* was a Democratic-affiliated newspaper, but it fell in line behind the anti-Secession position of the U.S. Government, and criticized Southern secessionists. The Cleveland *Morning Leader* was a Republican-affiliated newspaper (and a radical one, at that) which harshly condemned the Southern secessionists, and - as early as May 4, 1861 - was saying that “The slave-accursed soil about Washington needs recuperating,” in reference to Virginia’s secession and the threatened secession of Maryland, and “This unnatural rebellion will be crushed, and that speedily. I want no compromise, no re-construction—nothing short of an unconditional begging for quarter, and an unconditional surrender of the guilty leaders to condign punishment, will ever satisfy me…. I wish the war to be pushed to the bitter end.” By contrast, the *Anti-Slavery Bugle* of Salem, Ohio, just a short distance from Cleveland by train, loudly and eagerly supported Southern secession as a means of \"purifying\" the Union of the sin of slavery: \"For fifteen years, we have advanced the glorious motto full of salvation to the North, ‘No Union with Slaveholders.’ And now, that those gigantic pirates and man-thieves have taken it into their heads to do, what the North (for a heaven-wide different reason,) long since ought to have done… he \\[the editor\\] is accused of inconsistency and murderous feelings are entertained against him because he don’t go it blind to force the bloody cut-throats back again!!\"^(2)\n\nSo it should be obvious that there would be a variety of ways to interpret the variety of newspaper coverage of any event. We do know, for a fact, that enemy newspapers often found their way to army headquarters, on both sides. Robert E. Lee was known to have relied upon Northern newspapers for the position of the Army of the Potomac during his march to Gettysburg in June of 1863 due to the lack of cavalry scouts; and Ulysses S. Grant used them both to gauge the strength of resistence among the Confederate citizenry during the 1864-1865 Siege of Richmond and Petersburg, and to figure out where Sherman and his army were during the March to the Sea's communications blackout.^(3)\n\nIt was among the easiest thing in the world to have cavalry scouts or pickets pick up local newspapers while on patrol: taking them from farmhouses or city stores, and carrying them back to their lines. Thus, newspapers formed an integral part of strategic planning both North and South. Letters from soldiers published in the local daily or weekly could tell an enemy commander where the opposing army was encamped, what morale was like, and where the march was heading. War correspondents printed the wild rumors flowing through camp, and - several times - the actual battle plans of the commanding generals. Both governments leaned on the press to suppress embarrassing news stories for fear of the opposing side learning of them. Foreign newspapers, such as the *Times* of London and *Le Temps* of Paris, were instrumental in shaping the foreign policy of both sides as they presented the conflict in ways which were unflattering for both sides, putting their diplomats on the offense or defense on alternating days, and back issues were sent to Washington or Richmond with irritated commentary from ambassadors in London or Paris scrawled in the margins.^(4)\n\nWith regards to correspondents on opposing sides, it cannot be ruled out with any certainty - but I, personally, have not seen much evidence to support such claims. I am aware that both Northern and Southern press tended to exaggerate the doldrums of morale and war fervor in the other. At one point, a Richmond newspaper (I cannot remember which one) claimed that a disgraced Union General (Hooker, I believe) had been *beheaded* for his failures on the Ellipse outside of the White House.\n\nSpies and informants on both sides were incredibly prevalent - and of huge importance to both governments. I, alas, do not know as much about the espionage side of the Civil War as I would like to: and so I hope that someone else can jump in with a more thorough answer regarding that for you than I can. But I do hope what I've got about the press is able to help answer your questions!\n\n1. Thomas C. Leonard, *News For All: America’s Coming of Age with the Press* (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 50-52; Richard John, *Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 41.\n2. “The Right Kind of Talk,” *The Cleveland Morning Leader*, May 4, 1861; “A Brief Retrospection,” *The Anti-Slavery Bugle* (Salem, OH), May 4, 1861.\n3. Allen C. Guelzo, *Robert E. Lee: A Life* (New York: Knopf, 2021), 296; Ron Chernow, *Grant* (New York: Penguin, 2017), 458.\n4. James G. Randall, \"The Newspaper Problem in its Bearing upon Military Secrecy during the Civil War.\" *American Historical Review* 23, no. 2 (January, 1918): 303-323; James McPherson, *Battle-Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era* (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 618; Maxine T. Hamilton, \"The London Times and the American Civil War.\" PhD Diss. (University of Leicester, 1988); Gary W. Gallagher, \"The American Civil War Through the Eyes of the French,\" History Net, February 16, 2023, [https://www.historynet.com/le-temps-newspaper-covering-american-civil-war/](https://www.historynet.com/le-temps-newspaper-covering-american-civil-war/).", "created_utc": 1685561103, "distinguished": null, "id": "jmdncee", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/13wtqnf/during_the_american_civil_war_how_aware_were_the/jmdncee/", "score": 32 } ]

[ { "body": "\nAlthough African-Americans made up 1/10 of Federal forces in the war, to say the least, they were not equally represented in the ranks of officers. The black regiments raised were commanded by white officers - some of whom were sympathetic abolitionists, but others who were quite racist and dismissive of the capabilities of the troops under their command, and had simply taken the position for quick advancement in rank and pay.\n\nThe only meaningful exception to this was the Louisiana Native Guards, which were not USCT units. Rather, they were a unit of a militia unit that was heavily composed of mixed race and people of color who inhabited New Orleans, and had enjoyed a far greater degree of prewar rights and privileges in the fairly unique racial milieau of the city. The unit had even been raised *under the Confederates* in a bid to assert their position in the city, but they had not been accepted into service as the law prohibited non-whites from the state militia. When the US retook the city, their services would be better appreciated and the units were reformed. Although white officers took up most of the field positions in the reformed units, black and mixed-race men made up the bulk of the officership, being most of the line officers.\n\nBut this was not appreciated by everyone! In January 1863, men of the 2nd LA Native Guards were assigned to occupy ship Island alongside the 13th Maine. The units were to consolidate as part of their station there... but this meant that *black officers* were now going to in positions that would sometimes place white men and even white officers as subordinate to them. The 13th Maine simply refused to consolidate and Col. Nathan W. Daniels, the Guards (white) commander literally had to order 13ths arrest and confinement to quarters - unarmed and guarded by the black soldiers - to avoid the likely outbreak of violence.\n\nThis incident, which occurred *right* as the Emancipation Proclamation was being signed and the raising of the USCT was beginning, basically assured that black officers *were not going to happen*. The (white) army leadership decided it would create too much potential for insubordination, if not outright violence, to repeat what happened on Ship Island. As a result, while it surely would have been the general pattern no matter what, it was very much reinforced that white officers were to be placed in command of black troops, with the African-American men themselves limited to NCO positions for their potential rise. This didn't mean that a *few* exceptions weren't at least contemplated.\n\nSo, in sum, there were black officers, but they were few and far between. The vast bulk of their number were made up of the members of the Louisiana Native Guards, which counted somewhere in the range of 75 or so black officers in their ranks all totaled. But their positions were rather precarious. Although accepted into Federal service in 1862, they had been fairly unique then, but the arrival of the USCTs also made them *anomalous*. Part of the process of folding them into the rest of the military structure meant putting their ranks up to examination boards, which unsurprisingly saw many stripped of their commission, and in not a few cases the white officers on the board taking over the very same positions as the line officers of the units became whiter and whiter. Although some, such as the aforementioned Daniels, tried to fight for his men, it didn't stop Butler. And in a number of cases the black officers who managed to avoid removal nevertheless resigned their commissions soon after in protest and solidarity.\n\nOutside of the LA Native Guards, Massachusetts experimented with black officers, commissioning six men, all of them non-commissioned officers who had stood out. This was done by the governor, but the War Department refused to recognize the promotion of the first candidate, 1st Sgt. Stephen Swails, for almost a year, until finally relenting and accepting him as a 2nd Lt in early 1865. The remaining five would soon follow, with three (including Swails) officers in the famed 54th Mass, and three more in the 55th (five more were nominated, but one would be discharged for injury before mustering, and three wouldn't be mustered until after the war ended). At least a small handful of black men attained officer ranks beyond them, such as Dr. Alexander T. Augusta who was a military surgeon made a Major (and whose promotion made all of the white doctors in his post quite upset), or the Independent Battery, U.S. Colored Light Artillery which had the unique distinction of all three officers being black, making it the only Federal unit *entirely led by African-Americans in the war. It is also possible, although not well established, that some of the officers of the Native Guard went on to keep their officership in *white* units, although this was because of their light complexion allowing them to pass. It isn't clear how well substantiated, let alone how many, this was true for. \n\nIn total, just over 100 black men would hold commissions during the American Civil War, with nearly ¾ of them having gained their rank as officers in the Louisiana Native Guards. The next largest contingent would be the Massachusetts regiments, and the remainder were essentially a random scattering of men. The best final accounting would place 76 across the three Louisiana Regiments (The 1st, 2nd, 3rd Louisiana Native Guard, later redesignated the 73rd, 74th, 75th USCT), nine in the 54th and 55th Mass. (this is counting the three men who were mustered after the war ended), 2 in the 4th USCT, 2 in the 104th USCT, and 3 in the Independent Battery. 16 other black officers are known beyond them across various postings, *all* of them surgeons or chaplains, positions which of course did not include the chance of giving them *command* of men in battle.\n\n**Sources**\n\nBob Luke, *Soldiering for Freedom*\n\nJoseph T. Glatthaar, *Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers*\n\nDudley Cornish, *The Sable Arm*\n\nGabor Boritt, *Slavery, Resistance, Freedom*\n\nHoward Westwood, *Black Troops, White Commanders and Freedmen*\n\nWilliam A. Dobak, *Freedom by the Sword*\n\nEverett, Donald E. “Ben Butler and the Louisiana Native Guards, 1861-1862.” *The Journal of Southern History* 24, no. 2 (1958): 202–17. \n\nRoger D. Cunningham, \"Douglas’s Battery at Fort Leavenworth\". *Kansas History* Winter, 2000. 201-217", "created_utc": 1685758888, "distinguished": null, "id": "jmp0qf9", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/13yoqom/how_many_black_officers_were_there_in_the_union/jmp0qf9/", "score": 7 } ]

[ { "body": "> but in all of the artwork I’ve seen of the battles it seems like they’re all lined up? Both sides standing on each side of a field all in a line firing at eachother. That doesn’t seem very effective or like a good strategy. \n\nIt may surprise you to hear that forming up in a line is one of the most effective ways of waging warfare when one considers firearm technology of the time. I commend to your attention [the appropriate section of the FAQ](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/militaryhistory/earlymodernwar), specifically the headers 'Why did European armies use Linear Tactics?' and 'Mechanics of Linear Tactics'.\n\nAdding onto that section, a few more posts:\n\n* u/StoryWonker has [an overview of the relevant factors](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5br9pc/military_warfare_of_the_18th_century/);\n* u/dandan_noodles looks at [the dimensions of combat](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9xgmlt/firing_lines/);\n* and on [the degree of risk and likelihood of lethality](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/abbhq4/back_in_the_days_of_napoleon_when_men_fought_in/);\n* and in conjunction with u/PartyMoses, [the relative risks of being in formation](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c473hy/why_would_anyone_stand_in_the_front_row_of_a/);\n* PartyMoses also covers [the dimensions of combat](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a5kobk/why_did_people_in_the_civil_war_just_line_up_in/ebqbq3u/);\n* also [how the fighting *should* go, according to one contemporary theory](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7yty7q/how_did_napoleonic_era_soldiers_stay_calm_under/);\n* and on [a common idea, why the troops don't duck/get down/lie down/similar](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/o6zfwj/how_obvious_and_wellcoordinated_were_volleys_of/).", "created_utc": 1684920402, "distinguished": null, "id": "jleky4b", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/13qa25k/how_were_battles_in_the_american_civil_war_fought/jleky4b/", "score": 6 }, { "body": "The links by /u/DanKensington will give you some good reading, but I also have another answer that specifically addresses your question, talking about both grand strategy and tactical choices made during the Battle of Fredericksburg. Posted from the [previous answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/o9xk3r/as_an_infantry_commander_throughout_the_civil_war/h3ft8cs/).\n_____\nFrederick Lyman Hitchcock and his regiment were involved intimately in the debacle at Fredericksburg, where his men were left out in the open from artillery and small-arms fire from Marye's Heights. This, at first, seems like one of the classically foolish decisions of the Civil War, men marching elbow to elbow into range of rifle fire and standing to get shot to pieces. It was certainly true of Hitchcock's regiment, though they did, once their advance was stalled, lie down and take what cover they could. But if we pull back out perspective just a bit, we can see that the 132nd was one part of a very large machine, and each piece was to play a role in what was intended to be a decisive defeat of the Confederacy. Hitchcock explains the strategy as he understood it:\n\n> The plan of battle was to hold Lee's army at Fredericksburg by a “ feint in force” (which means an attack sufficiently strong to deceive the enemy into the belief that it is the real or main attack) at that point, whilst the left grand division was to throw a pontoon bridge across the river three miles below and turn his flank ( i.e., get behind them ) in the rear of Marye's Heights. For this purpose the left grand division was to advance and attack vigorously. If successful, Lee would then have been between Franklin's forces on the left and our own on the right, with every possibility of being crushed. Hooker was to hold his division in readiness to support either wing. Had this plan been carried out, our work at the right would, at its conception , have been as it appeared to be, a mad sacrifice of men, but with an opportunity later on of pushing forward and reaping a victory. In that event, our position would have made us a tremendous factor in the result.\n\nHowever, this didn't work for a variety of reasons, leaving Hitchcock's - as well as many other regiments - exposed on open ground before a formidable rebel defensive position. The results were appalling:\n\n> REACHING the place in the rear of that railroad embankment, where I had left the brigade, I found it had just gone forward in line of battle, and a staff officer directed me to bring the rest of the regiment forward under fire, which I did, fortunately getting them into their proper position. The line was lying prone upon the ground in that open field and trying to maintain a fire against the rebel infantry not more than one hundred and fifty yards in our front behind that stone wall. We were now exposed to the fire of their three lines of infantry, having no shelter whatever. It was like standing upon a raised platform to be shot down by those sheltered behind it. Had we been ordered to fix bayonets and charge those heights we could have understood the movement, though that would have been an impossible undertaking, defended as they were. But to be sent close up to those lines to maintain a firing-line without any intrenchments or other shelter, if that was its purpose, was simply to invite wholesale slaughter without the least compensation.\n\nEven understanding that his regiment's action was part of a larger strategy, Hitchcock was frustrated with this position, and wants to do nothing else than lead a reckless, doomed bayonet charge. In part this is because the strategy itself did not work, but because so much rested on fixing rebel attention on the American right, more men were fed into the advance to make it appear as if all Union hopes rested on that assault. Still, we can see that men and officers both threw themselves to the ground and found cover, if they could, though its efficacy was doubtful.\n\nThis is not a simple ignorant advance because commanders didn't know any better, it was a deliberate military demonstration, meant to pin down the enemy's attention to allow a rapid surprise advance onto the flanks. It didn't work, but its intention complicates our picture of the military doctrine of the Civil War.\n\nI quote Hitchcock not as any particularly great authority, in fact he was not a military man prior to the war and during his time at Antietam he was the regiment's adjutant, who had, essentially, a bureaucratic role, not a tactical or strategic one. But his casual insights into military strength and weakness, his ability to make sense of a grand strategy and his own regiment's role within it, reflect a much more complicated picture of tactics in the American Civil War than many modern armchair historians might warrant. The reality was that many soldiers and officers, from privates all the way up to major generals, looked for ways to innovate, looked for ways to surprise and confound the enemy, and to save lives in doing so. At a strategic level, few operations were unsupported by overlapping networks of feints, false reports, distractions and deceptions meant to obscure the true intention of the army - the operation that eventually captured Vicksburg was supported by three different deep cavalry raids and a feint with a division of infantry to convince the Confederates that Grant's forces were simply going to repeat an earlier, failed, attack on Vicksburg. The confusion and misdirection sown by the raids and the fixing force played an enormous role in letting Grant's men land in a much better tactical position relative to the town without resistance.\n\nThere were, obviously, times when a simple linear advance walked into enemy range and took fire, but most of the time this was meant to be a very small part of a large action. Sometimes a regiment or company was designated, by the hideous calculous of war, to take the brunt of enemy fire to allow another regiment to advance a little farther. A common infantry assault tactic was the \"advance in echelon\", in which the left or rightmost element of a line would advance forty or fifty paces ahead, drawing the first volley of the enemy and allowing the troops to their side to advance against fewer enemy men with loaded muskets on down the line. It was a sound tactic, and especially if supported by artillery or with cavalry working away at the flanks it could be very effective.\n\nThe tl;dr to this is that officers and soldiers in the Civil War were not stupid or ignorant. Many, even as civilians and members of their local militias, had made studying military strategy and tactics a vocation, and had a great deal of theoretical grounding even as the war started. Others, like Hitchcock, continued this education by reading and learning on the job throughout the war. They took this role very seriously, and even though the war as a whole was waged by far more enthusiastic amateurs than professionals, the tactics and strategies employed were theoretically complex and difficult to pull off, but many of them succeeded all the same.\n\nIn answer to your final question, would you harm your reputation by trying to save lives? Only if you failed in your role within the larger strategy by attempting to do so. Sometimes you would be forced to be that first regiment in echelon, to lead the fixing force. And if you balked, withdrew, or botched your advance in the vain hope of saving lives you would be blamed and castigated, for sure. Not for saving lives, but for dooming a complicated strategy, in which you played a small role.\n\n_____\n\nHitchcock's entertaining memoir is called War From the Inside and is good reading if you're interested in the period.", "created_utc": 1684931509, "distinguished": null, "id": "jlf258l", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/13qa25k/how_were_battles_in_the_american_civil_war_fought/jlf258l/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "The short answer is that Marx was opposed to slavery and was supportive of the North due to this, especially as emancipation did become an end goal of the war for the North.\n\nThere are multiple negative references to slavery as a exploitative system in Marx's work and even that in the US that \"the workingmen [...] allowed slavery to defile their own republic\". Perhaps of specific note for your question are these comments in a 1861 letter to his writing partner Friedrich Engels\n\n>In my view, the most momentous thing happening in the world today is, on the one hand, the movement among the slaves in America, started by the death of [John] Brown, and the movement among the slaves in Russia, on the other … I have just seen in the Tribune that there was a new slave uprising in Missouri, naturally suppressed. But the signal has now been given. ^^^4\n\nMarx actually wrote about the American Civil War so we can focus on what we know he actually said based on newspaper articles he wrote at the time. In these articles he is writing in the context of arguing against other views being put forward on the war at the time but they are quite clearly laying out his views.\n\nDespite being generally supportive of ending slavery and the North Marx did not see the war as a war started and waged for abolitionist ends to begin with. He argued it was a war between a pro-slavery South, which saw the basis for establishing slavery in the border states and preserving it in the South from within the Union disappearing, and a pro-union North that was less concerened with ending slavery than preserving the union.\n\n**What did Marx think the war was about?**\n\nMarx argued that the South had to fight the war because without \"conquest\" it would lose it's capacity to continue on the same economic basis and therefore defeat the point of secession. While the North had to fight because to cede peacefully to theSouth would surrender too much important territory, and even that the loss of some areas could create a knock-on effect toward succession, for example that the loss of the mouth of the Mississippi would create economic pressure on Missiori and Ohio to join the South. Marx even speculated that outside of the New England area there could be a snowball effect which would lead a South, that had been allowed to peacefully secede, to become the dominant power in the area that would have once been united under the United States (unclear exactly what he thinks would have happened with slavery in that scenario).\n\nAccording to Marx the South's economy was\n\n>export articles, cotton, tobacco, sugar, etc., carried on by slaves, ^^^4\n\nand so was only profitable as long as\n\n>it is conducted with large gangs of slaves, on a mass scale and on wide expanses of a naturally fertile soil, which requires only simple labor. Intensive cultivation, which depends less on fertility of the soil than on investment of capital, intelligence and energy of labor, is contrary to the nature of slavery ^^^4\n\nMarx catergorically states his opinion on what the war was about here. As mentioned he does not see it as an abolitionist war, in that sense agreeing with some of the English voices arguing against supporting the North. But he goes on to make it clear that he thinks the South absolutely is fighting the war to preserve and expand slavery. And I feel it's clear he has a favourable view of the North in comparison to the South because of this\n\n>The war has not been undertaken with a view to put down Slavery, and the United States authorities themselves have taken the greatest pains to protest against any such idea. But then, it ought to be remembered that it was not the North, but the South, which undertook this war; the former acting only on the defense. If it be true that the North, after long hesitations, and an exhibition of forbearance unknown in the annals of European history, drew at last the sword, not for crushing Slavery, but for saving the Union, the South, on its part, inaugurated the war by loudly proclaiming “the peculiar institution” as the only and main end of the rebellion. It confessed to fight for the liberty of enslaving other people, a liberty which, despite the Northern protests, it asserted to be put in danger by the victory of the Republican party and the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidential chair. The Confederate Congress boasted that its new-fangled constitution, as distinguished from the Constitution of the Washingtons, Jeffersons, and Adams’s, had recognized for the first time Slavery as a thing good in itself, a bulwark of civilization, and a divine institution. If the North professed to fight but for the Union, the South gloried in rebellion for the supremacy of Slavery. ^^^2\n\nElsewhere in the same article Marx says that the South's attitude to Missouri and Kentucky also show it cannot be just about state rights, otherwise the South would be protecting the rights of states to remain in the Union as readily as their right to secede.\n\n**Class struggle and class.**\n\nAs for whether this mean he saw it as class struggle? Well from a Marxist point of view all society is the history of class struggles, so yes. The Marxist theory of history involves the idea that economic realities for a base that the superstructure of society is built on, conflicts between the interests of these classes are at the root of conflict and progress. In terms of what that means applied to the American Civil War Marx pretty much sums it up here\n\n>The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other. ^^^2\n\nNote that \"free labour\" here is best understood in Marxist theory as a description in a specifically Marxist context, not necessairly as praise for the system. In *Das Kapital* (first published 1867) Marx describes the free labourer as\n\n>Free labourers, in the double sense that neither they themselves form part and parcel of the means of production, as in the case of slaves, bondsmen, &c., nor do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of peasant-proprietors; they are, therefore, free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own. [...] As soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a continually extending scale. The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage labourers. \" ^^^3\n\nSo when Marx says it was a struggle between free labour and slavery, it can be understood as similar to saying a struggle between developing capitalism and an archaic economic system. However, as discussed, that did not mean the defeat of the South did not break slave owner power in the US.\n\nWe can see that not only did he disagree with arguments against the North but had quite a strong negative view of the entire approach to the debate. After essentially accusing several English publications of playing dumb about slavery he also notes that\n\n>the staple of argument on the part of the anti-Northern papers is very scanty, and throughout all of them we find almost the same sentences recurring, like the formulas of a mathematical series, at certain intervals, with very little art of variation or combination. ^^^1 \n\n1/2", "created_utc": 1675112052, "distinguished": null, "id": "j6jsk2o", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/10p2vzb/what_did_karl_marx_think_of_the_american_civil_war/j6jsk2o/", "score": 561 }, { "body": "Marx seems to have been fairly convinced of the Civil War's importance from its beginning -- writing to Engels in support of John Brown's rebellion in a letter of January 1861 (\"In my opinion, the biggest things that are happening in the world today are... the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown\" -- his other pick, for reference, was the action of Russian serfs)^1.\n\nAs for the war itself, our most telling early source is his 11th October 1861 article in the *New York Tribune*. In Marx's view, he sees the Civil War as being purely one of Southern aggression against the North:\n> \"It ought to be remembered that it was not the North, but the South, which undertook this war; the former acting only on the defense... the North, after long hesitations, and an exhibition of forbearance unknown in the annals of European history, drew at last the sword...\"^2\n\nThe more pressing concern for Marx, who saw South-as-aggressor as self-evident, was in speaking against much public opinion in the British establishment of the time. Britain was keen to maintain trade with the Confederacy (evidenced later in the war by British blockade-runners attempting to sneak past the anaconda). British opinion at the time was anti-slavery, in line with the British Empire's policy, but at the same time its economic interests were high priority. Marx spends much of his 11th October article railing against London papers -- particularly the *Economist* and *Examiner* for being \"anti-Northern\" as he puts it.\n\nMarx was firm in his belief that the war was primarily one of slavery versus anti-slavery, and spoke out against perceived Confederate bias in the British press.\n\nAs a side-note, Marx's views are not necessarily representative of left-wing British thought on the subject. Famously, the left-wing newspaper *The Manchester Guardian* argued against the Union embargo, saying that its continuation was causing destitution and starvation amongst the now-redundant working class of Northern England's cloth mills; 60% of the labour force of Greater Manchester's mills had been made redundant because of the lack of Southern primary goods^3. That said, a strong labour front within Manchester did meet at the Free Trade Hall in 1862, pledging support to Lincoln against the institution of slavery. \n\nLiverpool's dockhands and workers, who relied on the South for its economy (importing up to three-quarters of all Dixie's cotton in 1860), were both very left-wing and very supportive of the Confederacy -- \"it was said that there were more Confederate flags flying along the banks of the Mersey than in Virginia\"^4.\n\nOn a more \"intellectual left\" side, the European focus on \"wage slavery\" made an impact on the debate on this side of the Atlantic. This is perhaps most evident in William Thomson, a Scottish weaver who travelled the US and Canada during the 1840s to see the state of labour on both sides of the Atlantic and bring home fresh ideas for helping the working men of his own country^5. While he discussed the reality of slavery, including its harshness -- he mentions the execution of one slave for murder, where the slaves of his plantation and all neighbouring farms and plantations were called out to witness (and indeed assist) -- he praised the elements of the system which he saw as preferable to the \"wage slavery\" of Scotland at the time. He best summarises this thus:\n>\"Truth, then, compels me to say that the planters in general treat their slaves with great humanity. Would to God the aristocracy or the government of [Great Britain] would interest themselves half as much to improve the physical condition of the factory slave of England!\"\n\nThomson would go on to discuss his conversations with planters, and conclude that \"some of the more moderate and reasonable did not pretend to defend slavery... How are they to get clear of it? No practicable plan has been proposed to them.\" For Thomson and those in his vein of left-wing thought, the benefits of having homes, food and medical care provided to slaves did a lot to mitigate the institution in their eyes^6. To what extent the \"wage slavery is worse than chattel slavery in some ways\" argument held sway in popular sentiment amongst Liverpool's trade unions is debatable -- it seems more likely to have been in response to worsening local living conditions -- but it's worth knowing that a strand of British leftism was much more positive about the South than Marx.\n\n**In short** Marx was engaged with London establishment debates around the Civil War, and dedicated to pushing the idea of Southern aggression as the dominant narrative of the war. Some work has claimed that he and Engels saw this as a class-revolution-by-proxy^7; this is somewhat supported by evidence. **But** Marx's views were only one of many within left-wing British thought of the period, and placing him within that context of differing views probably offers more fertile ground for discussion than simply answering \"what did he say about this?\".\n\n\n___\nCitations: \n\n1. Marx and Engels, Collected Works (International Publishers, 1985); letter 4.\n\n2. Marx, \"The American Question in England\", *New York Tribune*, 11 October 1861\n\n3. *The Guardian*, \"Lincoln's Great Debt to Manchester\", 4 February 2013 (accessed here: https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2013/feb/04/lincoln-oscars-manchester-cotton-abraham)\n\n4. Ibid.\n\n5. The cited passages come from William Thomson, *A Tradesman's Travels, in the United States and Canada, in the Years 1840, 41 & 42* (Oliver & Boyd, 1842), pp 181-195\n\n6. For a further discussion of this, see the commentary notes in the \"Master and Man\" section of Willie Lee Rose's *A Documentary History of Slavery in North America* (2nd ed., University of Georgia Press, 1999).\n\n7. Donny Schraffenberger, \"Karl Marx and the American Civil War\", *International Socialist Review* #80 (2011)", "created_utc": 1675103601, "distinguished": null, "id": "j6j5shr", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/10p2vzb/what_did_karl_marx_think_of_the_american_civil_war/j6j5shr/", "score": 1685 } ]

[ { "body": "More can always be said, but [this older answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aku0d2/im_the_wife_of_a_slaveowner_in_the_southern_us_in/ef83adh?context=9) might be of interest for you.", "created_utc": 1685105595, "distinguished": null, "id": "jlozbmp", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/13s8kdk/prior_to_the_american_civil_war_did_any_slave/jlozbmp/", "score": 4 } ]

[ { "body": "First, it has to be said that by 1861 firearms technology had greatly advanced. Artillery was more effective, and the Miné bullet doubled the range and the lethality of muskets of just a few decades before. But medicine had not changed too much. Yes, anesthesia had made the prospect of surgery less frightening, but doctors who believed in antisepsis were few, and surgical techniques were not up to repairing the damage that was being done by the new weapons. Benedict Arnold was shot in a leg in 1777, and still managed to keep the leg. In 1861, there would have been no choice but amputation. The pharmacopeia was still very meager. This was also before Louis Pasteur's work and certain knowledge about the role of bacteria and germs in disease. Infections like dysentery and typhoid killed around twice the number of soldiers that died from wounds. \n\nHowever, there was definitely a greater chance for a Union soldier to be patched up on or near the front line, given a ride in an ambulance, assessed for treatment and treated. And the Union made the effort rather early. Major Jonathan Letterman, of the Army of the Potomac, implemented a system of evacuation and triage for Union wounded at Antietam that collected 17,000 from off the wide-ranging battlefield within 24 hours after the battle was over. After Antietam he would go further, implementing the Letterman Plan. A wounded solider would be taken to a field dressing station, and evaluated. If he needed further care, an ambulance would take him to a field hospital further behind the lines for surgery, and then he would be sent to another hospital for long-term recuperation. Letterman also removed quartermasters from authority over medical supplies and instituted reforms in the structure of military hospitals.\n\n Now, did all this always work? No: there were very often shortages of supplies and surgeons and staff. But in contrast, after Antietam was over and the Army of Virginia had withdrawn across the Potomac, the small town of Shepherdstown, in economic decline since around 1840, found itself not only turned into a hospital but its citizens turned into nurses. As Mary Bedinger Mitchell later recalled:\n\n>“A Federal soldier once said to me, ‘I was always sorry for your wounded; they never seemed to get any care.’ The remark was extreme, but there was too much justice in it. There was little mitigation of hardship to our unfortunate armies. We were fond of calling them Spartans, and they were but too truly called upon to endure a Spartan system of neglect and privation. They were always ill-fed and ill-cared for. It would have been possible, at this time, one would think, to send a courier back to inform the town and bespeak what comforts it could provide for the approaching wounded; but here they were, unannounced, on the brick pavements, and the first thing was to find roofs to cover them. Men ran for keys and opened the long empty shops and unused rooms; other people got brooms and stirred up the dust of ages; then armies of children began to appear with bundles of hay and straw, taken from anybody's stable. These were hastily disposed in heaps, and covered with blankets - the soldiers' own, or else one begged or borrowed from anywhere. On these improvised beds the sufferers were placed, and the next question was of the proper dressing of their wounds. No surgeons were to be seen. A few men, detailed as nurses, had come, but they were incompetent of course. Our women set bravely to work and washed away the blood, or stanched it as well as they could, where the jolting of the long, rough ride had disarranged the hasty binding done upon the battle-field. But what did they know of wounds beyond a cut finger, or a boil? Yet they bandaged and bathed, with a devotion that went far to make up for their inexperience.\n\n>Bedinger Mitchell, M. ( 1887). *A Woman’s Recollection of Antietam*. The Century, v. 32, July.\n\nLee had launched his Maryland campaign with little thought to his men, remarking to his staff officers that there would be green corn for them to eat in the fields on the way. He perhaps assumed that his soldiers would knock on doors and beg for food everywhere they could: and they did. In the same way, perhaps he thought that once his battered army was back in Virginia, the wounded could knock on doors and Virginia would find a way to take care of them.\n\nThere is , in Frederick MD, a National Museum of Civil War Medicine. Located conveniently between the Antietam and Gettysburg battlefields it's well worth a visit.\n\nhttps://www.civilwarmed.org/", "created_utc": 1682205465, "distinguished": null, "id": "jhbux41", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/12vagar/lets_say_i_am_a_wounded_soldier_in_the_american/jhbux41/", "score": 21 } ]

[ { "body": "I can answer your bonus question much more thoroughly, but the good news is that it lends a big answer to the main question. The single largest difference between the Union and Confederate armies and their European counterparts was just that, training and proficiency. This is not to say that the armies of the ACW were ineffective, far from it, but that your average green recruit in the ACW was introduced to the military as an institution in a very different manner. America had an incredibly small standing army before the onset of the war, with 16,367 men compared to the 236,000 in the British army. The antebellum standing army had only 10 infantry regiments, 5 cavalry (most of which were mounted infantry) and 4 artillery regiments. Once again, 10 regular infantry regiments compared to around 109 in the regular British army. This is hardly surprising, the British were maintaining a global empire while in the US we still had our hands full with (violently) expanding into and organizing the frontier territories. In fact, that was the primary goal of the standing army of the time, the vast majority of which were stationed in forts on the frontier, the rest were posted in forts along the Canadian border or Atlantic coast. These officers and enlisted men had gotten used to fighting small, independent engagements across vast stretches of empty territory, a far cry from what would come in the ACW. Not only was the standing army small, but it was as much an engineering firm as it was a military. The US Military Academy at West Point taught Napoleonic doctrine to be sure, but it was not particularly lauded for teaching strategy or tactics alike. The prestige of 19th century West Point came from instruction in engineering, and artillery. Engineering in particular was a massive focus of the antebellum army, Robert E. Lee himself would not only design buildings at Fort Monroe as a Lieutenant of engineers, but would be sent to help lay out the state line between Ohio and Michigan, oversaw engineering for the St. Louis harbor, mapped the Des Moines Rapids. So the training of US officers in many cases was undertaken with a mind towards civil developments as well as military ones.\n\nOf course, all of this would soon change with the outbreak of civil war, but it highlights the American *mentality* towards fighting a war as a whole. The long revered system of militia and volunteers was relied upon to produce soldiers should a major conflict break out. From the Revolution, to the War of 1812, to the Mexican-American war, all of these were predominantly fought by civilians who volunteered to take up arms at the start of the conflict, and returned to their civilian lives once it ended. This mirrored a longstanding practice among officers to resign after a war had ended to pursue a career in politics, law, banking, or other endeavors. Despite this, by 1861 the militia was widely seen as a joke throughout the US, and not without good reason. Musters of local militia had devolved into predominantly social or drinking clubs, with almost entirely ceremonial drill. The lack of an examination for Union and Confederate officers alike at the beginning of the war displays the common idea that the art of war was one that any man could pick up if he applied himself, much in the same vein as politics. Company commanders were almost entirely elected by the men in their company, and regimental officers often were too, if not politically appointed or given a commission on account of how many men they recruited to their respective cause. Discipline in general was lacking throughout the armies, and many men would simply refuse to follow an order if they didn't agree with it. What's more, many officers were keeping future political ambitions in mind when commanding their troops. The volunteer system meant that companies and regiments were recruited from largely the same geographical area. If you wanted to run for office some day, the men under your command would need to like you enough to vote for you. As such, many officers were hesitant to enforce standards of discipline themselves. These practices were despised by officers and soldiers of the regular army, but the Union and the Confederacy alike needed to build massive armies very quickly, and volunteers were the only way to do so.\n\nContrast this with the experience of a French private in the 1859 Franco-Austrian War. Half a century before, his army was master of Europe. By 1859, it had been gutted and stitched back together by Napoleon III, but the lineage of a large standing army remained. Rather than volunteering at the onset of a war, (which still happened to be sure, but on a much, much smaller scale than in the US,) he would most likely have volunteered for a long term of service during a period of peace. In that time, he would have been outfitted, had time to get to know and train with his regiment, and (ideally) establish an identity as a soldier before ever entering combat.\n\nA similar institution existed in Prussia. Prussia instituted an officer examination as early as 1837, mandatory for anyone holding a commission. They established regimental schools for officers and NCOs alike, as well as a host of various military schools and academies.", "created_utc": 1682366253, "distinguished": null, "id": "jhk8gyv", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/12hxh97/we_often_hear_and_read_that_the_european_powers/jhk8gyv/", "score": 15 } ]

[ { "body": "Honestly, we see a very complicated relationship between Darth Vader and the US civil war. We have to remember a few things. Darth Vader was a slave as a child, which gave him genuine abolitionist sympathies. But he was also Sith, putting him (theoretically) ideologically aligned with the concept of the necessity of slavery. Ironically, he was much more open to slavery in the industrialized north vs the agrarian south as he saw slave labor as a far more useful tool for industrial manufacturing. But altogether, slavery was not a large part of his motivations.\n\nLooking back to the war and the leadup. The Missouri Compromise and the debacle that was Bleeding Kansas really effected not only the American government and its people, but also Darth Vader. We only saw later in secret recordings how Darth Vader started the civil war. And I quote, \"This situation cannot continue. The deal continues to be altered. The nation is weak and divided. The fools will be ruinous. They know nothing of truth, or the Dark side, yet the dark side is all around us. My ultimate power will put an end to this, and it will be war, and it will be by my hand\".\n\nAs we can see, Darth Vader sensed the disunity of the USA. He felt the dark side seeping into the minds of Americans and was unwilling to allow any presence of the dark side that he could not control. So, he decided to unite the union through violence.\n\nThe southern elites at this time were pushing hard for slavery, but they were very 50/50 on secession and war. They didn't know if they could win and there were many who didn't want to see the dissolution of the union. This is where Vader stepped in. Through combination of threats, use of force, and mind tricks, he was able to push and nudge many confederate leaders towards the side of war. Vader knew that they had no chance, but it didn't matter to him. The death and violence of the war was its own rewards along with spiritual access to all the previously locked dark side energies.\n\nUltimately, Vader not only got what he wanted, but was fairly instrumental to the war. There's genuine argument as to how much mental pressure he placed on the Confederates. Some even claim that the war would have happened no matter what Vader did. It's hard to say, but for sure he at least sped up the timeline, and at most caused the breakout of the war outright.", "created_utc": 1680332857, "distinguished": null, "id": "jeieo67", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1285xnq/what_role_did_darth_vader_play_in_the_american/jeieo67/", "score": 17 }, { "body": "At the time of the American Civil War (which happens to coincide with what we have been able to infer from the written record of \"A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...\", see SW: EP IV - ANH, 1977), Darth Vader was yet a newly minted Sith Lord and had still not fully recovered from the death of his (illegitimate, btw) wife Padme and defeat at the hands of his erstwhile friend and mentor, the Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi (a rank that, for the record, Vader [himself failed to reach](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/037/253/vlcsnap-2021-05-16-23h34m10s989.jpg) during his time with the Jedi when he went by the name of Anakin Skywalker, see SW: EP III - ROS, 2005). Given his compromised mental state and constant physical pain, Vader was prone to emotional outbursts and unsound judgment, even for the likes of a Sith Lord.\n\nMany historians seem to have glossed over the fact that this state of affairs contributed greatly to Vader's ultimate decision to partake in the America Civil War of earth. As the Jedi had been largely defeated in his home galaxy, Vader sought out a new challenge to distract himself from his personal struggles but also to prove his prowess on the field of battle and his worth to Emperor Palpatine, to whom he had pledged allegiance. The feeble peoples of earth seemed like an easy target and would pose little, if any, resistance to the might of the Galactic Empire. As a show of ultimate arrogance that would characterize his folly, Vader chose to embark on this mission of conquest and glory alone, as he had a penchant for taking matters of great importance into his own hands (SW, like all of the OT and PT, 1977 - 2005) but also sought solace ([authentic archival video footage](https://youtu.be/6A0rwG39Jzk?t=321)) from the daily tedium of life aboard the Death Star.\n\nHaving grown up in slavery (SW: EPI - APM, 1999) and witnessing the death of his mother before she could be freed from the shackles of serfdom (SW: EPII - AOC, 2002), Vader felt a degree of sympathy with the abolitionist cause of the Union. However, he also felt a need to distance himself from what he sensed was a struggle of black slaves seeking redemption, as aligning himself with this kind of fight would run counter to his personal philosophy ([genuine archival footage](https://youtu.be/6A0rwG39Jzk?t=88)). However, aligning himself with the weak-minded, misguided Confederate side was out of the question, for although demonstrating a degree of villainy and a modicum of evil, they were ignorant of the true power of the Dark Side of the Force.\n\nTorn between this dilemma and unable to choose a side to align himself with, Darth Vader sensed that he had, perhaps, erred in coming to earth. This feeling was exacerbated when he felt not only his connection to the Force weakening due the lack of Midichlorians in the earth's natural atmosphere, but also that the gravitational forces on earth hindered the Kyber crystal in his lightsaber from functioning at full capacity. Deprived of his two powerful weapons, Vader found himself virtually defenseless on the battlefield and at the mercy of the primitive earth projectiles that we was unable to deflect. It was in this compromised and awkward position that he was discovered by two Union soldiers, cowering in a ditch in the outskirts of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863, fleeing the brutal melee that was taking place there. The two soldiers tried to take Vader prisoner, not able to make sense of his foreign sounding speech nor his bizarre attire and assuming him to be an enemy combatant. But Vader resisted capture and was able to utilise a Jedi technique, a mind trick, despite his weakened state, fully clouding the awareness and memory of the two human soldiers. Hence no records of Vader's sighting and encounter remain on earth.\n\nIt was only in this moment that Vader truly understood the gravity of his error and failure in judgment. He embarked to the secluded spot in the forest outside of Gettysburg to board his shuttle and leave earth once and for all and return to the Death Star. On his arrival, he was chastened by his master and instructed to meditate on this failure, cementing his status yet again as, ultimately, a loser. So to answer your question, Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith played little, if any role of note at all in the American Civil War. \n\n\\----\n\nSources: Star Wars Episode I - The Phantom Menace, 1999\n\nStar Wars Episode II - Attack of the Clones, 2002\n\nStar Wars Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, 2005\n\nStar Wars Episode IV - A New Hope, 1977\n\nVader Sessions (totally real archival footage)\n\nConversation with Jocasta Nu, Chief Jedi Librarian\n\nOriginal research, etc.", "created_utc": 1680362831, "distinguished": null, "id": "jejol9y", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/1285xnq/what_role_did_darth_vader_play_in_the_american/jejol9y/", "score": 5 } ]

[ { "body": "More can always be said, but [this older answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/o9ury1/how_did_the_american_civil_war_affect_arms/h3e2l55/) might be of interest for you. It isn't focused entirely on the *money* side, but does touch on it, particularly int he follow-ups regarding Cotton Bonds.", "created_utc": 1680645475, "distinguished": null, "id": "jez3cz6", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/12bvhln/how_did_the_south_manage_to_get_money_to_buy_arms/jez3cz6/", "score": 5 } ]

[ { "body": "More can always be said, but [this older answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/93i20p/what_were_the_reactions_of_latin_american_nations/e3dzhuq/) might be of interest for you, as well as [this one](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7dghwe/umattpiv_posted_this_question_in_rhistory_but_im/dpxu1ad/).", "created_utc": 1679964109, "distinguished": null, "id": "jdy0ruc", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/124336c/what_significance_did_the_american_civil_war_have/jdy0ruc/", "score": 3 } ]

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[ { "body": "There is already an [extensive \\(but largely uncited\\) answer from several years ago.\n](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2yucge/pikes_in_the_american_civil_war/)\nOn the other hand, I'd also read a long time ago, that in either Shiloh or Chickamauga, there were confederate troops armed with pikes (but they were reserved and did not see action, understandably). This doesn't seem outrageous to me given the precarious situation of the confederate industry & logistics during the war.\n\n[Here is an article](https://www.civilwararsenal.com/confederate-retractable-pikes/) about retractable \"Georgia Pikes\", manufactured in the confederacy, with a demonstration of them. At the behest of the governor of Georgia, Joseph Brown, 10,000 pikes were commissioned, which were \"about 6 or 7 feet long, with a clover-leaf shaped blade. They were meant to be paired with an 18 inch long knife\".", "created_utc": 1677441014, "distinguished": null, "id": "ja4gw7w", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/11bpsdj/does_anyone_have_information_about_the/ja4gw7w/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "As far back as the 17th century pistols were sometimes taught in conjunction with sword play (see *Ein new Kůnstliches Fechtbuch im Rappier*, [Michael Hundt 1611](https://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Michael_Hundt#/media/File:Hundt_100.jpg)).\n\nConsistently, pistols from the age of single shot are taught as an offhand weapon. This is for a few reasons.\n\n1. The sword is assumed to be the primary weapon: in these fencing schools, they are teaching swordplay not shooting, and thus the gun comes in as a supporting element to the swordplay.\n\n2. The guns have limited shots. As mentioned this occurs primarily in the age before revolvers and certainly before quick reloading. Each shot from the gun is going to be valuable and not to be wasted by trying to hit a distant target like being fired with a long arm.\n\n3. The plays are showing close actions. Building on point no. 2, the assumption is if you have perhaps only a single shot from an unrifled black powder gun, you will be using it at very close range where you expect the sword to come into play anyway.\n\n4. Handedness of weapons. While there at times were handedness of pistols, there certainly were handedness of swords. By the time you reach the 19th century many officer’s swords could only be effectively used by the “right hand” due to an asymmetrical guard. This is not universally true, but often the case.\n\nContemporary artwork consistently depicts pistols being used in the offhand, so that even after they have been discharged they can then be used either as a club or as a makeshift vambrace to ward off blows on the arm. While present on foot, it was also seen on horseback and known in the US as the “[cavalry draw](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalry_draw)”, where the holstering of the pistol allowed for cross drawing by the left hand.\n\nAn important point to note is that while this may seem like a less effective technique for attack (having the powerful “gun” in the off hand), the context for most of these officer actions was not of fighting an equal opponent, but rather of desperation and self preservation. In most cases the close combat weapon set was only at a time when pressed by a close enemy and so the defense is against an attacking foe with a larger long arm with bayonet fixed. The sword and pistol are designed to keep the officer alive, and in tern the officer then uses his biggest weapon which are the troops he is in command of, to defeat the nuisance enemy. \n\nOf note, the cross-draw seems to have persisted in American training as long as swords were still in service: ~WWII era.", "created_utc": 1675959487, "distinguished": null, "id": "j7uxa21", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/10qfi1m/did_officers_in_the_napoleonicamerican_civil_war/j7uxa21/", "score": 6 } ]

[ { "body": "This one is pretty simple in some ways, and complex in others.\n\nFirst, it's important to remember that the Napoleonic Wars were a continuation of the wars of Revolutionary France, and Europe was at war with or around France nearly continuously from 1792-1815. The US Civil War only lasted four years. Twenty-three years is a much longer time for armies to mature, professionalize, and take on peculiar organizational expressions that require specific uniforms. European armies already had longstanding traditional troop types and roles with uniform elements that were inspired by or borrowed from other countries and cultures. Essentially, the complicated uniforms and troop types were a legacy of a long history of wars and alliances in Europe that saw a great deal of crossover between countries, even when they had their own military legacies. It's important to note, though, that even by the start of the French Revolutionary Wars, many troop types were more ceremonial/cultural than they were a practically separate troop type with a unique role. Grenadiers seldom threw grenades by the end of the 18th century (though they retained a sense of prominence as \"shock troops\"), and the words for certain troop types sometimes denoted nothing more than a uniform peculiar to a role no longer served, if that makes sense.\n\nEssentially, the Napoleonic Wars were a much bigger, much longer series of conflicts waged by dozens of countries or principalities each with their own distinct - but culturally similar - uniform traditions.\n\nThe wars with France also included dozens of countries and colonies, where the US Civil War was a rebellion in a single country, and a big part of the political goals of the federal side were to *prevent* intervention from foreign governments. It was also a war waged by a country that deliberately limited its military; at the start of the war there were only around 16,000 soldiers in the *entire* army. That was before the secession, and a good chunk of those men defected to the rebels. All the rest who were recruited and uniformed and drilled came predominantly as civilian volunteers serving in volunteer regiments meant to serve their time in the war and disband. The *regular* US Army saw some modest expansion, but compared to the volunteer structure it was a drop in the proverbial bucket.\n\nThis means several things, in terms of uniforms. First, in the first couple of years in the war, there was a *huge* diversity of uniforms. Volunteer regiments had very vague requirements for uniformity, and the general thrust was, mostly, that each regiment had a uniform that need not be very similar to any other regiment. Hat choices, colors, decorative flourishes and other choices were wildly disparate, bouncing between your typical union soldier look in a dark blue sack coat and light blue trousers with a kepi, to something bright and flamboyant like [Zouave regiments](https://www.marinersmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/zouave.jpg).\n\nAs the war continued, though, the wartime production of the United States improved, and made quantities of wool suitable for the typical sack coat/trousers the most widely available and durable option. There weren't too many Zouave uniforms by 1864 - not necessarily because the bright colors were too visible or anything, just because uniforms wear out and need replacement, and it was a more reliable and cost-effective choice to use the relatively standard option instead of a more flamboyant one.\n\nThe other part of your question is about troop types and combat roles, and it's true that the US didn't really have grenadiers or hussars, but this is mostly because every regiment or brigade was expected to serve a variety of battlefield roles. A crack regiment might be used as shock troops - like grenadiers - and companies could be thrown forward as skirmishers - like voltigeurs - and one company might serve as skirmishers one day and shock troops the next. Cavalry might serve as scouts, they might screen and skirmish, they might pursue retreating enemy forces, or they might go on deep offensive raids, and their role could change day by day. Because of the voluntary nature of the US military superstructure, the kind of traditional roles and professional peculiarities of continental armies didn't really exist, or at least weren't maintained during times of peace. However, the *roles* served by those peculiar unit types - your chasseurs and hussars and grenadiers and lancers, et al. - were embodied by units at need. Almost all of the regiments and brigades that saw combat during the Civil War variously served all necessary roles of a modern military of the time, from storming fortifications to marching in parades and reviews. It was exactly because the United States lacked a military establishment large enough to carry over peculiar traditions - and because the US was famously stingy with its military budget - that meant that the volunteer organization had to serve those roles. It should be noted that, as the war continued and armies matured, the volunteer regiments served in those roles admirably.\n\nThe simplest answer is that the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France were *much* longer and fought by a larger number of independent political entities than the US Civil War, and European militaries were much more deeply connected to a longstanding military tradition thanks in part to neverending European conflicts that peppered the long 18th century.", "created_utc": 1675347818, "distinguished": null, "id": "j6x0blu", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/10rayc3/why_did_the_american_civil_war_have_so_much_less/j6x0blu/", "score": 15 } ]

[ { "body": "Not in a position to answer the main questions, but because it’s more clear-cut I have to mention that the middle part is misguided: the American Red Cross didn’t exist at all during the Civil War, so it benefited the Union wounded not at all. \n\nThe original Red Cross was founded until after the 1859 Battle or Solferino, when a witness to the battle, Jean-Henri Dunant, helped organise medical relief, and was inspired to campaign for a broader international effort to provide relief during war, culminating in an 1863 conference in Switzerland, and in 1864 the first international convention in Geneva to found the Red Cross - delegates from the U.S. attended, but didn’t ratify it, in part because their Civil War was going on. The American Red Cross was not founded until 1881 by Clara Barton, who had similarly been horrified by the carnage of the American Civil War. The U.S. ratified the Geneva Convention in 1882.", "created_utc": 1673415661, "distinguished": null, "id": "j3uws0f", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/108qvqa/what_were_the_prospects_of_an_american_civil_war/j3uws0f/", "score": 12 } ]

[ { "body": "#1/2\n\nOne of the aspects of the American Civil War that has been stated pretty forcefully in most of the historical literature is that, while both sides sought to destroy or capture each other's armies, the armies themselves were, in practical terms, indestructible. Even after monumental disasters like Fredericksburg, or intense maulings at Shiloh or Antietam, armies proved resilient, cohesive, and if not combat-effective, at least capable of maintaining a fortified camp. Both sides, at various times, intended to -or attempted to - pursue enemy armies, both in a tactical and strategic scale, and both sides used a variety of force compositions and tactics to do so. But \"pursuit\" was often much more of a theoretical thing than it was a practical one, and I think someone much more fiery than McClellan would still have had a difficult time pursuing the rebels after Antietam, for a variety of complicated reasons that have much more to do with the nature of battle in the Civil War than it did about force composition.\n\nI'm going to talk a bit about tactical pursuits first, in which smaller, more localized engagements involved pursuit of fleeing enemies and the capture or recapture of tactically important terrain features or fortifications, and then talk about some of the larger-scale pursuits, or attempted pursuits, to show how strategic pursuit was intensely difficult in the Civil War. To keep things relatively limited, I'm going to discuss this mostly in relation to the Battle of Gettysburg, but there are a great many examples throughout the war we could get into in follow-ups.\n\n**Tactical Pursuit**\n\n\"Pursuit\" was a term used very often by officers on both sides during the war. It was a central aspect of warfare at the time, and was a means by which information, prisoners, or localized advantages could be seized or secured. When an enemy force was in retreat, they were vulnerable. If your force had the means to pursue, you did so with as little hesitation as practicable. Pursuit meant taking a tactical advantage, asserting a tactical threat. The enemy has to turn and stand, because the alternative was to be chopped up from behind. If they had an obstacle in their path - a river or mountain or suchlike - you could trap them, surround them, and demand their surrender.\n\nSurrender was a key feature of the American Civil War. According to David Silkenat, \"the number of soldiers who surrendered during the Civil War is approximately equal to the number of soldiers killed.\" As many as one quarter of *all men* engaged in the Civil War surrendered at some point. Prisoner taking, the granting or refusal of parole, and the expectation of fair treatment by surrendered troops were all relatively formalized during the war, and surrender was so common that dozens or hundreds of men could be taken on the field all while battles waged for hours or days after their taking. If tactical pursuit had any goals over and above securing tactical advantage, taking prisoners was certainly among them.\n\nThe nature of these little pursuits was pretty simple. At some point during an engagement, one side or the other decided that it had had enough, couldn't hold their position or couldn't take the enemy's, and decided to withdraw. If the enemy was strong enough, fresh enough, or eager enough, and had officers who recognized the enemy's withdrawal, they would begin their own advance. While we might have visions of ferocious charges with fixed bayonets or saber-waving horsemen, the reality was often an orderly, organized advance. The idea at this stage was just to put pressure on the enemy, and force them to stand and fight in a weakened state, or compel them into a more disorderly retreat. This could be dangerous for the pursuers, because if you misjudged the enemy's state of cohesion, you could easily just be leading your men into a slaughter as they left a defensive position and marched out into the open. As such, the decision to pursue, or not, was a tough one, and experienced officers as often as not erred on the side of caution.\n\nJEB Stuart, not known for his caution, made the decision to hold off on the pursuit of federal cavalry withdrawing across the Potomac after the skirmish as Brandy Station in the prelude to Gettysburg, because the union cavalry was supported by federal infantry, and made pursuit a potentially costly decision. In another example, though, during the collapse of Pickett's Charge just days later, Pickett's straggling elements were swept up by \"clouds of blue-coated skirmishers\" who took dozens of prisoners in their counter-charge.\n\nExamples like this are all over the Battle of Gettysburg, and gives some insight into the nature and scale of these battles. While we call it *the battle* of Gettysburg, the conflict itself was an interlocked, overlapping series of localized fights for terrain strongpoints. Every portion of the battlefield had ebbs and flows, charges and counter-charges, captures and recaptures, and with it the requisite tactical pursuits.\n\nEven when your side had the advantage - it was the one doing the capturing, the chasing - this was hard work. A pursuit could be a leisurely stroll of armed, organized men into the midst of shattered, shell-shocked men and simply pointing them to the rear, or it could devolve into a chaos of individual fights with individual men. A pursuing force could easily lose its own cohesion, unless it was carefully judged and commanded, and a single-minded pursuit could be taken unawares by an unexpected counter-charge, as its own cohesion and organization could be easily diffused by over-excited men running off to their own ends.\n\nI'll describe one example at length, just to put this in better perspective. On the second day of battle, a rebel charge into the Wheatfield pressured the federal defenders to the extent that some whole regiments were ordered to withdraw without challenge. A federal sergeant in the regulars later wrote of the disbelief he felt when, instead of the expected order to charge, he was ordered to about face and withdraw, and he and his men were \"cut to pieces.\" A nearby regiment, also a regular, reported that they'd lost *half* of their men to shots in the back and captures without inflicting any damage on the enemy.\n\nThe regulars withdrew, if we're to believe them, in good order, contrary to the pell-mell chaos and disorder of the volunteers, while behind them the rebels pursued closely. But their pursuit and sense of overwhelming victory had damaged their own cohesion, and as federal troops rushed to their rear, a line of federal guns, the 1st Ohio Light, were charged with double canister and under steady leadership. Artillerists stood tall and waved their hats at the retreating friendlies, shouting at them to get down and take cover. The battery fired *through* the scatter of retreating federals and into the pursuing Georgians, checking their charge. Several federal survivors described their narrow escape, and one wonders how many weren't so lucky. Grim though it was, the 1st Ohio Light and other guns and stable troops did check the retreat, and prevented a general rout from the Wheatfield, but afterward, neither side was in much shape to charge or pursue. They were exhausted, bloodied, and disorganized, and needed time to reconstitute into a fighting force. Descriptions of men too tired to attempt a pursuit litter the literature of the Civil War, and mark nearly every battle, if not every engagement, of the war.\n\n**Strategic Pursuit**\n\nThis kind of engagement was a microcosm of the kinds of problems that whole regiments, brigades, and divisions had in attempting the pursuit of like segments of enemy armies. At this scale, pursuit could only be practicable with segments of the army which had been unengaged, or only very lightly engaged, during the earlier battle. Understrength and exhausted men would quickly tire out, and if they succeeded in catching up to the enemy would likely not present much of a threat in any case. *If* an army had reserves, and the enemy itself was in flight, terrain, logistics, and potential cost were all issues that had to be worked out.\n\nAfter Gettysburg, there was a serious discussion about how to follow up. That Lee's army was in retreat was clear, and that they had taken a brutal mauling was clear, but Meade's army was hardly in great shape, either. Both sides had committed nearly their entire force to the battle, and there were very few fresh forces for either side to throw into a pursuit or a rearguard action. Nevertheless, the Union high command considered a variety of approaches to try to turn this victory into something more meaningful. One plan considered sending a force to the crossing at Harper's Ferry to challenge the rebel crossing, which would pinch Lee between a blocking force and the main body of the Army of the Potomac. The plan was eventually scrapped, but it was considered.\n\nAs it was, the exhausted men of the federal army were pulled onto their feet and kept marching in the footsteps of the rebels. Meade reported to Lincoln at one point, four days after the battle, that the Eleventh Corps had marched 30 miles overnight and during the day. A soldier in the Iron Brigade wrote that \"the hurried pursuit of the enemy to this point has been by far the most trying campaign.... The men have become ragged and shoeless, thousands have marched for days barefooted over the flinty turnpikes.\" Porter Alexander, on the other side of the pursuit, wrote that \"nothing was more wearying,\" having to stop every few miles to clear an obstacle or to re-organize a force or to take a short break, or not.", "created_utc": 1672424755, "distinguished": null, "id": "j29wb8q", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/zytpkx/what_would_postbattle_pursuit_have_looked_like_in/j29wb8q/", "score": 51 } ]

[ { "body": "So, the unfortunate answer is we don't really have a good sense of it, at least not at the scholarship level. And there are a few reasons for this. Firstly, operational military history has not had as much interest from historians of China as it has for histories of warfare in other contexts. Secondly, the Chinese historiographical tradition is not as tactically detailed as the European. European historians until the last century or two came from a background in which the elite served both military and civil functions, whereas for much of Chinese history, warfare and the martial sphere were considered beneath the literati elite. That is not to say we do not have some degree of detailed operational history for large parts of Chinese military history, but the focus of our sources tends to be somewhat elsewhere. I am certain we *could* reconstruct the Taiping War in terms of operational and tactical history from the sources we have, but as it stands, nobody really has done yet. Arguably the closest we get is from Jen Yu-Wen, who gives a decent accounting of campaigns in *The Taiping Revolutionary Movement*, but he really doesn't cover *battles* in depth.\n\nUnfortunately, I may not be of much help here. For one I'm in grad school now and don't have the same level of time or energy to devote to writing something totally original as an answer on the sub these days, and for another there is a source issue here, as surviving Taiping sources are light on tactical detail compared to Qing sources, and while the former isn't too hard to muddle through, unfortunately my grasp of 19th century high-register clerical Chinese is something still being worked on, and I simply don't have the necessary time and energy to work through these sources at the moment. What I will do, however, is point you to a few English-language sources that may be of help in at least getting a partial sense of the 'face of battle' in the Taiping conflict.\n\n* Stephen R. Platt's *Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom* is a relatively 'big picture' account, but it does include a decent amount of campaign and battle detail, just not a lot.\n\n* Augustus Lindley's *Ti-Ping Tien-Kwoh* (1866) is both a history of the Taiping and a personal narrative, the latter of which encompasses a few field battles Lindley personally participated in on the Taiping side.\n\n* Andrew Wilson's *The Ever-Victorious Army* (1868) is a triumphalist account of the Ever-Victorious Army under Charles Gordon, one which must be read with a mountain of salt, but which as an operational history should be at least decent.\n\n* Prosper Giquel's *A Journal of the Chinese Civil War, 1864*, translated by Stephen Leibo in 1985, is about the Ever-Triumphant Army, officially the Franco-Chinese Corps of Zhejiang, which was the French equivalent of the Ever-Victorious Army. Giquel doesn't go into huge tactical detail but he does have some material.\n\nA major caveat to the above sources is that they mostly concentrate on European or European-led units in the eastern theatre of the war, rather than the larger confrontations between the Taiping and the Hunanese militia in the west. Platt tries to balance between the two ends, and Lindley does record one or two confrontations further up the Yangtze to be fair, but be very aware that the focus here skews eastward towards the European-involved part of the fighting, rather than the more 'peer' conflict in the west.", "created_utc": 1668017077, "distinguished": null, "id": "ivpldyb", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/yq4yiz/what_did_pitched_combat_during_the_taiping/ivpldyb/", "score": 11 } ]

[ { "body": "The thing is, before the Great Migration there was already a large movement that tried to escape the violence and undemocratic government of the Jim Crow South, which took place in the late 1870's to the 1880's. A host of factors explain why this first exodus failed to move as many people as the Great Migration did. \n\nFirst, for context, let's discuss what happened in the aftermath of the war. When the South was defeated the destruction of slavery was assured, but far from settling the question the emancipation of more than four million of human beings opened new contentious debates and challenges. This is what's called the Reconstruction Era. Long story short, originally Reconstruction operated under President Andrew Johnson, who assumed power after Lincoln was assassinated. A racist who had no interest in changing the way the South worked, Johnson nonetheless required them to accept emancipation as an inescapable fact of their defeat. Yet, Johnson allowed White Southerners to take charge of the new government, returned what little land had been confiscated, and denied freedmen the protection of the Federal Army. Despite the heroic efforts of the Freedmen's Bureau, most Black people were forced into a condition close to slavery by a series of \"Black Codes\", that limited their rights and tried to reestablish the plantation system. \n\nDuring Presidential Reconstruction, Black people thus continued to suffer oppression in many ways. And in the face of this situation, thousands did migrate... to other parts of the South. Described by hostile observers as an \"aimless migration\", a \"vagabondage\", thousands of Black freedmen left their plantations and moved either to Southern cities or Western states like Texas, where wages were higher and the presence of the Bureau and the Union Army assured at least a modicum of protection. Southern cities, where \"freedom was free-er\", saw their Black population double in the aftermath of the war. Unfortunately, often Black people had to settle in \"shantytowns\" built in the periphery of the cities, resulting in precarious living conditions, disease and menial employment. \n\nIt's possible that the migration would continue and turn towards the North with time, but the start of \"Radical\" Reconstruction prevented this by giving Black people hope that things would turn for the better. Outraged at Johnson's actions, which seemed to surrender the South to the control of White Supremacist rebels and nullify the gains of the war, Republicans passed the Reconstruction Acts over his veto and started the process anew, further securing it by passing the 14th amendment. The new Republican regimes that appeared in the South were a radical departure from previous Southern governments, for they at least tried to assure equality before the law and extend the protection of the State, hitherto always denied, to Black people. Reconstruction also opened the way for Black officeholding and new economic opportunities, as having the law on their side allowed Black laborers to negotiate better terms of employment. Even when counterrevolutionary terrorism in the form of the Ku Klux Klan swept the region, Black people could count on the aid of Washington, where President Grant was committed to the defense of Black rights.\n\nBut Reconstruction collapsed. The reasons why are too complex, but at the end of the Grant administration a tired North, unable to summon the will or power to enforce the law and protect Black rights, simply gave up the fight. The election of 1876 traditionally marks the end of Reconstruction, but the sad fact is that it probably would have ended no matter what. Grant, though still sympathetic to Black people, had no effective strategy to deal with the question. Sometimes acting decisively, sometimes not so much, Grant found that no matter what he did he aroused the opposition of Northerners who were simple exhausted and wanted to move on. The Reconstruction states, corrupt, weak and broke as they were, collapsed under terrorist violence supported almost universally by Southern Whites. By 1877, all Southern states had been \"redeemed\", opening the way for White Southerners to reestablish White Supremacy and the oppression of Black Americans. \n\nIn the face of this outcome, the first Black exodus out of the South started. Reconstruction had been one of the few times in which the South offered opportunities to Black people, resulting instead in Black Northerners moving towards the region. But after 1877, interest in migration, \"all but moribund during Reconstruction\", revived. Several thousand expressed interest in migrating to Liberia, yet few did and many returned at the end. This was partly because of the financial exigencies of such a trip, but also because Black Americans simply didn't want to leave their country. So they looked to the West, hoping to settle in the Federal territories or even asking Congress to create a territory explicitly for Black settlement. Kansas was the main destiny for Black immigrants, who, however, didn't find the land and employment they wanted, but often had to settle for menial labor in the cities. Still, it did allow them to escape the violence of a South that was moving towards reinforcing White Supremacy by wiping away the last vestiges of Reconstruction. \n\nSome 21,000 \"Exodusters\" moved out of the South and mostly towards Kansas in 1879-1880, hoping that sympathetic Northerners would bring them aid. Unfortunately, Northerners mostly offered moral support. Observing that African Americans were leaving a Southern conditions \"only too strongly like those which have driven many a foreigner across the seas, to seek in our land the liberty to labor for himself and his family\", they talked positively of Black emigration, with a newspaper saying that Black people were just looking for \"peace, law and order, the security of property, the rights of man, and a chance to better their state.\" This immigration, the New York Times concluded, would continue as long as \"the laborer, white or black, is oppressed. While labor is considered servile, and the condition of the laborer made irksome, there will be discontent and flight.”\n\nP.B.S. Pinchback reported soon that \"the exodus has assumed alarming proportions, which threatens to depopulate the State of her laborers\", to the point that some apparently were looking into \"importing\" Chinese workers. This \"revolt of labor\", Northerners observed gleefully, would weaken the South and force the White population to come to its senses and offer better treatment to Black laborers. But initial support crumbled when a group of Black people migrated to Indiana. Democrats said Republicans were encouraging the migration simply to win Northern states, by importing enough Black voters to supply their deficits. Republicans then said that Black Exodusters were simply laborers who, having seen their rights denied, sought better conditions. But the Committee that met to examine the exodus to Indiana produced a report that, in the words of historian Heather Cox Richardson, conciliated these visions. A parade of witnesses, including well to do Black professionals, testified that Exodusters were \"the most ignorant of the country people\", \"the floating class\" that just didn't want to work and believed that by migrating they would get everything for free, while the intelligent and laboring could succeed in the South.\n\nThis aligned well with Southern claims that Black rights were, in fact, respected and that social mobility existed. Alarmed at \"communism\" in the North and afraid that they had been actually helping lazy vagrants, Northerners stopped their support. This view was reinforced by that of thinkers such as Booker T. Washington, who insisted that by shunning politics and focusing on education Black people could achieve success. At the end, less than 50,000 people ever left the South during this first exodus, meaning that for all its political importance the demographic impact was minimal. This was owed to the fact that opportunities outside the South weren't much better, that migrating was very difficult, but above all that Black rights hadn't been completely destroyed yet. In some areas there still remained Black officeholders and voters, and despite violence Black laborers were still able to strike and demand better conditions. The Northern economy was still depressed, while conversely Southern plantations required labor, resulting in relatively good wages even if good treatment was lacking. The South had to furthermore still tread lightly, for it was possible that being imprudent could reawake Northern anger and rekindle the conflict over Reconstruction. \n\nThe consolidation of Jim Crow and segregation thus took place in the 1890's, where the great majority of these vile provisions were enacted. Violence took a turn for the worse then, resulting in the \"nadir of race relations\", where lynchings and other forms of terror became even more common. Whereas Black people still had some hope that they could build a living, or that Reconstruction could return, now they lost it completely. This was joined by the fact that Northern factories urgently needed laborers, resulting in much greater support for migration. The structures of the Black community, by then fully established, also helped in this movement. Moreover, with their rule and economy stabilized, White Southerners now didn't oppose that exodus, whereas before they had apparently held Black laborers back at gunpoint. Though The Great Migration started in the 1890's with the migration of Black youth to Northern cities, the movement started in earnest in the period from 1910 to 1930, where 1.5 million African Americans left for the North. Altogether, several factors converged just right in that period, factors that hadn't been there during the first exodus in the 1870's. Nonetheless, the rhethoric and memory of the \"Exodusters\" did help to inspire and shape the Great Migration.", "created_utc": 1659140390, "distinguished": null, "id": "ii75df3", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/wb6lvl/there_is_a_large_45_year_gap_between_the_end_of/ii75df3/", "score": 130 } ]

[ { "body": "More can always be said, but [this older answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/mks78j/why_did_the_cherokee_a_nation_of_people_driven/gtigojf/) might be of interest for you.", "created_utc": 1668613597, "distinguished": null, "id": "iwlo2kv", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/ywvsll/did_most_tribes_in_indian_territory_support_the/iwlo2kv/", "score": 5 } ]

[ { "body": "Their shock wasn't a result of any belief that technology would have changed anything, it was that the intellectual knowledge of the horror of war doesn't prepare anyone for the experience of the horror of war. The fact that casualties at Antietam may have been marginally lower than comparable Napoleonic battles would have been little comfort to someone who can smell the blood, hear the cries, and see the shallow pit behind the hospital filling with severed limbs. \"The horror of war\" is so often repeated it's become axiomatic, but there's a reason it's repeated so often, and there's a reason that men who sent letters home or wrote in diaries about the carnage of Civil War battlefields found it difficult to express in words. It is, in every sense of the word, *unimaginable*. \n\nAntietam, we know now, was the bloodiest single day of the entire war, and that sense of horrific scale was something that every man on the field understood, even if they didn't have specific percentages to hand. Close to 1/3 of the men engaged north of Sharpsburg were killed or wounded, nearly *twenty thousand* men, out of sixty thousand. One of every three, from both sides. That is an *appalling* casualty rate. Nothing can prepare a person to experience that and come away unaffected.\n\nShiloh and Antietam were also both trendsetters, in a way. Though the Peninsula Campaign had had its share of extremely deadly battles, and though the Peninsula Campaign was one of swampy misery and indecision, outside of certain parts of individual battles, nothing had come close to the kind of baldfaced carnage faced by soldiers at Shiloh or Antietam. They were battles that announced, loudly and bloodily to everyone paying attention, that this was not a war that would be won by maneuver, and was not one that would be won quickly, that men on both sides were motivated by intangible ideals that filled them with a willingness to inflict and withstand brutality that had never been witnessed in North America.\n\nIt should also be said that because of the organizational dynamics of Civil War armies, many of the men who were shot down so that they laid on the field still dressed in line of battle, and lay so thickly that men could walk along their length for hundreds of feet without stepping on the ground, were men who knew each other. Regiments were raised locally, comprised of companies that came from small towns and villages, and contained within their ranks brothers and cousins and friends and colleagues. A colonel might be leading 5-600 men, many of whom were personally known to him or related to him in some way. When dozens or hundreds of those men could be hideously wounded or killed in *seconds*, no sense that you've taken comparable casualties compared to some French regiment on a former generation's battlefield is going to be any comfort whatsoever. This was a war that only slowly revealed its jaw-dropping cost, that for many was something unfathomable even as men mustered and armed and drilled outside their windows. It wasn't until late 1862 that the scale of the war and the scale of what would take to end it was finally, firmly cemented in the American consciousness.", "created_utc": 1663085004, "distinguished": null, "id": "io9uzaz", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/xcvynk/every_commissioned_american_civil_war_officer_was/io9uzaz/", "score": 56 } ]

[ { "body": "You may find your answer in [these excellent responses](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d51o0g/why_cant_the_civil_war_be_called_the_war_of/) by u/freedmenspatrol to a similar question.", "created_utc": 1667563591, "distinguished": null, "id": "iv0lj1v", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/ylo6nx/in_polish_and_spanish_the_american_civil_war_is/iv0lj1v/", "score": 6 } ]

[ { "body": "It is something of an apples-for-oranges question. Though it had a slower rate of fire, a rifled musket had a longer range, better accuracy and more power than a revolver. It could also take a bayonet. \n\nThe War Dept. would actually buy around 4,000 Colt New Model Revolving Rifles, starting in the mid 1850's, that had more power than the pistols, and more accuracy. However, these were just one of several breech-loading weapons that were issued, and they were almost all issued to cavalry. It was recognized that loading a muzzle-loading gun on horseback was awkward, even a short carbine buckled to a sling.\n\nThe War Dept was aware that muzzle-loaders were more and more obsolete- the recent wars in Europe had shown that. But there was , above all, the need to be able to equip an entire army. In contrast to the hundreds thousands of breech-loading guns purchased from various manufacturers for the war, around a million of the 1861 Model Springfield Rifled Musket *alone* were made, 700,000 more of the Model 1863, and hundreds of thousands more rifled muskets imported. There was also the enormous challenge of supply: the great variety of ammunition needed for the great variety of breech-loading guns gave the War Dept. fits, after it had to produce millions of cartridges for the .58 muskets it already had.", "created_utc": 1661448977, "distinguished": null, "id": "ilre01e", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/wxj4gc/question_about_american_civil_war_firearms_why/ilre01e/", "score": 24 }, { "body": "A myriad of reasons, but the primary one is effective range. The most common muskets were firing a 500gr projectile with around 65gr of powder behind it out of a long barrel, whereas the largest common revolvers were firing a 140gr projectile with around 30gr of powder behind it out of a much shorter barrel. That's a big disparity in weight and powder charge, exacerbated by the difference in barrel length (longer barrel gives more time for the powder to burn and impart energy into the projectile) all of which ultimately means that a musket has an effective range at least 4 times greater than the pistol. In practice this difference is even greater, because aiming pistols is far more difficult. In the hands of a skilled shooter you can range a pistol out to 40-50m at most, but that takes years of practice, and in the hands of a conscript the effective range drops to closer to 15m. Conversely, it is fairly easy to train someone to shoot a rifle effectively out to 100-200m\n\nAll this to say, if I can shoot you from a distance 4-5X further than you can shoot back, then it doesn't matter how quickly you can shoot, because you can't hit me anyways. \n\nAdditionally, it's important to consider that these are still fundamentally muzzle loading firearms. Yes, you have a 5-6 round capacity, but once that's expended, you still need to load each of those rounds individually. This is the reason early cartridge repeaters often came with magazine cutoffs, allowing for soldiers to load and fire single rounds, but have a reserve capacity for emergency. For sustained fire, assuming it takes say, 20 seconds to load. Firing once, loading for 20 seconds, then firing again, is effectively the same as firing 5 times, loading for 100 seconds, then firing 5 more times. The first set of 5 is faster, but if you sustain fire they approach the same effective rate of fire relatively quickly.\n\nFinally, there is the always relevant factor of cost. There were, for example, breech loading rifles that were pretty clearly superior in both range and rate of fire, but generally speaking militaries are reticent to adopt new standard weapons during times of war. At the time war broke out, they already had the ability to make hundreds of thousands of muskets, and they needed to arm hundreds of thousands of soldiers immediately.", "created_utc": 1661449661, "distinguished": null, "id": "ilrfsey", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/wxj4gc/question_about_american_civil_war_firearms_why/ilrfsey/", "score": 8 } ]

[ { "body": "There's a lot here, and I'm going to try to answer this with the caveat that there are entire books about this. \n\n\nA lot of this belief was steeped in biological racism. They believed that Black people were inherently inferior, and part of that meant they were not intelligent enough to be discontented with bondage. This is why Southerners instituted things like the mail ban, why Charleston and other polities did not allow Black sailors to get off of ships at harbor, etc.: they believed that it took someone else - someone with outside knowledge - to \"rile\" enslaved people up. They believed that Black people were somehow happier or content with having a rigid, oppressive schedule that did not allow them to have any control over their lives. \n\n\nEd Baptist in The Half Has Never Been Told argues (implicitly) that the existence of slave-breakers and the suffering and terror inflicted on enslaved people did, in the end, confirm these beliefs. Many enslaved people survived (I use this word because I would not be able to survive in the conditions these people faced; I simply am not strong enough to have been faced with the adversity and horror these people were confronted with every moment of their lives) because they had a community which they were struggling with. These ties were strong, and the fear of losing that community was immense. The fear of losing a family member - a spouse, a sibling, a parent, a child, a cousin, anyone who had been with someone their entire lives - was a real fear that was held over someone's head their entire lives. The fear of this and other punishment may (as Baptist and others argue) have had a role in shaping how enslaved people interacted and lived. Thus, many of these people saw enslaved people living lives which, in their eyes, confirmed their twisted understanding. \n\n\nGoing back to the previous point of the claim that enslaved people would only actively or passively resist their condition if they were influenced by abolitionists, this is a really convenient way to remain blind to reality. The claim that Nat Turner and his followers were planning on making an exodus to Haiti was wildly popular in the South. It, of course, makes no sense, but white Southerners had to preform mental gymnastics beyond our comprehension to continue to deceive themselves and each other that slavery was not inherently evil. So, when an alleged member of Turner's insurrection admitted to it, it was seen as evidence that either an abolitionist or a rebellious Black person (who in turn was influenced by an abolitionist, somewhere) had in stirred up rebellion. Drapetomania worked the same way, I would think: it's a convenient excuse to avoid facing the reality they were so afraid of.", "created_utc": 1657495526, "distinguished": null, "id": "ifnn1fx", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/vvo87y/both_antebellum_slaveowners_and_their/ifnn1fx/", "score": 22 } ]

[ { "body": "Quoting u/Bodark43's answer from 1 year ago [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/jpx9e7/comment/gbm2tco/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3):\n\n>u/Red_Galiray has posted [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c3wn0f/buchanan_is_often_thought_of_as_one_of_the_worst/ertu4cr/) a good answer as to why Buchanan is considered a bad President. \n> \n>After his actions in the Dredd Scott case and in Kansas encouraged the South to be even more intransigent, it is indeed hard to imagine what he could have done that would have stopped the onset of the war. However, once Lincoln had been elected, Buchanan watched the South prepare for war but did nothing to prepare the North. He could have moved to secure the Harper's Ferry Arsenal, or at least empty it. He could have supplied and fortified the Charleston forts, including Ft Sumter. And he could have fired Secretary of War John Floyd, who was a Southern sympathizer, before Floyd moved arms into the South. But Buchanan was himself a Southern sympathizer: he viewed the war as being caused by the North's unwillingness to accept slavery. Being a Northerner who sympathized with the South was how he had managed to be elected President in the first place, like his predecessor, Franklin Pierce. And so it's not surprising he was reluctant to ready the North for the conflict.\n\nu/Red_Galiray's previous answer was also recommended in a thread from 2 years ago [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/iqq5hb/why_is_james_buchanan_generally_considered_the/).\n\nAlso see u/psstein's answer on this thread [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6hipt0/why_is_president_james_buchanan_considered_one_of/), which cites several literary sources on Buchanan.", "created_utc": 1647790371, "distinguished": null, "id": "i1ew1b3", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/tik5f2/why_is_james_buchanan_viewed_as_being_such_a_bad/i1ew1b3/", "score": 769 }, { "body": "Here is a previous answer from /u/Red_Galiray\n that might help -- https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c3wn0f/buchanan_is_often_thought_of_as_one_of_the_worst/ertu4cr/", "created_utc": 1647790108, "distinguished": null, "id": "i1evf1z", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/tik5f2/why_is_james_buchanan_viewed_as_being_such_a_bad/i1evf1z/", "score": 41 } ]

[ { "body": "There are always more recommendations that can be made, but the [subreddit's booklist](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books) provides a great starting point with several options for you to look into.", "created_utc": 1661099839, "distinguished": null, "id": "il7kq4g", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/wu1y99/any_good_sources_to_learn_about_the_american/il7kq4g/", "score": 4 }, { "body": "The best one volume introductions to many periods of American history are the *Oxford History of the United States* for that time. **The Battle Cry of Freedom** on the Civil War and its lead up by James McPherson holds up very, very well. **The Glorious Cause** on the American Revolution is also good, and is a standard complement to Gordon Wood’s **The Radicalism of the American Revolution**.\n\nIn addition, I recommend a general history of the USA such as **Give Me Liberty** by Eric Foner; the sections on the American Revolution and Civil War are very good/accessible, and they are designed with surrounding sections (on settlement, the early state, commercialization, Antebellum nationalism, etc.) which will help give you additional context on the big events.\n\nGood luck! If you have any questions/more specific book requests, my DMs are open", "created_utc": 1661105090, "distinguished": null, "id": "il7xm36", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/wu1y99/any_good_sources_to_learn_about_the_american/il7xm36/", "score": 3 }, { "body": "I'm a little late to the party on this one, but thought i would add a few recommendations of my own.\n\n**Freedom National** is an excellent look at the evolution of anti-slavery politics both before and during the war.\n\n**Apostles of Disunion** is an interesting look at a part of the secession crisis that most people don't even known existed. The secession commissioners sent by the first group of states to secede to the rest of the slave states to try and convince them to secede as well. Does a good job of letting the Confederates themselves tell you why the seceded (hint, it was about slavery).", "created_utc": 1664809418, "distinguished": null, "id": "iqw30wg", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/wu1y99/any_good_sources_to_learn_about_the_american/iqw30wg/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "[This older answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/93i20p/what_were_the_reactions_of_latin_american_nations/e3dzhuq/) might be of interest for you. A bit broader than just the Caribbean, as it also includes South and Middle America, but does touch on some parts of the Caribbean too.", "created_utc": 1664161782, "distinguished": null, "id": "ipxdkc7", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/x14ndk/how_did_the_caribbean_react_to_the_american_civil/ipxdkc7/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "While there is certainly more to say on the topic, you should take a look at u/hannahstohelit ’s excellent answer to [a question about General Grant’s order to expel all Jews from his military district](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ge84vl/comment/fpq66pq/).", "created_utc": 1657846343, "distinguished": null, "id": "ig7cmea", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/vza535/how_were_jews_treated_during_the_american_civil/ig7cmea/", "score": 21 } ]

[ { "body": "I would say overall, those casualty numbers were not expected prior to the start of the war. The first major battle of the USCW, Bull Run in 1861, was the costliest battle in US history at the time it was fought. So not only was the level of casualties much higher than during the Mexican War, it was unprecedented in US history. Of course Bull Run was not particularly costly by the standards of the USCW. There are widespread accounts from both North and South surprised at the death toll. \n\nThere was hope in the North of a quick victory in the USCW. This is apparent prior to Bull Run, but you can also see that prior to and during the Peninsular Campaign in the summer of 1862. Both publicly and privately, General McClellan expected his Peninsular Campaign to result in a decisive battle that would result in the Union taking Richmond and effectively ending the rebellion. So even among the professionals fighting the war, there was some expectation that it would not drag on for as long as it did.\n\nYou can see similar outrage for casualties after the battle of Shiloh in the Spring of 1862. This was a tactical victory for the North, but the high casualty rates caused widespread shock and condemnation from the public. There were widespread calls to remove Grant from command after Shiloh. The rumors surrounding his drinking and unpreparedness were in part fueled by outrage over the high loss of life from the battle. \n\nEven if you fast forward to the Overland Campaign in 1864, many in the North were shocked at the cost of Grant's campaign against Lee to take Richmond. Grant's strategy was questioned privately and publicly throughout the campaign as one battle after another resulted in high casualties and Richmond not falling. Even at this stage with the South on the ropes, there were public calls for a negotiated peace (admittedly some of this was from Copperheads). So even after nearly 4 years of fighting, the public sentiment around casualties was something that had to be carefully managed. \n\nWhich is probably why the war lasted so long. To end it what was required was a massive expenditure in life that I think the North just wasn't prepared to stomach until the end. Even McClellan's Peninsular Campaign was an effort to outflank the Southern forces guarding Richmond in a fruitless attempt to take the city w/out having to engage in something like Grant's Overland Campaign. \n\nSources I am drawing from include Chernow's excellent biography *Grant*, and the likewise excellent, *To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign*, by Sears. \n\nEdit: I realize writing this I don't talk about the Southern public's reaction to casualties. I honestly don't have a good grasp of the public mood in the South. I don't recall that being a focus nearly as much as Northern attitudes in the books I have read.", "created_utc": 1642547630, "distinguished": null, "id": "ht8soue", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/s750z5/the_american_civil_war_killed_over_600000_people/ht8soue/", "score": 136 } ]

[ { "body": "More can always be said but I've written on the topic of Mexico in that period before which I'll repost below:\n\nThe summer of 1861, with the 'War of Reform' barely in the past, was a fairly chaotic one for Mexico, with the threat of renewed internal conflict high. The concluded conflict had drained the treasury, and placed the government severely in debt to foreign creditors. This was further compounded by the significant damage to the property, especially British, for which the new government of Benito Juárez was being held accountable to provide full repayment. The government was broke though, so Juárez called for a pause on repayment for the next two years, which certainly pissed off Europe, especially France, Spain, and the British.\n\nWhile Mexican debtors included the United States, under normal circumstances the European powers would have been limited in the degree to which they could have pressed for repayment, knowing full well that too strong a show of force would result in angering the United States, if not military intercession. But the United States was busy with its own issues at that time, unable to rattle its sabres in defense of the Monroe Doctrine, and as such, Napoleon III saw his chance, proposing that the three powers join forces for a demonstration of power against Mexico to force repayment, which would then allow for the invasion of the country to place Ferdinand Maximilian in power as Mexican Emperor, something of a dream for Napoleon, who envisioned a French-influenced puppet empire on the American continent.\n\nBritain and Spain mostly just wanted their money. As such, they committed a naval contingent, and the British government sought assurances from the French that this would be the extant of the exercise. Show up, remind Mexico that they needed to pay their debts, and go on their merry way. Napoleon III assured them he would abandon part two of the plan and then promptly returned to planning the invasion and just didn't let the British know. The Tripartite fleet arrived at Veracruz in December, 1861, and land troops put ashore the next month, and issued their demands that debts obligations be met.\n\nNot acting exactly *in good faith*, after all they had shown up with a navy behind them, the British and Spanish ministers, Charles Wyke and Juan Prim, were satisfied with the terms negotiated at swordpoint, and by April had ordered the respective forces to withdraw. The French at this point made their real intentions known, not only refusing to leave, but marching inland to begin their conquest of the country. The Mexicans put up a fierce resistance, flummoxing French advances at several points (including the victory on \"Cinco de Mayo\"), resulting in an entire army corps being sent to reinforce the invaders, and it wouldn't be another year until Mexico City fell on 10 June, 1863. It would be the better part of a year before Maximillian would take the offered crown, in large part recognizing the displeasure by the British over what had happened, finally convinced by an obviously forged petition claiming 6.5m votes in favor, allowing him to become a French puppet who ruled exactly as much Mexican land as there were French troops to occupy.\n\nAs for the United States in all this, to say they were upset would be an understatement, but they found themselves in an unfortunate position of relative powerlessness. The Tripartite actions had been a thumbing of the nose at the United States as it was, while the ensuing French invasion was a full slap in the face. To head off the possibility of European action, it has even been proposed that the United States take on Mexico's debts by offering their own loan of $12m to allow repayment to the European debtors, but it was voted down by the Senate, although there was also no awareness of the extent to which the French were aiming to go at that point. \n\nThere were also concerns, not unfounded, that Napoleon III would push for recognition of the Confederacy as a legitimate government if it meant destabilizing the United States to serve his own ambitions. In the end never materialized, but the United States government realized that it couldn't push back on the French invasion harsh enough to risk recognition of the Confederacy, let alone *war*, as it could spell their own doom. Even though Napoleon III continued to deny his full intentions right up until Maximillian's crowning in 1864, the Americans had little credulity for such claims, but also little they could do. The American press though could at least be more vocal, headlines crying out against the invasion, and promising that once their own domestic issues were handled, the American forces would make quick work of the French interlopers. And while unable to do much *action*, the Lincoln administration did nevertheless provide financial backing to the resistance forces under Juárez.\n\nThe slight irony of course was for the Confederacy, hoping for that possibility, it meant biting their tongue about the French actions and its potential for further encroachment in the continent, although it didn't stop a few voices being raised that it would be best to put aside differences, combine forces, and kick them out of Mexico (the most notable being from Alexander Stephens to Lincoln in early 1865. Too little, too late by then). Perhaps more amusingly, later on in the war, there was some vain hope that Napoleon would recognize the Confederacy because he could call on them to *assist* in the pacification of Mexico, as things continued to not quite work out.\n\nMexico was never truly pacified, and in 1865, the United States had managed to sort out is little domestic tiff, and was able to finally not only bring about the full diplomatic pressure it has been eschewing the past few years, but do so with a large, battle-tested army giving clear weight to the matter, including 25,000 troops sent to the Mexican border at the beginning of the summer. In the end though that was only one of several factors in the French withdrawal. Realizing his dream of a French controlled puppet state in Mexico was slipping from his fingers, the concerning rise of Prussian power nearby was perhaps more pressing that that of the United States abroad, and Napoleon III was coming to see that Mexico would likely be a bottomless pit insofar as its long term requirements for French funding to keep propped up, for what he had thought would be a project of a few mere months several years prior.\n \nAs such Napoleon III cut off his support for Maximillian, in a ludicrous declaration that *\"France had accomplished its objective for civilization\"* and that Mexico had been transformed into *\"a regular power which was ready to fulfill its commitments\"*, French troops were recalled in January, 1866, leaving only the Mexican monarchists who had chosen to back the foreign horse. The end for Maximillian was only a matter of time at that point, managing to hold on until mid-May of 1867, after which he was captured, tried, and executed a month later. \n\n**Sources**\n\nCunningham, Michele. *Mexico and the Foreign Policy of Napoleon III.* Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.\n\nFehrenbach, T. R.. *Fire & Blood: A History of Mexico.* Da Capo Press, 1979.\n\nJones, Howard. *Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations.* The University of North Carolina Press, 2010.\n\nSainlaude, Stève. *France and the American Civil War: A Diplomatic History.* University of North Carolina Press, Apr 2019.", "created_utc": 1655606302, "distinguished": null, "id": "icwi8lh", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/vfhyqx/what_was_going_on_in_mexico_during_the_american/icwi8lh/", "score": 88 } ]

[ { "body": "First things first, both the federal and rebel armies were uniformed by regiment, not by any central authority. There were a huge number of different uniform types, with different colors and cuts and headwear. As the war went on, availability of certain dyes as well as traditional US army uniform trends tended to somewhat standardize the federal army as wearing a dark blue coat of some kind with sky blue trousers, neither of which I'd exactly describe as \"drab.\" Many regiments, especially at the start of the war, even chose extremely flamboyant uniform types like the Zouave style uniform, with bright, baggy pantaloons and heavily embroidered round jackets and fezzes, which were considered flamboyant even in the very flamboyant 1860s.\n\nApart from the specific color choice, the combination of wool trousers, a wool sack coat (sometimes frock coat), brass buttons, and a kepi was deliberately [modeled after the French army](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tnn7rd/why_did_the_us_army_so_heavily_base_its_practices/i237734/), and was considered a practical and inexpensive uniform. Very few uniform decisions were made with the idea of keeping hidden, that's not really how armies operated in the 1860s. I've talked a bit about some of the reasons uniforms trended toward [camouflage or drab, earthy colors here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/umd5ef/why_are_modern_day_military_uniforms_so_much_less/i84ycxc/?context=3).\n\nFor the rebels, the simplest reason that they wore drab uniforms was the unavailability of dyed wool, and the scarcity of access to good wool for uniforms in the first place. Given the choice, I'm sure rebel regiments would have advocated for more colorful, more professional-looking uniforms than they ended up having, but for an army that regularly had trouble equipping their men with *shoes*, let alone coats and waterproof blankets and normal blankets, access to colorful or flamboyant cloth was a lesser concern. Men wore what they could, not what they wanted.\n\nSo in short, no, there was seldom any attention given to remaining hidden or camouflaged on battlefields. That's not the way war was fought at the time, and uniform choices had as much to do with tradition, professionalism, and access to good cloth and good dyes as they did with any practical field concerns, of which \"having clothing\" was often more important than \"having uniforms.\"", "created_utc": 1656176492, "distinguished": null, "id": "idpfvn1", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/vk79mt/camouflage_for_standard_infantry_wasnt_widely/idpfvn1/", "score": 11 } ]

[ { "body": "This only speaks to half your question, but I think [this older answer of mine](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/pcpxh3/civil_war_photos/hal7his/) might be of interest. To summarize the most salient point there is that the photographs you know best *aren't* battle photos, but often taken days after the battle was over, and by photographers in American cities close enough to travel to the scene of the battle when they heard it had happened.", "created_utc": 1655680914, "distinguished": null, "id": "iczzgtw", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/vfn8jh/why_are_the_most_common_depictions_of_the_spanish/iczzgtw/", "score": 5 } ]

[ { "body": "No, there was no rule against it, and being in the color guard was considered a high honor precisely because it was so exceptionally dangerous. The flag made an obvious target for enemy infantry and artillery, and in close-range fighting both sides might attempt to capture the enemy's standards.\n\nHappily for the band, they were often in the rear. But bands are complicated, and were never used in a standard way. Each company tended to have a handful of musicians; commonly drummers of some type, fifers, and/or buglers. But each *regiment* could detach the musicians from each company and assemble into a regimental band that might stay in the rear, rather than march with their companies. This was sometimes done, sometimes not. Musicians were important in relaying orders, and so having musicians posted to the headquarters and in each company was part of battlefield communication and coordination.\n\nI've written more about musicians and colors [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/lxljss/european_and_colonial_armies_are_often_depicted/gpo867y/), and a bit more about what the colors might mean for veterancy and shared unit experience [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/li9m8v/i_am_a_veteran_line_infantryman_during_the/).", "created_utc": 1656945837, "distinguished": null, "id": "ietn92b", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/vqt7zz/so_i_was_watching_the_patriot_but_also_this_i/ietn92b/", "score": 12 } ]

[ { "body": "Listen to [Episode 108 of the AskHistorians Podcast](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/88lrpz/askhistorians_podcast_108_poor_whites_in_the/) an interview of the historian Keri Leigh Merritt by /u/ThucydidesWasAwesome on this very topic.", "created_utc": 1645857216, "distinguished": null, "id": "hyhifgq", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/t1kdrp/what_kind_of_propaganda_if_any_was_used_to_sell/hyhifgq/", "score": 16 }, { "body": "The slave system itself served as propaganda. The poor yeoman farmers, sometimes destitute, but always laboring, could live with a certain amount of pride, that at least they weren't slaves, and they were a part of a grand agrarian lifestyle.\n\nLand and slaves were what determined wealth in the Old South, and many whites (including the yeoman farmers and hired hands) possessed neither. Planters used their seats of power to control major social institutions such as churches and colleges, reinforcing their own self-serving narratives. In particular, the south's racial ideology which stressed the superiority of all whites to blacks. Thus, slavery became the basis of equality among whites, inflating the status of poor whites and blunting the conflict among the (white) classes. This Herrenvolk democracy was supposedly the best thing you could have as a yeoman farmer, as long as you were on the white side of the line. Ironically, however, the growing plantocracy within the south kept political and economic decisions away from the yeoman. More than simple racial division, there was a grander narrative at play which the planters exploited.\n\nPresident Thomas Jefferson was one of the most prominent in romanticizing the agrarian lifestyle: the toiling in the fields and the mixing of labor with the earth- ironic for a man who never worked on a farm and detested manual labor. The planters coopted Jeffersons' narrative of a yeoman paradise, and Jefferson let them. The planters allowed themselves to believe they were the chosen people of God apart of a higher order than normal townsmen, merchants, or manufacturers. Another narrative that served the plantocracy at the expense and suffering of the yeoman, free blacks, slaves, and Native Americans.\n\n​\n\nFor more information about the yeoman, how Jefferson allowed the plantation system to erode his agrarian paradise, and how the yeoman were so similarly treated to native Americans, read \"Mr. Jefferson Lost Cause\", by Roger G. Kennedy.", "created_utc": 1645928369, "distinguished": null, "id": "hyldgje", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/t1kdrp/what_kind_of_propaganda_if_any_was_used_to_sell/hyldgje/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "I've written a good deal on music of the Civil War, so these older answers might be of interest:\n\n\n* [On the *Bonnie Blue Flag* in North and South](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cat2qs/during_the_american_civil_war_did_the_federals/etaw0bt/)\n* [On \"John Brown's Body\" and abolitionism in the Federal Army](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ch62u7/the_song_john_browns_body_and_its_influence_on/euqmxm2/)\n* [On music of the Civil War](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/726mqy/how_come_there_are_no_famous_or_wellknown_civil/dngge36/)\n* [On music, race, and slavery during the Civil War](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/p5i9o1/us_civil_war_historians_are_there_any_confederate/h98su84/)", "created_utc": 1656015610, "distinguished": null, "id": "idh32c5", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/vj3gpy/what_kind_of_musicsongs_were_popular_among_the/idh32c5/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "#1/3\n\nWere sabers expected to be used as weapons in the American Civil War? The short answer is a simple yes. Swords did not play an enormous role in creating wounds, but they were used in earnest. Fencing was taught in the standard West Point curriculum for all officers, and civilian experts and militia officers published fencing manuals intended to instruct militiamen in the rudiments of fencing before and after the war. Sabers were a standard issue weapon for Union cavalrymen throughout the entire war. Despite doctrinal complexity, large-scale cavalry charges played a part in critical moments of some battles, like Gettysburg and Third Winchester. Saber wounds were part of the extensive medical records kept by army surgeons, and following the war, bones from army wounded were put on grisly display in the Army Medical Museum in 1867, and out of 2211 specimens, 22 were wounds created by sabers or other cutting weapons. This is not a representative sample by any means, but it does show that swords were used to harm during the war.\n\nBut of course we should dig into the details a little bit, because the cavalry was in a weird place in American doctrine at the start of the war and its use changed quite a lot as the war progressed. So let's take a look at what the state of the US Army and the place many imagined for the sword prior to the war, what cavalry was intended to do at the outbreak of the war before getting into the details of some of the more visible examples of sword use in battle.\n\n**The Sword, ca. 1850, In American Military Thought**\n\nGeorge McClellan, prior to the outbreak of the war, was a committed student of military doctrine. He was sent overseas as an observer of the Crimean War in 1855, and studied the organization of the Russian, Prussian, Austrian, French, and Sardinian cavalry. In 1861, he published a rather involved overview of the practices of these cavalry branches, their organization and doctrine, covering their basic organizational structure down to their practices of breaking and training horses, as well as their preferred tactics, and their use of the saber. Speaking of the Russian practice, McClellan says that it \"is so similar to that in use in the United States service as to render it unnecessary to describe it in this report.\" He then goes on to detail the Russian practice, which included instruction of the recruit on foot to prepare them for the use on horseback, \"which is its proper object.\" There are a number of cuts and blows and parries, as well as specific cuts meant to target enemy infantry, as well as those meant to use against other saber-armed men. McClellan spends a great deal of time on the Russian saber practice, but very little on any of the other nations, but we should bear in mind mostly that McClellan sees it as very similar to the American practice at the time.\n\nThis was not the first time McClellan had written something that detailed fencing practice; in 1851, he had published a translation of the French bayonet practice led by a French officer only given as M. Gomard, after (he tells us) an extensive examination of the bayonet fencing systems of several other nations. This wasn't altogether surprising, as the American military tended to pattern itself pretty closely after the French practice, from its training down to its uniform aesthetics. West Point taught French and officers were encouraged to read and study French manuals and French history, and even apart from bayonet fencing, French fencing manuals were very common in American fencing culture, of which West Point was a part. Again, all West Point cadets would have at least some experience fencing with the bayonet, saber and broadsword, and smallsword. Fencing was encouraged by civilians as well, both for civilian uses - health, stimulating exercise, etc - and as good citizenship through preparation for war. If you'd like more detail on life at West Point, I've written a [longer answer here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/psw66q/what_was_westpoint_like_and_there_curriculum/hduy9cu/)\n\nThe US military system was pretty complex by the 1850s. Political beliefs that dated back hundreds of years discouraged a large military, and the United States got by with *very* small numbers of regular soldiers throughout the 19th century. By the outbreak of the Civil War, the total strength of the US Army on paper was only 16,000, about the size of one large division. It filled its ranks through the volunteer system, which allowed the private organization of regiments on a state level, which would then be placed under the command of the army, generally. This system worked, in part, because there was still a widespread militia structure in the country, and local infantry, cavalry, and artillery companies were, while hardly comprehensive in their quality, manpower, training, or readiness, at least pointed toward a spirit of military preparation among the citizenry. We should be careful not to look at the militia from the top down, though, as far more American men kept firearms and performed paramilitary preparation - end even fought in various capacities - outside the militia *system* in ways that would still look quite a lot like militias. Bleeding Kansas, for instance, involved dozens of *ad hoc* volunteer paramilitary organizations, many of which were legally unsanctioned and definitely outside the formal legal militia institution.\n\nWhile not every American citizen would be much interested in the militia, there were some who took particular interest in it as a way of social advancement and notoriety. Writing manuals for the state militia could be a way to boost a political or business career as well as to possibly secure a command in case war were to break out. So there was a robust little print industry in men writing military manuals intended for adoption of their state militias or aimed at use by the army as a whole. One of those men was Thomas Stephens, who wrote a book on broadsword and smallsword fencing in 1854. He claimed to be a \"professor of broad and small sword exercise\" and managed to publish the book in part because he worked as a clerk for the state of Pennsylvania. Tellingly, the book was dedicated, \"with much respect, to the MILITARY OF THE UNITED STATES,\" meaning, essentially, that it was in no way an official system of fencing at all, but one guy's ideas and experience. Stephens was a pretty good candidate to write a book, if he's to be believed. Born in England, he had apparently served in the queen's bodyguard and learned swordsmanship from English masters before emigrating to the United States, and his actual system of fencing shows much similarity to the very popular book on broadsword and saber written by Charles Roworth, which was the basis for very many fencing manuals to follow. After moving from Pennsylvania, he became the inspector-general of the Wisconsin militia, and served as lietenant-colonel of the 2nd Wisconsin Volunteer Cavalry regiment.\n\nStephens helps to illustrate the point that practical knowledge of swordsmanship was still something to be admired, and many men, regular soldiers and aspiring citizen-soldiers, advocated its practice in various ways.\n\n**Doctrine and the Changing Role of Cavalry**\n\nWe know that swords still played a role in military theory: swordsmanship was practiced and trained in European armies, made up a part of the education of regular officers in the US Army, and were an aspirational element of civilian thought, but how did swords fit into the US Army cavalry doctrine more specifically?\n\nAgain we're forced to confront the US Army's complicated interdependence on American civilians and volunteers. Already tiny, the army's cavalry arm was only five regiments in 1861, each of which were supposed to be about 1,000 men, five squadrons of two troops each, with the troop being roughly equal to an infantry company, 100 men. Desertion, resignation, and defection to the Confederate States Army withered that away significantly, as well. To make a complicated story short, the cavalry started the war primarily as support for the infantry and artillery but their role changed and expanded as the war went on, and by the end, independent brigades and divisions of cavalry were put to use in extensive raids and as cohesive formations of shock troops, while maintaining their traditional roles as scouts and flank and baggage guards.\n\nAt the start of the war, regiments and brigades of cavalry would be attached to and under the command of infantry generals, and the cavalry would skirmish, scout, protect flanks, and guard baggage trains. They mostly fought dismounted, using their horses for rapid movement but engaging the enemy on foot with carbines or musketoons. Sometimes, cavalry were used to discourage \"shirkers\" during battle; collecting up and sending back the men who volunteered to carry wounded men back from the front line or tried to hide near the fighting but take no part in it. It's important to note here, though, that the rapid upsizing from five regiments in the summer of 1861 to *fifty* by December meant that this doctrine was hardly cohesive. There were many individual actions and events that lay outside the standard procedures. It's an effect of having a rapidly mobilized, semi-professional force suddenly take the field with little experience in operational necessities (marching, camping, logistics, and coordinating with larger forces), with the added pressures of the general officers having little experience organizing and leading such large bodies of troops. Even the regular officers started the war on the back foot, with most officers’ operational experience rooted in the Mexican-American War more than ten years before.", "created_utc": 1648141065, "distinguished": null, "id": "i1yab4e", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/tm0i07/did_the_sabres_from_the_american_civil_war/i1yab4e/", "score": 44 } ]

[ { "body": "You mind find [this answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c36lvn/does_the_us_constitution_allow_for_states_to/) by u/secessionisillegal (a very fitting username, I might add) helpful", "created_utc": 1657733764, "distinguished": null, "id": "ig0ngeo", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/vxmkse/legality_of_secession_in_the_american_civil_war/ig0ngeo/", "score": 5 } ]

[ { "body": "\nLet me start off by saying that it’s important to note that the timeframe from the Crimean War to World War I was a time of rapid military advancement. In that time, militaries went from Napoleonic weapons and tactics to dispersed formations and and automatic weapons, so pretty much any conflict saw a new technology or idea being used. As such, anything and everything was being reported. \n\nThe ACW for example saw a fair share of interest from the British. Officers often time took leave to observe the conflicts and what they wrote about influencers various fields of the British military. An example of this is that Canada saw two reviews of its military defense during the duration of the war.[1] The British observers also wrote about the changes in tactics. The old dense formations were rendered obsolete by the increase in firepower and infantry now had to disperse or take cover behind increasing amounts of fortifications.[2]\n\nTo see the level some of these reports could go into, one has but to look at the various sections in *Reports on Military Operations in South Africa and China* written by US military personnel. In the China portion, there are reports for every nation that participated in the Boxer Rebellion. To use the report on the Japanese as an example, it looks at how many and what type of entrenching tools were carried( 2/3 of the infantry carried a shovel with a 7 in. by 7 in. blade and 1 foot handle), rations used (36 ounces of rice, 4 ounces of meat, and 4 ounces of veggies), and even pay (corporals got paid 1 yen 80 sen in war time).[3] such reports helped to serve as a gage for where one’s own military was in relations to others and if there was anything that could be adopted. \n\nMoving on to the Russo-Japanese War, this got a lot of attention from both observers and non-observers. Probably one of the more famous non-observers was Sir Julian Corbett who wrote the British War Offices official report on the naval action of the conflict. Six years later, Corbett would publish *Some Principles of Maritime Strategy*, one of the great treatises on naval warfare, alongside A.T. Mahan’s *The Influence of Sea Power upon History: 1660–1783*. Other works by non-observers included “Lessons to be Learnt from the Siege of Port Arthur as Regards R.E. Work” in the *Journal of the United Service Institution of India* and “A New Tactical System applied to the Russo-Japanese War” published by Norwegian Admiral Jacob Børresen in a British journal. In regards to the actual observers, it should be noted that many went on the serve in key positions during WWI, most famous of which is undoubtedly John Pershing. \n\nIt should also be noted that observers were not just limited to wars. On the American side, one of the more famous post-ACW observers was Emory Upton. One of his earliest observations of foreign militaries was when he left his ailing wife during their honeymoon in France to see maneuvers of the French military.[4] However, his most famous observations started in 1872 when he and a group of other US Army officers left California to study the militaries of various nations. His trip took him to Japan, China, British India, Persia, Russia, Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, and England. He then published his findings in *The Armies of Asia and Europe, 1878*. \n\n[1] Somerville, Michael *Bull Eun to Boer War: How the American Civil War changed the British Army*, pg 42. \n\n[2] Somerville, *Bull Run to Boer War*, 210. \n\n[3] Major Muir, Charles “Reports on Japanese Troops in North China” in *Reports on Military Operations in South Africa and China*, pg 359-360. \n\n[4] Fitzpatrick, David, *Emory Upton: Misunderstood Reformer*, pg 100.", "created_utc": 1647351414, "distinguished": null, "id": "i0qx7bf", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/tejqex/military_observers_were_sent_to_observe_the/i0qx7bf/", "score": 22 } ]

[ { "body": "Context is needed to better understand the circumstances around Sherman's March to the Sea.\n\nBy the spring of 1864, after four years of war and half a million Americans dead, Union and Confederate forces were locked in apparent stalemate. The previous year's Gettysburg victory was a must-win for the Union and halted the South's northern advance, but Lee's army remained intact. President Lincoln was under tremendous pressure to end the Civil War. His political opponents were already advocating for peace with the Confederacy. Lincoln needed a big Union victory, a decisive one, to preserve the republic.\n\nThe Union Army commander, Ulysses S. Grant, and Sherman agreed that the destruction of the Confederacy's ability to wage war would hasten the end of the Civil War. They devised an operation that many historians would now describe as \"scorched earth\" policy or an early example of total war. Union forces would target and destroy the Confederates' economic and military infrastructure, marching deep into enemy territory, with the strategic aim of crippling the Confederacy's war machine. Railroads, cotton gins, mills, warehouses, bridges, telegraph lines, any infrastructure that might aid and support the Confederate cause would not be spared.\n\nTerritorial conquest was not the campaign's primary strategic intent -- it was to send a clear message to both the Confederate army in the field and its political leaders in Richmond: that continued fighting would achieve little and defeat was inevitable. Both Lincoln and Grant were wary about the campaign's risks and prospect for success, but they nevertheless trusted and respected the judgment of Sherman. Grant's instruction to Sherman was simple: \"Go as you propose\". \n\nSherman commanded an overwhelming Union force of more than 60,000, while the beleaguered Confederacy could only muster 1/5th of that size to oppose him. \n\nSherman's march began on Nov. 15th, 1864, departing the ruined city of Atlanta. It also had a second, more traditional objective: to apply rearward pressure on Robert E. Lee's Confederate army, now besieged to the north in Petersburg, Virginia, with the intent of giving Grant's Union army a chance to make a breakthrough or, at best, limit Confederate reinforcements from flowing to Virginia.\n\nTo achieve this with speed, Sherman would forego supply lines and allow his army to live off the land after using up 20 days of assigned rations. He used the 1860 census on livestock and crop production to determine the best foraging areas for the army.\n\nOne of his formal orders to troops was that civilian homes and farms would be left alone -- as long as the army was left unmolested on their journey. But if the Union army was harassed or assaulted during their progress south, they were given license to destroy local residences and buildings commensurate to the hostility shown to them.\n\nSherman knew that the army living off the land and burning homes would have a detrimental effect on civilian morale in the South and pressure them to seek a quick end to the conflict. His freeing of slaves from plantations, who were emancipated by Lincoln's 1863 Proclamation, was also traumatic to the South. In the eyes of the Confederacy, this potent reminder of the war's causes added insult to injury.\n\nConfederate forces could only try to delay and distract a Union army of such size. They attempted to draw out Union troops away from their destructive path to the coast and the vital port of Savannah with feint attacks and raids, but Sherman's army (divided into two wings, confusing Confederate forces about Sherman's intents) largely declined to take the bait, all while he laid waste to the Confederacy's industrial and military arteries. \n\nSherman's army arrived in Savannah just before Christmas and soon defeated or drove off the smaller forces of Confederate troops defending the city outskirts. Achieving contact with the Union navy, Sherman was able to obtain the supplies and munitions he needed to invest the city proper. He gave his Confederate counterpart, General Hardee, a stark choice on Dec 17th: surrender the city, or face utter destruction. Hardee chose to evacuate his remaining troops and left the formal surrender to Savannah's mayor, who promised no resistance if Union troops pledged to leave its citizens and property unharmed. Sherman presented the capture of Savannah to Lincoln as a Christmas gift, along with 150 heavy guns, ammunition and 25,000 bales of cotton.\n\nSherman himself estimated that he had wrought $100M ($1.6B in today's dollars!) in destruction to Georgia and the Confederacy. In the wake of his march, much of the local populace was left homeless, starved, bitter and demoralized. The economic consequences in the South would linger into the early 20th century.", "created_utc": 1642008237, "distinguished": null, "id": "hsdediw", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/qufhxz/if_the_whole_point_of_shermans_march_to_the_sea/hsdediw/", "score": 6 } ]

[ { "body": "There's always more that can be said but this is a fairly popular subject and we have a bunch on it in our [American Civil War FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/civilwar). In particular I'll recomend;\n\n/u/Georgy_K_Zhukov writing in [\nWhy was there a Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/68myvr/why_was_there_a_civil_war_why_could_that_one_not/dgztopa/)\n\n/u/Borimi on [Causes of the American Civil War?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/svoo6/causes_of_the_american_civil_war/c4hebtj/)\n\nFor some related background you can check out /u/turtleeatingalderman on [Did the framers of the U.S. Constitution discuss whether it should be possible for states to secede?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3bav35/did_the_framers_of_the_us_constitution_discuss/cskk0x5/?context=3).", "created_utc": 1656524286, "distinguished": null, "id": "ie7mlhn", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/vnkjy2/why_did_the_unionists_fight_to_prevent_the/ie7mlhn/", "score": 7 } ]

[ { "body": "When the Tokugawa SHogunate went about modernizing their military in the 1860'es, it wasn't like they had a binary choice between a French and an American officer, each with different strengths and weaknesses to decide on. Rather, their decision on European partners were decided by many things. \n\nAmerica had initially played a key role in forcing Japan to open itself to the West in the arrival of Commodore Perry's black ships in 1853. However, the initial significant AMerican involvement largely came to end during the American Civil War from 1861-1865, for obvious reasons. With the Americans out, that left a few major players the Japanese could rely on for modernization. \n\nOne option was the British, however, their relations to the TOkugawa was significantly worsened after the Namamugi Incident in 1862, in which an English merchant was murdered by a samurai from the Satsuma domain. This eventually escalated to the British Bombardment of Kagoshima, the capital of Satsuma, although this, perhaps surprisingly, resulted in closer alliance between Satsuma and the British - Satsuma favored further opening of Japan than the Shogunate was willing to, and the British consul in Japan increasingly favored collaboration with htem. However, the Satsuma domain was the main threat to the Shogunate, meaning that this alliance would necessarily increase Shogunate suspicion of the British. \n\nThis created a favorable environment for cooperation between the Shogun and France. The Second French Empire was doing a major push to become a global colonial power in the 1860'es under Napoleon III, and in France, the Shogunate found a receptive audience to their requests for military support. In addition to this, the early Japanese students and visitors in Europe in these years reported that France was the major military power in Europe, a status that had seemingly been confirmed by Napoleons' successes in Italy during these years. Therefore, France had both the will and the capacity to provide meaningful military training to the Japanese, and as the British supported Satsuma, it became natural for Napoleon to hedge his bets with the Shogunate, hoping this could result in enduring French influence in Japan, perhaps even the seeding of the Yokohama naval base to Japan. \n\nIt was against this background that Jules Brunet arrived in Japan to train Japanese soldiers - note that in The Last Samurai, Algren is teaching IMperial troops after the Meiji Restoration, but Brunet actually trained SHogunate troops before it. When the restoration happened and the SHogunate fell, Brunet even kept supporting the pro-Shogunate forces as they continued the struggle. However, as may be expected, the fall of the Shogunate also spelled failure for the French attempt at seizing influence in Japan. The Meiji government did not continue using French advisors, and especially following French defeat against Prussia in 1871, their monicle of the greatest military power in Europe also disappeared. After this, several institutions of Meiji Japan was instead based on the newly unified Germany, including its military. \n\nSo in short, there were several good reasons for the Shogunate and the Second French Empire to work together in the late 1860'es, and one of them was in fact that the French military at this time was regarded as the strongest in Europe, perhaps the world.", "created_utc": 1653755899, "distinguished": null, "id": "iabup20", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/uzpsly/in_the_last_samurai_2003_the_japanese_hire_former/iabup20/", "score": 15 } ]

[ { "body": "Mormons largely saw the Civil War as punishment being meted out to the United States for their treatment of their faith in the years leading up to it. By the time of the Civil War began in 1861, the majority of Mormons had traveled west and settled in Utah, which at that time was US territory and called Utah Territory. This group, often referred to as the LDS Church or the Brighamite Church, as it was led by Brigham Young, had a largely negative view of the United States government. Just four years prior to the beginning of the Civil War, the Mormons were involved in the Utah War. Much can be said about that conflict, but essentially it was a conflict between the appointed administrators and judges of the Utah territory who were non-Mormon, and the populace, which was overwhelmingly Mormon and preferred to recognize their religious leaders as having authority over almost everything. As these administrators reported back to Washington and then some left their posts for fear of their safety, President James Buchannon sent troops to Utah, fearing rebellion. The Mormons in turn prepared for the troops, which they had learned were coming but whose intentions they did not know. They prepared for evacuation (and actually did leave Salt Lake City before troops arrived) and made plans to burn their homes, crops, and property so the US troops would have no resources to stay. \nThe result of the Utah War was that Buchannon replaced Brigham Young as governor and left a garrison of US troops to enforce civil authority in Utah, which was immensely resented by the Mormons and described as an occupation. \nIn that context, and with the prior grievances of Mormons stemming from conflicts in Missouri and Illinois, the Civil War was seen as an affliction upon all of the United States, and one that was not within the Mormon's ability to control or influence. As a result, the Mormons largely did not participate in the war. Their only real involvement was in raising a couple groups of Calvary to maintain trade/mail routes safe from Indian raids when the US troops left as a result of the need for all troops to engage in the Civil War. \nThe best estimate of Mormon participants in the Civil War indicate that only a few hundred Mormons participated, mostly for the North, as the majority of Mormons had originally been from the Northeast of the United States. Mormon men were not encouraged to fight in the war. \nMost leaders who expressed opinions on the matter indicated that the war was God's punishment to the United States for its treatment of the church, both in Missouri, from which it had been expelled, and then in connection with the Utah War. One leader of the church, Orson Hyde, during the Civil War, declared that \"Joseph Smith once said, on the stand in Nauvoo, Illinois, that if the Government of the United States did not redress the wrongs of the Mormon people inflicted upon them in the State of Missouri, the whole nation should be distracted by mobs from one end to the other; and that they should have mobs to the full and to their ‘hearts content.’\" \n Another leader, Wilford Woodruff, speaking in 1862 about the Civil War declared, \"It is a hard dealing of the Almighty and we cannot help it.” \nBrigham Young also declared it to be a scourge on the United States for its treatment of the church and its members. “God has come out of his hiding place and has commenced to vex the nation that has rejected us, and he will vex it with a sore vexation. It will not be patched up—it never can come together again—but it will be sifted with a sieve of vanity, and in a short time it will be like water\nspilled on the ground.”\n\nDuring the War, the church and its militia, the Nauvoo Legion largely stayed out of the war. In 1862, during the Civil War, the United States passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act in response to the polygamy practiced by Mormons at that time, as well as the massive ownership of property by the Mormon church. The law banned polygamy in US territory and also prohibited non-profit ownership of land in US territory over $50,000. According to the book Zion in the Courts by Edwin Brown and Richard Mangrum (2001), Abraham Lincoln chose not to enforce the law in exchange for Utah's non-participation in the Civil War. \"Abraham Lincoln reportedly compared the LDS Church to a log he had encountered as a farmer that was 'too hard to split, too wet to burn and too heavy to move, so we plow around it. That's what I intend to do with the Mormons. You go back and tell Brigham Young that if he will let me alone, I will let him alone.'\" \nSo the Mormon church did not pick sides, and rather stayed out of the conflict and rather saw it as a conflict between those that had afflicted them. For more reading, see the book above and also “We Know No North, No South, No East, No West”: Mormon Interpretations of the Civil War, 1861–1865 by Richard E. Bennett.", "created_utc": 1643328527, "distinguished": null, "id": "huihr9c", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/se5p2n/how_did_mormons_react_to_the_american_civil_war/huihr9c/", "score": 57 } ]

[ { "body": "The difference between a revolt and a revolution is success. If the American revolution had failed, it would be referred to as something along the order of the \"Colonial Revolt of the late Eighteenth century.\"\n\nIf the Southern insurrection had succeeded, it would have been referred to with terms that described its finality/success: the Southern War of Independence or something along that line, and millions of African Americans would have continued to live under the brutality of slavery. Edit: although the contrary is not implied by the statement provided, of course all sorts of brutality toward African Americans continued after the war. \n\nBecause the insurrection failed, it is referred to as a civil war - a war within a nation that existed both before and after the rebellion. The insurrection could have been referred to with any number of terms, but not one like \"the war of independence,\" which implies independence was achieved. Independence was not achieved, so it is designated with a term that describes the complete failure of the effort.", "created_utc": 1633880604, "distinguished": null, "id": "hg44odx", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/q58o9s/why_is_the_american_civil_war_considered_a_civil/hg44odx/", "score": 82 }, { "body": "Titles of events have long been used to advance an agenda, push a point of view. The American Civil War is no exception. It has been called The War of the Rebellion, the War of Northern Aggression, the War Between the States, and , now that Confederate monuments are coming down everywhere, there will likely be a push to call it something like The Slaveholders' Revolt. To call it a civil war just differentiates it as an internal war, as opposed to a war against external enemies, and is fairly neutral, just like \"barroom fight\" ascribes no particular blame to anyone in the bar. To call it a war of independence would give it connotations of liberty, freedom- like the War for American Independence- that many would say it does not deserve. But, more importantly, it would not really be accurate. The Confederacy did not give up the idea of re-joining the Union, and would negotiate to do so. It hoped to force the North to come to terms and abandon all efforts to abolish slavery. In this it was supported by a lot of people in the North- Whigs and many Democrats- and if Lincoln had capitulated to this demand ( or lost the 1864 election and McClellan had done so) the South would have almost certainly re-joined.", "created_utc": 1633881054, "distinguished": null, "id": "hg45pj0", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/q58o9s/why_is_the_american_civil_war_considered_a_civil/hg45pj0/", "score": 22 }, { "body": "Well a major aspect of why is going to be the general reality of what happened, and then I would argue there are also some moral considerations involved.\n\nHistorically, the American Civil War, unlike the Revolution, was not actually a \"Revolution\" in the same sense of fighting against oppressive government tyranny, but was more a response to the growth of Republican party and the growing resentment and favoritism of the Abolitionist causes. The Confederate states left the Union not because they were fighting against government tyranny, but actually to protect their own tyrannical institution of slavery. The idea that, had they been left alone, they would have just stopped enslaving people is actually ludicrous, because the South had realized that even though industrialism would overtake them, they could just reapply slavery to the industrial system, having a free labor source, which they could abuse and exploit.\n\nSo there was a key difference there. The American Revolution was fought specifically to release, particularly landowning white cis het, men from the confines of the British king, who was attempting to extract more resources and wealth from the colonies, and impose greater and greater militaristic control over them.\n\nNext, we also have the case that there were somewhat different circumstances of government. Typically, we refer to a Revolution as an attempt to overthrow one government and replace it with a new system. The Confederacy was not promoting a Revolution but was actually fighting to preserve antiquated institutions. As such, arguably it was the North that was actually more revolutionary, given the Emancipation Proclamation was motivated by strong abolitionist pressures as well as militaristic ones, and had the prospect of reshaping Southern economy (though, as we know, this did not happen because the Southern white supremacists ended up ending Reconstruction).\n\nNext, unlike in the British-America situation, where we were a colony separated by an entire ocean, and so qualifying us as a unified singular nation is, in reality, a bit of a stretch, the United States and Confederacy shared borders and were the same nation before, on the same singular continent. In short, there is a geographical and communal reasons to consider this more a Civil War than a Revolution.\n\nLastly, throughout the entire war the North always viewed the South in terms of states in rebellion, rather than a separate entity, whereas in Britain the colonies were viewed as extensions. Furthermore, there are ethical reasons. It seemed and still is very ethically irresponsible to refer to pro-slave insurrectionists as somehow being... \"revolutionaries\" because it affords them prestige, the opportunity to be remembered as anything but the traitors that they were. So the North also had those reasons as well.", "created_utc": 1633890425, "distinguished": null, "id": "hg4rumm", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/q58o9s/why_is_the_american_civil_war_considered_a_civil/hg4rumm/", "score": 0 } ]

[ { "body": "This is a great question! To answer your question let me outline what the political landscape looked like during the election of 1860, essentially the eve of the Civil War. A glimpse of the parties involved will give us insight into how the American people felt. Keep in mind our ideas of \"left\" and \"right\" wing that we use today don't really apply to 1860, so I will avoid using those terms when describing the spectrum. During the 1860 election we have 4 political parties:\n\n* The Republican Party - The candidate is Abraham Lincoln who received almost 40% of the popular vote. The general Republican platform on the slavery issue is that slavery should not be extended into new US territories or future states. Namely, they were against the Kansas-Nebraska Act which allowed those newly created territories to hold a popular vote on whether or not slavery would be allowed within their borders. This was a direct nullification of the earlier Missouri Compromise, which would have banned slavery in both Kansas and Nebraska because they both were above latitude 36°30'. Disregarding the Missouri Compromise meant that slavery could possibly continue into new territories, while the Republican Party wanted to simply contain slavery where it already was. The Republican Party would have been seen at the far side of the spectrum for these 4 parties.Although politicians like Lincoln were actually fairly moderate, the party was popular with die hard abolitionists as well. If we go all the way to the extreme end of this side of the spectrum, we end up with the Radical Republicans, with members like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens. Radical Republicans held the idea that slavery should be abolished and black emancipation granted. The Radical Republicans often directly insulted Southern planters, and were the group that greatly inflamed Southerners into threats of secession. A great example is when Charles Sumner gave an hours long speech on the senate floor about the horrors of the Kansas-Nebraska Act while simultaneously throwing personal insults at plantation owner Andrew Butler by calling him a pimp for owning slaves. Days later he would pay for his speech by being beaten with a cane by South Carolina senator Preston Brookes\n* The Constitutional Union Party - Their candidate was John Bell who received about 13% of the vote. This newly formed party was about as centrists as you could get in the 1860s. They wanted to completely shift their focus away from slavery altogether. The party itself was made up of Southerners who did not want secession, but wanted to keep their slaves. The reason this group is typically seen as moderates though is because they were the only one of the 4 parties to not adapt any official stance on the slavery question.\n* The Democratic Party - Their candidate was Stephen A Douglas who received about 30% of the popular vote. At this point in time the Democratic party had fractured into 2 distinctive branches formed mostly by geographical lines. Northern Democrats wanted to preserve the Union, keep slavery where it already was, and allow new territories to vote on whether or not they wanted slavery (Known as Popular Sovereignty). Southern Democrats by contrast wanted to actively take part in the say of slavery in new territories (I'll explain more about them below). The Democratic Party would eventually make a clean break, with the Southern Democrats making their own separate party, and the Northern Democrats being all that was left of the original Democratic Party. On the spectrum, the Democratic Party would be off centered far away from the Republican side.\n* The Southern Democratic Party - Their candidate was John C Breckenridge who got 18% of the vote but carried almost every Southern state. This party represents the far side of the spectrum opposite the Republican Party. The slavery question was simple for them: new territories should be allowed to have slaves automatically, or at the very least a slave state be admitted for every free state. On the extreme end of this party would be those labeled as \"fire-eaters\", Southerners who openly spoke about secession if pro-slavery laws were not passed. This is the group that frequently blamed the Radical Republicans for their threats of secession, believing that the Radical Republicans influenced all political decisions.\n\nSo now the other part your question: Was there blame laid on anti-slavery forces for pushing away centrists? The answer is yes. Abolitionists who believed slaves should be freed were seen as fairly extreme, hated in the South, and not very well liked in much of the North. Northerners feared immediate emancipation would greatly disrupt the economy and social structure, and typically wanted to keep slavery contained or look at gradual emancipation. They looked at abolitionists with fear that their extreme views would bring complete social upheaval both because it would upset Southerners and possibly lead to secession, but also because it would mean a huge influx of black people to Northern cities. Likewise, Southerners hated abolitionists because their ideas meant the end of their society, both economically, politically, and socially. To them, abolitionists were the epitome of everything they hated about the North. In the end though, abolitionists and the Radical Republicans ironically had far more influence on Southern Democrats and Fire-Eaters than on fellow Republicans in the North. The Radicals extreme views brought out the worst fears in Southerners, and completely drowned out moderate voices like those of the Democratic Party or the Constitutional Union Party.\n\nSources:\n\nA great book on the politics right before the Civil War, and where I got most of this information from is: *Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought on the Civil War* by Douglas R. Egerton\n\nFor opinions on the North and South's views on abolitionists and the attack on Charles Sumner I mostly used information from the book: *The Caning: The Assault That Drove America to Civil War* by Stephen Puleo", "created_utc": 1643331598, "distinguished": null, "id": "huip4fl", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/schvo4/in_the_lead_up_to_the_american_civil_war_where/huip4fl/", "score": 28 } ]

[ { "body": "Hi Dr Somerville, thank you for doing this AMA!\n\nHow many observers did the British send? What did they think about the capabilities of both of the Civil War armies?", "created_utc": 1593248567, "distinguished": null, "id": "fw5gb64", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/hgp365/i_am_dr_michael_somerville_author_of_bull_run_to/fw5gb64/", "score": 105 }, { "body": "Thank you for doing this AMA!\n\nThe title of your book makes me wonder about the nature of armies. Bull Run is known (perhaps wrongly?) as a big mess of a battle because both armies consisted of large recently raised levies with little training. The American Civil War continued to be a war of mass levies. The British army of the period saw itself as the opposite of that - a small but highly trained professional force. Did this factor into the British reception of the war?", "created_utc": 1593250689, "distinguished": null, "id": "fw5id05", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/hgp365/i_am_dr_michael_somerville_author_of_bull_run_to/fw5id05/", "score": 70 }, { "body": "Looks like a great book that I look forward to reading.\n\nCan you speak to the role of the press or public pressure from reporting on the American Civil war that may have influence British military planners? Or how the British press covered the civil war vs their American counterparts? \n\nI‘ve heard the press coverage of the Boer War factored into Imperial visions and policy, so I’m wondering if there are deeper antecedents that can be illuminated in the Civil War", "created_utc": 1593253784, "distinguished": null, "id": "fw5lb0n", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/hgp365/i_am_dr_michael_somerville_author_of_bull_run_to/fw5lb0n/", "score": 34 } ]

[ { "body": "Given your specific example of Lincoln, I'll repost an older answer of mine to a question about international responses to his death as it seems relevant:\n\n[How was the assassination of Lincoln perceived in Europe?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7dghwe/umattpiv_posted_this_question_in_rhistory_but_im/dpxu1ad/)\n\nThe war had been followed closely by the international community, and the cause of liberty, republicanism, and emancipation a resonant one. Lincoln and the Union cause had been exceptionally popular overseas with people - not always so much with the elites, which saw large pockets of Confederate sympathy in some countries, especially France but also the UK - and the tragic demise of the President resulted in massive outpourings of sympathy internationally. When the news began arriving internationally, large crowds gathered outside the nearest US embassy and consulate to pay respects, for weeks onwards they were inundated with seemingly endless parades of written correspondence in the same vein. Government officials too, of course, sent similar missives, but this was more to be expected as proper diplomatic protocol, and not necessarily the expression of heartfelt grief by, say, Napoleon III.\n\nStill though, the general and widespread demonstrations worldwide were quite impactful, coming from people and organizations in every part of society. In one eulogy from a French newspaper, which seems fairly representative, the editors remarked that “Lincoln represented the cause of democracy in the largest and the most universal acceptation of the word at cause is our cause, as much as it is that of the United States,” while the small Sicilian village of Acireale's letter lamented \"*Abraham Lincoln was not yours only—he was also ours, because he was a brother whose great mind and fearless conscience guided a people to union, and courageously up-rooted slavery.*” His death was seen not only as a tragedy for the US, but also a tragedy for the cause of liberty, committed at the hands of despotism. The American diplomatic corps was quite overwhelmed by the extent of the displays.\n\nIn France, where as noted already there had been notable Confederate sympathy in the government, the people themselves were quite saddened by the death, and demonstrations of mourning were utilized as subtle means of republican political protest - publically banned at the time. Demonstrators, dressed for a funeral, were giving a subtle challenge to the Empire. A public fundraising effort was started to present the widowed Mary Todd with a medal to honor her husband's memory, an act seen as threatening enough by the government that they stepped in to end it and ban further efforts, which simply resulted in more publicity as prominent republicans began agitating against the clampdown, and managed to get the medal - reading \"Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité\" - struck anyways in Switzerland, presented to the US Ambassador with with words \"Tell Mrs. Lincoln that in this little box is the heart of France.\"\n\nAs for negative reactions? One of the most notable perhaps would be the Pope. Or rather, the lack of reaction, as there was simply no statement one way or the other from His Holiness. And in contrast to the French medal honoring Lincoln, Pius IX - then on the ropes in the face of Italian unification - sent a signed photograph to *Jefferson Davis*, what Doyle describes as a \"gesture of respect from one victim of international liberalism to another\". This likely didn't help dampen rumors about a Catholic conspiracy behind the assassination.\n\nBut in any case, the sum of it all is that the assassination resulted in international mourning, and expressions globally that the lose was one for the world as a whole, not only the United States.\n\nAll from \"The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War\" Don H. Doyle", "created_utc": 1647209427, "distinguished": null, "id": "i0jlqsj", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/tddgok/what_information_was_being_shared_globally_during/i0jlqsj/", "score": 10 } ]

[ { "body": "Awesome question! I've personally never read any cases of individuals being so totally isolated from the society that they were unaware of the Civil War in its entirety. That said, the South was an extremely diverse place during the war and was far from being a monolithic region all falling into line to support the Confederate government. This was even more so true in rural areas of the Appalachian mountains. This question also, interestingly, brings up the importance of the home front during the Civil War and the guerrilla warfare that often impacted these more isolated families. \n\nWhile your question is broad, I would like to focus on the Shelton Laurel Massacre as a story of isolation and violence in the Appalachian mountains. In the Western North Carolina mountains (WNC), pockets of families that may traditionally fall underneath the definition of 'hill billy' lived and were aware of the conflict. While they certainly would not refer to themselves as such, they lived a lifestyle that would be commonly associated with the modern definition of hillbilly. Author Philip Paludan wrote \"*Victims: A True Story of the Civil War\"* that covers a rural mountain family that was massacred by Confederates in an infamous war crime.\n\nRoughly two-thirds of people in 1860 were defined as rural families. The Shelton family of Madison County, North Carolina had lived in their respective part of the mountain for three generations before the Civil War started. They were able to provide enough through subsistence farming to provide for their families and sometimes made it to the market to make a few dollars. Visitors to this area of WNC wrote \"Every phase of the mountaineer's life connects in some way with tradition currently received...Castaways...on some unknown island...untroubled by the growth of civilization, customs and ideas unaltered from the time of their fathers\" (Paludan, 11). Paludan writes that \"It \\[the Civil War\\] had come ripping into the fabric of a life whose rhythms were seldom interrupted\" (5). \n\nAs the war progressed and became less popular, desertion rates increased. These deserters often fled home to help their struggling families. These individuals often became targets of Confederate war policies like forced conscription and Tax in Kind (a 10% tax on farmed goods that civilians would give CSA authorities). These deserters and policies often put more isolated families into contact with outside forces. Additionally, the guerrilla warfare that occurred brought fighting as well. Some families, like the Sheltons, became targets because of Union support in the guerrilla fighting. The closest hub for the family was in Marshall, North Carolina where salt rations were being withheld from them. \n\n\n This was essentially a death sentence, as salt was used for meat preservation in the winter. This culminated in a raid in which members of the Shelton family overwhelmed guards in Marshall and stole salt and clothing. Confederate forces, while not on official orders to do such, responded by attacking and torturing civilians for information. These CSA soldiers eventually executed 13 civilians, the youngest being 13. News of this spread far relatively quickly and became an infamous part of the Appalachian Civil War history. \n\n\nSome historians, like Daniel Sutherland, would argue that the homefront and guerrilla warfare that isolated communities experienced were actually turning points in the Confederate war effort similar to how Gettysburg and Vicksburg were. This guerrilla warfare spilled over and affected isolated families in different ways. So, these individuals would have been aware of the conflict, but participation or loyalty would vary from area to area. I can expand on this or answer follow up questions around lunch! \n\n\nSources: \n*Victims: A True Story of the Civil War* by Phillips Paludan \n\n\n*The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War* by John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney\n\n*A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War* by Daniel E. Sutherland\n\n “Setting the Stage: Antebellum and Civil War Western North Carolina.” *Reconstruction's Ragged Edge: The Politics of Postwar Life in the Southern Mountains*, by STEVEN E. NASH, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2016, pp. 9–27. *JSTOR*, \n\n War Comes to the Hills.” *Western North Carolina: Its Mountains and Its People to 1880*, by Ora Blackmun, Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina, 1977, pp. 343–355. *JSTOR*,", "created_utc": 1573218098, "distinguished": null, "id": "f6w6i9g", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/dt9vfb/im_a_hillbilly_living_a_secluded_life_in/f6w6i9g/", "score": 1231 }, { "body": "Everyone in Appalachia knew about the Civil War. Everyone. And it is simply not true that, at that time, Appalachian folk were isolated from news about the rest of the world. Let's look at two small Appalachian communities in specific, both next door to Georgia.\n\nFirst up is Cave Creek, TN, which is really just a spot on a map. There was no town, there was just a collection of farmsteads. At the time of the Civil War it was as isolated as can be, and it hasn't changed much. In 1891, a constable living in Cave Creek named Brack Smith was murdered. This eventually led to the live funeral of Bush Breazeale, which was fictionalized in the film \"Get Low\" (Robert Duvall, Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek). The movie was historical fiction, but the live funeral did happen, and the real reason for it was that Bush was accused of murdering Brack Smith. And one of the reasons (though not the only reason) Brack Smith was murdered was the Civil War. His family had been pro-Confederate during the war, while Cave Creek was pro-Union. Cave Creek cemetery is littered with graves of Union veterans, specifically the Union 1st Regiment Volunteer Tennessee Infantry. A lot of folks in Cave Creek served the Union, despite Tennessee being Confederate. But Smith's family was Confederate, which led to tension that lasted decades. There was tension at the time, too. Church records show members of the church there being kicked out for supporting the Confederacy was back in 1861. Folks in Cave Creek knew what was up, and that place is very much Appalachia.\n\nA second place worth looking at is Cades Cove, also in TN (EDIT: not in NC lol). Most people know it because it is a popular historical site, but back then it was just a typical rural Appalachian community. It was also pro-Union, and after the war, in 1865, a Confederate supporter who lived there named Daniel Foute was dragged behind a horse all the way to Knoxville. This killed him, obviously, but it shows how divided Cave Creek was during the war. They too knew what was up, and were very much in the heart of Appalachia.\n\nHow did these folks know? Because rural Appalachia was not a backwater then. Rural Appalachia only became a backwater AFTER the Civil War. In fact, the war largely caused it. Before the Civil War, Tennessee was socially and economically prominent. The state produced three Presidents before the war but none after (sorry, Al Gore). Then the war came, and more battles were fought there than any state other than Virginia. It had the most Union volunteers of any Southern state, and a high number of Confederate volunteers. It tore the state apart. In 1850 it led the nation in hog production, but by 1930 it had declined by about sixty percent. The overall Tennessee economy declined each of the three decades after the war. Before the Civil War, Tennessee was a modern state. After the war, it remained the same while the rest of the country advanced. The economic devastation of the war is what caused many places in Tennessee and rural Appalachia to become backwaters. But even then, these folks were not isolated. Many people in Cave Creek served in the World Wars. Appalachia became an economic backwater, but they never stopped getting the news, and they never stopped being part of the larger society of America. The notion that they have been isolated is, and always has been, a misconception.\n\nSources:\n\nCades Cove: A Southern Appalachian Community, by David Dunn (this is FANTASTIC)\n\nVengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 18th Century American South, by Edward Ayers\n\nUncle Bush's Live Funeral, by Scott Seeke", "created_utc": 1573220956, "distinguished": null, "id": "f6w9q5d", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/dt9vfb/im_a_hillbilly_living_a_secluded_life_in/f6w9q5d/", "score": 354 }, { "body": "[Edit: TL;DR, seclusion, or the archetype of the purely independent mountaineer, is largely a myth. Even the most isolated people in the mountain South were connected to the \"outside world\" on a regular basis.]\n\nYeah, you would know... news traveled faster than you might think. Even the most isolated people were still connected. Of those people that perhaps didn’t have newspaper subscriptions, or correspondence with the “outside world,” nearby social centers (even in the most rural areas) such as churches and especially gristmills were places to gather and gossip. Let’s say you’re a relatively impoverished hillbilly... you’re still likely to be traveling and connecting with outsiders due to the nature of the mountain economy. You might pass a traveler while driving hogs and learn of your state’s secession, or while taking apples to market, encounter a recruiting sergeant. Let’s say you’re somewhat of an outlaw moonshiner... again, you or one of your cronies will likely have visited the local mill to grind the corn for your mash. Mills were often the site of elections, politicking, country fairs, and militia musters, and of course by extension “milling” around of locals. Let’s say you were a slave in the southern Appalachians— they, too had more mobility than you might expect, again due to the nature of the economy, the lower numbers of slaves there, and the “hiring out” system that spread skilled workers (blacksmiths, joiners, etc.) around the mountain hamlets. And though fears of slave insurrection were less intense than, say, the South Carolina lowcountry, slaveholders in the mountains were very much attuned to the national crisis and of course couldn’t feasibly hide the war from their slaves. And, in the case of the Eastern Cherokees in the mountain South (mostly in North Carolina), some of them did not speak English but were still very aware of their state’s secession convention and the unfolding implications. In general, news did travel more than you might expect, and certainly by the time the Confederate government extended a more heavy-handed grasp even in its peripheries (in the form of tax-in-kind, conscription, etc.), yes, the reality of secession and wartime pressures would have been acutely felt even for your most podunk “hillbilly”. \n\nSources: I’ll direct you especially to the scholarship of John Inscoe:\nThe Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War (with Gordon McKinney as co-editor)\n& Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina\n\nEdit: while Inscoe focuses mostly on WNC, he illustrates the interconnectivity across the mountains to GA and other states.\n\nSee also:\nJohn Finger, Eastern Band of Cherokees, 1819-1900", "created_utc": 1573216081, "distinguished": null, "id": "f6w4i6z", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/dt9vfb/im_a_hillbilly_living_a_secluded_life_in/f6w4i6z/", "score": 72 } ]

[ { "body": "Yes, it is true. You can see in the tweet thread that Silliman cites a source from an academic press, and in looking into it, the book checks out. I can completely understand why you would question it, though! Twitter history that goes viral is very often off-base or significantly flawed. (DON'T TALK TO ME ABOUT BEAU BRUMMELL.)\n\nIn the northern and southern English colonies of North America that would eventually become the United States, pumpkin (or \"pompion\", as it was sometimes called) was widely cultivated because it grew so well with little tending and could be used in so many ways: brewed into beer, boiled or roasted as a vegetable, mashed into thick soup or pancake/quick bread batter, and made into pies, tarts, and puddings; it could even be processed into a naturally sweet paste as a replacement for expensive, imported sugar. It also was ready for harvest after the other crops and kept well even without being preserved. In the colonial era, the pumpkin was really more a food of necessity than a prized crop - something you grew just to get by, if you couldn't afford cider, meat, sugar, etc. - but by the days of the early republic, it had taken a space in the national imagination as an important part of a specifically American cuisine. The first really American cookbook, Amelia Simmons's *American Cookery* (1796), included two recipes for pumpkin pie, reflecting its importance: one richer and made with sugar (indicating its use for the table in a wealthier household that could in theory have afforded something else), the other made with molasses and fewer spices.\n\n>Eating pumpkins signified a family’s taking care of itself on its own piece of land, no matter how humble the size, and depending on no one but itself. Growing pumpkins required nothing more than land, honest work, and family. Because the pumpkin produced large yields on minimal plots, wealth and social class were superfluous to its production. Any man, at least any white man, could plant pumpkins, and every woman could transform them into food for the family, nourishing themselves and the nation’s democratic aspirations in the process. The pumpkin, therefore, made a strong political statement. ... Yet while some Europeans scorned the pumpkin as rural peasant food and others equated it with hedonism, the vegetable triggered a sense of pride and nostalgia in some early Americans. It did more than fill dinner plates; it communicated a set of assumptions about who Americans were and what America stood for in contrast to Europeans.\n\n(Cindy Ott, *Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon*)\n\nAt the same time, the increasing prosperity and industrialization of the new nation meant that fewer people were actually eating pumpkin as a regular dish - they could afford winter squashes and proper ale, and could relegate the pumpkin to livestock feed if they even bothered to cultivate it at all. In fact, the main distinguishing feature of a squash versus a pumpkin was that people wanted to eat it, in general! To the urbanizing population, the pumpkin was a symbol of rural life and the negative stereotypes of backwardness that went along with it.\n\nThe exception to all this was pumpkin pie in New England, so tied to regional identity that many cookbooks called it specifically \"New England pumpkin pie\". Despite not needing to use pumpkin as a sugar substitute or as a mashed vegetable on the table, New Englanders were very happy to use it as a pie filling. This is probably because those rural stereotypes were (and to some extent still are) held proudly as self-identifiers in the northeast, in a way that they weren't in the south. Ott also ties it to parallel feelings about unrefined nature vs. artificiality, which likewise connected to New England's self-fashioning as rugged, unpretentious individualists. The new-ish holiday of Thanksgiving in particular tied into this view, since much of the way it is and has been celebrated tied into harvest festivities, with a large dinner featuring seasonal domestic produce as a central focus. Spread-out extended families in New England would traditionally (or stereotypically) go back to the farmhouses of their parents and grandparents to enjoy the meal, which would often conclude with the traditional pumpkin pie.\n\nThe pie began to tie in with abolition in the decades leading up to the war, as the magazine writers like Sarah Josepha Hale (later to become most famed for her work on *Godey's Lady's Book*) who promoted Thanksgiving as a national holiday - which it wasn't at the time - were also writing and publishing material against slavery. I will allow Ott's clear prose to draw the connections again:\n\n>The writers interpreted agrarian ways of life or modes of production in social and political terms, imagining the small family farm as an antidote to the plantation. Rather than being determined to spread the agrarian way of life itself, they sought to spread the values and sense of morality they saw embedded in it and in themselves. ... Whittier, Child, and Hale, some of the most outspoken abolitionists, also wrote some of the period’s most popular and cherished pumpkin stories. To them, the pumpkin—and pumpkin farming—so completely embodied New England, as opposed to southern, values. The pumpkin was a naturally abundant crop that exemplified agrarian prowess, yet at the same time it was an unmarketable crop that stood for timeless agrarian values uncorrupted by the pursuit of profit.", "created_utc": 1637889385, "distinguished": null, "id": "hm3oli0", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/r1yak9/was_pumpkin_pie_a_symbol_of_abolition_during_the/hm3oli0/", "score": 38 } ]

[ { "body": "Hello Dr. Silkenat, thanks for doing this.\nAs a researcher on desertion and defection during another American conflict, the Vietnam War, I’m very interested to hear about the process of defection during the American Civil War. Defection ostensibly involves surrender followed by integration - how did this process look during the Civil War?", "created_utc": 1585318243, "distinguished": null, "id": "flngqq7", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/fpxd3n/i_am_dr_david_silkenat_here_to_discuss_my_recent/flngqq7/", "score": 88 }, { "body": "Something that is always fascinating to me is the parole system and its mechanics. How widely was it respected prior to its break-down midway through the war, and how effective was enforcement of it by the opposing sides, lacking the kind of modern tools we would have to check identity?\n\ni.e. if a soldier gave his parole and went home, how likely would it be that he is back in the ranks fighting? How much did that depend on North v. South in respecting it? And if captured a second time, what was the chance it would be recognized he violated his parole?", "created_utc": 1585318796, "distinguished": null, "id": "flnhmw3", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/fpxd3n/i_am_dr_david_silkenat_here_to_discuss_my_recent/flnhmw3/", "score": 76 }, { "body": "Were soldiers (from either side) who surrendered treated poorly when they returned home? Did that change as the war progressed?", "created_utc": 1585318227, "distinguished": null, "id": "flngprv", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/fpxd3n/i_am_dr_david_silkenat_here_to_discuss_my_recent/flngprv/", "score": 31 } ]

[ { "body": "I'd like to suggest one, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, in Frederick MD. It's not big, but has a lot of well-designed exhibits and good information- and useful information. I myself like looking at a rack of rifles and carbines, can be interested in variations on tape primers and tube sights...but the other end of the bullet trajectory is too often neglected. The advent of the rifled musket and minie bullet resulted in a lot more deaths but also more badly wounded soldiers, and the museum does a pretty good job of explaining what happened because of that, how the army surgeons tried to cope. \n\n It is also convenient- about a half hour's drive from Antietam Battlefield. And ( merely personal opinion) there are some pretty good places nearby, with local beers, for lunch.", "created_utc": 1642369791, "distinguished": null, "id": "hsydu2n", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/s5kpwo/best_american_civil_war_museum/hsydu2n/", "score": 6 }, { "body": "Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. **Please [Read Our Rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules) before you comment in this community**. Understand that [rule breaking comments get removed](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/h8aefx/rules_roundtable_xviii_removed_curation_and_why/).\n\n#Please consider **[Clicking Here for RemindMeBot](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/s5kpwo/best_american_civil_war_museum/%5D%0A%0ARemindMe!%202%20days)** as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, **[Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=AHMessengerBot&subject=Subscribe&message=!subscribe)**.\n\nWe thank you for your interest in this *question*, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to RemindMeBot, consider [using our Browser Extension](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d6dzi7/tired_of_clicking_to_find_only_removed_comments/), or getting the [Weekly Roundup](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=subredditsummarybot&subject=askhistorians+weekly&message=x). In the meantime our [Twitter](https://twitter.com/askhistorians), [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/askhistorians/), and [Sunday Digest](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all) feature excellent content that has already been written!\n\n\n*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskHistorians) if you have any questions or concerns.*", "created_utc": 1642364856, "distinguished": "moderator", "id": "hsy139o", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/s5kpwo/best_american_civil_war_museum/hsy139o/", "score": 1 }, { "body": "I'm like week late to this one, but if it's arms you like, the best place I've seen is the Chickamauga Battlefield [Fuller Gun Collection](https://www.nps.gov/chch/learn/historyculture/fuller-gun-collection.htm). It has hundreds of military and civilian arms from 1500s matchlocks to the World Wars. Lots of obscure, only-a-few-known-to-exist in the US guns as well.", "created_utc": 1642985069, "distinguished": null, "id": "htydtvm", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/s5kpwo/best_american_civil_war_museum/htydtvm/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "More can always be said but [this older answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/67fvaf/was_the_average_confederate_soldier_a_strong/dgq8tn2/) should be of interest.", "created_utc": 1648316531, "distinguished": null, "id": "i27sfko", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/toy4gs/why_did_nonslave_holding_southerners_fight_for/i27sfko/", "score": 5 }, { "body": "Listen to [Episode 108 of the AskHistorians Podcast](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/88lrpz/askhistorians_podcast_108_poor_whites_in_the/) an interview of the historian Keri Leigh Merritt by /u/ThucydidesWasAwesome. It might be helpful to you.", "created_utc": 1648324386, "distinguished": null, "id": "i28aaa0", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/toy4gs/why_did_nonslave_holding_southerners_fight_for/i28aaa0/", "score": 2 } ]

[ { "body": "Not particularly, no. American democracy was never in particular contention during the period surrounding the pre Civil War period, though it certainly had its share of strongmen and authoritarian politics. The primary questions that arose from the Slave Debate revolved around both the humanitarian aspect of slavery and the rights states held over being able to enforce the practice; this is why Confederate apologists will frequently cite \"States Rights\" as the leading cause of the Civil War, because while it is a vast simplification of everything surrounding slavery's involvement in the matter, it isn't technically incorrect. While the Lost Cause myth is an integral part of that topic, its better explained in the FAQ relating to the Civil War than here. Back on our topic, there were never objections to the structure of American democracy or the federal structure as a whole; the government of the Confederacy was almost an identical replica of the Unions government, with the primary exceptions within its constitution being those enshrining both the right to own slaves and vague language about strengthening states rights. While the Confederacy never really experienced an extended period of peace during its existence, it largely conducted itself in the same manner the U.S government had previously, though with far more emphasis on the slavery aspect. Ironically, Radical Reconstruction is probably the largest amount of democratic backsliding the United States has ever experienced, when its primary purpose was meant to be reunification and bringing the country closer together; The South experienced far more authoritarian conditions in large areas for the decade after the Civil War than it ever had pre-war or during the Confederacy.", "created_utc": 1640918880, "distinguished": null, "id": "hqmsxqo", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/rsbkac/leading_up_to_the_american_civil_war_were/hqmsxqo/", "score": 4 } ]

[ { "body": "Below I have copy-pasted [my answer to a similar question](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f0w6ha/if_slavery_was_protected_by_the_constitution_via/fh1illp/), with some revisions. \n\n(1 /3)\n\n**TL;DR:** Many secessionists understood that Lincoln and the Republicans in the incoming 1861 Congress likely wouldn't be able to get their agenda enacted. But his election represented, to them, a turning point in federal politics. Due to the population discrepancy, the North had now proved they could win the White House and gain Congressional majorities without any Southern support at all. That meant, compromise and concessions from the North would soon be unnecessary, and slavery was certainly going to be an eventual victim. Secession was important in the aftermath of Lincoln's election because there was likely to be no future point when the South would be as united as they then were in support of slavery, and against the Republicans and abolition. It was \"now or never\". If they did not take a stand in support of slavery at the present moment, Southern politics were sure to soon fracture on the slavery issue, and it would be doomed. Secessionists were willing to go to war to prevent that from happening.\n\n**LONG ANSWER**:\n\nGood question, and it was one that Northern politicians and moderate Southern politicians from slave states were wondering about out loud at the time, too. Put it into context: Even before the Civil War and the Secession Crisis, there had already been related crises. The most notable is the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33, during which some South Carolina politicians had threatened secession by a \"state's rights\" or \"Compact Theory\" interpretation of the Constitution, a view that had never had much support in the federal judiciary (almost certainly [not enough](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c36lvn/does_the_us_constitution_allow_for_states_to/erpcamd/) to have South Carolina's argument on behalf of nullification upheld by the federal courts). This culminated in the South Carolina General Assembly passing an \"Ordinance of Nullification\" in November 1832, signed by the governor in February 1833, [that ended with a commitment](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/ordnull.asp) to secede from the Union if South Carolina did not get their way.\n\nViolence was averted by a Congressional compromise, though not before President Andrew Jackson issued [a proclamation](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/jack01.asp) declaring secession to be illegal. There was a famous Senate debate at the time, too, called the Webster-Hayne debate between Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Robert Hayne of South Carolina, highlights of which were published in newspapers nationwide. Webster was roundly considered victorious in his defense of the Constitution that it rejected nullification or secession as a legal constitutional remedy to federal-state disagreement.\n\nAnd at the time, many of South Carolinas's [fellow slave states rejected the argument](https://books.google.com/books?id=MW8sDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA159&dq=%22alabama%22+%22tennessee%22+%22mississippi%27s%22) that a state had the right to secede, let alone that it was justified in the 1832-33 circumstances. But over the next couple of decades, the pro-slavery, pro-state's rights wing of Southern politics became more vocal and more extreme, and began to find supporters in almost all the Southern statehouses, particularly in the Deep South.\n\nAnother flash point had occurred with the passage of the Compromise of 1850, after which there was a Nashville Convention of representatives from slave states, some of whom advocated for secession in response to the Compromise, though this was still a minority view. Nevertheless, Southerners in Congress lobbied for a more favorable compromise and further concessions by the North, to replace what had been passed by Congress in 1850.\n\nThrough the presidencies of Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, the situation over slavery deteriorated even further, especially due to the fallout from the Kansas-Nebraska Act that led to the proxy war known as Bleeding Kansas.\n\nIn the lead-up to the 1860 Presidential election, with the North having organized [a party explicitly around the issues](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1860) of repealing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, of stopping the spread of slavery to new states out West, of repealing the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and of appointing abolitionist judges to the federal courts, there were calls by Southern politicians during the campaign that the election of Abraham Lincoln would be tantamount to an act of hostility against the South that could only be resolved by secession.\n\nNot every politician from the slave states saw it that way, however. During the campaign, in August 1860, U.S. Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky gave [a speech on the floor of the Senate](https://www.nytimes.com/1860/08/08/archives/presidential-the-constitutional-union-party-able-speech-of-hon-jj.html) saying that, even with a Lincoln victory, however alarming that may be to the South, it should not be a cause for disunion. Slavery could survive a Lincoln presidency, and the best course of action was to fight the constitutional way, through the congressional process, against any anti-slavery measures that Lincoln and the Republican Party proposed. Oppose the Republican platform in Congress, then vote Lincoln out of office. Secession was a drastic, and unwarranted act:\n\n> \"The mere fact of the election of Mr. Lincoln would be a great calamity, though it should not create resistance to the Government. Personally, he is very probably upright, honest and worthy. He married a Kentucky lady, and is a Kentuckian himself. But, politically, he is the agent and subject of the party which brought him into political existence. As the Republicans' President, he would be at least a terror to the South. There is a very considerable Southern sentiment which apprehends much mischief from their success. A feeling of uneasiness and insecurity would pervade [the South].\n>\n> \"But, whoever be elected, [the winner] should be sustained. No State, or set of States, should start up and rebel, and resist by force of arms a president of the United States elected by the people of the United States. No minority should act the dictator unless they are ready for revolution and anarchy. If our President misbehaves, let us call him to account in a legitimate way according to the constitutional forms of our Republican Government, and displace him at the constitutional time.\"\n\nAbout six weeks later, on September 22, 1860, [Gov. Sam Houston of Texas gave a similar speech](https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth498755/) in support of slavery but against secession. After giving many reasons why secession would be worse for upholding slavery than would continuance in the Union, he said that Lincoln's election by itself was not reason enough to secede:\n\n> \"But if, through division in the ranks of those opposed to Mr. Lincoln, he should be elected, we have no excuse for dissolving the Union. The Union is worth more than Mr. Lincoln, and if the battle is to be fought for the Constitution, let us fight it in the Union and for the sake of the Union. With a majority of the people in favor of the Constitution, shall we desert the Government and leave it in the hands of the minority? A new obligation will be imposed upon us, to guard the Constitution and to see that no infraction of it is attempted or permitted. If Mr. Lincoln administers the Government in accordance with the Constitution, our rights must be respected. If he does not, the Constitution has provided a remedy.\n>\n> \"No tyrant or usurper can ever invade our rights so long as we are united. Let Mr. Lincoln attempt it, and his party will scatter like chaff before the storm of popular indignation which will burst forth from one end of the country to the other. Secession or revolution will not be justified until legal and constitutional means of redress have been tried, and I can not believe that the time will ever come when these will prove inadequate.\"\n\nOf course, Lincoln was elected, and within days, South Carolina was passing legislation to hold a secession convention, and other states had followed suit by the end of November. South Carolina was the first to secede on December 20. Six more states seceded by February 1 of the following year.\n\nThere was a lot of negotiation of \"compromise\" back and forth during the Secession Winter of 1860-61, essentially to make further concessions to the South to prevent secession. But Republican politicians, and many in the North otherwise, already felt they had given way more concessions than they should have under the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and *Dred Scott*, and more, so compromise didn't get very far. Though it did get far enough that the \"Corwin Amendment\" to the Constitution got its 2/3 approval in both houses of Congress in the last days of the Buchanan administration. However, it was a rather modest concession, basically saying that the federal government couldn't interfere with slavery where it already existed, and making a concession that the feds could never abolish slavery in those states in the future against their will, even if they had the votes to do so. But this didn't do anything to stem the tide of secession.\n\nIn the days before South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860, there was debate on the floor of the Senate over an earlier, failed, compromise (the Crittenden Compromise, in fact, proposed by the aforementioned senator from Kentucky). During the debate, [Sen. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee gave a speech](https://archive.org/details/constitutionalit00john/page/1/mode/2up) that echoed the sentiments of both Crittenden and Houston. Sorry it's a bit long but it is all worth reading (emphasis mine, which is the section most relevant to your question):", "created_utc": 1634324063, "distinguished": null, "id": "hgrt82r", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/q8o2k4/when_the_american_civil_war_started_there_were/hgrt82r/", "score": 27 } ]

[ { "body": "Lincoln was aware that the blockading of ports was an act of war. In fact, since an act of war is, by implication, taken against another state, some in his cabinet argued that a blockade would constitute a tacit recognition of the sovereignty of the Confederacy, something the North wanted to avoid. Lincoln was less interested in the legal definitions than in the military utility of the plan, and he approved it despite the objections.\n\nOn April 19, Lincoln issued his proclamation blockading Southern ports. It provided that “a competent force will be posted so as to prevent entrance and exit of vessels” from the ports of the states in rebellion. Then, to make the proclamation official, he signed this document, authorizing “the Secretary of State to affix the Seal of the United States to a Proclamation setting on foot a Blockade of the ports of the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.” The seal was affixed to the blockade proclamation, which was announced that day. It was a de facto declaration of war by the Union against the Confederacy.\n\nAfter the war, the Supreme Court issued an opinion fixing the exact dates on which the war began and ended. It held: “…The proclamation of intended blockade by the President may therefore be assumed as marking the first of these dates, and the proclamation that the war had closed, as marking the second.” Thus, according to the Supreme Court, Lincoln’s signature on this order sealing the imposition of the blockade marked the official beginning of the Civil War.\n\nNow that that's settled out of the way regarding the Union's declaration of war towards the Confederacy, to answer the question towards the Confederacy's perspective. \n\nTo answer this question, we need to understand why the Confederates attacked Fort Sumter. This is mainly because of two factors: Jefferson Davis's pride on not appearing weak by allowing a federal fort in his \"sovereign\" territory, and also because quite literally; at least by the Confederate's perspective, Fort Sumter was on their land.\n\nThese aspects lead into the knowledge in that the idea of secession is a form of declaration of war itself for the Confederates because it lays active claim towards formerly federal land in South Carolina.\n\nSo in essence, the Confederates did not have a formal declaration of war because from their perspective they were already a legitimate state and it was not necessary to declare war against an adversary that was already impeding on their \"sovereign\" soil. The same way that the Union did not find it necessary to have a formal declaration of war against the Confederacy.", "created_utc": 1633022908, "distinguished": null, "id": "hevhaej", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/pykzns/why_didnt_the_confederate_states_of_american/hevhaej/", "score": 24 } ]

[ { "body": "It is true that the Confederacy begged, bought, made or stole whatever arms it could for the War. There would be factories set up converting old flintlock muskets to percussion, even lining, reboring and rifling them for minie bullets.. However, though some soldiers might bring their own pistols or , for cavalrymen, their own shotguns and pistols ( cavalrymen liked revolvers) there would be little military use for the typical small-bore hunting rifle circa 1830-1860 that you would find in the southern Highlands. It could not take a bayonet, for one thing, but it was also simply unfitted for combat, having a heavy barrel ( a after 1845, a rather short one) and a rather light, fragile stock. For the same reasons, shotguns also made bad infantry weapons. It's far more likely that someone who enlisted in the regular army would be issued a musket and bayonet. You might, however, look into specific North Carolina units and see if any research has been done on how they were actually armed.", "created_utc": 1635857362, "distinguished": null, "id": "hj073wm", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/qkusml/what_firearms_would_confederate_civilians_have/hj073wm/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "Sounds like Camp Chase.\n\nMuch, much more can be generally said about prisoner exchanges and paroles in the Civil War , here, but specifically it does seem as though Confederate prisoners were sometimes exchanged from Camp Chase for Union prisoners. In 1861 , 23 were exchanged, put on parole: which meant that they were not to resume fighting in the Confederate Army. Perhaps there were more later on. Oral tradition could have transformed your family story from simple parole into something more heroic.\n\nThat batch of 23 were from Kanawha Co. in what's now West Virginia. None of them were named Carpenter, which may be important, because here in WV we have a story of a prisoner from the Kanawha region also getting released from Camp Chase for an irregular reason. Solomon \"Devil Sol\" Carpenter of Clay Co. was captured and sent there. Knowing there were several good fiddlers in the camp, the commandant one day announced that the fiddler who could play the best tune could leave. Devil Sol added a couple of notes to the tune George Booker, won the contest, and was turned loose. Of course, every fiddler back in Clay immediately wanted to learn it, and lots of fiddlers still want to learn *Camp Chase* , when they hear the story. There is something immensely attractive about a fiddle tune that might be able to get you sprung from jail.\n\nWhen the Smithsonian recorded French Carpenter , back in 1964, he told the story and played the tune. You can hear a bit of French Carpenter [here](https://folkways.si.edu/french-carpenter/camp-chase/old-time/music/track/smithsonian), and Erynn Marshall doing Wilson's Douglas' version of the tune [here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAnW8sEo3hs)\n\nAgain, oral tradition being what it is, both your ancestor and Devil Sol might have simply been paroled, and it's just not in the surviving records. But let's hope not.\n\n[William H. Knauss ( 1906) The Story of Camp Chase](https://archive.org/details/storycampchasea00knaugoog/mode/2up)", "created_utc": 1622773388, "distinguished": null, "id": "h0iocpe", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/nrrmio/pows_in_the_american_civil_war_is_this_plausible/h0iocpe/", "score": 34 }, { "body": "The other thing to consider, besides your ancestor's likely camp described in the other comment is the region which he was from, the mountain region of North Carolina.\n\nThe mountainous western region of NC was generally known by Northern authorities to be only very loosely under Confederate control. By 1863, many men in mountain counties were openly avoiding military service under the confederacy and any contribution to the war effort. The following years, 1864 and 1865, disaffection in the mountains boiled over into feuds, banditry, and a low boil insurgency. Bands of union aligned men and confederates struggled for local control of each mountain valley. The drain of manpower and the instability inhibited agriculture, so provisions became scarce in a hungry and violent time.\n\nDuring this time, their was little to stop wounded soldiers or other persons from moving around. It was still quite dangerous, and travelers of either allegiance could be subject to random attacks from armed bands making assumptions, or simply robbing. Stopping at a farmhouse to beg for food could be dangerous.\n\nA wounded mountain man being sent home from Ohio and making the journey is by no means implausible.\n\nSource: *Trotter, William. \"Bushwackers: The Civil War in North Carolina: The Mountains\"*", "created_utc": 1622816615, "distinguished": null, "id": "h0kjrlh", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/nrrmio/pows_in_the_american_civil_war_is_this_plausible/h0kjrlh/", "score": 7 } ]

[ { "body": "[This older answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/glfrq6/its_late_1864_and_im_a_confederate_soldier_who/fqyokob/) should be of interest.", "created_utc": 1640048783, "distinguished": null, "id": "hpd7n24", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/rl0k60/were_there_dissenters_in_the_south_during_the/hpd7n24/", "score": 3 }, { "body": "You may be interested in this earlier question [Where their [sic] any pro-union groups of guerrillas operating in the south during the Civil War?](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1yjoy3/where_their_any_prounion_groups_of_guerrillas/) which got answers from /u/eternalkerri and others.", "created_utc": 1640044342, "distinguished": null, "id": "hpcy08b", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/rl0k60/were_there_dissenters_in_the_south_during_the/hpcy08b/", "score": 3 } ]

[ { "body": "[Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4r09c0/why_were_confederate_leaders_like_robert_e_lee/) is answer that deals with why Confederate leaders were not tried for treason by u/ReadySettGo with follow ups by u/Rittermeister and u/dandan_noodles", "created_utc": 1618242462, "distinguished": null, "id": "gu9ko0c", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/mpdo8e/why_werent_the_leadership_of_the_confederacy/gu9ko0c/", "score": 24 }, { "body": "I answered a similar question to this a couple of years ago. You can find my response here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6tios5/why_were_there_no_nuremburgtype_trials_for/\n\nHappy to answer any follow up questions.", "created_utc": 1618245445, "distinguished": null, "id": "gu9rgwe", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/mpdo8e/why_werent_the_leadership_of_the_confederacy/gu9rgwe/", "score": 31 } ]

[ { "body": "Fighting in the period of musketry definitely looks odd to the eye in 2021, but *Glory*'s depiction is good enough by the standards of film. More can always be said should anyone wish to address the matter; for the meantime, as this is *the* single most common Early Modern warfare question, we of course have a bunch of previous posts addressing this:\n\n* u/petite-acorn observes [basic infantry tactics of the period](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bp2p3v/why_did_soldiers_of_the_civil_war_line_up_in/);\n* and also [alternatives to such](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6saxvd/why_did_soldiers_fight_in_line_formation_during/).\n* u/PartyMoses also has [a cautionary note and observations on taking cover](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/o9xk3r/as_an_infantry_commander_throughout_the_civil_war/).\n\nThese cover the ACW specifically, but since the concerns are largely similar, I shall also direct you to [my usual link compilation for when people ask \"Why did Early Modern armies line up to fight\"](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/nvt1vt/what_caused_war_to_gravitate_from_efficiency_ie/h15t6uk/?context=3).", "created_utc": 1635799397, "distinguished": null, "id": "hixfs2w", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/qkmtov/how_accurately_is_the_combat_strategy_of_the/hixfs2w/", "score": 7 }, { "body": "Hi there -- while you wait for more answers you may be interested in [this section of our FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/civilwar#wiki_conflict).", "created_utc": 1635799417, "distinguished": null, "id": "hixftxw", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/qkmtov/how_accurately_is_the_combat_strategy_of_the/hixftxw/", "score": 1 } ]

[ { "body": "**Content Warning: brief talk of sexual violence in the second post**\n\nYou might want to grab a snack and find a comfortable chair. Let's start at the very beginning, which I am told [is a very good place to start](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RW3nDRmu6k).\n\n**1**\n\nOn **Monday, May 19, 1856**, [Charles Sumner](https://freedmenspatrol.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/charles-sumner.jpg) (R-MA) stands up in the Senate, under the eye of packed galleries, to deliver a major speech. As a Republican decidedly in the Senate minority and just barely elected a few years back after months of wrangling by an unstable coalition of Free Soilers, dissident Whigs, and Democrats back in Boston, Sumner doesn't actually have a lot else to do. Furthermore, his political future is in some doubt because his coalition has basically fallen apart back home. \n\nSumner is a well-regarded rhetorical stylist, if kind of a stuffy one, and also a bit of a research monster so when he delivers a major speech, it's a big deal. He spent months preparing, taking a copy of *Don Quixote* out of the Library of Congress to make sure he got his insults right and busied himself with histories of Georgia and the Carolinas to check his facts. \n\nSumner wrote a massive oration, then memorized the whole thing so he wouldn’t have to check his notes as he spoke. Most politicians at the time wrote their speeches in advance and then just read them. Sumner drilled himself on tone, posture, gestures, and all that rest; he aimed to put on a show. A legend developed at the time that Sumner did most of his practicing at night, with a black boy holding up a mirror and/or a candle so he could watch himself in the mirror. There's no truth to it so far as his biographer could determine, but it's one of those stories that stuck around. Sumner did a dry run with [William Seward](https://freedmenspatrol.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/seward-1851.png) (Whig-turning-Republican-NY) and then deemed himself ready.\n\nSumner's previous big speeches all involved his opposition to slavery. He associated with other reform causes, but antislavery made him famous. Previously, Sumner focused on the injustices of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. -He coined the antislavery slogan Freedom National.- Those ills were considerable, but old news. Instead Sumner turned to the nation's most troubled territory. Amid great controversy and with much political wrangling, Kansas (and also Nebraska, which at the time extended to Canada) were opened to white settlement without restriction on slavery [by the Kansas-Nebraska Act](https://www.ourdocuments.gov/print_friendly.php?flash=true&page=transcript&doc=28&title=Transcript+of+Kansas-Nebraska+Act+%281854%29). This is a direct repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which had for thirty years previously promised that land to northern white men. (Technically it barred slavery there; same effect.) The fate of slavery in Kansas would be decided by popular sovereignty, which meant the white men on the ground would vote. That was just fine with everybody, if and only if their side won. Seeing this as a betrayal of a near-constitutional pact, antislavery northerners organized sympathetic white colonists and subsidized their movement into the territory. Kansas is right next to Missouri, a slave state, and specifically next to the most enslaved portion of it. The Missourians decide they're going to keep the Yankees out, violently if need be.\n\nThings go to pot in territorial Kansas, to the point where there's nearly a pitched battle in late 1855. As Sumner spoke, a second proslavery army was enrolled as a posse aimed at arresting the antislavery leadership and moving toward their headquarters at Lawrence. People have been killed, homes burned, arrested, rescued, recaptured, and all the rest. It's a remarkably tangled, weird fascinating situation where I'm skipping over almost completely. What you need to know is that the proslavery Missourians came over armed to the teeth, including cannons, any time Kansas ran an election. They all voted and dared anyone to vote against them, even to the point of overruling proslavery Kansans in favor of their own proslavery guys. The long and short of this is that by the end of 1855, not two years after first being opened to white colonization, Kansas has two governments, two constitutions, and both governments seek admission to the Union as the sole legitimate government of the state. The Senate is in the process of considering their applications. Charles Sumner has *opinions*, which he voices in an oration he calls *The Crime Against Kansas*. \n\nThe whole speech is 30+ pages of two column, small print in its original pamphlet edition and north of 100 in his (single-column) collected works. I've read every word, most of it more than once. Suffice it to say that Sumner's oratory appeals to *a very specific set of tastes*. Here's his opening paragraph:\n\n>Mr. President: You are now called to redress a great transgression. Seldom in the history of nations has such a question been presented. Tariffs, army bills, navy bills, land bills, are important, and justly occupy your care; but these all belong to the course of ordinary legislation. As means and instruments only, they are necessarily subordinate to the conservation of government itself. Grant them or deny them, in greater or less degree, and you will inflict no shock. The machinery of government will continue to move. The State will not cease to exist. Far otherwise is it with the eminent question now before you, involving, as it does, liberty in a broad territory, and also involving the peace of the whole country with our good name in history for evermore.\n\nThen Sumner walks you through a map to tell you where Kansas is and dives into historical allusions (Militiades, Marathon, Sparta, Rome, Crecy, Agincourt...). The nice thing about Sumner's style is that it's trivial to follow where he's going and drop in and out when looking for specific parts, but he also repeats himself often and spends a lot of time showing off his education. None of us on the sub can relate. *None of us*.\n\nI'll spare us all extensive quotes from the speech. It's available in full [here](https://archive.org/details/crimeagainstkans00sumn) if you'd like, in just the version that plays a part in the story. The crux of the thing is him excoriating the various explanations and solutions for Kansas already proposed. The problem was that Kansans were victims of a \"swindle\" -Sumner apologized for not using a word with a Latinate pedigree; he's that kind of guy- and gave us four of each. I'll run them down.\n\nThe **Apology Tyrannical** held that Kansas proslavery government was recognized by the nation and that was that. The circumstances of its birth in fraudulent elections didn't matter. The **Apology Imbecile** basically said that whatever happened in Kansas, the United States did not have the power to fix it. The **Apology Absurd** blamed everything on antislavery militias in Kansas, which were a thing and occasionally burned proslavery colonists off their claims...but the other guys preferred to straight up murder people so you can kind of see why they wanted armed protection. The **Apology Infamous** was a close relative, blaming the societies of northerners who funded colonization in Kansas for all the troubles.\n\nThat took up the first day of the speech. (The whole thing took about three hours to deliver.) On **Tuesday the 20th**, Sumner gets up to continue. He proceeds to the solutions offered to Kansas' problems: the Remedies of **Tyranny** (compelling obedience to the proslavery government by force), **Folly** (disarming the free state colonists entirely and wishing them luck), **Injustice and Civil War** (giving the proslavery government the go-ahead for statehood), and **Justice and Peace** (admitting the antislavery government to statehood). You can guess which Sumner preferred.\n\nAll that's maybe a little nasty, but basically within the bounds of acceptable discourse at the time. If Sumner only said those things, he would probably be an obscure one-term Senator no one much cared about. Sumner also found it necessary to make some remarks about the people who brought Kansas and the nation to this point.\n\n> before entering upon the argument, I must say something of a general character, particularly in response to what has fallen from Senators who have raised themselves to eminence on this floor in championship of human wrongs; I mean the Senator from South Carolina, [Mr. Butler.] and the Senator from Illinois, [Mr. Douglas.] who, though unlike as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, yet, like this couple, sally forth together in the same cause.\n\nButler is [Andrew Pickens Butler](https://freedmenspatrol.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/andrew-butler.jpg), who actually sat next to Sumner in the Senate. They had gotten on well and Butler asked Sumner to check the Latin he used in speeches. [Stephen Douglas](https://freedmenspatrol.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/stephen-douglas.jpg) is the chief architect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and thus literally the man who made all this possible. -Salmon Chase, another antislavery Senator, called him an Accomplished Architect of Ruin- Sumner has things to say about Douglas and others, but Butler is the important one. He's also not in the chamber at the time, being instead back home in South Carolina. Sumner says Butler\n\n>has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight-I mean the harlot, Slavery.", "created_utc": 1615306535, "distinguished": null, "id": "gqcbznn", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/m0zspo/prior_to_the_american_civil_war_a_south_carolina/gqcbznn/", "score": 61 } ]

[ { "body": "Yes they knew this was happening. Yes they faced off in battle. And yes there was reconciliation afterwards. I will focus on one strange post-war wrinkle of history.\n\nClearly you are interested in the Civil War. After the war (like most wars) there is tremendous dislocation, rich families on the losing side become poor, men become mercenaries or soldiers of fortune, etc.\n\nDuring 1874-1878, Egypt (as part of the Ottoman Empire) fought a colonial war with Ethiopia. Roughly speaking, the Ottomans wanted to control all of Africa north of the equator (including pushing Egypt's borders down across Sudan, and east to include Suez and Somali). Ethiopia was an ancient Christian territory, and the Islamic Ottoman-Egyptians wanted to conquer it.\n\nEgypt was wealthy, but Ethiopia had more people. So what do you do? You hire mercenaries to train your army. To bolster their military, the Egyptians hired ex-Civil War officers to reorganize, train, and lead their military in this war between Egypt an Ethiopia. Starting in 1870, former Confederate officers began working for the Ottomans as military advisers. Thaddeus P. Mott, a Union officer, was involved in recruiting officers from both sides for service in Egypt. These Confederate officers moved 6,000 miles around the world to lead Islamic North African soldiers into war in the Ethiopia highlands. The first Confederates there (Henry Hopkins Sibley (West Point, then Confederate General) and William Wing Loring (Confederate General)) were ***at the recommendation of their former arch-nemesis, General Sherman*****.** General Charles Pomery Stone (West Point, then Union) was also recruited by Mott. \n\nThese guys (Mott, Loring, Sibley, and Stone) recruited a host of former Union and Confederate officers (many from West Point or the Naval Academy) to also move to Egypt and work together to reorganize, oversee construction of coastal fortifications and batteries, teach modern infantry and artillery tactics, and lead the Egyptian army in a war in Ethiopia.\n\nSo in the fallout of the American Civil War you have former foes, working together, leading Muslim-Arabs in a war against Christian-Africans. This is stranger than a Hollywood movie. \n\nThere is one memoir of the war, written by Loring.\n\n[https://archive.org/details/aconfederatesol00lorigoog/page/n10](https://archive.org/details/aconfederatesol00lorigoog/page/n10)\n\nSimilarly, you have Dr. Edward Warren, who was from prominent Virginia families on both maternal and paternal sides, went to boarding school, went to UVA, went to medical school, and then studied medicine in Paris. During the Civil War he holds various high medical positions both in the Confederate army and then as Surgeon General of North Carolina. He writes and publishes a field manual for for military surgery.\n\nHe bounces around after the war trying to put rebuild/reopen various Southern medical schools, and then goes to Egypt in 1875 to become Chief Surgeon, removing a tumor and repairing a hernia on the Egyptian minister of war. After basically saving the life of a high ranking Egyptian official, he is given an aristocratic title and begins to run in high circles in Egypt. He then runs into a number of other ex-Confederates who have been hired by Egypt and move in these elite circles. He publishes a 600 page collection of his letters and essays and life history, \"*A Doctor's Experience in Three Continents.*\"\n\nUltimately, Egypt sort of lost the Egyptian-Ethiopian War (the two main battles were sort of a loss or a draw). Egypt had the most money, the better equipment, and private military advisors from the Union and Confederacy working together, but it had to operate with long extended supply lines in hostile territory. It's relations with Ethiopia remained in constant tension.\n\nThe Ethiopians had a British military advisor helping them, John Kirkham. He originally ended up there as part of the British Expedition to Abyssinia. However he stayed and took up the side of the Ethiopians. He was captured by the Egyptians and held in a lion's cage for about six months with basically no food but given lots of alcohol. Eventually some British sailors happen upon him and want to free him, but are told that Kirkham foresake his British citizenship and passport when he joined the side of the Ethiopians. He died about six months later from dysentery and alcohol poisoning. General Loring writes about seeing Kirkham in his memoir.", "created_utc": 1644528557, "distinguished": null, "id": "hwf8fai", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/soozfa/what_was_going_through_the_minds_of_the_officers/hwf8fai/", "score": 8 } ]

[ { "body": "So, as the quote you highlight implies, Europe was absolutely awash in purchasing agents from both the United States and the forces in rebellion and I can certainly understand how it would be both a useful, and believable, cover story for the Austrians to be passing about. The Federals, although possessing by a large margin the manufacturing base of the country, nevertheless was buying up any arms it could get its hand on, especially early in the war when production still needed to catch up with volume the forces being raised. Although the government placed numerous orders with private manufacturers to make up the difference, it wouldn't be until 1863 that domestic production was at sufficient levels. The rebels, with only a handful of facilities capable of arms production, had even greater need on that front, and further, having few naval yards, they also sought to arrange for purchase of construction of ships both for blockade running as well as commerce raiding.\n\nI'll touch on a few different aspects of this that manifested itself in more depth. Looking to small arms, the main source on the international market was Britain, which provided roughly 75% of all small arms purchased abroad, and somewhat ironically given the frame of your question, Austria, which provided another 20%, with the remaining 5% mostly coming from a hodgepodge of European countries. The scramble for arms began essentially immediately, with purchasing agents dispatched the moment hostilities began, although with little understanding of the scope of the coming conflict. Caleb Huse, dispatched by the Confederate Ordnance Department to Europe and arriving in Britain in May, 1861, had authorization for the purchase of a mere 12,000 rifles and a small number of artillery, although no credit to do so when he arrived!\n\nTo be sure, this reflected not just lack of foresight, but limited resources, and a certain level of snobbery to boot. Whereas the American purchasing agents in the UK were said to be buying up anything and everything that could shoot, even long outdated flintlocks - possibly partly on orders to prevent anything being available for the other side - and were backed by the credit of the United States, Huse and his associates had tight purse strings, and initially refused to buy anything that wasn't the newest technology and at the best deal they could work out, Huse knowing ports may close soon and they needed reliable arms for the duration. Having already spent time in Britain studying its arms industry, Huse was well chosen for his role, and worked with local agents, trained in contracting for the British Army, to assist in the facilitation of his purchases. Although they would, of course, become less picky as time went on, in using British agents for the purchases themselves, Huse did likely manage to get better deals than his northern counterpart, in line with his desire for the best quality arms available. \n\nThe change in volume once it became clear how long the fight would go on is quite noticeable. Over nearly the first year of the war, only 15,000 or so arms were imported, the first arriving at southern ports in September, 1861. In the spring and summer of 1862 though, nearly 50,000 arrived, and by the 20 month mark, Huse had arranged deliver of over 130,000 arms and tens of thousands more awaiting a ship to take them. And of course the arms are only the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of cannon were purchased, mostly in the UK and Austria, and thousands of swords and kit bags and the like. And of course guns are useless without anything to shoot, with hundreds of thousands of pounds in gunpowder, and literally millions upon millions of cartridges and percussion caps.\n\nAs for the money, Confederate financial interests were primarily represented by Frazer, Trenholm and Company. Not recognized as a country, they lacked both pre-existing credit and the backing of a stable, longstanding government to get much on mere faith. Much of the funding that was made available for the purchase of guns, ships, and supplies was premised on the sale of Cotton Bonds, sold through Frazer, Trenholm & Co. and backed by the ability of the Confederacy to smuggle cotton out through the Federal blockade. Charles Prioleau, the director of the firm, as an American from Charleston, had even advanced Huse the initial funds to ensure he could begin buying immediately before such means were available. Confederate bonds proved quite popular and trendy in certain circles in the early days of the war, providing decent amount of funding, and despite waxes and wanes, even retained reasonable funding power through 1864, but in the end Frazer, Trenholm and Co. would be forced to declare bankruptcy in 1865, having very much bet on the wrong horse. \n\nVolume wise, roughly half the expenditure of the Confederacy would be on small arms, which by the end of the war equalled about 375,000 from Britain, and 100,000 more from Austria. Of the former, the best known by far was the 1853 Enfield, a percussion lock rifled-musket of the same type then used by the British Army, and made up at least 300,000 of the British arms purchased across various versions. The remainder was a hodgepodge of arms, likely in large part the Brunswick rifle which the Enfield had replaced, although Confederate records often called *all* British imports \"Enfields\" making it hard to be sure. Although ordered, eventually, to buy anything, Huse apparently resisted the authorization to even buy flintlocks. \n\nFrom Austria, most purchases were either the rifle or carbine of the Lorenz rifle. Huse had traveled there early in the war to arrange the contract, along with an order for six batteries of 10 cannon each. The purchase in Austria had been made completely in the open and against the protest of the American Minister there. According to Huse's recollections:\n\n>He was told that the making of arms was an important industry in Austria; that the same arms had been offered to the United States Government and declined, and that, as belligerents, the Confederate States were, by the usage of nations, lawful buyers.\n\nThe American Minister then offered to buy the shipment, but were rebuffed by the Austrians as they were not going to abrogate the contract, although in the end the US would far more arms from Austria anyway, including 226,924 Lorenz rifles.\n\nThis circles us back to one of the continuing themes here. The focus has mostly been on the rebel purchasing efforts, which is of interest in large part because they faced *issues*. Funding was not certain, credit was non-existent, delivery was hardly a guarantee. But in point of fact, their purchases paled in comparison to the government's! In the end numbers for the Confederacy are imprecise, but at least half the total arms carried during the war were imports - at least 500,000 - which dwarfed domestic production of just over 100,000. But while the Federal armories churned out over 2,000,000 arms, this number was well supplemented by over 1,000,000 imports, including large numbers of the same Enfield and Lorenz rifles, although as noted before, also large numbers of obsolete arms which were used for roles away from the front or training. And while the Confederates almost exclusively purchased from the British and the Austrians, the Federal agents were more willing to spread across Europe, especially in 1861 and 1862, with significant purchases from France and Belgium, although often being used as a way to unload older, used weapons. Both sides of the line generally agreed that the Enfields were by far the most reliable of imports, the Lorenz a distant second, and the rest something of a total grabbag.\n\n½", "created_utc": 1624930257, "distinguished": null, "id": "h3e2l55", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/o9ury1/how_did_the_american_civil_war_affect_arms/h3e2l55/", "score": 56 } ]

[ { "body": "I resisted the temptation to find interviews with the two men so I don't know their personal histories of the song. As such, my answer may miss details from their experiences or different takes on the song itself. Instead, I focused on what was happening in Arkansan and Ontarian education in the mid to late 1950s, early 1960s. Before we get into curriculum specifics, it's helpful to start with the bigger picture around them and some common themes.\n\nIt's my understanding that Roberston grew up in Southern Ontario and attended schools in and around Toronto. Meanwhile, Helm grew up in Phillips County in eastern Arkansas. Despite the distance between their schools, they were both surrounded by a culture of anti-blackness and systemic racism. As boys, both men moved through communities that explicitly denied Black children access to the spaces and resources they could access. Although the ruling of *Brown v. Board* in 1954 was supposed to mean all American states with legally segregated schools were supposed to desegregate, some, including Arkansas, simply ignored the ruling or dragged their feet. In a practical sense to a young Helm, this meant that the adults around him were open advocates of keeping Black children out of white schools. Not long after he'd graduated, white parents founded and funded the first so-called \"segregation academy\" in Arkansas. Located in Helm's hometown, the Marvell Academy was explicitly created so white parents could avoid sending their children to school with Black children. \n\nRobertson's experiences likely weren't that different. Despite the sense that escaped and free Black Americans would find a different future in Canada, white parents in Ontario were just as willing to stand between Black children and the schoolhouse door as were white American parents. Not only were the student populations in Ontario schools segregated by race, so were the teaching staff such that it made national headlines in 1952 when Toronto hired a Black teacher, Wilson Brooks. Brooks, a former Royal Canadian Air Force Officer, wasn't the first Black teacher in the province, but he was the first Black teacher in front of an all-white class. It wasn't until the 1960s when the provision in The Common School Act of 1850 that allowed for segregated schools was overturned. The primary force behind repealing the provision was a Black MPP named Leonard Braithwaite. \n\nBoth men saw segregation firsthand as children. As far as I can tell, neither man had a Black teacher. I'm doubtful that either boy had Black friends or was in community with any Black families. This context matters as it undeniably shaped the curriculum and pedagogy both boys experienced related to the American Civil War and how they responded to that information. \n\nI wasn't able to find specific curriculum documents from Ontario in that era, but it was before the creation of a province-wide history curriculum in the 1970s. That curriculum included mention of the American Civil War but in the context of British North America's involvement, especially as a destination for enslaved people and the role of Canadian men in the Union army. So, it's likely that if Robertson did learn about the American Civil War, the context was focused on the experiences of white Canadian men and possibly, messaging around Canada as a benevolent or welcoming place for enslaved Africans or free Black adults and children looking to escape the war. It is possible that he had a teacher who focused on the experiences of enslaved people before and during the War and as such, centered on the millions of people living in the American South who were very much against the slavery and the Confederation but unlikely. So, it's unsurprising that Roberston was amenable to Helm’s focus on a poor white Southerner.\n\nAs evidenced by the song lyrics, when Helms thought of the history of the Civil War, when he sat down to research the history, he centered his thinking and composition on the experiences of white Southerners. Based on his age and where he grew up, I'm confident that not only did Helms bear witness to anti-blackness, but he experienced first-hand one of the most effective PR campaigns in American history: “The Lost Cause” narrative. The idea that the War was about “states’ rights” or that poor, Confederate soldiers were fighting a personal war in way white American men weren’t was advocated by multiple groups, most notably the United Daughters of the Confederacy. \n\nI provide more information about the UDC in this answer [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e8o29s/propoganda_during_the_american_civil_war/fae2bst/?context=999) but the gist that's worth stressing is that Helm's teachers - who were surely all white, likely all women - used textbooks that were mandated by white educators, politicians, and advocates who wanted a particular history of the Civil War passed down through the ages. They wanted boys like Helm to empathize with the poor Southern man who lost his farm or had to fight his brother, not the enslaved person whose basic humanity depended on the outcome of the war. \n\nSo, to sum up, both men likely learned the American Civil War was about something other than maintaining the system of chattel slavery. They were taught to empathize with the white soldiers, farmers and landowners, to other, or minimize, the enslaved adults and children who worked the land and were compared to property in the founding documents of the Confederacy. They were taught that Lee was someone to be admired, rather than hearing how he was a traitor to his country who enslaved people, including children.", "created_utc": 1625529117, "distinguished": null, "id": "h46k2ir", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/oe97vn/arkansan_musician_levon_helm_b_1940_took_ontarian/h46k2ir/", "score": 7 } ]

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[ { "body": "In the case of the picture you highlight here, while I see how the fading of the photo might give the impression of Confederate grey, the picture is in fact of Cpl. Joseph Pierce of the 14th Connecticut. Born in china, there is some contention on what brought him to America, but he most likely arrived there in 1853 aboard a merchant ship, *Hound of Stonington*, and settled in the US under the tutelage of her captain, Amos Peck. He enlisted with the regiment in the summer of 1862, was promoted a year later, making him the only known soldier of Chinese heritage to attain NCO rank in the US Army during the war, and served for the duration of the war until the unit disbanded in May, 1865. \n\nEarly account of the war claimed Pierce to be one of only a handful of Chinese men serving in the US Army, but research over time has uncovered several dozen. It can be tough to be certain since often there is little more to go off than muster rolls meaning numbers are hard to be completely certain of, but we know of roughly fifty men who served during the American Civil War and were of Chinese heritage. If we expand to count AAPI, the numbers multiply considerably. You can find a list maintained by the National Park Service [here](https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/upload/List-of-Asian-Pacific-Islanders-by-Country-of-Origin.pdf) which sorts them by country if you want to get a sense of numbers and heritage. It is worth noting that, given a population numbering only in the low hundreds east of the Mississippi, this would suggest that Chinese-Americans enlisted at a rather prodigious rate, their small absolute numbers being a very high percentage of their total population.\n\nMost Chinese-Americans known to have served did so in the American military. Largely this was simply related to the fact that the population was centered in the north, but a few were known to have turned traitor. Chang and Eng Bunker, famous as the original \"Siamese twins\", had settled in North Carolina where they married local women and settled into life as enslavers, and their children served in rebel grey. Alternatively is the case of John Fouenty, who been kidnapped from Hong Kong and forced to accept a labor contract in Cuba. When completed, he left via a ship that docked in Florida and managed to get himself drafted into the Confederate Army. He promptly deserted at the earliest opportunity however and was allowed to continue on home to China.\n\nIf you peruse the NPS list you'll notice that the majority of name identified served in the Navy rather than the Army. In part this reflects the norms of the time, with naval service being generally more open to men of all races to serve, but it also reflects something of a liminal space that those of Asian heritage occupied in the American racial mindset of the time, with census takers of the time in some cases noting Chinese-Ameicans as 'white', and others noting them as 'black' or 'mulatto', the only options available. Many were considered 'white' in the dichotomy of the period, but this doesn't mean they were spared racial prejudice. On both sides we have figures who served in white units, such as Pierce for the US, and the Bunker cousins for the rebels, but also at least two of the Chinese-Americans known to have served did so as members of the US Colored Troops, and it is believed that Yung Wing, who had attended Yale, declined to join because he was not offered a commission as he believed himself entitled to as a college graduate.\n\nAfter the war race continued to be a point of contention. Almost all Asian-American veterans had been foreign born, and foreign-born (US) veterans were supposed to be guaranteed petition for citizenship. In some cases, Chinese veterans were successful, but others, due to naturalization laws which prohibited Chinese persons from attaining citizenship, were not. The most unfortunate case of this perhaps was William Hang, a US Navy veteran, who successfully applied for citizenship in 1892, only to be suddenly arrested un 1904 for attempting to vote, and despite attempts to appeal, but stripped of citizenship in 1908, being told *\"I consider the judges who issued the papers responsible for the dense and almost inexcusable ignorance shown by them in not knowing of the naturalization laws [...] which explicitly states that Chinese cannot be naturalized\".*\n\n**Sources**\n\nFoenander, Terry et. al.. *Asians and Pacific Islanders in the Civil War*. National Parks Service, March 2015.\n\nFoenander, Terry et. al.. *List of Asian & Pacific Islanders by Country of Origin*. National Parks Service\n\nHe, Angela (2019) \"“Mulatto, Indian, Or What”: The Racialization Of Chinese Soldiers And The American Civil War,\" *The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era*: Vol. 9 , Article 5.\n\nMcCunn, Ruthanne Lum. \"Chinese in the Civil War: Ten Who Served\" *Chinese America: History & Perspectives* 10: 149-81\n\nMcCunn, Ruthanne Lum. \"Chinese in the U.S. Civil War\" in *Chinese Americans: The History and Culture of a People.* ed. Jonathan H. X. Lee. ABC-CLIO, 2015.\n\nPage, Charles Davis. *History of the Fourteenth Regiment, Connecticut Vol. Infantry.* Horton Printing Company, 1906.", "created_utc": 1625450122, "distinguished": null, "id": "h433tr7", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/odopjv/who_is_this_asian_american_boy_that_was_featured/h433tr7/", "score": 86 } ]

[ { "body": "**1/3**\n\nGreat question! There's a little difficulty in pinning it down though, because American Civil War generals attended West Point at various times between like 1818 and 1863. A great many Confederate generals graduated between 1824 and 1861, the latter being an \"accelerated\" class that graduated a year early so the graduates could move to field commands early - George Custer, for instance, was among the accelerated class of 34 men who graduated to commissions that year.\n\nSo unless we go through year by year to find a curriculum and survey their classmates to see who was a prankster, who was the Goat, who was a model citizen and who was destined for great things, we have be a little general; it's certain that Custer's course of study was different than, say McLellan's 1846 graduation. \n\nNevertheless I'll take a crack at it. First I'll break down the course of study for each year, along with elements of the cadet culture that existed alongside studies.\n\n**First Year - Plebes**\n\nA cadet would start their course of study with what was termed \"Plebe camp,\" a six-week encampment that functioned like an extended boot camp. Cadets would drill from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m., with wiggly lines around the reveille and chow calls. After breakfast, cadets would study until 1 p.m., study after lunch til 4, and then drill for another three hours.\n\nEncampment of course included all students, not just the plebes - the general term for first-years - but the plebes had extra duties such as cleaning the very well used parade ground, clean the tents, make the beds, and fetch water and the like. The elder cadets had more leisure time, presumably because these \"domestic\" tasks were handed off to the plebes. This was in no way official, in fact the policing was done as a matter of rotation, with certain classes doing the cleaning at certain times of day, but a part of the ongoing and systemic hazing that was part of life at the Point. Henry O. Flipper, a West Point graduate of 1877 - and the first black cadet ever to graduate - put it succinctly: \n\n> [The plebe] marches into the company streets. He surveys them carefully and recognizes what is meant by \"the plebes have to do all the policing,\" servants being an unknown luxury.\n\nIt should be understood that this was an institutional element of life at the academy, and even the bristling Flipper claimed that \"it is indispensable as practised at the Academy.\" Regardless, the plebes would do hours of drill and hours of study each day, with additional loads of menial labor in policing and other servile tasks, and on top of that they still had the expectation that they would keep their uniforms and arms clean and servicable.\n\nDrill and study time was of course broken up by official ceremonies and other duties. A drill parade was done after breakfast, and each phase of drill was broken up into manual, squad, or company drill, and at certain phases of plebe camp the whole class might drill together for the extended parades that ended the encampment.\n\nAt night, each class had a rotation of guard duty. One might assume, given that the camp is not under arms or embodied for combat at all, that guard duty's worst element would be cold or boredom, but of course that's not the case, because guard duty is another means by which senior cadets would go on \"hazing tours\" of the plebes. Flipper again describes:\n\n> After getting into camp they separate, and manage to come upon a sentinel simultaneously and from all points of the compass. If the sentinel isn't cool, he will challenge and advance one, and possibly let the others come upon him unchallenged and unseen even. Then woe be to him! He'll be \"crawled over\" for a certainty, and to make his crimes appear as bad as possible, will be reported for \" neglect of duty while a sentinel, allowing the officers and non-commissioned officers of the guard to advance upon him, and to cross his post repeatedly without being challenged.\" He knows the report to be true, and if he submits an explanation for the offence his inexperience will be considered, and lie will probably get no demerits for his neglect of duty.\n\nPlebes were not officially cadets until they graduated plebe camp. Afterward they were considered cadets and gentlemen. Though Flipper describes conditions in the 1870s, ostensibly for a peacetime army, he reflects that much of what he went through was easier than many others in his company - his visibility as the only black plebe may have had something to do with that - and also that conditions were likely *worse* in years and decades prior.\n\n**The First Year Course of Study or; A Peacetime Army’s Occupation**\n\nNevertheless, the course of study officially began in July. For later classes, much is arranged according to class rank, but the first years - still unofficially plebes but full members of the school now - had no class rank established, and so their class assignments were handled alphabetically.\n\nFlipper gives his first year course of study as engineering, law, and ordnance and gunnery. This is consistent with earlier descriptions of West Point study. In the peacetime antebellum army, the small size and limited scope of military actions in the United States necessarily valued engineering, especially, as a field of study. Officers vied for postings in up-and-coming cities across the continent in the \"scientific corps,\" which is usually where the highest ranking cadets preferred to go on graduation. The military flavor and posting to forts and the like was obviously an expectation, but especially during the long periods of peace (note here that I mean \"peace\" in the sense that the United States was not involved in a conflict that required the expansion of the army, not that it was ever truly at peace, Indian wars even before the Civil War were persistent), many cadets expected a short military career followed by a lucrative switch to civil engineering positions. Quoting here from Terry Mort's *Wrath of Cochise*, which has an extended section on the West Point of the 1840s and 50s:\n\nCadet Adelbart Ames, class of 1848, said, “The effort to stand high is prompted almost wholly by the prospect it holds out of selecting one’s own corps, and being able to enter one of the scientific corps.”\n\nHe goes on, later to explain that the academy's academic schedule was heavily weighted toward mathematics and engineering, not only because artillery and logistics demanded it, but because the expectation was that the academy would produce engineers, first, who could if called upon function as soldiers, rather than soldiers who might occasionally assist in engineering. This is totally consistent with the political limitation of the US army in peacetime. It was a politically limited arm, expected only to serve in times of *defense*, not to start or carryout offensive wars. This remained the political reality even in the lee of the Mexican War, an unambiguously offensive war of conquest that was, like the War of 1812, cast as defensive in rhetoric and spirit, if not reality.\n\nThis also meant that the graduating butterbar facing his first post in the west might be utterly unprepared to lead men in the field against hostile natives, or to intervene during times of domestic guerilla warfare, like Bleeding Kansas. West Point graduates, though given command preference in the army during the Civil War, were not necessarily any better trained or experienced than some volunteer officers only by their graduation from West Point. Everyone in the United States army had to learn the new tasks of the job *on the job*, which was a feature of both the US and the British political-military doctrine. \n\nThe year would end with exams, a review of their merits and demerits - a system implemented in 1817 by Sylvanus Thayer, a graduate from 1809 who had served in the War of 1812 and then toured European military academies, and brought back knowledge of their practices to the United States. Thayer was, like most other American officers, an enthusiastic devotee of the French system, and was especially influenced by their practices.\n\nThayer had graduated at a time when the Academy had no regularized curriculum, no official course of study, few rules, and not even an age limit. Some cadets were as young as fourteen, and several were long in the tooth, in their forties. Part of the problem was that the superintendent before Thayer, Alden Partridge, was less interested in producing effective officers than he was in running what appeared to be, in essence, a social club with a military flavor. When Thayer was first appointed, Partridge had not been made aware of the change, and the two had a series of dueling commands in a struggle to control the place.\n\nThayer eventually won and went on to institute a series of extremely unpopular reforms, but ones that professionalized and regularized instruction at the Academy. Chief among them was the rigorous \"board\" process, in which students, once a day, would write answers to questions on chalk boards, reciting every subject *every day*. This is, again, on top of drill, hazing, cleaning, and guard rotations. The most consistent subjects were mathematics and science, then languages - predominantly French but Spanish as well, especially by the 1870s. Thayer also limited class sizes so instructors could better individually scrutinize cadets - very similar to modern educational best practices but with a slightly inverted purpose. The most lasting reform he made was likely the system of merits and demerits, known as points.\n\nMore below!", "created_utc": 1632327089, "distinguished": null, "id": "hduy9cu", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/psw66q/what_was_westpoint_like_and_there_curriculum/hduy9cu/", "score": 13 } ]

[ { "body": "Not to discourage a response from others about the rest of the world but going off the FAQ, here are some answers about European perspectives specifically:\n\n-\t[How did European Nations react to the American Civil War?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/39ls7k/how_did_european_nations_react_to_the_american/cs4pwc3?context=3) by /u/The_Alaskan\n-\t[At the start of the American Civil War, there was a rumor that Garibaldi was offered command of the Union forces. Would this rumor have been believable at all? What was the reaction to it? ](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6oanmu/at_the_start_of_the_american_civil_war_there_was/dkghfle/)by /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov\n-\t[What was the opinion of the people and workers of Northern England towards the Union or Confederate causes during the American Civil War and the Cotton Famine that resulted from it? ](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14js5p/what_was_the_opinion_of_the_people_and_workers_of)by /u/agentdcf and /u/Borimi", "created_utc": 1625756759, "distinguished": null, "id": "h4hbb68", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/og7a4b/how_was_the_american_civil_war_viewed_from_the/h4hbb68/", "score": 12 } ]

[ { "body": "While /u/JohnBrownReloaded may have had the good fortune to have avoided this particular Lost Cause myth (while having the misfortune of encountering others spread by the Abbeville Institute, among others), this was once a widespread myth before, during, and after the Civil War.\n\nThe argument went that the Southern colonies had been established by Cavaliers/Royalists, with a huge influx of Cavaliers to the Virginia colony once the King had been defeated. The Northern colonies, on the other hand, had been established by Roundheads/Parliamentarians, that had fled to America earlier, in order to subvert the authority of the crown. This regional character, so the myth goes, had remained in place uninterrupted from the early 1600s until 1861. So, therefore, rather than a cultural conflict about slavery, it was a conflict about different white cultures and class, and slavery was just a misdirection. The societies were too different even absent slavery to remain compatible, and this is what led to disunion.\n\nNo recent scholar accepts this explanation. It was pretty tenuous even at the time it was being advanced. More recent scholarship, in fact, has shown that the immigrant colonists to Virginia around the time of the English Civil War and Restoration were *not* very often active Cavaliers fleeing persecution, but were indentured servants in search of work. \n\nThe two books you'll want to start with if you're interested in this subject are *Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character* by William R. Taylor, and *The Cavalier Figure in Virginia Fiction: The Making of a Myth* by Ritchie D. Watson. Both books trace the roots of the myth to early 19th century literature, beginning at least as earlier as Mason Locke Weems' somewhat infamous *Life of George Washington*, published in 1800, where the \"cherry tree\" myth was first invented. The whole book paints Washington as a man of virtue and honor and chivalry, often completely inventing the stories it tells.\n\nFrom there, many other \"biographies\" bordering on historical fiction of the Revolutionary leaders began to appear. Taylor's book singles out future U.S. Attorney General William Wirt's 1817 biography of Patrick Henry as being particularly influential. This partially led to Wirt being invited by Congress in 1826 to eulogize the recently-deceased John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, where, again, he talked of the men being from two different cultures, emphasizing the gentlemanly aspects of Virginia.\n\nThese early works were followed/accompanied by straight up historical fiction reinforcing the same myths, that the South--and Virginia in particular--was populated by \"country gentlemen\" devoted to honor and chivalry. At the same time, the Yankee myth emerged, too -- the self-made man, often an immigrant, who strove for an egalitarian society absent a class system. But these Yankees also happened to be greedy, unscrupulous, and not devoted to chivalry or honor like their Southern counterparts. It should be pointed out, too, that during this stage, the myths were being promoted both North and South. \n\nOne of the most widely-read works from this era is James Fenimore Cooper's *The Spy*, which uses many of these caricatures. Another important work was Sarah Hale's *Sketches of American Character*, which is a series of fictional character profiles of supposedly typical Americans, using these nascent regional caricatures. But she takes it one step further - some of the Northern Yankees move South, and fail because they can't get a handle on these ideas of chivalry, honor, and virtue, instead falling back on their inborn greed and selfishness.\n\nAround this same time, some authors then tried to find an explanation for the diverging societies. And this is where the North vs. South, Roundhead/Yankee vs. Southern Cavalier myth became explicit. This apparently started with William Alexander Caruthers' 1834-35 book *The Cavaliers of Virginia*. The book takes places during Bacon's Rebellion in the 1670s, but Caruthers advanced the notion that Virginia was full of Cavaliers at that time fighting for the King. Later authors, such as John Esten Cooke, would then write of Revolutionary-era Virginians, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, in these Cavalier terms. By the 1850s, this whole \"Cavaliers of Virginia are the origins of Southern culture\" myth had become widespread.\n\nAnd, as Taylor's book points out, the myth didn't end with the Civil War. Many Lost Causers promoted the myth after the war, quite often to deflect from the slavery issue. Among them are Thomas Nelson Page's *Pastime Stories*, and Myrta Lockett Avary's *A Virginia Girl In the Civil War*.\n\nIt was being promoted at least as late as 1927, writes Taylor, in Charles Beard's book *The Rise of American Civilization*. However, as Watson writes, the myth had begun to die by then, starting with Mary Johnston's 1911 and '12 pair of novels, *The Long Roll* and *Cease Firing*. Both are Lost Cause/Confederate apologist tales, but in both, she acknowledges the \"Cavalier\" myth as a *metaphor* for Southern honor, rather than an actual historical fact inherited down through the centuries.\n\nNowadays, this myth usually doesn't get much attention, outside of academia. Even Neo-Confederates rarely seem to bring it up. The most enduring legacy of the myth is the mascot of the University of Virginia -- the Cavaliers. But that's usually about as far as it goes in the modern era.\n\nSaying all that, there has been some acknowledgement of diverging Southern and Northern identities during the antebellum period, and there are several books about the emergence and advocates for a Southern nationality during the period between 1830-61. They would often use the Cavalier myth to promote the idea of two different societies. Nonetheless, other authors have pointed out just how similar white North and South culture were before the Civil War -- *except* for slavery. They read the same books, popularized the same songs, attended the same churches, ate very similar foods, and on and on. In short, while there may be truth to diverging Northern and Southern cultures, this cannot be honestly divorced from the slavery issue, as the Cavalier myth tried to do.\n\nOther books that deal with the subject include *Yeoman Versus Cavalier: The Old Southwest's Fictional Road to Rebellion* and *Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War* both by the aforementioned Ritchie D. Watson, and *Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity* by James C. Cobb. Google also tells me there's a fairly recent college thesis on the subject, too, entitled \"The Cavalier Image in the Civil War and the Southern Mind\" written by Colt Allgood. You may also want to check out some of the books by Paul D.H. Quigley, who has written on the subject of Southern nationalism before the war, which gives context for this myth.\n\nOne last, easily digestible source for all this is the [Virginia Cavalier](https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/virginia-cavalier-the/#heading3) entry in the state government-sponsored Encyclopedia Virginia. To get a more thorough, but still concise explanation for all this, then I'd recommend reading that article. If you need more, I'd start with Taylor's book and move on to the books by Watson.", "created_utc": 1625704607, "distinguished": null, "id": "h4f47ze", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/ofhn6b/did_the_cromwell_rebellion_help_lead_to_the/h4f47ze/", "score": 11 }, { "body": "Okay wow, that's a take I've never heard before.\n\nI have never run across any evidence whatsoever to suggest that the English Civil War was a factor leading to the American Civil War. Disagreement between North and South revolved around plenty of issues, but they were all related in one way or another to slavery. Cromwell was never mentioned in any ordnance of secession, but slavery was. And I think it's awfully odd that some grudge from the 17th century was big enough to lead to a civil war in 1861, but not bad enough to keep northern and southern colonies from uniting against the British in 1775. It just doesn't make sense to me.\n\nWhat I have run across pretty frequently are bad faith arguments trying to make the Civil War about anything, *absolutely anything* other than slavery, and this sounds a lot like one of them. They almost always have a political agenda. For example, organizations like the Abbeville Institute and Sons of Confederate Veterans are focused on rehabilitating the image of the Confederacy and often try to make the war about states' rights or some other red herring. One particularly deranged take I've encountered is Grady McWhiney's and Forrest McDonald's Celtic Thesis, which argued that the animosity between North and South stems from a perennial ethnic conflict between mostly Celtic southerners and Anglo-Saxon northerners. Grady McWhiney advocated for the South to secede in the 90's and went on to found the League of The South as a means to that end. \n\nI would challenge your friend to provide a primary source for that claim, any primary source at all. Literally anything written by someone before the Civil War mentioning it in the context of disagreement between North and South.", "created_utc": 1625663178, "distinguished": null, "id": "h4clhqj", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/ofhn6b/did_the_cromwell_rebellion_help_lead_to_the/h4clhqj/", "score": 22 } ]

[ { "body": "**Short(ish) Answer:**\n\n**[Note: Long(er) answer here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/antcue/lindybeige_amongst_others_has_made_the_assertion/efznrfs/)**\n\n>Why were Union and Confederate generals hesitant to use the bayonet?\n\nThey weren’t hesitant to use the bayonet, per se. It’s just that the bayonet was a tool, just like the musket. Sometimes, the bayonet was thought to be the best tool to use, like [Emory Upton’s massed assault on the Mule Shoe in 1864](https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/unions-bloody-miscue-spotsylvanias-muleshoe). In other cases, charges were spontaneous affairs, like the chaotic assault up Missionary Ridge in 1863.\n\n>Another point, obviously there were bayonet charges in the American Civil War. However, they seem to be mainly desperate attempts to turn the tide of a battle, not attempts to press the advantage. See Pickett's Charge.\n\nBayonet charges (or other assaults that had some bayonet fighting) happened for many different reasons. Some assaults were quite large and involved 20,000+ men, while others involved a few dozen or a few hundred.\n\nMost commonly, charges were launched to dislodge an enemy from fortifications or strong defensive positions. Since standing in an open field while getting shot at from a trench was a bad deal, getting stuck in could be a better option. Some of these assaults failed, with bloody results. The frontal assaults on Cold Harbor in 1864 cost Grant nearly 13,000 men, something he bitterly regretted the rest of his life. In 1864, a Maine regiment charged Confederate breastworks at Petersburg, losing 115 killed and 489 wounded, nearly 67% losses. In other cases, charges worked. In 1864 another assault near Petersbug by Horatio Wright’s VII Corps would fair much better, rolling over Confederate lines and leading to the fall of Petersburg and Richmond. There are several other examples of [successful large-scale attacks](https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/greatest-charges-civil-war).\n\nBayonet charges could also be launched to buy time. During the Second Day at Gettysburg, the 1st Minnesota was ordered to counter-attack advancing Confederate troops to let Hancock’s II corps re-organized. The Minnesotans charged across an open field and never made it to Rebel lines. They lost 215 men in just five minutes, an 82% loss rate. Only 47 men made it back to friendly lines, having bought precious minutes for the Union.\n\nIn other cases, bayonet attacks happened when units simply ran out of ammunition. Its ammunition gone by the end of the Second Day at Gettysburg, part of 137th New York covered the retreat of its comrades by launching a bayonet charge in the dying light. Earlier in the day, on the other end of the battlefield, the 20th Maine had launched its own famous charge down the Little Round Top.\n\nWith all that said, actual bayonet-on-bayonet fighters were pretty rare. Much like the Napoleonic Wars, bayonets and swords accounted for relatively few Civil War battlefield deaths and injuries. Union surgeons treated about 250,000 men for bullet and shrapnel wounds, compared to just [1,000 men treated for bayonet and saber wounds](https://web.archive.org/web/20161020095850/https:/www.medicalmuseum.mil/index.cfm?p=exhibits.past.nationswounds.page_02).\n\n>LindyBeige, amongst others, has made the assertion that high casualties in the American Civil War were, in part, due to unwillingness on both sides to use the bayonet to press advantages. Is this a valid claim? \n> \n>…his idea is that once one side had a significant advantage, they should equip bayonets and charge the enemy who in turn would route. This minimizes casualties since it minimizes the time spent standing in lines shooting at each other.\n\nSo Lloyd makes the contention that “bayonets save lives,” because soldiers run away when charged, whereas soldiers who shoot it out with muskets fight a longer, bloodier battle.\n\nTo some extent, this is true. Many bayonet charges never lead to a clash of cold steel, because one side broke and ran before the attack could be driven home. Either the attackers were routed by gunfire or the defenders lost their nerve and booked it. In the rare cases where bayonet-on-bayonet combat did occur, it was usually during battles for villages, woods, or fortifications.\n\nLloyd then claims that the Civil War was bloodier because Johnny Yank and Billy Reb shot at each other, rather than charging in cold steel to break the enemy. **This is just flat-out wrong.** It’s based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how bayonets were used during the Napoleonic Wars and how Civil War infantry combat actually worked (my upcoming Long Answer has more on this).\n\n**Aggressively using the bayonet more often during the Civil War would** ***not*** **have lowered casualty rates. Instead, more bayonet use would have resulted in** ***higher*** **casualty rates.**\n\nConsider the shift in technology that happened between the two wars. Napoleonic troops facing smoothbore muskets had to cross 50-100 yards to ground to press home a bayonet attack after exchanging volleys. After about 50 meters, a smoothbore musket’s ball became “spent” and considerably less-deadly, so wounded men had a good chance of returning to action [(see page 72)](https://publishing.rcseng.ac.uk/doi/pdf/10.1308/rcsbull.2016.70).\n\nOn the other hand, Civil War troops facing longer-ranged, more accurate rifled muskets had to cross a “deadly ground” of around 150-200 yards, which gave their opponents more time to fire. Their conical Minié bullets flew faster and hit harder. Compared to older musket balls, these new bullets inflicted much more severe wounds to [bone](https://i.imgur.com/MsNytne.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/MsNytne.jpg)) and [flesh](https://i.imgur.com/koQLa7B.jpg) (warning: NFSW photos). Charges across open ground could be (and often were) torn to shreds by multiple volleys.\n\nAs for the point about saving lives, a few things come to mind. When looking at death tolls, it’s important to note that during the Napoleonic Wars and the Civil War, germs killed more men than bullets. Nevertheless, the Minié ball and the rifled musket were certainly more lethal than the musket ball and the Brown Bess. Paradoxically, deadlier weapons don’t always lead to deadlier battles, however. Trevor DePuy points out that the Napoleonic Wars and the Civil War had nearly identical daily battle casualty rates *per day*: about 15% for the winning side and about 20% for the losing side. You can see [this graphic](https://i.imgur.com/8YxkFre.png) for a visualization.\n\nIf Lloyd’s contentions that “bayonets save lives” and that the Civil War needed more cold steel were correct, then you’d expect the bayonet-rich Napoleonic Wars to have a far lower death rate than the bayonet-poor Civil War. But that isn’t what the data shows.\n\n", "created_utc": 1549520748, "distinguished": null, "id": "efxfpzo", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/antcue/lindybeige_amongst_others_has_made_the_assertion/efxfpzo/", "score": 34 }, { "body": "It is a common observation among generals at the time (Robert E. Lee, William T. Sherman, and John Bell Hood among others) that it was better to charge home with the bayonet than to stand and exchange fire. A bayonet charge would force an issue and reduce casualties by making the fighting as short as possible. To see this articulated by Hood in particular with the following general order (General Field Orders No. 7, HDQRS. Army of Tennessee, *O.R.* 38, part 5, 909 here: [https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924079597013;view=1up;seq=911](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924079597013;view=1up;seq=911))\n\n\"SOLDIERS: **Experience has proved to you that safety in time of battle consists of getting into close quarters with your enemy.** \\[Emphasis mine\\] Guns and colors are the only unerring indications of victory. The valor of troops is easily estimated, too, by the number of these secured. If your enemy is allowed to continue the operation of flanking you out of position, our cause is in great peril. Your recent brilliant success proves the ability to prevent it. You have but to will it, and God will grant us the victory your commanders and country expect.\n\n \tJ.B. Hood, General\" \n\nHowever, I take issue with the idea that American Civil War was bloodier or had higher casualties than contemporary or even earlier European conflicts, which saw much more use of bayonets and even much more close-combat oriented weapons such as pikes. In his excellent thesis, *The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth,* Earl J. Hess has several charts breaking down casualty rates by percentage between American Civil War battles and European battles. These are tables 8.1 and 8.2 on pages 199-200, respectively.\n\nThe bloodiest battle of the American Civil War was Gettysburg. At Gettysburg, the Confederate army took a 30.2% casualty rate, while the Federal army took a casualty rate of 21.2%. For comparison, Blenheim, more than a 100 years earlier, saw a 33.3% casualty rate for the French and 23.2% for the Alliance forces. That is a pretty similar casualty rate. By rates, Waterloo was even bloodier, with a 61.1% French casualty versus an Allied rate of 32.3%. It can be argued that in some ways the American Civil War was less bloody than its Napoleonic predecessors.", "created_utc": 1549495375, "distinguished": null, "id": "efwms59", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/antcue/lindybeige_amongst_others_has_made_the_assertion/efwms59/", "score": 43 }, { "body": "Let's start from the beginning, and work our way to your specific question. \n\nWhy was the American Civil War so deadly? \n\nFirst and foremost, the number one killer during the war was disease. Armies were composed from a great many men, drawn from widely separated regions across the country, deployed in distant theaters, and kept in close confines of questionable sanitation and safety. There is no better environment for the spread of disease; attrition to sickness can for the most part be considered a given. \n\nWith this in mind, the most important factor setting the American Civil War apart from previous American wars the sheer number of men mobilized; in rough terms, the total exceeds three million. Year-round, the US and Confederacy maintained at least 800,000 men under arms, and the war continued for four years. Not only did this naturally increase the scale of the disease problem, but indeed battle casualties were higher, as more men were fighting and trying to kill each other. \n\nThe question then is first, why were so many men mobilized, and second, why did the war last as long as it did? An important place to start with both questions is the strategic objectives of the two combatants. The United States pursued nothing less than the total conquest and reintegration of the Confederacy into the Union; after Jan 1 1863, this was extended to dismantling the system of slavery that was the very bedrock of Southern society. As an extension of this, Southerners feared the threatened end of slavery would mean the end of their preeminence altogether; not only would slaves be free, but would be their equals or even their masters. It should not be hard to see why the South fought with such determination for such a monstrous system. \n\nOn the other hand, the US felt the Confederacy to be an existential threat as well. The Confederate attempt at secession threatened the legal and ideological foundation of the United States; the US Constitution requires that a republican form of government be maintained, and this would be impossible if legitimate elections could be disregarded at will by dissident states. This isn't often well understood, as our narratives tend to concentrate on emancipation or abolition as the chief motivation behind the Union war effort. Moreover, many of us have lost what the Union and republican government meant to the men who fought for it. This came up in conversation with another flair here, so I'll quote my response there.\n\nLincoln on July 4 1861 called it,\n\n> that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.\n\nIt was a duty of filial piety to maintain this form of government, which their forefathers had created in the shared national struggle of the American Revolution. Whereas in contemporary societies in Russia, Germany, and England retained ossified systems of subordination and deference, the Americans believed themselves masters of their own destiny because of this government, this Union their fathers had handed down. \n\nFollowing the failure of the 1848 Revolutions, there was a linked sentiment that republican government was on the back foot; they felt that the cause of posterity as well demanded they fight to preserve the Union. If a contentious election was enough to tear the nation apart into a horrific civil war, it would be seen as a failure of republican government for all nations. Quoting the Gettysburg address is almost trite, but it's worth recognizing that this 90 second speech makes two references to the war in a global context,\n\n> Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.\n\nand\n\n> that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.\n\nIn war, the value of the objective determines the sacrifice that can be borne; to many Americans, the Union and all that it represented was worth sacrifice without end. \n\nThat only gets us part of the way there, though. While the American people were willing to give everything to preserve the Union, we still have to ask how the price became so high. After all, the US was far more powerful than the Confederacy, with more than twice the population and vastly greater industrial resources. Why were they not simply crushed in the first battle and wholly overrun? The Confederate capital in Richmond, their chief rail hub and industrial center, was not more than a hundred miles from Washington; such a campaign wouldn't have been beyond the logistical abilities of a medieval state, much less a modern nation with railroads, telegraphs, and steamships. \n\nIdeally, the Union would have been able to call on a large, disciplined, and loyal regular army that would easily overpower anything the rebellion could scrape together on short notice. The problem was that the US in 1861 barely had an army. Its 16,000 or so men (in an age where half a million was none too many for a power of its size and wealth) were widely scattered in frontier garrisons in the west, and not immediately available for aggressive action against the Confederates. As such, the US needed to mobilize a new army essentially from scratch. While the army could have cannibalized the pre-war regulars for cadre to speed up the mobilization and training of new formations, this was not done. As a result, following the poor performance of the 90 day volunteers at 1st Bull Run, the rest of 1861 passed without general engagements between the core armies of either side. As such, many thousands died of disease and minor actions before a general engagement between the combatants' main armies had even taken place. \n\n", "created_utc": 1549580989, "distinguished": null, "id": "efzahj7", "permalink": "/r/AskHistorians/comments/antcue/lindybeige_amongst_others_has_made_the_assertion/efzahj7/", "score": 8 } ]