In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
In many classrooms, a study of the Civil War will emphasize battles, war strategies, and outcomes. While indispensable to an understanding of this significant event in American history, these facts alone provide little insight into what life was actually like for the soldier. An enormous amount of material is now easily available, both through Mississippi History Now and other Internet sites, for students to gain a much broader view of the war by examining the personal letters and diaries of the participants.
General William Tecumseh Sherman is probably best remembered for his spectacular 1864 “March to the Sea” in which he stormed 225 miles through Georgia with no line of communication in a Union campaign to take the American Civil War to the Confederate population. Sherman, however, was not always so daring and independent, but rather he was a general who profoundly grew and developed during the Civil War.
When Vicksburg fell to Union troops on July 4, 1863, the Confederacy lost its last chance to control the Mississippi River.
In the years after the American Civil War, famous generals and common soldiers alike published their remembrances. These accounts appeared in books, in magazines, and, as was the case here, in newspapers. The press created Civil War series such as the one reprinted here from the New York Tribune. The most famous of all these series appeared in The Century Magazine and in the late 1880s was published in four volumes under the title Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. (In 2002, a fifth volume was added to the original four.)
Most Union soldiers fought the American Civil War close to home. Recruits from Pennsylvania in the Army of the Potomac, for example, spent the entire war within one or two hundred miles of home. Farther west, men from Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio did not have far to travel to reach the battlefields of Kentucky and Tennessee.
The American Civil War (1861-1865) left Mississippi in chaos with its social structures overturned and its economy in ruins. However, the war meant freedom for enslaved people who made up more than half the population of the state.
“Over a century ago, prodded by the demands of four million men and women just emerging from slavery, Americans made their first attempt to live up to the noble professions of their political creed - something few societies have ever done. The effort produced a sweeping redefinition of the nation's public life and a violent reaction that ultimately destroyed much, but by no means all, of what had been accomplished.
The Civil War took the lives of more Americans than all the other United States conflicts combined, from the American Revolution through Vietnam. Amazingly, more soldiers succumbed to disease, such as measles and dysentery, than died from the awful wounds caused by grape, cannister, and rifled musket minie balls. Being a White or a Black soldier in the conflict between the North and the South was no glamorous adventure; it was horror of the worst magnitude.
L. Q. C. Lamar is perhaps Mississippi’s most noted nineteenth century statesman. He was the first person, and one of only two in American history (the other was South Carolina’s James Byrnes in the twentieth century), to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, the U. S. Senate, as a member of the President’s Cabinet, and as a justice on the U. S. Supreme Court. Despite these accomplishments, Lamar's legacy is tainted today by his active role in the reestablishment of White supremacy in the post-Reconstruction South.