The Civil War in Four Minutes

[chasfh]

I went to the Field Museum today for their Maps exhibition, and they had one of the most compelling video presentations I've seen in a long, long time.

It's called "The Civil War in Four Minutes". The presentation is a map of the area in which the war was fought, and shows how battle lines changed and casualties mounted every day over four years at a rate of one week per second. I was totally floored.

Fortunately, I was able to find a video of it online, here:

http://www.idkwtf.com/videos/latest-videos/the-civil-war-in-four-minutes

Full-screen mode is available on the embedded video player. The resolution is not great, but it is nevertheless extremely compelling. The simple Ken Burnesque soundtrack is very haunting, and I was taken aback at how the casualty figures exploded right out of the box.

This is a fantastically creative presentation. Sheer genius.

[DaYooperASBDT]

Cool find. The number of casualties in the Civil War was truly horrendous.

[chasfh]

No doubt. I did not have in my head a number as high as 1.3 million between both sides. And a separate source indicates that 3.2 to 4 million men fought the war. This out of a free population of about 28 million.

That's the equivalent of having a civil war today with 35 to 43 million men fighting, with 14 million casualties.

That's incredible scale.

[wingedwheel]

That was pretty eye opening! I would like to see other historical events (WWI, WWII) shown on a map like that.

[Sparks4Ever]

That was pretty eye opening! I would like to see other historical events (WWI, WWII) shown on a map like that.

Not as good as the Civil War video, but interesting:

First World War: Western Front Animation (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/launch_ani_western_front.shtml)

I couldn't find a decent animation for the Eastern Front/Balkans/Middle East through 10 minutes of searching, which is too bad because there was actually significant movement on those fronts.

[Sparks4Ever]

BTW, I'm actually in the middle of reading Shelby Foote's mammoth Civil War narrative. I highly recommend it for anyone looking for a comprehensive history of the civil war.

[Todd]

BTW, I'm actually in the middle of reading Shelby Foote's mammoth Civil War narrative. I highly recommend it for anyone looking for a comprehensive history of the civil war.

i read all three volumes over like 5 years, it was well worth it. WW I is a war i wish i knew more about there doesnt seem to be alot of books about it like the Civil War and WW II

[Blue Square Thing]

i read all three volumes over like 5 years, it was well worth it. WW I is a war i wish i knew more about there doesnt seem to be alot of books about it like the Civil War and WW II

Well, Amazon UK lists about 4,500 - less than on WW2 by a long way, although not all that many less than the ACW.

From a quick browse there's one by John Keegan which looks like a really good introduction - well rated and he has a good reputation as a not too academic writer. Here's the link (http://www.amazon.co.uk/First-World-War-John-Keegan/dp/0712666451/ref=sr_1_50?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199121031&sr=1-50) (it may work...)

Must admit the listings on the UK Amazon site look a little better - too many used sellers in the top two pages on the US one and there was a handy reference to the Waffen SS as well which, well, isn't awfully WW1 really...

You could read some Wilfred Owen or Sassoon or someone as well. That's an interesting pov of that war I think, although, obviously, very much a pov. I'm sure you could find Dulce et Decorum Est on the web somewhere if it's not something you came across in school?

Ian

[BFK]

BTW, I'm actually in the middle of reading Shelby Foote's mammoth Civil War narrative. I highly recommend it for anyone looking for a comprehensive history of the civil war.

I never stop reading Foote's trilogy. One volume or another is always on our nightstand. And I usually find something new. The man was not only a historian, he could write. That's an unusual combination.

Casualties in the war were astonishing. Grant suffered from 10k-12k in the morning assault at Cold Harbor on 6/3/1894. Close to 2,000 of those men died. Accounts of the battle state that half of the total Union casualties were suffered in the first fifteen minutes.

The following November, Hood's Confederates suffered a similar bloodbath at Franklin, losing 7k men before noon. The carnage in that war eclipsed everything before or since in terms of the percentage of casualties suffered per unit. Complete battalions and regiments ceased to exist after an hours fighting.

[Mr.MelissaG915]

Great find Chas. Thanks!

[Baseknock]

Chasfh, thanks for sharing, that was really compelling....

[sagnam]

Great video. Thanks.

[dadair6]

Casualties in the war were astonishing. Grant suffered from 10k-12k in the morning assault at Cold Harbor on 6/3/1894. Close to 2,000 of those men died. Accounts of the battle state that half of the total Union casualties were suffered in the first fifteen minutes.

I was never really interested in the Civil War, but I was in Richmond for business in July and finished up everything I had to do on a Friday and my flight home wasn't until Saturday evening so I went to Cold Harbor and Gaines' Mill Saturday morning to kill some time. Cold Harbor was interesting enough with the earthworks, but nothing too riveting, until I stopped at the main battlefield. As I stood looking over a field no bigger than 300 yards deep by 200 yards wide and realized thousands of men died in that area in a very small amount of time, I was simply speecheless. From that minute on I've tried to find out as much about the war as possible. It's one thing to read about it in books, it's another to stand where the fighting and death occured.

[DaYooperASBDT]

When we visited Gettysburg, we stopped at the field where Pickett's charge took place. When you visit such places, many powerful thoughts and emotions take hold within you. And you come away from there feeling very blessed in your current circumstances.

[irishmick79]

Yep, that song is called "Ashokan Farewell," from the Ken Burns movie.

If you're really interested in the civil war campaigns in the Eastern theater, I highly recommend getting yourself a copy of "Lee's Lieutenants", by Douglass Southall Freeman. It's a really good three volume analysis of confederate military operations in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania from the start of the war to its finish.

[djhutch]

That video is cool, especially as you watch Sherman's March To the Sea. I found this site thru Stumble-Upon. See 5,000 years of history in 90 seconds. (http://www.mapsofwar.com/images/EMPIRE17.swf)

[RedRamage]

Thanks everyone for those links. I love looking at maps like that.

[redshark63]

A fascinating new Civil War book revied by the NYT, with its focus on the deaths and the impact they had to the people and the nation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/books/review/Ward-t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bu&oref=slogin


Death’s Army

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/01/27/books/cover-600.jpg

By GEOFFREY C. WARD
Published: January 27, 2008
During the Civil War, my great-great-grandfather, a Presbyterian clergyman, served as chaplain to the 104th New York Infantry Regiment. He was a man of stern moral conviction and in weekly letters to his parishioners back home allowed little to escape his censorious eye. President Lincoln’s erratic church attendance irritated him. So did mud and heat and the “intemperance” and “profanity” that he believed were the “great sins of our army,” and he was infuriated by the proximity of his quarters to the “tents of several of the most blasphemous, immoral persons I ever heard.” But in the aftermath of Gettysburg, words failed him. “Sad scenes!” was all he could write after two days spent officiating at the trench burials of Union and Confederate boys. “I have no time, strength nor heart to recall and narrate what I have seen!”
Skip to next paragraph (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/books/review/Ward-t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bu&oref=slogin#secondParagraph)

THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING
Death and the American Civil War.

By Drew Gilpin Faust.
Illustrated. 346 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.



Related

First Chapter: ‘This Republic of Suffering’ (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/books/chapters/1st-chapter-this-republic-of-suffering.html?ref=review) (January 27, 2008)

Up Front (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/books/review/Upfront-t.html?ref=review) (January 27, 2008)


Enlarge This Image (javascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/01/27/books/Ward-2.html', 'Ward_2', 'width=406,height=600,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,r esizable=yes'))
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Little wonder. Some 7,000 corpses lay scattered across the Pennsylvania countryside, alongside more than 3,000 dead horses and mules — an estimated six million pounds of human and animal flesh, swollen and blackening in the July heat. For weeks afterward, townspeople carried bottles of peppermint oil to neutralize the smell.

Americans had never endured anything like the losses they suffered between 1861 and 1865 and have experienced nothing like them since. Two percent of the United States population died in uniform — 620,000 men, North and South, roughly the same number as those lost in all of America’s other wars from the Revolution through Korea combined. The equivalent toll today would be six million.

The lasting but little-understood impact of all that sacrifice is the subject of Drew Gilpin Faust’s extraordinary new book, “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.” “Death created the modern American union,” she writes, “not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments.” And she continues: “The work of death was Civil War America’s most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.” Her account of how that work was done, much of it gleaned from the letters of those who found themselves forced to do it, is too richly detailed and covers too much ground to be summarized easily. She overlooks nothing — from the unsettling enthusiasm some men showed for killing to the near-universal struggle for an answer to the question posed by the Confederate poet Sidney Lanier: “How does God have the heart to allow it?”

She begins with what she calls the “work” of dying. The faithful looked forward to what was called a Good Death, with time to see the end approaching, accept it and declare to friends and family members their belief in God and his promise of salvation. The battlefield brutally truncated that serene process, and soldiers and their families alike worried about what that might mean for their chances in the afterlife. Survivors tried to provide reassurance. When one Union soldier was killed during the siege of Richmond, a comrade told his mother that while her boy had died instantly and without the opportunity to declare his faith, he had told his fellow soldiers the previous summer that he “felt his sins were forgiven & that he was ready and resigned to the Lord’s will & while talking he was so much overjoyed that he could hardly suppress his feelings of delight.” But sometimes candor trumped comfort: one Georgia soldier worried in a letter home that while his dying brother had “said that he hoped he was prepared to meet his God in a better world than this,” he was also aware “he had been a bad, bad, very bad boy.”

When the war began, the Union Army had no burial details, no graves registration units, no means to notify next of kin, no provision for decent burial, no systematic way to identify or count the dead, no national cemeteries in which to bury them. The corpses of officers often received special treatment, boxed up and sent home in what one entrepreneur advertised as “METALLIC COFFINS ... Warranted Air-Tight” that could “be placed in the Parlor without fear of any odor escaping therefrom.” Dead enlisted men were generally just wrapped in blankets and buried where they died. Officers “get a monument,” a Texas soldier wrote, “you get a hole in the ground and no coffin.” Men going into combat were issued no identification tags. One soldier made sure he always carried a used envelope “somewhere about me so that if killed in battle my friends might know what became of me.”

Undertakers and embalmers followed the armies. “If you could only make him breathe, Professor,” an officer exclaimed as he watched an embalmer work over a Union corpse.

“Ah,” the man answered, “then there would be money made.”
Fathers and brothers wandered battlefields in search of missing relatives. So did wives and mothers dressed in black. Private “agents” promised to search for missing men in exchange for a percentage of their widows’ pensions. Spiritualists made a good living conveying vague but consoling messages from the Other Side.

In 1862, Congress empowered the president to purchase grounds for “a national cemetery for the soldiers who shall die in the service of their country” but provided him with no funds with which to buy it. By war’s end, there were just five such cemeteries, three established by Union generals in the western theater, and two — Antietam and Gettysburg — paid for by states from which many of those killed there had come. Only after the war was over — and amid news reports that vengeful Southerners were desecrating Union graves — did Congress finally provide a national solution to what had become a national need. The Union dead were to be gathered from scores of Southern battlefields, identified when possible, then re-interred in burial grounds to be protected and maintained by the federal government. The ghastly work went on for six years, much of it performed by African-American soldiers. When the last body was reburied in 1871, 303,536 Union soldiers had been laid to rest in 74 national cemeteries at a cost of $4 million. Almost half remained nameless. “Such a consecration of a nation’s power and resources to a sentiment, the world has never seen,” wrote one of the officers charged with recovering the bodies.

Confederate corpses were barred. A Northern reporter walking a Southern battlefield stumbled upon the unburied skeletons of two soldiers. His local guide examined their uniform buttons. “They was No’th Carolinians,” the man explained. “That’s why they didn’t bury ’em.” Southern women saw to it that the Southern dead were reburied, but many of those who’d been hastily covered with earth during Confederate forays into the North were never found. As late as 1996, spring rains were still uncovering their bones near Gettysburg.

“The war’s staggering human cost demanded a new sense of national destiny,” Faust, now the president of Harvard University (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/harvard_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org), writes, “one designed to ensure that lives had been sacrificed for appropriately lofty ends.” Frederick Douglass thought freeing the slaves should have provided the “sacred significance” of all that loss. But, Faust continues, “the Dead became what their survivors chose to make them,” and as the decades passed and memories blurred, “assumptions of racial hierarchy would unite whites North and South in a century-long abandonment of the emancipationist legacy.” In the end most Americans of my great-great-grandfather’s generation — and their successors — allowed their shared memories of suffering to “establish sacrifice and its memorialization as the ground on which North and South would ultimately reunite.” We might wish, with Frederick Douglass, that they had decided otherwise, but Drew Gilpin Faust’s profoundly moving book helps us understand why they did not.

Geoffrey C. Ward, the author of “The War: An Intimate History 1941-1945,” is at work on “A Disposition to Be Rich,” about a nefarious ancestor, the swindler Ferdinand Ward.