This collection of Civil War letters, written by one of the younger members of an Illinois regiment, was printed in a men's magazine at a time when the U.S. was gearing-up for it's first military adventure in Europe. The editors wished only to impart to their younger readers what a soldier's life is like:
"I will try to give you some of the particulars of soldier life so far as I have tried it...We don't have more than half enough to eat...Health is good, with the exception of dysentery." Appearing in the pages of Confederate Veteran Magazine some forty-three years after the bloody end of the American Civil War was this reminiscence by a Confederate veteran recalling the important roll that corn played during the war and throughout American history:
"I am an old Southern planter, past eighty-five years of age, in perfect condition as to mind and health, have lived on cornbread all my life, and feel that I can speak intelligently on the much-mooted cornbread question."
"During the war I commanded the 1st Arkansas Regiment, consisting of twelve hundred men, and during the four years we never saw a piece of bread that contained a grain of wheat flower. We lived entirely on plain corn bread, and my men were strong and kept the best of health..."
A thumbnail description of Lee's gamble in the North: the Battle of Antietam: "Lee repeatedly broke and drove back the advancing Union armies. Then in the summer of 1862, he took the aggressive and invaded the North. His eager and victorious soldiers hoped to sweep successfully over the entire country. But they were met in Maryland at Antietam Creek by the Union army commanded by General George McClellan. The battle that ensued was the bloodiest and the most costly single day of strife in all this awful war." Written at the time when the United States was marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, Dudley Miles, a Professor of History at Columbia University, wrote this appreciation concerning one of the lasting virtues of the American Civil War: "The torrent of natural life has swept away the bitter memories of brother struggling with brother. In both North and South faces are turned from the past, and hearts are filled with pride and hope and aspiration for the future of the republic....The magnanimity which Grant displayed at Appomattox, the restraint which even political temper displayed during Reconstruction, stopping short of confiscation of property and the execution of prominent leaders...these things furnish a new chapter in the history of victor and vanquished." Looking back on the American Civil War from a vantage point of fifty-seven years, these two versifiers, both highly schooled in Southern lore, penned these Dixie ditties for their South-land readers of Confederate Veteran Magazine.
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Read an article about how Victorian fashion saved a life during the Civil War. Nathan George "Shanks" Evans (1824 – 1868) was the Confederate general in charge of the rebel forces at the Battle of Secessionville, South Carolina. Attached you will find his two page report written upon the conclusion of that battle on June 19, 1862. This battle marked the first major attempt by the Union Army to take the Rebel city Charleston, South Carolina.
Click here to read about the heavy influence religion had in the Rebel states during the American Civil War.
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