Others were swept into the army by peer pressure and community expectations, the promise of adventure, or the prospect of proving their manhood through the crucible of war. Many on both sides were motivated by patriotism and other high-minded principles. The men who took up arms for the Blue and Gray also held a multitude of reasons for participating. Recruits were of many different nationalities and had widely different occupations furthermore, while most troops were young, some were quite old-indeed, ages varied across a roughly fifty-year span (Sutherland 1989, p. But beyond this unsurprising preponderance of young recruits, there was no one type of Civil War soldier. 696), and an even greater percentage of young Southerners took up arms for the Confederacy. About one-half of all Northern men who were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four in 1860, for example, fought in the war at some point (Rorabaugh 1986, p. While the soldiers who fought under the banners of the Union and Confederacy were not a monolithic group, most were young. In one early clash, for example-the Battle of Shiloh of April 1862-more Americans fell than in all previous American wars combined. But the carnage on the field of battle was nonetheless appalling. The majority of these fatalities-360,000 from the Union side, 260,000 from the Confederate rolls-stemmed from disease and other causes rather than from battlefield wounds. Of the approximately three million men who fought in the American Civil War, more than 620,000 did not survive.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |