Page No: 20 Dulwich Despatch
The American Civil War The American Civil War was the crucial turning point for the United States of America. It was the war that started to shape America into what we know today. In four years of bloody conflict, from 1861 to 1865, 652,000 soldiers died in the conflict, almost as many as all other soldiers that have died in other wars America has fought. The very beginning of the civil war was in 1820, as a line was established called the Missouri’s Compromise. It divided America into two halves – the free North and the slavery South. At the time, Thomas Jefferson, when he heard of the deal, said:
“…considered it at once as the knell of the Union. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be It is hushed indeed for the moment.
obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.”
Personally, I think that this is a very good way to express the civil war, even though it was said 41 years before the beginning of the war. There were many more events leading up to the civil war each event “marking it deeper and deeper” . From Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831, in which he interpreted two eclipses to begin his bloody rebellion in Virginia, to John Brown’s white and freed - slave raid in 1859. During this time four more slave states joined the Confederacy, which is what this unofficial and illegal band of states called themselves, now numbering eleven. In 1861, Abraham Lincoln’s skillful strategy made the Southerners fire the first shots of the war at the Battle of Fort Sumter. After this battle, Abraham Lincoln rallied the militia, artillery and cavalry. He sent them down to the South to form a line stretching over fourteen times the length of Hadrian’s Wall, with around one million armed men on either side of this line, from Virginia to Missouri. A few comparatively small battles were fought, one near Manassas Junction in Virginia, where the Union victory lined the way for the creation of a new state, West Virginia. Others were fought at Wilson’s Creek in Missouri and at Cape Hatteras in North Carolina. In 1862 the big battles began, at Shiloh in Tennessee, Gain’s Mill, Second Manassas, Fredericksburg in Virginia, as well as Antietam in Maryland. These battles were then dwarfed by the campaigns that followed in places such as Pennsylvania, Mississippi and Georgia. By this time, the original goal of the Northerners to use the smallest amount of force to win had now, three years from the beginning, opened up to a more violent action, total war.
After four years of bloody fighting, the Union finally came out on top. The Union won a long string of victories over the Confederacy in Northern Virginia and in the Deep South around Atlanta. This ultimately guaranteed total Union victory, and the abolition of slavery.
Oscar Cunningham, 7W
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