Between the endless battles and hopeless nights, the war between the Confederate States and the Union was meant to determine the fate of what we now know as the United States of America. Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Dred Scott, and much of the other major political icons before and during the Civil War devoted their life’s to creating a Union that would stand without fault. Men and disguised women stood beside their leaders through the battlefield firm and brave ready to win, with every intention of coming out as either a Confederate champion, or a Union hero. Before the Civil War, the North and the South differed on political issues. For starters, the agriculture economy of the South cultivated when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin …show more content…
State after state continued to secede from the Union and the country proceeded to fall apart. On April 12, 1861 the Southern forces fired on Fort Sumter and the war began. Expectedly, on June 8, 1861 the final Southern state, Tennessee, seceded from the Union. Abraham Lincoln wasn’t necessarily concerned with slavery at first. He wanted his nation as one, and if he had to keep or remove slavery to do that then he would. The first major battle fought, The Battle of Bull Run, was fought on July 1, 1861 in the city of Manassas. During the beginning of the war, faith in the South was low. It was certain that the North had a well-supplied amount of money and resources, and definitely more of it than the South. Many predicted the war to last not much more than a couple of weeks. Nevertheless, the war proceeded and the most severe fighting began in 1862. Battles such as Shiloh, Second Manassas, and Fredericksburg negatively developed into “total war”. “Total war” is the strategy of bringing war into the entire society, not just the military, and William Tecumseh Sherman is thought to be the originator and the first practitioner of this strategy. Sherman wanted to have a sociological effect on Southern civilians and what better way to do that than bringing the brutality to their very doorstep? At Sherman’s March to the Sea from December 15 to December 21, 1864, Sherman led his 60,000 men on a 285 mile march from Atlanta to Savannah, burning and vitally