Civil War 1861-1865

Civil war places an important role in American history and its current politics. For a starter, Unionists are from the states in north, also referred as Yankees. Confederates are from the southern states. Confederate states parted from the union and formed a new country. They feared that with the new presidency of Abraham Lincoln in 1861, he would back Abolitionists and put an end to slavery, and hence departed. Abolitionists supported abolishing slavery and were not a main stream movement up until 1861. Eventhough Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the end of slavery and freedom for African American people, but that was not the main reason to go war with Confederates. The war was started on the pretext of secession and to bring back the confederate state back to the fold of union. But slavery was an issue looming large and without addressing that there won’t be any union. Civil war was a bloody war, costing lot of human lives, due to clash of human ideologies, sheer madness, but may be inevitable and unavoidable.

In the last few days, I watched the de facto documentary on this subject, The Civil War by Ken Burns. Backed that with National Geographic’s special edition Atlas of the Civil War. I rented the BlueRay DVD from County library and bought the latter from a news stand. Both documentary and the magazine had 5 main chapters titled, 1861 to 1865. Rather than a mere account of the events, the documentary shows the human side of the war. There are lot of names and events mentioned in it, one may easily get lost. The magazine helped in reiterating some of the key topics.