It was such a a sad part of American History. The cause. the battles, the officers & men, Andersonville Prison. & finally RECONSTRUCTION. There is a mountain of material and I will not live long enough to do anything more than scratch the surface.
That war was a disgrace and shameful to Americans. I had ancestors who fought on both sides and I think any civil war or war for that matter is terrible.
It does me, too. I have two shelves of books on the Civil War in my library, as well as several documentaries and some movies. I have mentioned it elsewhere, but there are a lot of Civil War memoirs available on Kindle now, some written by regular soldiers on both sides, and I find them to be fascinating. They write about the parts of the war that they were involved in, and without trying to put it in a larger perspective. This is much different than those written by the generals and the officers.
Much of the cruelty & mis treatment towards black slaves by slave owners seems to have also been directed toward captured Union troops by Rebel troops. I too had ancestors fighting on both sides.
With any war, horrible things are going to occur. Yet, at the same time, so many of the generals and officers, on both sides, displayed a great degree of honor. Of course, it was also interesting that so many of them knew one another very well, in some cases even being roommates at West Point, now fighting on opposite sides.
That is why the modern battle rifle a variation of the M-16 does not have an auto fire function. Three round bursts are produced when the trigger is held down.
The cruelest period in the War Between the States, was the brutal, deplorable Andersonville Prison, where Confederate captors kept Union prisoners in the most inhumane conditions. Hal
That Tom Dooley ballad was recorded in 1958 and made world-famous by the legendary Kingston Trio. Hal
My boyfriend's great-great-great grandfather was a traveling Methodist Episcopal minister who rode around Maryland, Virginia and West "By God" Virginia establishing new churches and preaching at established ones. As such, he frequently crossed battle lines and was arrested on occasion by both Union and Confederate troops as a spy. Luckily, he was able to convince both sides sufficiently of his innocence to stay out of the worst of the prisons. We visited his grave in West Virginia several years ago.
I live in PA and we have a Confederate soldier buried here a few miles away. He was a prisoner on his way to a prison camp in NY but never made it because of his wounds. He received a Christian burial in the same cemetery with Union troops. The local American Legion requested some Georgia soil from a Legion in Georgia to spread over his grave and they complied. He is remembered every Memorial Day along with the rest.
@Peter Renfro Hasty generalization. U.S. Marines were issued an "M-4" model of the M-16 in the 2000s, having both burst-fire as well as full-automatic firing modes. Frank