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Find old Civil War articles here. We have great newspaper articles about the Civil War check them out today!
“The attempt to enforce the draft in the city of New York has led to rioting. Men have been killed and houses burned; worst of all, an orphan asylum – a noble monument of charity for the reception of colored orphans – has been ruthlessly destroyed, and children and nurses have lost everything they had in the world.”
“…It is said that the panic grew out of the fears aroused by the ferment in the Southern States. Although at New Orleans all is quiet, and everybody seeks peace, throughout the states of Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Georgia, great excitement prevails; and if any reliance can be placed upon the assertions of the politicians and the newspapers of those states, the election of Lincoln will not be tolerated without a struggle. What that form of struggle may take remains to be seen.”
This 32 year-old reminiscence of the closing moments of the Civil War, told from a Southern perspective, recall it all in the simplest terms – the letters exchanged between the commanders, the McLean House secured, agreeing to terms and Lee’s exit. The intended audience for this article was the young men of the South who came after the war.
“Is it strange that the world wondered when 7,892 infantry, 63 pieces of artillery, and 2,100 cavalry was all that was left to surrender to an army of more than 75,000 men?”
These are the letters written between April seventh and ninth, 1865, by Union General Ulysses S. Grant (1822 – 1885) and his Confederate counterpart, General Robert E. Lee (1807 – 1870), that established the terms of surrender and cleared the way for that famous meeting near Appomattox Courthouse.
General William Tecumseh Sherman (1820 – 1891), U.S. Army, found himself in hot water at war’s end when he accepted the surrender of Confederate General Joseph Johnston (1807 – 1891) after having provided far more lenient terms than President Lincoln preferred.
Here is an eyewitness report of the Union rout from the first battle of the Civil War, Bull Run (July 21, 1861):
“Leaving my carriage, I went to a high point of ground and saw, by the dense cloud of dust that rose over each of the three roads by which the three columns of the [Federal] Army had advanced, that they were all on the retreat. Sharp discharges of canon in their rear indicated that they were being pursued.”
During the Civil War many young boys enlisted. In fact, three out of every ten men on the Union side were under 21, and not until 1864 did Congress pass a law forbidding the enlistment of of anyone under 16. But Johnny Clem, who joined up at ten, had them all beaten.
– Indeed he did. In fact, at the age of 12, Johnny Clem was a hero.
For many it will come as no surprise that the Confederate States of America entered it’s twilight with the same hubris and cupidity that gave it life. This 1912 article solved a mystery: what had become of the gold and silver from the vaults of the CSA when it finally became clear to all that the rebellion was over.
Click here to read a memoir of the Union victory parade in 1865 Washington.
Here is a reminiscence of the grand parade following the close of America’s bloody Civil War. It took two days; with the Army of the Potomac marching on the first day followed by General Sherman’s Army of the West on the next. The Grand Review was the brain-child of Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton and was attended by (so it was believed) over one hundred thousand people from the victorious Northern states.
From Amazon: Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War
The ball has opened. War is inaugurated. The batteries of Sullivan’s Island, Morris Island and other points were opened on Fort Sumpter at 4 ‘oclock this morning… The answer to General Beauregard’s demand by Major Anderson was that he would surrender when his supplies were exhausted, that is, if he was not reinforced.
Here are the dispatches from Charleston that appeared on the front page of the New York Times on April 13, 1861.
Here is the book review for The Case For Mrs. Surratt
More on the assassination can be read here
Fed-up with decades of articles and editorials declaring that he and his Confederate comrades fought tirelessly for four years in order to preserve and advance the cause of slavery, elderly Southern veteran, James Callaway, put pen to paper in order explain that this was not the case. Equipped with numerous passages from A Soldier’s Recollections and an artificial Lincoln quote, Calloway argued that it was Northern aggression that swelled the Confederate ranks.
A chaplain’s proper place in the Confederate Army was well defined in theory at least, but in fact each of us was a law unto himself and stayed wherever he liked. He belonged to the medical staff. But the medical staff in a campaign is divided… The regulation spot was with the surgeons.
Click here to read about the chaplaincy within the American military during World War II.
A few paragraphs on the difficulties faced by the medical establishment of the Confederacy as a result of the Union naval blockade of Southern ports. We were surprised to learn that the scarcity of quinine and other medicinal aids forced the doctors of the South to embrace herbalism.
Click here to read about the heavy influence religion had in the Rebel states during the American Civil War.
As the one-hundredth anniversary of the War Between the States grew ever nearer, a Pulitzer Prize winning Civil War Historian, Bruce Catton, wrote the attached article concerning the overwhelming popularity that the nation was finding in their study of that remarkable contest:
The requirements for becoming a Civil War Buff are very simple. All you need is a desire to join. If you are interested in the Civil War, you’re in… You may get to the point where you want to join a Civil War Round Table. [Overtime] commonplace words like Appomattox and Antietam and Perryville take on a new meaning for you; a good deal of the monotony and routine of modern life somehow evaporates, as you escape into a period of profound and haunting significance.
All in all, it’s quite an experience.
Welcome to the Army!
This article from 1897 is a digest of Cheerful Yesterdays, a longer piece by Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823 – 1911) originally appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. Having served actively in the anti-slavery movement during the days leading up to the Civil War, Higginson put to paper his memories of famed abolitionist John Brown, wishing to banish all thoughts that the man was mad.
An anonymous reviewer tells his readers about the mournful spirit that dominated each room at the Matthew Brady Gallery where he attended a unique exhibit of the photographer’s Civil War pictures:
At the door of his gallery hangs a little placard ‘The Dead of Antietam’. Crowds of people are constantly going up the stairs; follow them…there is a terrible fascination about it that draws one near these pictures, and makes you loath to leave them. You will see hushed, reverend groups standing around these weird copies of carnage, bending down to look in the pale faces of the dead, chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men’s eyes.
It was on the first day at Gettysburg that the Confederates made a terrible mistake. Read about it here.
