What does Sup Forums know about the American Civil War?

What does Sup Forums know about the American Civil War?

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS_Shenandoah#Colony_of_Victoria_stopover
youtube.com/watch?v=a0asSaCVDzw
youtube.com/watch?v=SFwHQYDqf6c
youtube.com/watch?v=zJuWszf4g_s
youtube.com/watch?v=p5mmFPyDK_8
youtube.com/watch?v=zhCheCryopA
youtube.com/watch?v=5OKdbc0DYpM
theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/08/we-have-received-provocation-enough/61276/
theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/
listverse.com/2013/03/17/10-war-crimes-of-the-us-civil-war/
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_massacre
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

I know that civil war generals are overrated

Some guy named Sherman likes to set things on fire.

100% this

Biggest war criminal in US history, but not recognized as such because he fought for the Yankees.

Drop dead, redneck.

Make me carpetbagger

Perhaps so. The tactics used in the ACW were frequently quite terrible. Take a battle like Shiloh. There were no tactics to speak of. It was just a mob of armed farmers shooting and bayoneting each other in the woods.

Well, we didn't have the martial tradition or large standing armies of Europe.

The South had pretty good generals which is why they lasted so long. The North was a clusterfuck of military incompetence until Ulysses came along and realized, “We have literally have every single conventional advantage in this war, all we need to do is Zerg rush these motherfuckers”

>The South had pretty good generals which is why they lasted so long. The North was a clusterfuck of military incompetence

Hold up there. This was only true of the Virginia theater. The West had much shittier Confederate generals and much better Union ones. Some of this was because Western generals had a freer hand without politicians and the press breathing down their necks, but also because the Eastern generals played it more cautious. A single defeat could expose Washington DC to the enemy while defeats in Tennessee were easier to recover from.

Shiloh was only a year into the war. They did get better towards the end.

For example in the West, the Confederates lost huge amounts of territory in a short time. Most of Tennessee and New Orleans were all overrun by the spring of 1862. The Lost Causers focused an inordinate amount of attention on the Virginia theater since there wasn't a lot about the war in the West to celebrate.

rednecks want to keep slaves but capitalist freedom loving unionist chads strip them off their virgin assests

first modern war, gettysburg (sid meiers game is awesome), lincoln, some south city burned to ash

10/10 would see again

Civil War movies and vidya have too much focus on Gettysburg. Yes, it was important but so were a lot of other battles.

but a lot of other battles isn't as important as gettysburg

They do this because it's the one Civil War battle that normalfags have heard of.

no... they do this because it was the south's last chance on dc

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS_Shenandoah#Colony_of_Victoria_stopover

Gettysburg was a popular tourist destination/gathering site for veterans not long after the war due to having a railroad run through it and being easily accessible. It was one of the first battlefields to be designated a national historic site, and President Roosevelt visited it in July 1933 with surviving veterans to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the battle.

a true patriot

This
It was legitimately the most strategically important battle of the Civil War. The reason why the civil leaders rocked up to memorialise it so soon afterward is because with it the tide of the war had changed

Actually that would be Early's raid on Washington in July 1864, stopped by the timely arrival of the Union VI Corps.

It was the battle that permanently wrecked Lee's offensive capability. The Army of Northern Virginia was still a formidable foe when well-entrenched, but it would never again be able to launch a major offensive movement.

> the USA is founded on the principles of individual and state rights
> opportunists and Jews infiltrate the upper echelons in DC
> they start bossing states around
> they murder brave Southern boys in Kansas
> they instigate an armed Negro rebellion in Virginia
> they oppose the civilization of jungle people in Spanish countries
> Southern states decide they have had enough
> so on the same principles that kicked the aristocratic British out in 1776, the South rises as a free nation
> Yankees won't accept this free assertion of states' rights so the war of Northern aggression begins
> Southern men fight tooth and nail as gentlemen while Northern aggressors like Sherman the devil commit unspeakable war crimes
> outgunned, overpowered and desperately undersupplied, Southern heroes resist for four long years
> Yankee oppression is established, bringing opportunistic carpetbaggers and destroying Southern economy
> eventually Negroes are pushed into crime, insecurity and poverty, none of which existed under Southern administration
> eventually a Kenyan Islamist is elected in DC
At least that's what this fat bearded alcoholic guy living in a caravan in a Louisiana trailer park told me.

youtube.com/watch?v=a0asSaCVDzw

was he right

youtube.com/watch?v=SFwHQYDqf6c

it's thanks to the civil war bongistani crown didnt disarm all citizens in US and turn yous into Australia 2.0

The stories about Sherman being a war criminal are comically overstated by butthurt Southfags when actually he always tried to minimize battlefield casualties. The horrible carnage at Shiloh had a deep effect on him and he resolved never to launch a frontal assault.

During the Atlanta Campaign, he did it just once, at Kennesaw Mountain unlike the multiple horrific bloodbaths Grant produced in Virginia at the same time. The whole Atlanta Campaign from May to August 1864 cost Sherman about 30,000 men while Grant racked up 60,000 casualties in just May-June.

the blockade won the war for the union,not some shitty generals

All true

Union was a force of righteousness and good while Confederacy was one of the most morally bankrupt and evil regimes in human history, on par with nazis desu. Sherman did nothing wrong.

Most of the South's resources were diverted to the ANV. For example, the farms in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama were all used to feed Lee's army, and they got the best weapons and equipment at the expense of the Western armies.

European wars were bloodier and had bigger armies, but Civil War battles caused more casualties proportionate to the total amount of men on the field. Stones River holds the record for this. The Confederates had 35,000 men and lost 11,000 of them, and the Union had 43,000 men and lost 12,000. That works out to a 33% casualty rate for the Confederates and about 28% of the total Union strength.

For comparison, Napoleon lost 35,000 of the 190,000 men he had at Borodino (the biggest battle of the Napoleonic Wars), a casualty rate of about 19%, while the Russians lost 40,000 out of 160,000 men for a 25% casualty rate.

At Sadowa, a year after the end of the ACW, the Prussians lost 9,000 men out of 221,000 engaged, less than 10% of their total strength while the Austrians lost 40,000 of 215,000 men, for a 19% casualty rate.

It produced a war hero, a force of righteousness that struck the heart of anarchy and evil to help the Union win the war, saving thousands of lives in doing so.

Sheridan in that sense was worse because the burning of the Shenandoah Valley destroyed the property of a lot of Unionists and pacifist Mennonites/Quakers who had nothing to do with the war.

Staff work was also very poor compared to European armies.

What I should know about it: NOTHING

You had 120,000 civil wars of your own anyway.

The Union armies did depend on that sweet, sweet Colombian coffee though.

Confederates just had to make chicory coffee instead.

mmmuh right to own slaves

But even so, the ACW was not at all bloodier than European wars of the XIX century. The Crimean War a decade earlier killed almost 800,000 people.

Cringe

*tips fedora* to you, good sir.

"The two days of fighting at Shiloh in April 1862 produced the biggest and bloodiest battle yet seen in the Western Hemisphere, with roughly 23,000 casualties. The fighting, particularly in the Hornet's Nest, had been one of frenzied carnage with so many bodies strewn about that 'one could walk across them without ever touching the ground beneath.' as an officer in Grant's army recalled. Dead and dying men with every ghastly form of mutilation or injury imaginable lay everywhere, the spring air being filled with the pitiful cries of the wounded. Literal rivers of blood flowed across the ground. Future president James Garfield, a brigade commander in the Army of Ohio, wrote that 'Any belief I had in the sacredness of human life vanished that day.'"

"The casualty reports horrified both the North and South, although the effect in the latter was by and far worse due to the grim realization that the smaller manpower pool of the Confederacy could not take such severe losses. It was said that 'the sun never smiled on the South again after Shiloh.'"

Or a war criminal.

A bunch of retarded agrarian oligarchs comitted secession to maintain their backwards, immoral economy.

They got righteously buttfucked so fucking hard they still haven't fully recovered.

Thread theme : youtube.com/watch?v=zJuWszf4g_s

nothing, completly irrelevant in our classes

"Following the disastrous defeat at Fredericksburg in December 1862, General Burnside wrote that one of the Army of the Potomac's chief defects seemed to lay in the fact that the soldiers and officers did not hate the South with the same fervor as the South hated them. There were reasons for this. After all, the union they were fighting to save was an abstract concept, while the idea of fighting for the freedom of the Negro was hardly more palatable of an idea. The Negro after all was little more loved north of the Mason-Dixon line than he was south of it, and there was also the real fear that freed slaves would migrate north en masse and steal jobs from hardworking white men. Meanwhile, the Southerner could very well argue that he had practical reasons to fight for his economy and property. Although only the wealthier segments of the South owned slaves, the poorest Southern white could nonetheless take confidence in the fact that he was still above the Negro in the social hierarchy."

100% correct, and reminder that US Southerners are honorary meds

The war was fought with a clumsier form of Napoleonic tactics, at least until the siege of Petersburg which presaged WWI in a lot of ways.

That was what the generals had all been raised on, but Napoleonic tactics really weren't possible at all. Armies didn't have good enough staff work, nor were the soldiers trained enough for it. Plus the terrain in North America was more rugged than in Europe with lots of woods, hills, and swamps that made classical European warfare impossible. It was not like the neat, manicured villages and farms of France, Belgium, Germany, etc.

I know slave owning élites and corrupt politicians tricked the poor southern people into fighting a war were they had nothing to gain and everything to lose just to preserve their own privileges

Good ol' Phil Kearny. Fought with the French army in North Africa and at Solferino before becoming a Union division commander. Got killed at Chantilly on September 1, 1862. Shame because he was one of the few higher-ranking offers in the Army of the Potomac who liked to fight instead of hiding behind a trench like a little bitch.

The reason why Southerners fought the war was because they saw the South as their homeland and saw US forces as invaders. They weren't "tricked", they just reacted as anybody else in the world would have to the situation they were in.

The secession of the CSA in the first place, however, was motivated by what you were saying: greedy plantation owners trying to preserve their way of life.

I think if people just accepted this compromise view of the war (that secession was motivated by slavery, but the war itself was motivated mostly by the North trying to preserve its own power) people today would be able to approach the conflict in an adult manner instead of autistically REEEEing at statues or making stupid, bizarre claims such as that slavery wasn't a reason for the war at all.

Lincoln offered a place as a Unionist General to Garibaldi but he refused because they had yet to abolish slavery in the Union and also because he wanted to be the supreme commander of the army and also because the second italian independence war was about to start

that the confederates soldiers are unfairly demonized

I wouldn't doubt it that industrialists in the North were chomping at the bit to access all that cheap black labor once slaves were freed. Behind every noble cause is a practical, get rich one.

John Fremont had a bunch of European soldiers-of-fortune in his entourage. Most were little more than grifters and con men and the native-born Americans ridiculed them. Fremont however was a retard who automatically assumed anyone who'd served in a European army was Napoleon himself.

That's exactly what modern history books say, and that's also the way I know it, the North started the war to put down a rebellion, not to free the slaves
Anyways by "being tricked" I mean that the southern nationalist sentiments were used by slave owners to foment the rebellion

The thing is, even if you were a professional soldier from Europe, it didn't mean whatever skills you learned in Prussia or whatever were usable or translated to fighting a war in America. After all, European warfare and fighting conditions were very different from over here.

well then you are completely correct.
>what modern history books say, and that's also the way I know it, the North started the war to put down a rebellion, not to free the slaves
that is what literally 100% of history books will say about the conflict, unfortunately most people don't read them. A huge portion of people in America basically believe that the Union declared war with the sole wargoal of freeing the slaves. Fact is the union included several slave states even after the CSA left, and slavery was not officially made an aim of the war until it became economically and politically convenient for them to make it one.

That's not to say a lot of people here in the South don't believe a lot of our own romantic revisionist bullshit about it, but we're not the ones writing the history books or making the movies.

Also, abolitionism was mostly a thing of New Englanders, the rest of the country merely wanted to save the union.

likewise, only the Deep South seceded solely because of Lincoln and slavery. Other states like Virginia didn't secede until Fort Sumpter yet still get shit for it along with the rest.

it had some rad tunes
well the union had atleast, not too high on dixie tunes
youtube.com/watch?v=p5mmFPyDK_8
Churchill was a big fan of that one,was played at his funeral

youtube.com/watch?v=zhCheCryopA
anthem of the USA desu

The Western armies tended to be tougher and grittier than the Eastern "paper collars". A soldier from Iowa was used to living in harsher conditions than someone from New England or another rich, urbanized part of the Northeast, and these guys had to march huge distances compared to the Virginia Theater. The area between the Appalachians and Mississippi is fuck huge and would be challenging even for an army of today to operate in.

After his initial experience as a brigade commander at Bull Run, William T. Sherman was eager to be transferred to the West, where he felt the real, interesting stuff was going to happen.

>not too high on dixie tunes
>he doesn't like the song "Dixie"
youtube.com/watch?v=5OKdbc0DYpM
fun fact: I'm pretty sure this was actually penned by a Northerner

Especially cavalry. Westerners knew how to handle a horse while the Army of the Potomac suffered from too many kids from New York City and whatnot who thought being a cavalryman was romantic and would impress girls. The Confederates were also much better at horsemanship since the South was more rural to begin with, but also in the Union armies, cavalry horses were provided by the government while Southern cavalrymen had to provide their own animal. When it's your own horse, you're more motivated to take proper care of it unlike "Oh well, if my mount breaks down, Uncle Sam will just get me a new one."

There's a lesson somewhere in there about why socialism doesn't work.

expect that the south lost and its shit redneck culture is shit

centralized government making equal chances for its citizens>rural traditional romanticized shithole

you are the equivalent of the retards fanboying our kurultáj we wuzzing and the said thing is you think you are so smart

...

>Biggest war criminal in US history, but not recognized as such because he fought for the Yankees.
Not even close but generally start shit and you generally face the consequences of the other side seeking to end the war. Also, the south did fucked up shit in Union territory like enslaving freed Northern blacks. They were never in one of the major Union cities so who knows what terror they would have done.

theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/08/we-have-received-provocation-enough/61276/

theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/

And both sides committed other massacres.

listverse.com/2013/03/17/10-war-crimes-of-the-us-civil-war/

>a true patriot
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_massacre

The Atlantic is a known leftist site so I tend to take whatever they say with a grain of salt.

This gon b gud

our port incremented exports like 30%

Gettysburg
Wilderness
Fredericksburg
Fort Sumter
Appomattox Court House
Bull Run
Shiloh
Vicksburg
Antietam

>Wilderness
Imagine fighting in a tangled forest where nobody can see anything and the woods are catching on fire and burning wounded men alive. Nobody in a European war had to deal with this.

>Nobody in a European war had to deal with this

Bad guys lost.

Reminder that the Confederacy had more jews fighting for it then the Union that banned Jews from office.

Outside of Scandinavia, Europe cut down all their forests by the 1500s or so.

Gettysburg is SO Fucking cozy.
And the Whitest area I’ve ever been to in America.
T.Been there Twice, this Summer the latest.

what did you like about it?

Ye Oldey Timey feel.
Barely any niggers/mexicans/muzzies
Beautiful Architecture.
Legitimately interesting History.
Spooks.
Lots of things to love about it.