William F. Fox and Thomas Leonard Livermore, two Union Army veterans turned amateur historians, took on the task of counting the dead. They studied battlefield reports, conscription lists, pension records and news accounts of remote battles. Their estimate of Union dead was 360,222. Because many records about the South had been destroyed, they made educated guesses about the Confederate dead, a total they put at 258,000.
Their estimates of the war’s toll was accepted for over a century until J. David Hacker, a demographic historian figured out how to use other sets of data from that era to come up with a more accurate count. Mr. Hacker estimated that the number of Civil War dead is actually closer to 750,000.
via Greater sacrifice: 150 years later, the Civil War’s death toll rises – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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Douglass’s sentiments were those of an antislavery activist who insisted that secession was intimately about slavery. He believed, as many reasonable Americans have ever since, that the significance of any exercise of states’ rights doctrine is in the issue for which it is employed. The prospect of civil war frightened him, but by January and February 1861, he cast the dreaded prospect in positive and apocalyptic language: The “God in history everywhere pronouncing the doom of those nations which frame mischief by law,” he declared, had caused a “concussion . . . against slavery which would now rock the land.” National will and institutions had not solved the problem. “If there is not wisdom and virtue enough in the land to rid the country of slavery,” he claimed, “then the next best thing is to let the South go . . . and be made to drink the wine cup of wrath and fire, which her long career of cruelty, barbarism and blood shall call down upon her guilty head.”
via Cup of Wrath and Fire – NYTimes.com#more-75107.
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In December 1860, like most northern opponents of slavery, Garrison reacted sharply to reports that South Carolina had left the Union. And like most enemies of slavery, he viewed South Carolina’s act as an extra-legal transgression that defied the Constitution. Even so, the reaction of Garrison and his fellow staunch abolitionists to South Carolina’s act differed drastically from mainstream anti-slavery opinion: they welcomed it. Indeed, in the weeks after South Carolina’s secession, the issues of Garrison’s bimonthly newspaper, the Liberator, provide a focused lens on the vanguard of abolitionist thought on the eve of the Civil War.
via The Messianic Schoolmaster – NYTimes.com#more-74715.
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In other words, for South Carolina, slavery and states’ rights were not mutually exclusive; in fact, they were the same thing. Today too few people understand the intricate legal history that connects slavery to states’ rights — and as a result a needless debate continues, 150 years after secession began.
via State’s Rights, but to What? – NYTimes.com.
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As politicians throughout the country debated secession and young men drilled for war, Harriet Tubman had been plotting a mission into the heart of slave territory. She did not know that it would be her last. Over the past 10 years, she had undertaken about a dozen clandestine journeys to the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland, the place from which she herself had escaped in 1849. She had managed to bring some six dozen people – most of them family and friends – across the Mason-Dixon Line into freedom, then across the Canadian border to safety. But Tubman had never managed to liberate several of her closest relatives: her younger sister Rachel and Rachel’s two children, Ben and Angerine. In the autumn of 1860, she decided to rescue them.
via Moses’ Last Exodus – NYTimes.com#more-71385.
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Frederick Douglass was not going to let anyone keep him from speaking. Twenty years earlier, as a teenager kept in slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, he had struck back with his fists against the most feared white man in the county, a “slave breaker” who had been tasked with destroying the youth’s irrepressible spirit. Now – as a free person, an internationally renowned orator and one of America’s most fearless abolitionists – he would not yield even to a room full of white men. Not even if they included some of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in the state of Massachusetts. And especially not on this day, of all days.
via Silencing the Fanatics – NYTimes.com#more-71797.
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A Map of American Slavery
One of the most important maps of the Civil War was also one of the most visually striking: the United States Coast Survey’s map of the slaveholding states, which clearly illustrates the varying concentrations of slaves across the South. Abraham Lincoln loved the map and consulted it often; it even appears in a famous 1864 painting of the president and his cabinet
via A Map of American Slavery – Interactive Feature – NYTimes.com.
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But a look through the declaration of causes written by South Carolina and four of the 10 states that followed it out of the Union — which, taken together, paint a kind of self-portrait of the Confederacy — reveals a different story. From Georgia to Texas, each state said the reason it was getting out was that the awful Northern states were threatening to do away with slavery.
via Gone With the Myths – NYTimes.com.
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According to this article Longfellow’s Midnight Ride of Paul Revere was actually about the impending Civil War
Longfellow, a passionately private man, was, just as passionately and privately, an abolitionist. His best friend was Charles Sumner, for whom he wrote, in 1842, a slim volume called “Poems on Slavery.” Sumner, a brash and aggressive politician, delivered stirring speeches attacking slave owners; Longfellow, a gentler soul, wrote verses mourning the plight of slaves, poems “so mild,” he wrote, “that even a slaveholder might read them without losing his appetite for breakfast.”
via The ‘Midnight-Message’ of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – NYTimes.com.
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The New York Times has a feature on the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.
DISUNION – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com.
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