Military

Return to Mississippi Soldiers in the Civil War

Written in the Spring of 1862

Return to Mississippi Soldiers in the Civil War

Head Quarters Dist. Dept. No. 1
Tangipahoa, La. July 4, 1862
General Orders
No. 4

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.

The president of the United States addressed the nation and called for war. Tyrants, he said, could not be allowed to destroy the bonds of civilization by engaging in inhumane and immoral actions that oppressed their own people and threatened their neighbors. The world had to be made safe for democracy.

The nation's leading newspapers overwhelmingly agreed with the president, but the American people were divided. While some enthusiastically backed the official call to arms, critics suggested that the war was being undertaken to further privileged economic interests.

World War II was truly a world war. All of the major countries and a large number of small nations were drawn into the fight. Even countries that tried to remain neutral found themselves in the conflict either by conquest or by being in the path of the campaigns of the major powers. For example, in 1940, more than a year before the United States entered the war, the major powers — Britain, Italy, and Germany — fought important battles in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya in North Africa.

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.

In 1836, the northeastern region of Mexico known as Tejas revolted, fought for its independence, and became The Republic of Texas. In truth, its citizens were mostly farmers from the southern United States who had emigrated to Texas seeking new land, including many people from Mississippi.

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.