While studying for my history exam tomorrow (which, in large part, concerns the Civil War and the years leading up to it) I have stumbled upon a few amusing facts in my notes.
Fact one: General Joseph Hooker (of the Union) was quite a ladies man and had a group of women who followed him around who were apparently called "Hooker's Brigade" (or something along those lines). It is commonly accepted that this is the place where we get the slang term for prostitute: Hooker.
Fact two: In March of 1863, Congress passed the Conscription Act which allowed men between 20-45 who were drafted to pay $300 and hire substitutes to go to war for them. The Civil War thus became known as the "Rich man's war and a poor man's fight". (This is less amusing as it is interesting. Although I can imagine someone with a snooty accent saying, "Oh I don't want to go to war... here's $300. Send him instead. That sounds, fair, right?")
Fact three: The battle fought at Gettysburg was started when men from both sides went in search of shoes for their men, saw each other, and then began fighting. They then called for reinforcements and (badda bing, badda boom), a massacre of both Northern and Southern soldiers. This leads me to believe that the bloodiest battle of the Civil War and the site where thousands died and were wounded... was started by a fight over shoes.
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On a more serious note...
It's really easy to go back and read about all of these battles and see the numbers and shrug, but something else that I know about the Civil War was that it was the time in which war shed it's Shining Glory, Honor and Prestige... war was no longer considered a noble cause like it was in the times of the Revolution. Of course, there is always honor in fighting for what you believe in, but I think that the development of (dare I say it) conscious within war was important. Each side thought that it was fighting for what was right, but both sides understood that it was wrong to lose so much life.
When I was 13, some of the required reading for school was The Red Badge of Courage, and while I hated every minute of reading that book (it was terribly boring - especially for a class of thirteen-year-olds - and quite honestly, it seems to have scarred my seventh grade English class at St. Gabriel's for life. Mention it to any of them and watch them cringe), I still remember what was important about it: It was one of the first books that portrayed wars as they were... not as something glorious but something terrifying. The main character of the book, an eighteen-year-old boy who joins the fight because he believes in the nobility of the cause and the honor in earning a 'Red Badge of Courage' (a wound, to prove one's bravery... which is rather ironic, really), realizes when he is put in uniform and handed a weapon that war really isn't everything that it was told to be and he flees the battle to seek refuge in the forest. I vividly remember how the author described how frightened the boy was.
All wars have been terrible, every one ever fought. What I have observed through studying (and a little bit of watching the news and living through the last 8 or so years) is that often at the onset, we don't tend to take them seriously... don't expect them to be as hard as they actually turn out to be. I mean, at the first battle of Bull Run, there were city spectators there on the hill, watching the battle progress as if it were going to be a show. They expected the war to be over within months... little did they know that it would last for years and kill more than 600,000 of the nation's citizens. Two days of fighting (at Shiloh) killed more people than the American Revolution, the Mexican-American War, and the War of 1812 combined.
Here ends my musings on the Civil War. Wish me luck on my exam tomorrow, and I will blog more tomorrow afternoon after my exam is finished!
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