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What They Fought For Chapter Summaries

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In chapter one of What They Fought For, I learned about the letters and diaries of the Confederate soldiers. The themes of the letters were home-sickness, lack of peace, and the defense of home against their invading enemy. The thought of soldiers fighting for their homes and being threatened by invaders, made them stronger when facing adversity. Many men expressed that they would rather die fighting for a cause, than dying without trying and this commitment showed patriotism. Throughout the letters, soldiers claimed their reason for fighting, was for the principles of Constitutional liberty and self-government. There was a comparison between the Civil War and Revolutionary war that the Confederate Armies discussed in their diaries. The Confederate
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591 Words | 3 Pages

She argues that the white Union men who enlisted disliked slavery from the beginning, even though they viewed blacks as inferior. She argues that over the course of the war, the Union armies saw firsthand the brutality of what slavery had done. For instance, Manning includes accounts of Unionist seeing slaves with “great welts, and callous stripes … [and] great scars” (77). She also has narratives of Unionist who saw slaves that were almost as white as they were and the anger that they felt towards the sexual abuse that slave women went through at the hands of white men (77-78). On the other hand, she argues that the Confederates wanted to preserve slavery because it was the backbone to the southern economy and that there would be dangers to society if the slaves became free.

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1199 Words | 5 Pages

In the beginning of the book, Manning explains that soldiers on both sides of the war both fought because of slavery. This was shown by Manning on both sides. While quoting a union solider from the third Wisconsin, “‘the rebellion is abolotionizing the whole army.’ Time in the south forced troop ‘to face this sum of all evils, and cause of the war,’ slavery (45).” By quoting this union solider, she proves that the Union became an “abolitionist army” of sorts, with the goal of eventually eradicating slavery from the United States.

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118 Words | 1 Pages

As a farmer, James Kelso may not have known much about the savagery that was associated with war, however he would soon learn. After signing up to fight for the Union cause, Kelso recruited men from Cumberland County as well as neighboring areas, to form Company D of the 130th Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Bravery may have seemed like something that was running rampant throughout the countryside considering the number of men that signed up to join both the Union and Confederacy, however war has a way of turning the bravest of men into cowards. The fact that Kelso rallied his town to join the Union provides valuable insight into the close knit nature of the town of Shippensburg.

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1636 Words | 7 Pages

In the 1950s, Texas was at the forefront of two major, but very different civil rights movements—the African-American movement and the Mexican-American movement. Fighting Their Own Battles by Brian Behnken describes and compares the separate battles for rights of the two movements. People in Texas knew what was happening and newspapers reported about the different events that occurred throughout the 1950s. In hindsight, and with the help of Behnken’s book, one is able to see the subtle influences of both civil rights movements in the Texas newspapers. At the time however, these differences in strategy between the African-American and Mexican-American movements were not so easily understood.

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997 Words | 4 Pages

Taylor Headrick Review of: McPherson, James M. For Cause & Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. New York, Oxford University Press, 1997. In James M. McPherson’s book, For Cause & Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, he investigates Civil War soldiers’ diaries to discover why men from both sides chose to fight in the Civil War while also examining the different motives for each side. McPherson challenges traditional knowledge about the motives and mentalities of Civil War soldiers, offers new insight that differs from typical historians, and provides readers with specific details from soldiers’ journals and letters.

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1091 Words | 5 Pages

The United States Civil War is possible one of the most meaningful, bloodstained and controversial war fought in American history. Northern Americans against Southern Americans fought against one another for a variety of motives. These motives aroused from a wide range of ideologies that stirred around the states. In James M. McPherson’s What they fought for: 1861-1865, he analyzes the Union and Confederate soldier’s morale and ideological components through the letters they wrote to love ones while at war. While, John WhiteClay Chambers and G. Kurt Piehler depict Civil War soldiers through their letters detailing the agonizing battles of war in Major Problems in American Military History.

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822 Words | 4 Pages

In this article, the intent was to show us the Civil War from a confederate’s perspective and I think it did a great job at that. Showing that the army officers interacted during the war even unearthing the Native American skeletons and gathering them up to see what their ancestors looked like. This article did not concentrate much on the war which I think was a good thing since a lot of people today usually view the confederates as bad people since they were fighting to keep slavery. There is one flaw that I found in this article.

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1533 Words | 7 Pages

While the popular image of the Confederacy, and indeed the Secessionist Southern States as a whole, are looked at as containing white populations uniformly supportive of the Confederate cause, the reality is more complex. As portrayed in Victims: A True Story of the Civil War and Free State of Jones there existed sizable pockets of dissent among the populace whom the Confederate government failed to convert to the cause. In places like the mountains of western North Carolina and southeastern Mississippi this led to desertion, passive resistance, and even outright armed rebellion which sapped Confederate resources that were needed to continue to fight the Union. Though this anti-Confederate feeling would often translate into support for the Union, this was not based on some inherent loyalty to the Federal government. As shown in Victims and Free State of Jones the disunity within the Confederacy stemmed from the failure of the Confederate government to get their non-slave holding lower classes to buy into the pro-slavery ideology of the nation, which was compounded by the lower classes bearing many of the harsh measures of the war including the draft and the

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461 Words | 2 Pages

In “Nathan Bedford Forrest; A Biography” by Jack Hurst, there are many occurrences of literary and historical contrast. One main occurrences are the contrast of the North and South's’ beliefs of slavery. The other is the contrast of General Nathan Bedford Forrest and General William Tecumseh Sherman and how they chose to fight the war.     To begin, a major contrast is obviously the beliefs of both the North and the South. In the biography, the ideas and actions of both sides is equally shown.

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752 Words | 4 Pages

The Civil War sparked an era of depression for all Texans, and America as a whole. In the period of the Civil War, over 70,000 Texans fought in the Civil War. In the early 1820’s, the United States was expanding its territorial grasp, however many of the states wished to join the union with legalized slavery. All of the slave states in the union led to the secession of eleven states, the Confederacy, and the Civil War. With the high likelihood of suffering a tragic death in the war, the question is brought up, why did Texans fight in the Civil War?

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1063 Words | 5 Pages

The living legacy of the United States Civil War is a complicated time in American history one finds difficult to describe. The ramification of the war prior, during and after still haunt the current citizens who call The States their home. Tony Horwitz’s book Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War looks at the wide gap of discontent that still looms in the late 1990s. For some southerners, the Confederacy still lives on through reenactments, stories and beliefs. For others in the South, reminders the land was dedicated to the Confederacy spark hatred and spite.

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887 Words | 4 Pages

Life for the Union Soldier was not only brutal on the battlefield, but the camp life for a Union soldier was just as cruel. With the lack of personal hygiene, unsavory and repugnant food, and the shortage of clothing made living, a very difficult thing to do. Growth in the number of people with diseases was also a contributing factor to the massive amounts of death within the camp and as well as the post-battle wounds that often left either a man with one less limb or put in a mental institution. A Union Soldier’s life during the Civil War was cruel and horrific during their stay at the camps.

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590 Words | 3 Pages

There are numerous similarities and differences between the American Revolutionary War and The American Civil War. Both wars were waged in the name of unity, the Revolutionary War was to bring together the colonies of America and the Civil war was to bring together and preserve the Union. In both wars Americans did fight other Americans, in the Revolutionary War those who supported the American way fought against those who who supported the crown along side of the British. In the Civil War the North fought the South. Both wars were relatively short, both lasting less than ten years each; and the outcome of both wars was the unity of the nation.

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825 Words | 4 Pages

Although the Civil War and American Revolution shared many similarities, the Civil War differed in the fact that it was more of a confrontation of two opposing

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1277 Words | 6 Pages

“Enlisted the United States Service August 16th, 1862, at Mound City, Kansas.” (Wing, 1), “On January 22nd 1862 we left Camp Siegel, Milwaukee Wisconsin on train for Chicago and arrived at Chicago the same evening.” (Christ, 21). These are not just words from someone’s diary, these are two real separate documents from the life of an average american soldier. Soldiers who fought on the same side for one of the most gruesome wars that America has ever witnessed, The Civil War.

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