Transcript Life During Wartime

Life During Wartime
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African-Americans
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By 1862, they could serve in the military.
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After EP, large-scale enlistment
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They made up 1% of Northern population.
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By the end of the war, 10% of the Union army was black.
The majority were former slaves.
They were for the most part accepted as soldiers however,
there was still discrimination.
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Served in separate regiments commanded by white officers.
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They usually could not rise above the rank of Captain.
White Privates earned $13 a month plus $3.50 clothing
allowance.
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Black Privates earned $10 a month with no clothing allowance.
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Finally equaled in 1864.
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Worked in garrisons
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If captured by the Confederacy, they
were executed, usually not held as
prisoners of war.
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If they were not killed, then soldiers
found ways of putting some back into
slavery.
Fort Pillow, TN/1864
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They caught typhoid, pneumonia,
malaria…etc.
Confederate troops shot more than
200 African-American prisoners and
some whites as they begged for their
lives. It was a massacre.
One slave owner said since, “slaves
caused the fight, they should share in
the burden of battle.”
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Another Southerner responded, “if slaves
will make good soldiers our whole theory
of slavery is wrong.”
War Affects Regional Economics
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Decline of the plantation system
Inflation
Federal tax
Expanded Northern economy and shattered
Southern economy.
Southern Shortages
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Food
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Drain of manpower and slaves working in fields.
Meat became a once a week luxury.
Prices skyrocketed
In 1861, the average family spent $6.65 on food…in 1863,
they spent $68 a month.
Union blockade of Southern ports caused people to
smuggle goods into the North for exchange…trading
with the enemy in order to survive.
Northern Economic Growth
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Army needs supported factories.
Western farmers bought goods to use on land.
Wages did not keep up with prices.
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Factory owners hired immigrants, free blacks,
children, and women to work for lower wages.
Standard of living declined.
Greenbacks- paper money that was issued.
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Confederacy had their own version.
Lost value because people lost value in the country.
Women
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Replaced men on farms and in city jobs.
Obtained government jobs for the first time.
Worked as clerks, copying ledgers and letters by hand.
Congress began collecting
an income tax in 1863 to
help pay for the war.
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Life for soldiers on both sides…
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No garbage disposal or latrines in camps
The armies tried to get soldiers to wash their hands and
face every day and take a bath once a week.
• Body lice and diarrhea were common.
Union troops practically lived on beans, bacon, and
hardtack.
Confederate troops ate “cush” a stew of small cubes of beef
and crumbled cornbread mix with bacon grease.
Civil War Medicine
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U.S. Sanitary Commission:
1. Improve hygienic conditions of army camps
2. Recruit and train nurses
Sent out agents to teach soldiers how to avoid
contaminating water supplies.
Developed hospital trains and ships to transport
wounded men from battlefield.
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Dorthea Dix:
Nation’s first superintendent of women nurses.
Some 3,000 women served as nurses.
Clara Barton- “Angel of the Battlefield” helped soldiers
on the front lines of Antietam.
The Confederacy did not have a Sanitary Commission
but they did have nurses.
A monument at
Antietam
dedicated to Clara
Barton
A Federal Hospital
and Union soldiers
are now amputees.
Prisons
• Conditions were worse than camps.
• Confederate prison-Andersonville, Georgia.
– 33,000 men into 26 acres or about 34 square feet per person.
– No shelter from the sun or rain. They tried to make tents out of
their blankets and sticks.
– They drank from the same river they used the bathroom in.
– 1/3 of the prisoners died.
• Camp commander, Henry Wirz (eventually executed as a
war criminal)
• Union prisons such as Elmira, NY were only
slightly better.
– Men slept in barracks but had adequate food.
– Most contracted pneumonia from lack of heat.
– Hundreds suffered from malnutrition
and dysentery.
• Battle of Chancellorsville, Virginia
1863
– May, 1863
– South defeated the North
– Lee outmaneuvered General Joseph Hooker and the
Union forces retreated.
• General Stonewall Jackson returned from patrol on
May 2. He was shot in the left arm. His arm was
amputated.
– He died from pneumonia a couple of weeks later.
• Lee wanted to invade the North. He crossed into
Maryland and continued into Pennsylvania.
North Takes Charge
• Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
– July 1-3, 1863
– TURNING POINT of the Civil War.
– Crippled the South
• Confederate soldiers led by
General Lee.
– Majority of them were barefoot.
They heard there was a supply of
shoes in Gettysburg.
– While marching, they came across a
couple of brigades of Union cavalry.
• Union soldiers led by General
George Meade.
– Sent his troops to back up the
cavalry.
• Day 2:
– 90,000 Union soldiers vs. 75,000 Confederates.
– Lee gave orders to General Longstreet to attack a ridge
held by the Union.
– Colonel Chamberlain’s men from Maine successfully
fought back.
– His men began to run out of ammunition so he ordered a
bayonet charge.
– The Confederates began to surrender.
• Day 3:
– Both armies exchanged fire for 2 hours straight. People
say it could be heard in Pittsburgh.
– Longstreet reluctantly pushed forward along with
General Pickett’s men to the center of the Union troops.
(Pickett’s charge).
– They were unsuccessful again.
• Union losses=23,000
• Confederate losses= 28,000
General Pickett
General
Longstreet
Colonel Chamberlain
Gettysburg Address
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November, 1863
A ceremony was held to dedicate a cemetery for those
who died fighting.
Lincoln’s speech was only 2 minutes long but it had a
big impact.
Vicksburg
• Grant was in Vicksburg, Mississippi
– It was one of two Confederate
holdouts preventing the Union from
taking the Mississippi River.
– 1863, Grant destroyed railways to
distract the Southern soldiers.
– While distracted, Grant was able to
get an infantry into Vicksburg.
– 18 days later, he took control of
Jackson, the capital of the state.
– Confederates surrendered on July 4th.
– 5 days later, Port Hudson, Louisiana
the other Confederate key to the River
fell and the Confederacy was split in
two.
• Hard times…
– Food ran low and people
ate dogs and mules.
The Confederacy Wears Down
• The South is no longer able to fight…
– Low on ammunition, supplies, food, men
– Would not give up so easily
• Confederate morale deteriorated.
– Some soldiers deserted after receiving letters from home
about the lack of food and labor to work farms.
• General Grant appoints William Tecumseh Sherman as
commander of the military division of the Mississippi
River.
– They were old friends.
– Both believed in total war…fighting both the army and
civilians.
• Civilians helped produce food and weapons and were a major
contributor to the war effort.
• If you eliminate this then the army couldn’t survive and would
collapse.
Grant and Lee meet in Virginia
• Grant’s strategy:
– Immobilize Lee’s army in VA while Sherman raided Georgia.
– May, 1864- Grant threw his troops into battle after battle with Lee’s.
• Fredericksburg, Spotsylvania, Petersburg
• In just a little over 1 month, Union lost nearly 60,000 soldiers.
Petersburg
Spotsylvania
Sherman’s March to the Sea…
• Sherman’s men occupied the transportation center of
Atlanta, Georgia.
• September, 1864 Sherman started marching Southeast
through Georgia, leaving a path of destruction and living off
the land.
• He wanted to make Southerners “so sick of war that
generations would pass away before they would again
appeal to it.”
• By November, he burned most of the city and set off toward
the East coast.
• He went up through North Carolina
destroying it like Georgia. He
accumulated 25,000 free slaves willing
to fight for the Union.
The Burning of AtlantaGone With The Wind
Hospital in the streets of AtlantaGone With The Wind
Election of 1864
• Lincoln was disliked by a lot of people.
– The war had gone on too long.
• George McClellan is nominated to run against him.
– He agrees. He is still bitter from being fired.
• Other opponents- John C. Fremont, Andrew Johnson
• Lincoln won a second term.
Surrender at
Appomattox
• March, 1865
• Confederate President, Jefferson Davis and his
government abandon their capital, setting it on fire.
• Lee and Grant arranged a surrender on April 9, 1865
in a Virginia village called Appomattox Court House.
• Grant paroled Lee’s soldiers and sent them home with
their personal possessions, horses, and rations.
• The Civil War was finally over.
• The power of the Federal
government increased:
– Passed laws that gave more
control over citizens,
including an income tax and
draft.
• Economic changes:
– National Bank Act- set up a
system of federally chartered
banks, set requirements for
loans, and provided for bank
inspections.
– Made safer for investors.
• Union War cost- $2.3 Billion
The Legacy of the
War
– 360,000 soldiers died,
275,000 wounded
• Confederate War cost- $1 Billion
– 260,000 soldiers died,
225,000 wounded
Changed Lives
• 13th Amendment- outlawed slavery.
• Red Cross
– Started by Clara Barton in 1881
Lincoln is Assassinated
• 5 days after the surrender at
Appomattox, Lincoln and his
wife, Mary attended a play at
Ford’s theater in Washington.
– John Wilkes Booth, 26 year old
actor, and Southern
sympathizer
– Shot Lincoln in the back of the
head
– He was captured and shot.
• Lincoln died the following
morning, April 15th.
– 1st President to be assassinated.
– A funeral train carried Lincoln’s
body from
Washington to Springfield, IL in
14 days.
– 7 million turned out to mourn
him.