gettysburg was the big battleground because it was perceived as the big turning point in the war.
near gettysburg are some other sites.
to go to nearby antietam and see reminders of the worst day in amercan history for casualties and to try to understand how people fought like that.
it is stunning when you see how close they were when they fought each other.
they were leveling guns and firing at each other from 50 or 60 feet.
bullets expanded as they entered the body and were 4 times their size coming out.
these bullets traveled slow and deformed, causing terrible damage.
there was considerable innovation in our civil war.
land mines were invented.
metal sided ships were first used during the conflict.
the gatling gun, a forerunner of the modern machine gun was used.
aerial observation balloons were first used.
there was one battle where the corpses were stacked 20 high.
was it sponsylvania courthouse?
in the smithsonian is a tree trunk 2 feet across that was cut down by miniball fire.
general lee wanted gettysburg over because disease and infection killed huge percentages of the soldiers.
lincoln told lee "do something."
sanitation was not well understood then.
there were lots of problems in the camps.
the battle of antietam killed over 20,000 people in a day.
people were more usual dying in battle than from disease.
grant is not perceived as a tactical genius.
his rational was 'i have more bodies,more people, more guns.
i am going to throw them up against your positions and, eventually, you are going to fold.'
lee's rational was that now that the armies were together, the battle was better off being fought then than 9 months later.
there was a lot of that thinking at gettysburg.
the fall of atlanta doomed the south. this was a great aid to lincoln's presidential campaign.
the north had more material, more men, and once they got the blockade going, the south was strangled.
what if france, spain, or canada, after the civil war, shipped guns and supplies into the south, to enable continued harassment of union interests?
a couple of serious movies are in the making of lincoln's assassination. one is by robert redford.
strangely, states voted their way into the union, but cant legally vote to get out.
to legally secede, states would have to propose constitutional amendments.
there is still debate on the issue.
individual states of the confederacy printed their own money.
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