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*** Note that ''Glory'' has it right. Mass-produced shoes of this era didn't come in left and right, they just got that way..
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** The Battle of Gettysburg started when a Confederate unit headed for Gettysburg to look for shoes and ran into Union troops.
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* TemptingFate: The very first time that John Sedgwick made his famous quote, nothing happened to him. It was second time he said it that his luck ran out.
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* TemptingFate: The very first time that John Sedgwick made his famous quote, nothing happened to him. It was the second time he said it that his luck ran out.
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* TemptingFate: The very first time that John Sedgwick made his famous quote, nothing happened to him. It was second time he said it that his luck ran out.
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Narrated by KenBurns. And since motion film hadn't been invented yet in the Civil War, but photographic film has, here's a bunch of shots [[TheKenBurnsEffect zooming in and out and panning over some static images.]]
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Very unusually, a large portion of the battlefields are preserved in national parks, and, after a concerted effort by the US National Parks Service in the 1990s, most have been almost entirely restored to their appearance in the 1860s. Unlike practically any other place (or for any other war) on Earth, it is possible to visit a very significant portion of all the war's battlefields, and have a reasonable possibility of experiencing ''exactly'' what the combatants saw. Combined with an extensive preservation and historical research community (and a huge commitment from the US government to support it), the US Civil War is perhaps the best-preserved war in history. Not just US history, but world history. It borders on obsessive, especially for a nation that came this close to self-immolation. Said parks have been the location setting for many (if not most) of the historical and fictional films about the period, which gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "on location."
Narrated by KenBurns. And since motion film hadn't been invented yet in the Civil War, but photographic filmhas, had, here's a bunch of shots [[TheKenBurnsEffect zooming in and out and panning over some static images.]]
]]
Finally, contains two of the greatest speeches ever made, both by the same man, Abraham Lincoln. [[http://www.bartleby.com/43/36.html The Gettysburg Address]] (pure distilled Awesome in 2 minutes) and his [[http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html Second Inaugural Address]] (an eloquent EarnYourHappyEnding )
Narrated by KenBurns. And since motion film hadn't been invented yet in the Civil War, but photographic film
Finally, contains two of the greatest speeches ever made, both by the same man, Abraham Lincoln. [[http://www.bartleby.com/43/36.html The Gettysburg Address]] (pure distilled Awesome in 2 minutes) and his [[http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html Second Inaugural Address]] (an eloquent EarnYourHappyEnding )
** Note that the advances in rifle technology (from the minnie ball to rifling to percussion-cap to breechloading and cartridges) combined with continued use of Napoleonic infantry tactics against well-protected defenders meant that the Civil War was the first war fought with firearms where casualties from infantry firearms were greater than artillery. For all the horrific damage short-range canister and explosive shell did, the majority of casualties were caused by massed infantry rifle fire. In all prior wars, artillery was the primary killer. Should be obvious, since a typical regiment consisted of over 1,000 men, and typically was supported by no more than two batteries (12 total) field guns. And both now had approximately the same range (rifled cannon were rare, while rifled infantry muskets were ubiquitous).
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* UsefulNotes/RebelsWithRepeaters: The CSA Army.
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* UsefulNotes/RebelsWithRepeaters: The CSA Army. Subverted in that very, very, very few Confederate soldiers were ever equipped with repeating rifles, as the South did not have the industrial capacity to produce them or their ammunition. Virtually all Southern uses of repeating rifles (or, even things like the Sharps breech-loading rifles) were from captured Union stocks, and they likewise depended entirely on captured ammunition.
** Historians also consider him to be one of the most pragmatic of all Civil War generals. He routinely avoided many of the common tactical mistakes that plagued both sides' battle strategies, and the few instances he didn't are notable mostly ''because'' he didn't sidestep the issue like he usually did, not because he did something unusually stupid. The "March to the Sea" is also an extremely clear-headed evaluation of the most efficient method of ending the war. In many ways, it is seen as the 19th Century's equivalent of the Atomic Bombings: horrific, but ultimately justified in being less destructive than the alternative methods would have been.
* WarReenactors - the Trope Maker and Trope Codifier. The poster child for the global re-enactment community - there are more US Civil War re-enactors than all others, combined, and is generally credited with starting the meme as a serious endeavor. It continues to be popular 150 years after the war ended. Note that virtually all of the "extras" used in such epic films as ''Gettysburg'' are in fact unpaid re-enactors, completely with exacting period costumes and equipment, ''all of which are individually owned''. Yes, you read that right. 15,000 extras, all with completely authentic reproductions (or occasionally actual relics) of uniforms, equipment and weapons, all supplied by the reenactors themselves. And yes, they're all a bit crazy - strangely enough, there are a substantial number of non-Americans in the movement, which brings it to another level of wacko, when you realized that there were several hundred ''foreign nationals who came to the US on vacation to reenact someone else's history.''
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* ZergRush
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* ZergRush
ZergRush - oh so regularly done, oh so horribly ineffective.
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* The film ''{{Film/Glory}}'' -- Showed popular culture once and for all that black didn't just beg for their freedom, but fought for it.
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* The film ''{{Film/Glory}}'' -- Showed popular culture once and for all that black blacks didn't just beg for their freedom, but fought for it.
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* Perhaps the film that put Hollywood on the map; ''TheBirthOfANation''.
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* Perhaps the film that put Hollywood on the map; ''TheBirthOfANation''.map: ''TheBirthOfANation''. Brutal, massively racist, blindly revisionist and yet the most influential piece on the technical art of cinematography ever.
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* ElvesVersusDwarves: The agricultural, Slaving South vs the urban, 'ndustrial North.
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** This is mostly due to the '''very''' poor handling of Reconstruction (the period immediately after the war, through the late 1870s) which was simultaneously too lenient and too harsh, not to mention the completely inept administration by the Federal Government.
* ElvesVersusDwarves: The agricultural, Slaving South vs the urban,'ndustrial industrial North.
* ElvesVersusDwarves: The agricultural, Slaving South vs the urban,
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* GatlingGood: Arguably the TropeMaker, as this war featured the first combat fielding of the [[TropeNamer Trope Namesake]] Gatling gun.
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* GatlingGood: Arguably the TropeMaker, as this war featured the first combat fielding of the [[TropeNamer Trope Namesake]] Gatling gun.
** Sadly, despite all the hype (and good press it gets nowadays), the hand-crank gatling gun was less effective than a bronze napoleon smoothbore cannon. It was decidedly cantankerous (jamming frequently), had difficulty with the ammunition feed, and had no more range than canister from the napoleons. And, despite the impressive rate of fire from a gatling (up to about 200/minute peak), it's hard to beat a napoleon field gun shooting canister rounds for range, rate of fire, and simplicity. A good gun crew could manage 3-4 shots/minute from a napoleon, each with about 30 1.5" balls, and each ball could wound several men. The gatling would have to wait for about 30 years of mechanical improvements before it could be more efficient than the napoleon, and by the time it did, it was overtaken by the gas-operated Maxim machinegun.
** Sadly, despite all the hype (and good press it gets nowadays), the hand-crank gatling gun was less effective than a bronze napoleon smoothbore cannon. It was decidedly cantankerous (jamming frequently), had difficulty with the ammunition feed, and had no more range than canister from the napoleons. And, despite the impressive rate of fire from a gatling (up to about 200/minute peak), it's hard to beat a napoleon field gun shooting canister rounds for range, rate of fire, and simplicity. A good gun crew could manage 3-4 shots/minute from a napoleon, each with about 30 1.5" balls, and each ball could wound several men. The gatling would have to wait for about 30 years of mechanical improvements before it could be more efficient than the napoleon, and by the time it did, it was overtaken by the gas-operated Maxim machinegun.
** Note that the vast majority of death and mistreatment at Andersonville and other POW camps (on both sides) was primarily due to complete neglect of the POWs, not active torture. In most cases, prisoners were just herded into large fields and left there, with virtually no food or shelter being provided. Naturally, they succumbed to starvation and disease at an incredible rate.
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*** Hood's Texas Brigade (CSA) at Antietam- The last reserve available on the Confederate left, the brigade successfully stymied a whole Union Corps, and took 60% casualties.
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*** Hood's Texas Brigade (CSA) at Antietam- Antietam - The last reserve available on the Confederate left, the brigade successfully stymied a whole Union Corps, and took 60% casualties.
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*** 1st Minnesota Regiment (USA) at Gettysburg Day 2. The only available Union regiment guarding a gigantic gap in the Union line. So it was ordered to attack a threatening Confederate brigade (five times its size) to buy time for the Union brass to patch up the line. It did. 282 North Star staters go in. 47 come back.
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*** 1st Minnesota Regiment (USA) at Gettysburg Day 2. The only available Union regiment guarding a gigantic gap in the Union line. So it was ordered to attack a threatening Confederate brigade (five times its size) to buy time for the Union brass to patch up the line. It did. 282 '''It did.''' 262 North Star staters go in. 47 come back. 83% casualty rate ''in 5 minutes of combat''. The regimental equivalent of JumpingOnAGrenade
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*** The historical Forrest-started Klan only existed for less than two decades, and while hardly a paragon of virtue, wasn't the bunch of murderous racists we now associate with the KKK. What we now think of the Klan was restarted essentially from scratch around 1920, and definitely deserves its villainous reputation.
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** And Sherman at Kennesaw Mountain.
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* Averted by "Ashokan Farewell," the instrumental theme of Ken Burns' documentary -- while quite similar in tone to Civil War-era music, it was written at Ashokan Reservoir, New York, in 1982.
* "Battle Hymn of the Republic," by Julia Ward Howe, is a classic and still a popular patriotic song and hymn. Others, such as "The Vacant Chair," "Battle Cry of Freedom," and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," were still well-known up until World War II.
* "Battle Hymn of the Republic," by Julia Ward Howe, is a classic and still a popular patriotic song and hymn. Others, such as "The Vacant Chair," "Battle Cry of Freedom," and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," were still well-known up until World War II.
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* AgonyOfTheFeet: Keeping the armies supplied with boots and shoes was a perennial problem for both sides.
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* FriendlyEnemy: Common soldiers on both sides could be quite amiable during truces, many being former friends.
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* FriendlyEnemy: Common soldiers on both sides could be quite amiable during truces, many being former friends. It was fairly common for pickets of the various armies to engage in black market trading (Northern imported coffee for southern grown tobacco) when they were close enough to speak to each other.
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* PutOnABus - Gen. Burnside got given "extended leave" after the Battle of the Crater. Ironically, of the generals involved in the battle hew as probably the ''least'' responsible for the failure. Later a Congressional committee [[VindicatedByHistory exonerated Burnside and placed the blame on Meade]], but by that point Burnside's career was already over.
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* PutOnABus - Gen. Burnside got given "extended leave" after the Battle of the Crater. Ironically, of the generals involved in the battle hew as he was probably the ''least'' responsible for the failure. Later a Congressional committee [[VindicatedByHistory exonerated Burnside and placed the blame on Meade]], but by that point Burnside's career was already over.
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* Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize winning ''The Killer Angels'', which was the basis for the movie {{Gettysburg}}, and largely responsible for rescuing Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain from the back pages of history. Shaara's son Jeff Shaara later wrote a prequel (''Gods and Generals'') and a sequel (''The Last Full Measure''). ''Gods and Generals'' (Which was also turned into a movie, which wasn't as well received as ''Getttysburg'') depicts the beginning of the war, following Lee, Jackson, Hancock, and Chamberlain from joining their respective sides to late June of '83. ''The Killer Angels'' follows Lee, Longstreet, Buford, and Chamberlain through the battle of Gettysburg. ''The Last Full Measure'' is post-Gettysburg to Appamattox, and features Lee, Longstreet, Grant, and Chamberlain. Jeff Shaara is now in the process of writing a second trilogy about other theaters of the war, the first of which, ''A Blaze of Glory'' (About Shiloh) was published in 2012.
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* Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize winning ''The Killer Angels'', which was the basis for the movie {{Gettysburg}}, and largely responsible for rescuing Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain from the back pages of history. Shaara's son Jeff Shaara later wrote a prequel (''Gods and Generals'') and a sequel (''The Last Full Measure''). ''Gods and Generals'' (Which was also turned into a movie, which wasn't as well received as ''Getttysburg'') depicts the beginning of the war, following Lee, Jackson, Hancock, and Chamberlain from joining their respective sides to late June of '83. ''The Killer Angels'' follows Lee, Longstreet, Buford, and Chamberlain through the battle of Gettysburg. ''The Last Full Measure'' is post-Gettysburg to Appamattox, and features Lee, Longstreet, Grant, and Chamberlain. Jeff Shaara is now in the process of writing a second trilogy about other theaters of the war, the first of which, ''A Blaze of Glory'' (About Shiloh) was published in 2012.Shiloh), ''A Chain of Thunder'' (About Vicksburg), and an as yet unpublished third volume about Sherman's March to the Sea.
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* MyCountryRightOrWrong: The ''only'' reason that Robert E. Lee, who was a pro-abolitionist who gave up his slaves long before the war began, fought for the Confederacy, as he didn't want to oppose his home state of Virginia.
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* MyCountryRightOrWrong: The ''only'' reason that Robert E. Lee, who was a pro-abolitionist who gave up his slaves long before the war began, did not approve of slavery, fought for the Confederacy, as he didn't want to oppose his home state of Virginia.
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** It seemed like a good idea at the time: Dig a T-shaped mine under the Confederate lines and pack it with explosives. And then, after you blow a hole in the enemy's positions, rush in through the gap and force the capitulation of Petersburg. Unfortunately, Meade [[ExecutiveMeddling intervened at the last second]] and ordered Burnside not to use the division of black troops that he had specially trained for the attack, forcing Burnside to switch over to his own 1st Division which was not briefed on what to do and were led by an alcoholic named James H. Ledlie. Fast forward to the explosion and Ledlie's troops going INTO the crater instead of AROUND it[[note]]Not helped at all by the fact that Ledlie himself was busy getting plastered [[MilesGloriosus in a fortified redoubt a safe distance away]][[/note]] and getting slaughtered wholesale by cannons, muskets, and even improvised spears and large rocks.
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** It seemed like a good idea at the time: Dig a T-shaped mine under the Confederate lines and pack it with explosives. And then, after you blow a hole in the enemy's positions, rush in through the gap and force the capitulation of Petersburg. Unfortunately, Meade [[ExecutiveMeddling intervened at (almost literally) the last second]] and ordered Burnside not to use the division of black troops that he had specially trained for the attack, attack[[note]]Surprisingly, this was not due to racism but because Meade feared that if the attack failed, the Union would be accused of seeing blacks as mere cannon fodder who were more expendable than white troops.[[/note]], forcing Burnside to switch over to his own 1st Division which was not briefed on what to do and were led by an alcoholic named James H. Ledlie. Fast forward to the explosion and Ledlie's troops going INTO the crater instead of AROUND it[[note]]Not helped at all by the fact that Ledlie himself was busy getting plastered [[MilesGloriosus in a fortified redoubt a safe distance away]][[/note]] and getting slaughtered wholesale by cannons, muskets, and even improvised spears and large rocks.
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* PutOnABus - Gen. Burnside got given "extended leave" after the Battle of the Crater.
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* PutOnABus - Gen. Burnside got given "extended leave" after the Battle of the Crater. Ironically, of the generals involved in the battle hew as probably the ''least'' responsible for the failure. Later a Congressional committee [[VindicatedByHistory exonerated Burnside and placed the blame on Meade]], but by that point Burnside's career was already over.
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* ButThouMust: Grant's strategy during the Overland Campaign to force the war into its final act in Virginia. Previous Union commanders had always followed each of a [[AttackAttackRetreatRetreat string of attacks with humiliating retreats]] after being bested by Lee's army in the field. Grant, while still unsuccessful in defeating Lee's army, was smart enough to realize that [[TakeAThirdOption he didn't have to retreat after a defeat]] and instead [[WeHaveReserves used his superior numbers]] to block Lee's path to Washington while ''simultaneously'' maneuvering to get between Lee and Richmond. After each battle Lee was forced to abandon his positions and retreat, despite not ever losing in the strict sense of the word. Campaign ended when Grant ran out of maneuver room and had to settle into trench warfare around Petersburg.
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** Most of Robert E Lee's early victories could be chalked up to repeated use of Batman Gambits. Lee was able to make highly risky maneuvers and gain the upper hand from a position of weakness because he could count on the Union commanders' generally inept or overly cautions actions. Lee's strategy completely fell apart as soon as he went up against Union Generals that could no longer be counted on to make mistakes.
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The Southern part of the United States at this time is a world filled with romantic, tall-columned plantation houses where delicate {{Southern Belle}}s sashay in large skirts and [[{{Fainting}} Corset Faint]] at every available opportunity. Where chivalrous, [[FatSweatySouthernerInAWhiteSuit cigar-chomping, white-tuxedo-wearing]] [[SouthernGentleman Southern Gentlemen]] pistol-duel at dawn and where the word "Damyankees!"[[note]]One word. Two words is when you cuss out the UsefulNotes/{{Baseball}} team.[[/note]] is used with a fair degree of regularity. Slaves work the fields down here, although whether a production chooses to show the more ''realistic'' aspects of slave life depends a lot on the era in which it's made. (Don't expect to see many [[DiscreditedTrope whitewashed "happy" portrayals]] of slaves in any ''modern'' series.)
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The Southern part of the United States at this time is a world filled with romantic, tall-columned plantation houses where delicate {{Southern Belle}}s sashay in large skirts and [[{{Fainting}} Corset Faint]] at every available opportunity. Where chivalrous, [[FatSweatySouthernerInAWhiteSuit cigar-chomping, white-tuxedo-wearing]] [[SouthernGentleman Southern Gentlemen]] pistol-duel at dawn and where the word "Damyankees!"[[note]]One word. Two words is when you cuss out the UsefulNotes/{{Baseball}} team.[[/note]] is used with a fair degree of regularity. Slaves work the fields down here, although whether a production chooses to show the more ''realistic'' aspects of slave life depends a lot on the era in which it's made. (Don't expect to see many [[DiscreditedTrope whitewashed "happy" portrayals]] of slaves in any ''modern'' series.)
''any'' modern series. People despise historical inaccuracy these days, given that there's really no excuse for it)
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In 1861, a group of southern States seceded from the American Union and declared themselves independent as a new Confederation of American States. From there events took on a life of their own and the situation devolved into a full-blown war which lasted four years, the government's attempts to crush the rebellion inevitably and eventually resulting in dissolution of the confederation.
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In 1861, a group of southern States seceded from the American Union and declared themselves independent as a new Confederation of American States. From there events took on a life of their own and the situation devolved into a full-blown war which lasted four years, the government's attempts to crush the rebellion inevitably and eventually resulting in the dissolution of the confederation.
confederation and the rebellious states' re-integration into the Union.
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Four years long, the Civil War was by far the most protracted of the early industrial wars[[hottip:*: defined as a war between modern, industrialized countries using mass-mobilisation and -production techniques]]; none of the other industrial wars of this period, save the Crimean and Boer Wars, lasted more than three years. Though several of those conflicts were more expensive in absolute terms, ''none'' were 'relatively' more expensive or illustrated quite so well the crippling effect of protracted industrial warfare upon an economy and society[[hottip:*: Even, if not 'especially', in those parts not directly affected by the fighting. Inflation affects everyone]]. The Austro-French war in Piedmont-Sardinia/Northern Italy, the Russo-Turkish War, the FrancoPrussianWar, the Second Boer War, and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 all give certain (and ''better'') insights into 'modern' warfare at the time, however, as they involved The Great (and second-rate) Powers of the age. TheCrimeanWar of 1853-6 is often contrasted with and seen as a smaller-scale precursor to the American Civil War - Russia was about as under-industrialized relative to the Franco-British[[hottip:*: and Piedmont-Sardinian]] alliance as were the USA's rebel states to its loyal ones).
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Four years long, the Civil War was by far the most protracted of the early industrial wars[[hottip:*: defined as a war between modern, industrialized countries using mass-mobilisation and -production techniques]]; none of the other industrial wars of this period, save the Crimean and Boer Wars, lasted more than three years. Though several of those conflicts were more expensive in absolute terms, ''none'' were 'relatively' more expensive or illustrated quite so well the crippling effect of protracted industrial warfare upon an economy and society[[hottip:*: Even, if not 'especially', in those parts not directly affected by the fighting. Inflation affects everyone]]. The Austro-French war in Piedmont-Sardinia/Northern Italy, the Russo-Turkish War, the FrancoPrussianWar, the Second Boer War, and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 all give certain (and ''better'') insights into 'modern' warfare at the time, however, as they involved The Great (and second-rate) Powers of the age. TheCrimeanWar of 1853-6 is often contrasted with and seen as a smaller-scale precursor to the American Civil War - Russia was about as under-industrialized relative to the Franco-British[[hottip:*: and Piedmont-Sardinian]] alliance as were the USA's rebel states to its loyal ones).
ones.
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** After the war, Confederate general George Pickett was asked why Pickett's Charge failed. He replied, "I've always thought the Yankees had something to do with it."
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** Another alternate-history novel is Ward Moore's ''BringTheJubilee'' which is set in a world where the South won the war. But then the protagonist gets involved in a [[spoiler: time-travel experiment and inadvertently ends up changing history during the Battle of Gettysburg, creating our real-world timeline.]]
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** Another alternate-history novel is Ward Moore's ''BringTheJubilee'' ''Literature/BringTheJubilee'' which is set in a world where the South won the war. But then the protagonist gets involved in a [[spoiler: time-travel experiment and inadvertently ends up changing history during the Battle of Gettysburg, creating our real-world timeline.]]
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** The same logic--although not the shipbuilding--applied to France the only other power worth mentioning. Although the French weren't as virulently anti-slavery as the British, they weren't exactly in favor of it either, and going to war to support what the French people probably regarded as a revolt of privileged slaveholders wouldn't have gone down very well in the land of ''liberté, égalité, fraternité''. French industry was also not as dependent on American cotton, so the pressure was felt less, and if France got involved on the side of the Confederacy, it's very possible that Britain would have made a global conflict of it. Even if Britain didn't participate, some other power [[CoughSnarkCough *cough*]] OttoVonBismarck [[CoughSnarkCough *cough*]] might have ginned up a war in Europe while France was distracted. (As it turns out, [[FrancoPrussianWar France didn't need to be distracted to be utterly destroyed by Bismarck]], but that's another issue entirely).
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** The same logic--although not the shipbuilding--applied to France the only other power worth mentioning. Although the French weren't as virulently anti-slavery as the British, they weren't exactly in favor of it either, and going to war to support what the French people probably regarded as a revolt of privileged slaveholders wouldn't have gone down very well in the land of ''liberté, égalité, fraternité''. French industry was also not as dependent on American cotton, so the pressure was felt less, and if France got involved on the side of the Confederacy, it's very possible that Britain would have made a global conflict of it. Even if Britain didn't participate, some other power [[CoughSnarkCough *cough*]] OttoVonBismarck [[CoughSnarkCough *cough*]] might have ginned up a war in Europe while France was distracted. (As it turns out, [[FrancoPrussianWar France didn't need to be distracted to be utterly destroyed by Bismarck]], but that's another issue entirely).
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[[AC:Theater]]
* The musical ''The Civil War'' with music by Frank Wildhorn, nominated for the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1999, portrays the Civil War through Union, Confederate, and slaves perspectives in a collection of vignettes. The musical's story is derived largely from letters, diaries, and firsthand accounts from the war era as well as from the words of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman.
* The musical ''The Civil War'' with music by Frank Wildhorn, nominated for the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1999, portrays the Civil War through Union, Confederate, and slaves perspectives in a collection of vignettes. The musical's story is derived largely from letters, diaries, and firsthand accounts from the war era as well as from the words of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman.
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** Union Cavalryman Judson Kilpatrick made a habit of this. Gettysburg was most egregious example: for reasons known only to himself, on July 3rd Kilpatrick ordered Elon Farnsworth's brigade to attack Rebel infantry entrenched on Big Round Top. It didn't go well.
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** Union Cavalryman Judson Kilpatrick Kilpatrick, made a habit of this. Gettysburg was the most egregious example: for reasons known only to himself, on July 3rd Kilpatrick ordered Elon Farnsworth's brigade to attack Rebel infantry entrenched on Big Round Top. It didn't go well. well, and Farnsworth was killed after being surrounded by the enemy.
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* BadassGrandpa: General John Ellis Wool, who at the age of 79 was the oldest officer to exercise field command during the war.
* BadassMustache: Subverted. Ambrose Burnside had the most awesome whiskers on either side, but even he agreed he was a terrible general. He wanted to refuse the promotion, but knew it would've instead gone to somebody even less suitable.
* BadassMustache: Subverted. Ambrose Burnside had the most awesome whiskers on either side, but even he agreed he was a terrible general. He wanted to refuse the promotion, but knew it would've instead gone to somebody even less suitable.
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* BadassPreacher: Subverted. Confederate General Leonidas Polk was an Episcopal bishop known as The Fight Bishop. Although beloved by his troops, he was considered a poor commander.
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* BadassPreacher: Subverted. Confederate General Leonidas Polk was an Episcopal bishop known as The Fight Fighting Bishop. Although beloved by his troops, he was considered a poor commander.commander, and was ultimately killed by an artillery shell.
** Jack Hinson, 50+ year old Tennessee farmer who killed at least 36 Union soldiers with his .50 caliber Long Rifle.
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** Daniel Sickles was so selfish and eager for personal glory and promotion that he didn't care what happened to his men, just so long as they and the Confederates did the dying and he took the credit. Historians say that his arrogance and insubordination could've lost the Battle of Gettysburg for the Union army.
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** Daniel Sickles was so selfish and eager for personal glory and promotion that he didn't care what happened to his men, just so long as they and the Confederates did the dying and he took the credit. Historians say that his arrogance and insubordination could've lost the Battle of Gettysburg for the Union army. It at least cost him his right leg.
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* UltimateJobSecurity: Ben Butler. Never that great a soldier, he was made a general to convince War Democrats that this wasn't just a Republican war. After Lincoln won his 1864 re-election campaign, he had no more use for Butler. Grant then [[ReassignedToAntarctica put him in charge]] of the amphibious assault on Wilmington, North Carolina, the Confederacy's last open port. The first step in taking Wilmington would be taking Fort Fisher, which Butler signally failed to do, calling off his first and only assault after one man was killed and fifteen wounded out of a 6500-man force. He was promptly hauled in front of the [[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War]] to account for his failure; he rested his defence on the claim that Fort Fisher was impregnable anyhow. ''Midway through his defence speech'', news arrived that his successor had taken Fort Fisher. So what happened then? Well, the Joint Committee unanimously exonerated him on all charges, then voted him a commendation for his calm decision-making in calling off the assault in the face of a superior enemy position. Yeah.
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* UltimateJobSecurity: Ben Butler. Never that great a soldier, he was made a major general to convince War Democrats that this wasn't just a Republican war. After Lincoln won his 1864 re-election campaign, he had no more use for Butler. Grant then [[ReassignedToAntarctica put him in charge]] of the amphibious assault on Wilmington, North Carolina, the Confederacy's last open port. The first step in taking Wilmington would be taking Fort Fisher, which Butler signally failed to do, calling off his first and only assault after one man was killed and fifteen wounded out of a 6500-man force. He The next month he was promptly hauled in front of the [[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War]] to account for his failure; he rested his defence on the claim that Fort Fisher was impregnable anyhow. ''Midway through his defence speech'', news arrived that Alfred Terry, his successor successor, had taken Fort Fisher. So what happened then? Well, the Joint Committee unanimously exonerated him on all charges, then voted him a commendation for his calm decision-making in calling off the assault in the face of a superior enemy position. Yeah.Yeah.
* UnfriendlyFire: Union general Jefferson C. Davis' murder of general William "Bull" Nelson. And he got away with it.
* UnfriendlyFire: Union general Jefferson C. Davis' murder of general William "Bull" Nelson. And he got away with it.
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* BraveScot: A few units on both sides were kilted, though usually only in their dress uniform. The 79th New York, in particular, called itself the Cameron Highlanders. There were also a LOT of Unionist Scots-Irish in the Appalachians.
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* RecycledScript: Most of the Confederate constitution was copy-pasted from the U.S. constitution, with a few changes added here and there to make it more racist. Oddly, they kept the three-fifth compromise, even though the lack of free states meant there was no longer anything to compromise over. The Confederate constitution did require every state to have slavery, so there goes any claim that they were fighting for individual states having the right to decide for themselves whether or not to have slavery.
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* ''TheThreeStooges'' short "Uncivil War Birds".
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* ''TheThreeStooges'' ''Film/TheThreeStooges'' short "Uncivil War Birds".
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** The prequel novel ''Gods and Generals'' was also turned into a movie (With the same name), though it wasn't as well received.
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* Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize winning ''The Killer Angels'', which was the basis for the movie {{Gettysburg}}, and largely responsible for rescuing Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain from the back pages of history. Shaara's son Jeff Shaara later wrote a prequel (''Gods and Generals'') and a sequel (''The Last Full Measure''). ''Gods and Generals'' depicts the beginning of the war, following Lee, Jackson, Hancock, and Chamberlain from joining their respective sides to late June of '83. ''The Killer Angels'' follows Lee, Longstreet, Buford, and Chamberlain through the battle of Gettysburg. ''The Last Full Measure'' is post-Gettysburg to Appamattox, and features Lee, Longstreet, Grant, and Chamberlain.
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* Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize winning ''The Killer Angels'', which was the basis for the movie {{Gettysburg}}, and largely responsible for rescuing Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain from the back pages of history. Shaara's son Jeff Shaara later wrote a prequel (''Gods and Generals'') and a sequel (''The Last Full Measure''). ''Gods and Generals'' (Which was also turned into a movie, which wasn't as well received as ''Getttysburg'') depicts the beginning of the war, following Lee, Jackson, Hancock, and Chamberlain from joining their respective sides to late June of '83. ''The Killer Angels'' follows Lee, Longstreet, Buford, and Chamberlain through the battle of Gettysburg. ''The Last Full Measure'' is post-Gettysburg to Appamattox, and features Lee, Longstreet, Grant, and Chamberlain. Jeff Shaara is now in the process of writing a second trilogy about other theaters of the war, the first of which, ''A Blaze of Glory'' (About Shiloh) was published in 2012.
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* The Civil War trilogy: ''GodsAndGenerals'', ''{{Gettysburg}}'' and ''Last Full Measure''.
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*** He is also widely cited as the last Civil War veteran to die of his wounds - [[{{Determinator}} in 1914, when he was 85.]]
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*** He is also widely cited as the last Civil War veteran to die of his wounds - [[{{Determinator}} in 1914, when he was 85.85 (Or, to put it another way, fifty years after the papers originally claimed that he died from them).]]
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Doh.
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* Gen. Ben Butler claimed the Fugitive Slave Law didn't apply to the United States because the Confederacy is technically a foreign country.
* The separation of West Virginia from Virginia: When Virginia voted to secede from the Union, the counties in the north-west part of the state chose to stay, and decide to form a new state. The only problem was that the Constitution stated that a state could only be split with the approval of said state, and Virginia's state government was currently claiming to be a different country. What did the Unionists do? They "moved" the capital of Virginia to Wheeling, elected new representatives and a governor, sent the representatives to Washington, and approved the split.
* The separation of West Virginia from Virginia: When Virginia voted to secede from the Union, the counties in the north-west part of the state chose to stay, and decide to form a new state. The only problem was that the Constitution stated that a state could only be split with the approval of said state, and Virginia's state government was currently claiming to be a different country. What did the Unionists do? They "moved" the capital of Virginia to Wheeling, elected new representatives and a governor, sent the representatives to Washington, and approved the split.
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* LoopholeAbuse - Gen. Ben Butler claimed the Fugitive Slave Law didn't apply to the United States because the Confederacy is technically a foreign country.
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* LoopholeAbuse - LoopholeAbuse:
* Gen. Ben Butler claimed the Fugitive Slave Law didn't apply to the United States because the Confederacy is technically a foreigncountry.country.
* The separation of West Virginia from Virginia: When Virginia voted to secede from the Union, the counties in the north-west part of the state chose to stay, and decide to form a new state. The only problem was that the Constitution stated that a state could only be split with the approval of said state, and Virginia's state government was currently claiming to be a different country. What did the Unionists do? They "moved" the capital of Virginia to Wheeling, elected new representatives and a governor, sent the representatives to Washington, and approved the split.
* Gen. Ben Butler claimed the Fugitive Slave Law didn't apply to the United States because the Confederacy is technically a foreign
* The separation of West Virginia from Virginia: When Virginia voted to secede from the Union, the counties in the north-west part of the state chose to stay, and decide to form a new state. The only problem was that the Constitution stated that a state could only be split with the approval of said state, and Virginia's state government was currently claiming to be a different country. What did the Unionists do? They "moved" the capital of Virginia to Wheeling, elected new representatives and a governor, sent the representatives to Washington, and approved the split.
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[[redirect:TheAmericanCivilWar]]
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[[caption-width-right:177:...and then things went downhill from there.]]
->''"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great CivilWar, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure."''
-->--'''AbrahamLincoln''''s Gettysburg Address
In 1861, a group of southern States seceded from the American Union and declared themselves independent as a new Confederation of American States. From there events took on a life of their own and the situation devolved into a full-blown war which lasted four years, the government's attempts to crush the rebellion inevitably and eventually resulting in dissolution of the confederation.
The war was the result, like those civil wars later suffered by China and Russia, of a grand failure of normal politics. Modern historiography - the history of history - tells us that the great failure was to resolve tensions over the future of African chattel slavery. The southern 'Slave States' feared that the central government in Washington D.C. would attempt to regulate or ban the slave trade and the practice of slavery. This was an unjustified fear but an understandable one given the increasing 'liberalism' of the Northern 'Free States', wherein Anti-Slavery groups[[hottip:*: modelled after their British counterparts]] had begun to flourish. Abolitionists were a vocal minority, however, but the people of the North generally agreed that slavery was a violation of the principles of free labour and that the black population should be shipped back to Africa - [[ValuesDissonance removal of course being preferable to attempts at integration, for there was no escaping the possibility of miscegenation and cultural degeneracy that would come with harbouring such a large population of free negroids]].
Again, as typical of civil wars, the initial phase of the war was something of a mess. The 1861 secession of the 'slave states' didn't see 'all' the slave states secede, though all the states that did secede were 'slave states'. The border-states of Missouri and Kentucky remained loyal through the initial secession crisis and the war that followed, and a rebel state (Virginia) quickly suffered its own secession crisis when half the state (West Virginia) defected back to the central government. The loyal states of the north were also not nearly as unified in their opposition to either slavery nor secession as they came to be seen in retrospect. There was also a notable split between the industrialized Northeast and the mostly agricultural Northwest (the name then used for what is now called the Midwest).[[hottip:*: In the first half of the 19th century the Northwest, a large part of which depended on the Mississippi for its outward trade, was still seen as the South's natural ally against the Northeast with its abolitionist sympathies (some New England states had already given Blacks the vote before 1860), but the conflict of interests and the improved communications to the east (railways) slowly drove it into an alliance with the Northeast.]] This was clearly demonstrated in the antebellum political scuffles over the future of the west-American colonies that the USA had just conquered from Mexico. The Southern states wanted to establish new 'slave states' in those areas so that no laws outlawing slavery could be passed by the central government[[hottip:*: Which had and still has two 'houses', both of which need to approve all new laws; in one of these houses each state has two votes, making a legal-deadlock possible despite the fact that the people in 'free' outnumbered those of 'slave' states by 2:1]]. Many Northwesterners opposed this because more plantations meant less space for small farms (owned by 'homesteaders'), which they believed were more economically efficient (as it used free, rather than coerced, labour) and more desirable as the social-moral bedrock of a new/developing society. This conflict over the extension of slavery exploded into a prologue to the Civil War in 1856 in the internecine conflict known as "Bleeding Kansas".
Like TheAmericanRevolution, this was a civil war that tore families, towns and states apart. Nationalism had truly developed since then and where before people had largely been torn between ideals, people were now divided just as much if not more by State and local loyalties, for 'National' nationalism had yet to supersede these. It was for their States and for Freedom that, as in the English Civil War, about 2-5% of the total population of the United States died and far more were left impoverished, displaced, maimed and traumatised. Again as in the Revolution, the victory of the government was almost guaranteed; but no world powers aided the unsympathetic cause of these rebels, who were left to face the far superior manpower, finance, and industry of the central government on their own. The result was almost inevitable; the whole affair appeared a very close-run thing, especially given the rebels' early successes, but the Army learnt (however slowly) from its mistakes and made good on its material advantage, grinding the rebels down and eventually crushing them after four years of the bloodiest fighting North America has ever seen. The rebels - The Confederacy - still engender sympathy in certain states, generally those that rebelled. Such people often prefer to think that the rebels fought for Freedom From The Tyranny Of Central Government more than The Freedom To Own And Use People As They Saw Fit. This was the American Civil War, ''The War of the Rebellion'', the ''War Between the States'', the ''War of Southern Treason'', the ''War of Northern Aggression'', ''Lincoln's War'', the ''Slaveholders' Revolt'', and the ''Late Unpleasantness'' - though rarely, if ever, referred to by any of those names while the war itself was being fought.[[note]]At the outset some Secessionists referred to their cause as The Second American Revolution, a term that would later be used by others for the entire era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Outside the United States, the preferred term is usually American Civil War or, e. g. in France and Germany, (American) War of Secession.[[/note]] It was an era which pitted brother against brother, and where the armies of the Blue and the Gray shot cannons and Minié Balls at each other across smoke-filled battlefields.
The Southern part of the United States at this time is a world filled with romantic, tall-columned plantation houses where delicate {{Southern Belle}}s sashay in large skirts and [[{{Fainting}} Corset Faint]] at every available opportunity. Where chivalrous, [[FatSweatySouthernerInAWhiteSuit cigar-chomping, white-tuxedo-wearing]] [[SouthernGentleman Southern Gentlemen]] pistol-duel at dawn and where the word "Damyankees!"[[note]]One word. Two words is when you cuss out the UsefulNotes/{{Baseball}} team.[[/note]] is used with a fair degree of regularity. Slaves work the fields down here, although whether a production chooses to show the more ''realistic'' aspects of slave life depends a lot on the era in which it's made. (Don't expect to see many [[DiscreditedTrope whitewashed "happy" portrayals]] of slaves in any ''modern'' series.)
In the North, there is industry and patriotism, and Abolitionists cry out against the evils of slavery from every pulpit. Abraham Lincoln is a pretty popular guy in these parts -- he spends most of his time in the Oval Office, brooding over battle maps and writing deep historical speeches on stovepipe hats. Ask him why he's fighting the war and he'll tell you it's to free the slaves. Never mind that this runs contrary what he actually ''said'' when asked, during the war; this is HollywoodHistory, where heroes are pure and their motives always perfectly clear. Similarly ignored are all of the explicit references to preserving slavery made by Southern governments and politicians during this time, because the product has to be sellable in all fifty states. Naturally, you don't see much of pro-slavery Confederate President JeffersonDavis in most Civil War movies.
In actuality, Lincoln at first refused to make freeing the slaves a Union war aim. Doing so would have made the border states--slave states that stayed in the Union--leave. When the mood was right, he presented the abolition of slavery (in those states which were in rebellion) as a means of critically undermining the rebel war effort. Two years previously by this time, a lawyer-turned-general had made his major contribution to the war effort by declaring he claimed three slaves who had been used to dig trenches on the grounds they were contraband of war, and then expanding that legal fiction to encompass any slave, whom the Union then emancipated on the grounds they didn't want them; since the most die-hard racist and advocate of slavery who supported the Union could see the logic of seizing rebel slaves, the legal fiction was so widespread that escaped slaves were (and are) habitually referred to as contrabands. The Emancipation Proclamation merely declared it a universal matter; it was ostensibly written as a war measure that only freed slaves in rebel-held areas--where public opinion didn't matter very much.[[note]]It is ''not'' a question of the fact that the Proclamation only applied to rebelling states; there was plenty of land in rebelling states held by Union forces, and since the Proclamation was a military order, they were the ones expected to enforce it. The arrival of Union troops in any place in the rebelling South meant freedom for the slaves in that area.[[/note]] But by the end of the war, the national mood shifted, and Lincoln helped pass the Thirteenth Amendment that completely ended the institution. Emancipation also had the effect of making British and French public opinion--already wary about the Confederacy--turn decisively in favor of the Union, more or less making recognition of the Confederacy politically unthinkable.
Meanwhile, on the battlefield itself, the Age of [[MoreDakka Dakka]] has dawned, which means that everything anybody knew about warfare is wrong again. For instance, soldiers learned the new realities such as rifles as standard longarms which enabled deadly accuracy at three times the range of smooth muskets, and multishot repeating rifles that create near-unsurvivable hails of gunfire at the enemy. HollywoodTactics are played straight, and while this is [[JustifiedTrope justified]], that doesn't make anybody any less dead. There is smoke and blood ''everywhere'', with doctors severing gangrened legs left and right, bugles blowing, drummer boys drumming, and cavalry charging every which way (often resulting in casualty figures upwards of 30%, per battle). Expect to see at least one man from either side bravely carrying a tattered unit flag until he gets shot with a Minié ball and crumples artfully in a heap. One aspect that tends to get lost in nearly all depictions of the war is that as in previous wars, but unlike the ones that came after, the majority of deaths were still due to non-combat-related causes such as various diseases contracted in the field (such as "camp fever") and the still-primitive state of battlefield medicine that meant almost any infected wound could kill if it wasn't on an easily-amputated limb. The cumulative effect was enough, especially near the end of the war when the campaigns were relentless, to churn out men suffering from "soldier's heart" -- what we would today recognize as [[ShellShockedVeteran post-traumatic stress]]. Americans like to believe that they bore this in mind for a long time, while the European powers didn't notice until after WorldWarOne presented it to then on a massively greater scale. This is true if one sticks only to the effects of the war upon the USA's economy and society, for this period was one of rapid development that made the tactical lessons of the war irrelevant in just two decades.
Four years long, the Civil War was by far the most protracted of the early industrial wars[[hottip:*: defined as a war between modern, industrialized countries using mass-mobilisation and -production techniques]]; none of the other industrial wars of this period, save the Crimean and Boer Wars, lasted more than three years. Though several of those conflicts were more expensive in absolute terms, ''none'' were 'relatively' more expensive or illustrated quite so well the crippling effect of protracted industrial warfare upon an economy and society[[hottip:*: Even, if not 'especially', in those parts not directly affected by the fighting. Inflation affects everyone]]. The Austro-French war in Piedmont-Sardinia/Northern Italy, the Russo-Turkish War, the FrancoPrussianWar, the Second Boer War, and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 all give certain (and ''better'') insights into 'modern' warfare at the time, however, as they involved The Great (and second-rate) Powers of the age. TheCrimeanWar of 1853-6 is often contrasted with and seen as a smaller-scale precursor to the American Civil War - Russia was about as under-industrialized relative to the Franco-British[[hottip:*: and Piedmont-Sardinian]] alliance as were the USA's rebel states to its loyal ones).
In the 1910's, around the 50th anniversary of the war, Civil War films (then silent) became extremely popular, with hundreds being produced, including the (in)famous ''BirthOfANation''. Most films had a theme of reconciliation; a film about the civil war that did not portray southerners as heroic victims (as did ''Birth of a Nation'' and ''Film/GoneWithTheWind'') risked having no audience or bookings in the states of the old Confederacy. Most early Hollywood studio bosses were first and second generation European immigrants, so they had no personal association with the war to motivate them to make movies that automatically wrote off a fifth or a quarter of all theater screens before the production even began.
'''Several tropes therefore became standard in older Civil War movies:'''
* Other than Quantrill's Raiders (Missouri guerrillas whose ranks include Jesse James, the Dalton Brothers, and other famous outlaws) Confederate soldiers are almost always shown as as heroic and respectable. Where individual Confederates were villainous, there would be noble Confederates around as contrast. Confederate officers are gentlemen, Confederate enlisted men are tough, have thicker accents, but are very loyal to their officers.
* Confederate soldiers are superior to Union soldiers in every way. They are braver, more clever, more noble, and just more tragic. Battles where the Union showed innovative strategy (such as Vicksburg) are forgotten or given a one-off mention in favor of showing battles that "prove" the Union only used WeHaveReserves. This occurs even if the Union soldiers are the heroes of the movie or television episode.
* Union soldiers and politicians are thuggish and venal. If motivation is brought up, they are likely to wonder why they are in the army, and why there is even a war going on. The black soldiers are the exception, since they know ''exactly'' what they are fighting for, and - conscious of the good example they must set - act with the utmost discipline and valor.
* Race and slavery is seldom, if ever, mentioned as a motivation for the war. If slaves are involved in the story line at all, some or all of them will be loyal to their masters, and there is often a ''Loyal Slave'' scene in which they protect the family home from Yankee invaders or aid their masters to outwit the Yankees or escape them. There may even be a one-off scene where southern generals or gentlemen sit down and have a talk about how the conflict is [[SuspiciouslySpecificDenial definitely]] ''[[SuspiciouslySpecificDenial not]]'' [[SuspiciouslySpecificDenial about slavery]].
* Quite often there might be a specific ''Slave Denial'' scene. In this scene a slave or slaves is questioned about slavery, asked to turn against their masters, or offered their freedom--and they turn it down, often with a simple silent denial. This scene turns up in Civil War epics made as recently as the 1980s (the TV mini-series ''North and South'')!
** There were plans in place to raise Southern Black regiments; the war ended before the plan got off the ground. One Confederate commented on the irony: "If they do not fight well, we are lost. If they do, our country is built on a lie."
** There were also white regiments from every Confederate state fighting for the Union. Ironically, "hillbilly" stereotypes in movies and TV (including Granny Clampett from ''The Beverly Hillbillies'') are often portrayed as Confederate diehards. In reality, Appalachia was strongly pro-Union during the Civil War ([[RebelliousRebel West Virginia so much so that they formed their own state]]) and many regions suffered retaliation from the Confederate government.
*** The reason Appalachia (especially West Virginia) was so strongly pro-union was that the mountainous topography separated them from the government seats, prevented them from using plantations as means of income, and meant most trade and transportation came from Northern states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Maryland. Therefore those areas didn't have as strong a loyalty to the state's governments when they seceded. The economic and social differences in West Virginia were so great that they had pushed to form their own state as early as 1820, the secession just gave them a opportune vacant seat to take advantage of.
*** Or the CSA was nearer, the nearer would be more able to be irritating and they disliked TheGovernment whoever it was, because rednecks are Just That Ornery.
*** This is perhaps a bit of an oversimplification. There were also religious differences at work (Presbyterian and Baptist backwaters vs. Episcopalian Tidewater), class differences (wealthy plantation families vs. impoverished, disenfranchised mountain folk), even ethnic differences (Scots-Irish hillbillies vs. Anglo plantation aristocrats) all contributing to the animosity. A hundred and fifty years later the differences have not all been forgotten, either.
This war was essentially the TropeCodifier for modern battlefield tactics: less about cavalry, more about infantry, and keep your Dakka handy, 'cuz UsefulNotes/{{Swords}} aren't useful anymore. In fact, the [[GatlingGood Gatling gun]] was invented and used during this war, the predecessor to [[MoreDakka rapid-fire automatic weaponry]]. The world even got a sneak preview of WorldWarOne in the form of the trench warfare that took place at Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and Vicksburg. Of course, like it does so often, [[FunnyAneurysmMoment the world proceeded to completely ignore it]][[hottip:*: Not that, of course, it was any easier than usual to tell 'which' lessons could/should be learned from the war. It was very hard to draw conclusions from the limited reports of the time, as it has taken ''generations'' to compile a thorough account of the war in all its details. That's not even mentioning the 'benefit' of hindsight.]] Like WorldWarII, this war was waged on battlefields but won in factories; the highly industrialized North could mass-produce muskets, cannon, and ships that the agrarian South could only import, and largely couldn't in large numbers with the Union naval blockade in place. Also, this war had the first recorded successful sinking of an enemy ship by a submarine, and they did it ''completely blind''. And the first battle between two fully-armoured ships, the CSS ''Virginia'' (an ironclad) and the USS ''Monitor'' (founder and namer of its class, first all-iron ship, first rotatable gun turret) at Hampton Roads.
Current historical estimates are that about 620,000 American soldiers died in the Civil War.[[note]]More recent estimates put it around 750,000 and even as high as 850,000.[[/note]] That's more armed-forces casualties than in every other war the United States has fought, ''combined''... and does not include civilian deaths (which came out to another 41,000, for a total of over 660,000 out of a combined population around 34 million).[[note]]Over half, possibly as much as two-thirds, were actually killed by disease and post-injury infection rather than in battle - in particular, treatments for gangrene were not developed until shortly ''after'' the war.[[/note]] Read that figure again. More Americans died in a single day at Antietam than on D-Day, or at Pearl Harbor, or in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The casualties for the three-day Battle of {{Gettysburg}} almost equal the Americans killed in the ''entire'' VietnamWar. The destruction and loss of life were immense, even 'medieval'[[note]] amateur historians can put away the tissues, we only use the word in the (totally inaccurate, as well you know) HollywoodHistory sense of medieval conflict, i.e. large-scale and barbaric[[/note]]; it was like something out of Homer, or perhaps the ThirtyYearsWar. The costs of the war—not just the immediately obvious ones like having to pay for raising and maintaining massive standing armies, but also vast swaths across entire states laid waste, cities burned and farms looted, interruptions in trade, factories idled and mines closed for lack of labor, two-and-a-half million maimed and crippled veterans who could not support themselves and required pensions—caused an economic depression that lasted for a generation after the war. Some regions took generations to recover; some maintain that part or even all of the South ''still'' hasn't recovered from the War (specifically Sherman's March to the Sea), although some of these claims are more silly and unqualified than others. Some of the more dramatic statements about post-war former-rebel-state suffering at the hands of the central government[[hottip:*: we ain't NEVER recovered from them damnyankees!]] [[YouFailEconomicsForever basically ignore subsequent economic development over the next century-and-a-half to the order of a several hundred-percent increase in GDP]], not to mention the huge advances in general quality-of-life. Now leave it at that. We mean it.
Admittedly, the Civil War took a big toll upon the Southern states of the American Union, where most of the war was fought. Not only was property destroyed, but more importantly a lot of ''wealth'' disappeared virtually overnight; wealth in the form of Confederate government bonds and currency - which became worthless when the Confederacy was dissolved in '65 - and perhaps most importantly slaves, who were declared free by the Federal Government as a means of sabotaging the Confederate war effort. Slavery had shaped the southern economy for decades, the profitable and dependable returns from investing in slave-picked cotton discouraging investment in other forms of agriculture, raw-resource gathering, primary and secondary industries. Ultimately - as technology developed - the economic 'sideshows' of industry and commerce turned out to be far more profitable than agriculture ever could or would be. The south had been prosperous, but by the 1850s the central-northern United States had become more prosperous than them and were growing at a dramatically faster rate. What the war did was destroy much of the wealth of the south and force a fundamental restructuring in its economy. Thus did the South largely lag behind the rest of the United States until the [[FranklinDRoosevelt New Deal]] and the advent of the more balanced economy of the 'New South' in the mid-twentieth century. The southern states were neither impoverished nor left backward (relative to the rest of the entire world except Britain, the Low Countries, and France) by the Civil War. But the war did leave them struggling to adapt to a more... ''normal'' state of economic affairs, something that would have been difficult even had there been a smoother and more gradual end to slavery (a virtual impossibility in any case).
Narrated by KenBurns. And since motion film hadn't been invented yet in the Civil War, but photographic film has, here's a bunch of shots [[TheKenBurnsEffect zooming in and out and panning over some static images.]]
----
!!Popular tropes from this time period are:
* TheAlcoholic: General Grant. Although the nature of his alcoholism is controversial to this day. The charges by his enemies, both during his Army career and his postwar political career, that he was a raging drunk, appear to be false. What is known is that when Grant got posted to lonely Fort Humboldt, California after The {{Mexican-American War}}, he developed an alcohol problem so severe that it drove him from the peacetime army. He also went on a bender during the Vicksburg campaign. He was [[CantHoldHisLiquor a notorious lightweight]]--"One-Beer Grant" was a common nickname--which may have furthered the impression of him as an alcoholic during a hard-drinking age. The truth of the matter seems to be that he only drank under two conditions: 1. There was nothing interesting going on and 2. [[HappilyMarried He was separated from his wife.]]
** Lincoln took a simpler view "I cannot spare him - ''he fights''", in marked contrast to some others of his generals (notably [=McClellan=]). Another supposed Lincoln quote on the subject - "Find out what he drinks so I can send some to my other Generals" -- is purely apocryphal, stemming from an equally apocryphal remark attributed to King George III.
* AnAsskickingChristmas - The March to the Sea. Savannah was Sherman's gift to Abe.
* AndThisIsFor: The Union's cries of "Chickamauga! Chickamauga!" during the Battle of Missionary Ridge are only the most famous example.
** On the Confederate side, there was Brigadier General Lewis Armistead's call to arms before [[BolivianArmyEnding Pickett's Charge]]: ''"Virginians! For your lands! For your homes! For your sweethearts! For your wives! For Virginia! Forward... march!".''
*** And when it fails, the Union chants "Fredricksburg! Fredricksburg!" at the retreating Confederates.
* AscendedExtra The KenBurns documentary did this for a bunch of people - Mary Chestnut, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.
** Chamberlain was an ascended extra in real life - College professor to Major General in four years, chosen by Grant above all other officers to accept the Confederate surrender.
** Phillip Sheridan was a second lieutenant in the start of 1861. By 1864 he was a ''regular army'' major general (opposed to a voluntary Major General), making him 4th in the entire Union Army.
** Nathan Bedford Forrest enlisted as a private in the Confederate Army, and was a Lieutenant General by the end of the war.
* AttackAttackAttack: Any general on either side who ordered frontal attacks against well entrenched, fortified postions that were defended by cannons. Even the all time greats like Lee and Grant did this. If your first few thousand men didn't crack (or even dent) 'em, [[FailureIsTheOnlyOption try try again]]. Accounts for a lot of those aforementioned 600K casualties.
* AwesomeButImpractical: Why Abe politely declined the King of Siam's gift of a herd of war elephants.
** Sadly, the offer was more in the line of using them for heavy lifting and transportation than Elephant Brigades.
** However, the Union was more than capable of using this trope - for instance, at the First Battle of Bull Run, they brought an enormous fortress piece to try and shock and terrify the Confederates. It has been cynically suggested that this useless weapon was brought along more to impress the European military observers (it failed) than through any belief that it would be useful.
** The war produced many weird weapons, usually at the hands of the desperate Confederates: Like a revolver cannon, which wasn't a Gatling gun, but an oversized Colt revolver on a carriage that was just as likely to blow up as it was to fire: A two barreled cannon intended to fire two cannonballs with a chain stretched between them, only slightly less suicidal; and Ross Winan's centrifugal steam gun, which used a revolving disk to sling ball bearings in the general direction of the enemy, which also proved more dangerous to its crew than it did to the enemy.
* AxCrazy - '''JOHN FRIGGIN BROWN''' liked to hack people to death with swords and pikes like it's the Middle Ages or something
* {{Badass}}: Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry. When his troops were running out of ammunition trying to hold Little Round Top, he ordered a bayonet charge.
*** At Petersburg, Chamberlain was shot through the hip and groin. In order to prevent the retreat that was looking more and more likely, he drew his sword, stuck it in the ground, and held himself up until he collapsed from blood loss. He was given a battlefield promotion and [[ReportsOfMyDeathWereGreatlyExaggerated his death was reported in the Maine newspapers]]. (He got better.)
*** He is also widely cited as the last Civil War veteran to die of his wounds - [[{{Determinator}} in 1914, when he was 85.]]
** Colonel Strong Vincent probably deserves as much credit as Chamberlain for the defense of Little Round Top.
** Nathan Bedford Forrest. Started the war as a private in the Confederate army. Ended as a Lieutenant General. And he wasn't some hide-behind-the-lines general; he was always in the front rank. He was once shot by a disgruntled subordinate, whom he immediately stabbed to death with a pen-knife. ''A pen knife.'' [[AuthorityEqualsAsskicking Authority does indeed equal Ass Kicking.]]
** Considering the tactics and the casualties, every single man who didn't turn and run at the first sign of battle counts. It takes a lot to stand up straight, in a line, and get shot at. Not all infantrymen had to expose themselves, mind; there were some breech-loading rifles available to the Army, courtesy of the Manufacturing hub of the North-East.
** TookALevelInBadass: The general standard of American arms. One European observer who watched the whole war described the First Bull Run as a "music hall farce," relating how a Prussian officer had fallen about laughing watching it. Antietam? "One of the bloodiest, blackest fields I have ever had the misfortune to observe."
** Winfield Scott Hancock, aka "Hancock the Superb." While he never rose above corps command in the Army of the Potomac, he was universally praised and respected for his skill. His leadership at Gettysburg, where he played key roles on all three days of battle, is particularly impressive.
* BadassBeard: Facial hair was all the rage, so nearly everyone had one.
* BadassBookworm: Chamberlain again. He started out as an English professor (one who [[{{Omniglot}} fluently spoke 9 languages]], no less), and was eventually a Major General.
** For the Confederates, Stonewall Jackson, who was a physics instructor at the Virginia Military Institute prior to the war.
* BadassGrandpa: General John Ellis Wool, who at the age of 79 was the oldest officer to exercise field command during the war.
* BadassMustache: Subverted. Ambrose Burnside had the most awesome whiskers on either side, but even he agreed he was a terrible general. He wanted to refuse the promotion, but knew it would've instead gone to somebody even less suitable.
** J.E.B. Stuart's beard was so large it looks fake.
* BadassPreacher: Subverted. Confederate General Leonidas Polk was an Episcopal bishop known as The Fight Bishop. Although beloved by his troops, he was considered a poor commander.
* BatmanGambit: One of the considerations behind the Emancipation Proclamation was to turn British opinion against the South. It had been hoped in the South and feared in the North that the BritishEmpire, which they felt (wrongly) was dependent on Southern cotton, would recognize the Confederacy as a new nation and send the [[GunboatDiplomacy world's most powerful navy to back this up.]] However, the British hated slavery more than they loved cotton (which they could source from India and Egypt anyway), and the Emancipation Proclamation convinced the British that the war was all about the liberation of slaves - which was Lincoln's intention.
* BayonetYa: Col. Joshua Chamberlain's BadAss MomentOfAwesome at Gettysburg; see above.
* BeamMeUpScotty: Abraham Lincoln never said that Ambrose Burnside "could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory." The apparent source of this quote was the dust jacket from Charles Fair's book ''From the Jaws of Victory'' (1969). Fair himself never claimed Lincoln uttered the phrase, blaming the publisher for attributing '''his''' words (Fair's) to Lincoln.
* BigBulkyBomb: One of these opened the Battle of the Crater.
* BigDamnHeroes: A.P. Hill at Antietam.
* BlackMarket : Rebs had tobacco and Yanks had coffee. And even war cannot stop Americans from being capitalists.
* BlackSheep: George H. Thomas, Union General, war hero, [[RedBaron The Rock Of Chickamagua]] was disowned by his wealthy Virginian family for choosing his country over his state.
* BlindMistake: Felix Zollicoffer. The Confederate General was nearsighted and absently wandered into Union lines who he thought were fellow Confederates. After discussing the war for some time with a Union colonel, the officer recognized him as the enemy and killed him.
* BloodKnight : Pretty big list, Stonewall Jackson, Sheridan, Custer, and in a less gentlemanly manner, Nathan Bedford Forest. General John Bell Hood, thought that higher casualties meant his men were fighting hard. It worked so well, he destroyed his own army in the Nashville campaign.
* BookEnds: TheAmericanCivilWar's first major battle was The First Battle of Bull Run (July 18, 1861), and the Confederates used [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmer_McLean Wilmer McLean's]] house as a headquarters. During the war, Wilmer eventually moved to the quiet(er) community (one that wasn't right on the front lines) of Appomattox, Virginia. On April 8, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee finally decided to surrender his forces, and he sent out a messenger to find a house to handle the surrender in. The house the messenger found was Wilmer [=McLean=]'s. The war started in his yard, and ended in his parlor.
** Also, the war began with the Union Loss of Fort Sumter. Shortly after the war, on April 14, 1865, Fort Sumter had a flag-raising ceremony where the same commander who took the flag down when the Union lost the fort raised the same flag up. While this is nice bookends for the fort itself, this ceremony of raising the flag at Sumter was on the very same day Abraham Lincoln was assassinated - the last major loss of the Civil War Era.
* BoringButPractical: Grant. A reserved, unassuming man a fellow officer once described as "plain as an old stove" and wore a simple (and often mud-spattered) field uniform instead of the flamboyant, personalized uniforms many generals on both sides preferred. He was also widely considered the best Union generals and Confederate commanders who faced him quickly learned not to underestimate him.
** Likewise with his Confederate counterpart, Robert E. Lee.
** In terms of equipment, the Springfield Rifle. Nothing fancy or flashy, just a simple, reliable rifled musket produced in large quantities. Arguably the weapon that won the War for the Union.
* BritsWithBattleships: Much to the chagrin of the Confederacy, averted. See SummonBiggerFish, below.
* [[BrokenBase Broken Country]]: You'd be amazed at how frequently and vehemently folks in the States still disagree about the cause of the war, the men who fought in it, the legitimacy of secession, and just about any other topic you can think of.
** Hooo boy. Try living in a border-state-that-was. Get together a tableful of people all from the same town and you'll have at LEAST half as many opinions as you do people. Get together a tableful from all over the place, and you'll probably have twice as many opinions as you do people. With little connection to what their ancestors thought, too.
** Immediately after the war, people sympathetic to the South immediately began assigning blame as to who was responsible for losing the war. A good number of these focused on the Battle of Gettysburg, especially which of Lee's subordinates ultimately ended up sabotaging the battle with bad advice or misinterpreted orders. (See PoorCommunicationKills below for one particular instance.)
* BunnyEarsLawyer: Stonewall Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant, amongst many others. American Civil War General could have been the name of the trope.
** Daniel Sickles, definitely, at least in a half-literal sense. He was a lawyer, congressman, and was acquitted of murder by pleading insanity -- [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Sickles#Trial as was proven by a court of law]].[[note]]The historical record is, sadly, silent on whether or not he had bunny ears.[[/note]]
** Edward Ferrero, an Italian-American dance teacher who rose to the rank of brigadier general in the Union Army.
* TheButcher: Whether deservedly or not, this was Grant's nickname.
** On the one hand, [[WeHaveReserves his main strategy]] was [[RedShirtArmy rather cold-hearted]]. On the other hand, it worked.
*** And in any case, he definitely felt the carnage deeply: after the first day of the Wilderness, he broke down and wept. Then he pulled himself together and rammed the army through thirty-eight more consecutive days of equally horrendous carnage.
** Not to mention Jubal Early, who needlessly razed Union towns he conquered, on the grounds that they " burn so beautifully."
** General Sherman, likewise, razed the towns his troops passed through on his March to the Sea, particularly in South Carolina; unlike Jobal Early, though, this was done with Grant's implicit approval.
*** Except Sherman didn't take explicit PLEASURE in what he did. Sherman was more IDidWhatIHadToDo than TheButcher.
** General Pickett thought this of General Robert E. Lee after Pickett's Charge, [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Pickett#cite_note-Tagg240-20 bitterly stating "That old man destroyed my division"]].
* CanadaEh: Some 33,000-55,000 Canadians (well, British North Americans; Canadian Confederation wouldn't happen until 1867--partly in response to this war) served in the Union Army.[[note]]About 15,000 American deserters and draft dodgers fled to Canada; they were not deported.[[/note]] Admittedly, many of these were Canadian-born men who had been living in the US prior to the outbreak of war, but many were volunteers recruited in Canada. Their number included the colonel of the unit that captured John Wilkes Booth and the original writer of "O Canada". Of the Canadians in Union service, at least 29 were awarded the Medal of Honor. Canadian agricultural and industrial products were also vital to the Union war effort, as the increased flow of Canadian goods freed up the North to focus ''even more'' of its resources on pursuing the war; this trade led to a major economic boom north of the border.
* CaptainEthnic: Franz Sigel was a TERRIBLE general, but they kept him around because he got German immigrants to volunteer.
** Many lower ranking examples on both sides. The Union Army of the Potomac had brigade commanders Thomas Meagher (Irish) and Phillip R. DeTrobriand (French). Russian-born Ivan Turchin gained some infamy as the Union's "Russian Thunderbolt" in the war's Western theater. Interestingly, Prince Philippe, the [[LEtatCestMoi Orleanist pretender]] to the French throne, served on [=McClellan=]'s staff (as a captain) for about a year near the beginning of the war. The Confederates had their own French nobility in the form of Camille Armand Jules Marie, Prince de Polignac - known as [[EmbarrassingNickname "Prince Polecat"]] to his troops. General Patrick Cleburne, killed at the Battle of Franklin, was also Irish-born.
* TheCaretaker: Clara Barton.
* CatchPhrase - Lincoln's "Four score and seven years ago" and David Farragut's "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!"
* ChildSoldiers - A huge proportion of troops were under eighteen -- as much as a million in the Union Army alone. While most lied about their age or were winked at by the authorities, every regiment had at least twenty musicians as young as twelve officially on the rolls, and the Virginia Military Institute fielded a battalion of 264 boys aged fourteen to eighteen in the Battle of New Market -- 52 of whom were killed or wounded. The youngest Union general, Galusha Pennypacker, was seventeen in 1861, and twenty years old when promoted to Brigadier, too young to vote for the President who granted him the commission.
* CityOfSpies: [[http://www.civilwarhome.com/espionage.htm Both]] UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC and Richmond suffered this trope. Washington was wedged between two Southern slave states - Virginia and Maryland - and a large number of residents were Confederate sympathizers. Richmond was filled not only with slaves - "natural spies" for the Union cause - but also a lot of pro-Union sympathizers (Virginia was one of the last states to join the Confederate side and was nearly reluctant to do so)
* ColorCodedForYourConvenience: The Blue and the Grey. Oh, wait, the rebels couldn't actually produce or afford grey... 'twas more like 'The Blue and the whatever-they-happened-to-be-wearing-at-the-time-but-probably-mostly-brown', really. Many units, particularly in the early days of the war, wore different colors -- there were Union regiments in grey, Confederate regiments in blue, and both sides in exotic uniforms, from Zouaves to Highlanders.
** The Blue and The Butternut doesn't [[RuleOfCool quite have the same ring to it]], though. And even then, it was really more the Blue and The Guys in Motley Rags, a Few Butternut Uniforms, and Maybe One or Two Grey Ones.
** It's a bit hard to tell given that the surviving examples are a century and a half old now, but it appears that even those who actually had "Grey" uniforms varied considerably in hue, with some of them being actually grey and some of them looking rather more like they had taken a Union uniform and bleached the hell out of it, winding up with a sort of dingy sky-blue.
* CombatPragmatist: Union general William Tecumseh Sherman. His only goal was victory and he didn't care ''what'' he had to do to accomplish it. Destroying infrastructure, confiscating property, burning cities - there's a very good reason he's almost [[HateDom universally hated in Georgia]] even to this day. Doesn't quite qualify as a BloodKnight, as he did the things he did out of a single-minded desire to accomplish his mission rather than a love of battle. Furthering his pragmatism in peacetime, Sherman (following the example of his friend U.S. Grant) granted defeated Confederates terms of surrender so lenient that Grant had to reject them. "Hard war, easy peace," indeed.
** He also had a pragmatic way of resolving the problem of landmines (then called "torpedoes") when the South began to use them in desperation. He had Confederate [=POWs=] sweep the area clean of them and sent a messenger to the Southern commander that he would continue doing so unless the use of landmines against his troops was stopped. It worked.
* ConflictingLoyalty : They don't call it "the Brothers' War" for nothing. Especially for people in the border states, it was not at all unusual (still sad, but not unusual) that brothers would literally be fighting on opposite sides of the war.
** And towns trying to remain neutral could end up a target for ''both'' sides. Take [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport,_TN#The_Civil_War Newport, Tennessee]] as an example.
** Most of the officers had gone to school and served with men on the opposing side. One of the most poignant examples may be that of Lewis Armistead and Winfield Scott Hancock; on the eve of the war, before Armistead left his command to join the Confederacy, Hancock threw a going-away party for his friend of nearly 20 years. They did not meet again until 1863, when Armistead led his brigade in a charge up Gettysburg's Cemetery Ridge directly against Hancock's II Corps. Both men were wounded in the fight; as Armistead lay bleeding he asked a nearby soldier about his friend and, on hearing that Hancock was also injured, exclaimed "Not both of us on the same day!" Hancock survived. Armistead did not.
** The Kentucky-born Mary Todd Lincoln had several brothers serving in the Confederate Army, which caused [[AbrahamLincoln her husband]] considerable embarrassment in Washington society.
* CoolBoat: The USS ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Monitor Monitor]]'' (First warship with a revolving turret, ''i.e.'', first modern battleship) and the CSS ''Virginia'' the first ironclad warships to fight each other (though not the first to see combat).
** The former was bult in response to the latter, and their [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hampton_Roads single battle]] is still considered a CrowningMomentOfAwesome for both navies.
*** The second those two ships fired at each other, wooden ships were heading for obsolescence. When it was seen how little damage the many hours of close-quarters cannon fire had inflicted (the ''Monitor'' was practically undamaged, the ''Virginia'' was damaged but still seaworthy), old-style cannon were heading that way too.
** There is also the Confederate submarine ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS_H.L._Hunley H.L. Hunley]]'', the [[UrExample first submarine]] to ever [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_USS_Housatonic sink an enemy vessel in combat.]]
*** However, the ''Hunley'' [[MutualKill sank herself along with her victim]], the USS ''Housatonic''. Also, only five Union sailors were killed; the Hunley carried nine, and had already sunk twice before with its entire crew, including Hunley himself.
*** The Union developed its own submarine, the ''Alligator'', early in the war. Like the ''Hunley'' it sank during sea trials, but was never salvaged.
** We also have the USS ''George Washington Parke Custis'', a barge that was modfied to carry one of Thaddeus Lowe's observation balloons. In short, the world's first aircraft carrier.
* CoolGun: The Sharps single-shot breechloading rifle, and the Henry and Spencer repeating rifles. Good news for Union soldiers, and [[OhCrap very bad news]] for Confederates.
** Also, the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LeMat_Revolver Lemat Revolver]], a nine-round revolver with a small shotgun built in for good measure, though it proved AwesomeButImpractical in actual use because it was badly balanced.
** Dr. Richard Gatling's invention, the Gatling gun, was a devastating weapon for the time. It even has a [[GatlingGood trope all its own.]]
** This is the reason why Sherman's March to the Sea was a series of trailblazing curb-stomps: Despite being outnumbered, Union forces had experience and cutting-edge weaponry while the Confederates could do little but watch their raw recruits get slaughtered trying to fight back with outdated muzzle-loaders.
* CoolHat: The Iron Brigade of the Union Army of the Potomac was also known as the Black Hat Brigade because the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardee_hat Hardee hats]] they wore became iconic for them, even though such hats were also issued to other units of regulars.
* ColdSniper: There were several feats of notable marksmanship in the war, including the use of rifles fitted with early sniping scopes. So much so that the term "sharpshooter" is often misattributed to the accurate Sharps rifle, which saw use in the war as a marksman's rifle.[[note]]The earliest recorded use of the word is from 1802[[/note]] Two entire Union regiments were formed of sharpshooters.
* CripplingOverspecialization: The USA's slaving states and by extension , the Confederacy. In their defence, it was only in the last few decades before the war that investments in industry started to have greater returns than those put into (slave) agriculture. As a result the South had good infrastructure but very little industry, especially in sophisticated products (a single factory supplied every cannon they had).
** The South's leadership was convinced that Great Britain (the chief buyer of North American cotton) would help them, somehow, even if it was just to broker a ceasefire. However, the huge cotton harvests of 1865-60 effectively meant that British textile manufacturers had at least a year's supply of the material hoarded away come 1861. Noting the events of 'Bloody Kansas', British banks [[GenreSavvy had already stepped up investment in Anglo-Egyptian and particularly Anglo-Indian cotton plantations,]] leaving their fellow textile-manufacturers increasingly less reliant on the Americas for their supply.
** In fact, the Confederate economy was so focused on cotton that they didn't have enough free cropland left to grow ''food'', at least not in sufficient quantities to feed their entire population; as a result, bread riots were a common occurrence, food confiscation laws were passed permitting the Confederate government to seize food from private farms for the war effort, and even with these measures in place Confederate soldiers were frequently severely underfed and malnourished.
* CrowningMomentOfAwesome
** Confederate general John [=MacGruder=] outfoxing Gen. George [=McClellan=] at the siege of Yorktown ([[TheAmericanRevolution part 2!]]) by making it look like he had a bigger army.
** Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest fighting out of a Union ambush by using an enemy soldier as a human shield at Shiloh.
** Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine's defense of Little Round Top at Gettysburg.
** Phil Sheridan's ride at Cedar Creek.
** Lee's successive victories at the Peninsula, 2nd Bull Run, Fredericksburg and Chancelorsville.
** The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment's assault on Battery Wagner. Although this all Black unit was not able to take the fort, their valiant fighting pushed the North to accept the worth of Black soldiers and inspired thousands more of Black recruits to help defeat the Confederacy.
** Union Generals Grant and Sherman won massive public praise and presidential support in the North with their respective successes in Vicksburg and the deep strike mission that was the March to the Sea.
** Jefferson Davis almost single-handedly quashing a bread riot.
* CrowningMusicOfAwesome: This era is a positive treasure trove of Crowning Music.
** ''Battle Hymn of the Republic'' for the North; ''Dixie'' for the South are just two of the ones that are still well-known today. Other gems used by both sides were ''When Johnny Comes Marching Home'', ''Marching Through Georgia'' and ''Battle Cry of Freedom''.
* DavidVersusGoliath: The South is David to the North's Goliath, the Slaves are David to their owner's Goliath. Confusing, No?
* ADayInTheLimelight: In 1861, P.G.T. Beauregard became the South's premiere war hero for capturing Fort Sumter and co-commanding the Confederate army at First Bull Run. It didn't last.
** Really this could be said of most Union commanders through the first two years of the war: George McClellan, John Pope and Ambrose Burnside all won a small but dramatic victory in a peripheral theater, came East to take over the Army of the Potomac (Virginia in Pope's case), failed miserably and were never heard from again.
* DeadpanSnarker: Lincoln! After he appointed Joe Hooker to command of the Army of the Potomac he got wind of a comment in which Hooker said the country needed a dictator. Lincoln responded by writing Hooker a letter in which he said "What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship." He also spurred the overly-cautious General [=McClellan=] by telling him, "If you are not using the army, I would like to borrow it for a while."
** While considering whether to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln asked his cabinet to vote on the issue. Every single member of the cabinet voted against it[[note]]Almost all of Lincoln's cabinet secretaries were at least moderate abolitionists, and some were radical abolitionists; they opposed issuing the Proclamation at that particular time[[/note]]. Lincoln's response: "The ayes have it."
* DeathGlare: Robert E. Lee was known to have one.
* DefeatMeansFriendship: Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, who command the last of the CSA forces in the Carolinas Campaign before surrendering to William Tecumseh Sherman. They became friends and corresponded frequently in the years after the war, partly due to the fact that Sherman issued rations to Johnston's soldiers and offered to distribute food to civilians in the area. Johnston attended Sherman's funeral and refused to wear his hat despite the cold, [[TearJerker which may have led to him catching a fatal case of pneumonia]]...
** Confederate General Gordon's troops attacked Union General Barlow's troops at Gettysburg. In the confusion, Gordon believed that Barlow had been killed. After the war, they met at a mutual acquaintances house and Gordon reportedly asked Barlow if he were related to the General Barlow killed at Gettysburg. Barlow replied that he ''was'' that General Barlow, and asked if Gordon were related to the General Gordon who had "killed" him, to which Gordon replied that ''he'' was that General Gordon. The two wound up becoming friends (possibly because it seems that both of them liked telling this story... which is probably apocryphal, as Barlow and Gordon faced each other in the Wilderness, and it's unlikely that Gordon could not have known that his opponent was again Barlow).
** Similarly, Robert E Lee, in the last years of his life, would not tolerate any unkind words about Ulysses S. Grant to be said in his presence.
* TheDeterminator: Pretty much inevitable when there are Americans on ''both'' sides. Also, a typical regiment had been raised from the population of a single town or county, so if a soldier ran away or didn't fight his hardest he'd have to answer for it when he got home. In previous wars the majority of casualties had been inflicted in the pursuit after one army retreated or in skirmishing as the armies maneuvered, but in the Civil War the majority of casualties were in actual battle, with the armies standing face-to-face.
* DirtyCoward - Rebel general Gideon Pillow (a favorite of Jeff Davis), who 3 times abandoned his command.
* DraftDodging: You could buy your way out (or just hire a substitute to enlist in your place)!
** *cough* ''GroverCleveland''!
** TheodoreRoosevelt's father as well, which was one of the motivating factors for TR to become a BadassNormal.
** In the South, slaveowners didn't even ''have'' to draft-dodge, as they were automatically exempt from all conscription laws. Additionally, several Southern counties with high slave populations were granted full exemptions from conscription quotas due to needing all of the men of appropriate age and fitness for military service armed, at home, and on constant patrol to discourage potential slave uprisings.
* EarlyBirdCameo: Trench warfare was first seen in Virginia towards the end of the war, in all its bloody, gory, honorless detail, a full fifty years before the No Man's Land in France.
** Although in some ways it was actually very much like the trench warfare that had been going on at least since the 17th century under the name siege warfare. The difference was that now soldiers were digging trenches without a fortress behind or in front of them.
* ElephantInTheLivingRoom: Slavery is often quickly brought up just to be dismissed as something minor compared to other things, such as the brave soldiers defending their homes and way of life ([[SarcasmMode of which slavery really isn't part of, honestly!]]). Needless to say, the wounds are still there because AMERICANS JUST WON'T STOP PICKING AT THEM.
* ElvesVersusDwarves: The agricultural, Slaving South vs the urban, 'ndustrial North.
* EndOfAnAge / DawnOfAnEra: In a sense, the War was the final move of an ideological conflict at play in the early 19th Century. In its early days, the United States was envisioned as a confederation of sovereign states, with each member state having its own rights, not the least of which being the right to secede from the confederation if desired. This intepretation was slowly changing as the 1800s went on, and this "states' rights" notion was one of the factors in the Confederate states' decision to secede. The Union victory meant a strengthening of the federal government and the political redefinition of the United States as not a collection of nations, but a nation in itself.
* EnemyEatsYourLunch: The attacking Confederate troops at the Battle of Shiloh stopped to eat the breakfasts they found in Yankee camps after the Union soldiers had fled in panic from the attack. This delay actually helped save the Union army. It's not quite as stupid as it sounds - Confederate forces were usually criminally undersupplied, and all of that hot, fresh food just lying around for the taking was probably too much for the half-starved soldiers to resist.
* EpicFail: The Battle of the Crater.
** It seemed like a good idea at the time: Dig a T-shaped mine under the Confederate lines and pack it with explosives. And then, after you blow a hole in the enemy's positions, rush in through the gap and force the capitulation of Petersburg. Unfortunately, Meade [[ExecutiveMeddling intervened at the last second]] and ordered Burnside not to use the division of black troops that he had specially trained for the attack, forcing Burnside to switch over to his own 1st Division which was not briefed on what to do and were led by an alcoholic named James H. Ledlie. Fast forward to the explosion and Ledlie's troops going INTO the crater instead of AROUND it[[note]]Not helped at all by the fact that Ledlie himself was busy getting plastered [[MilesGloriosus in a fortified redoubt a safe distance away]][[/note]] and getting slaughtered wholesale by cannons, muskets, and even improvised spears and large rocks.
* EveryoneWentToSchoolTogether: Pretty much every officer on both sides went to West Point.
** They also fought together against Mexico in the U.S.-Mexican War. 15 years before they started fighting against each other.
* ExecutiveMeddling: The Confederate military suffered heavily from this. Jefferson Davis, a Mexican War veteran and former US Secretary of War, repeatedly promoted old friends even when lacking demonstrable skill or basic competence. In the Western theaters especially, Davis appointed the likes of Braxton Bragg and Gideon Pillow to important commands, with disastrous results. Perhaps the most egregious example was replacing Joseph Johnston with John Bell Hood during the Siege of Atlanta, because the former wasn't aggressive enough. Hood was aggressive all right, destroying his army in [[ZergRush suicidal frontal assaults]] at Peachtree Creek, Franklin and Nashville.
** It went the other way too, as Davis routinely sacked generals like Johnston and P.G.T. Beauregard who crossed him for one reason or another. Robert E. Lee lucked out, winning enough victories to make him untouchable.
* FamousLastWords: "They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance." - John Sedgwick, shortly before getting a headshot from a Confederate sharpshooter.
** [[ExactWords You have to admit, they didn't hit any elephants.]]
* AFatherToHisMen: Robert E. Lee, probably the most famous single Confederate.
** General [=McClellan=] was this, to the point of inefficiency; his caution was admirable and the men loved him for it, but it prolonged the war and lead to his replacement as a front-line commander.
** William Tecumseh Sherman, a.k.a. "Uncle Billy", was this too - but he was more willing to sacrifice his men.
** In fact, many officers were like this, on both sides, as it was a good way to inspire loyalty.
* FieryRedhead: General Sherman.
* FightingForAHomeland: President Lincoln intended to give citizenship to every soldier who fought for the Union, driving many immigrants to sign up. However, he was assassinated before he could put this into effect.
* FinalSolution: "Any negroes in federal uniform will be put to death. Any white officer in command of negro soldiers will be put to death." ~Confederate Government
** After the surrender of the Union Garrison of Fort Pillow, Forrest's Confederates murdered all of them in cold blood simply because half of them were black.
* {{Foreshadowing}}: "Mark me, [[Creator/BenjaminFranklin Franklin]]. If we give in on this issue, there will be trouble one hundred years hence. Posterity will never forgive us." - JohnAdams, 1776. He was only off by about 15 years.
** [[http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/159.html Jefferson's Letter to John Holmes, 1820]]. Most famous for the line (referring to slavery) "We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go."
** "The tariff was only the pretext, and disunion and southern confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro, or slavery question." - AndrewJackson, 1833.
** [[WorldWarOne Trench warfare]] makes an appearance.
* ForWantOfANail: If Confederate General D.H. Hill had kept better track of his cigars - or at the very least, hadn't wrapped his cigars in his ''highly-detailed battle orders'' and then misplaced the box - the entire course of the war might have gone differently.
** And not only that if a couple of Union soldiers hadn't found decided to unwrap and then hand in the cigars. Really the whole order 191 debacle was a string of bad luck for the Confederates
* FourStarBadass: Technically only on the Confederate side, as only the C.S.A. had full generals (four stars), the highest rank attained by a Union officer during the war being lieutenant-general (three stars), by U. S. Grant in 1864. One might think this was because the Confederate generals proved themselves so much better in the war, but in fact five of the seven full generals were appointed by the summer of 1861, when just one major battle had been fought. Ironically, the top-ranking general of the Confederate Army was its Adjutant-General, Samuel Cooper, who never held a field command during the war.
* FriendlyEnemy: Common soldiers on both sides could be quite amiable during truces, many being former friends.
** In one famous example, Nathan Bedford Forrest once rode up to the Union line, mistaking it for the Confederate. Rather than taking the golden opportunity before them, the Northern soldiers told Forrest the truth and suggested he get back to his side; Forrest saluted and rode off.
** At Gettysburg CSA General Wade Hampton came under fire from a Union sharpshooter, then returned fire with his six-shot revolver. Hampton allowed the sharpshooter to reload his single-shot rifle before firing a second time. The two engaged in an ad hoc duel for several minutes until Hampton wounded his opponent. Hampton and the Yankee met several years after the war, Hampton supposedly saying he was glad he hadn't killed the man.
** Sometimes averted with soldiers from South Carolina or Massachusetts, who tended to get a rougher deal from the opposing side as South Carolina was seen as the hotbed of secession by the Northerners and Massachusetts as the most abolitionist state by the Southerners. Also definitely averted with black soldiers serving in the Union army.
* FriendOrFoe: Claimed the life of "Stonewall" Jackson; even worse, it wasn't even during a battle. Friend Or Foe problems happened many times during the war.
** DressingAsTheEnemy: Even the First Battle of Bull Run illustrates this problem very well: Union personnel in Grey Uniforms and Confederate personnel in Blue Uniforms. Particularly common in early battles, since the Confederate Army mostly started out with US Army uniforms, on account of having been part of the US Army just months before. It also didn't help that the first Confederate flag[[note]]the ''actual'' "Stars and Bars", not the modified Confederate battle flag that's commonly flown today and often incorrectly referred to by that name)[[/note]] was very similar in appearance to the Union flag, especially if there wasn't much wind and the flag was hanging down on its pole. This is why the more famous Confederate battle flag was created: it was unlikely to be mistaken for a Union flag, and a unit's flag-bearer in those days was the main way of identifying which side they were fighting for.
* GatlingGood: Arguably the TropeMaker, as this war featured the first combat fielding of the [[TropeNamer Trope Namesake]] Gatling gun.
* GaulsWithGrenades: The French army had a high reputation in the 1860s, and both North and South copied French military fashions when designing their uniforms. Including their swords. However, see SummonBiggerFish, below.
* GeneralFailure: A lot of generals, especially on the Union side, had this reputation, deservedly or not. The generals heading the Army of the Potomac before Grant took command were also said to be so in awe of Lee that their defeatism and resultant apathy made them lose many a good chance to defeat the Army of North Virginia. As one of Sheridan's brigadier generals, James H. Wilson recalls in his memoirs, U. S. Grant asked him what was wrong with the army, to which Wilson replied that there was too much to go into detail, but that there was a simple remedy: ply Grant's Seneca staff officer Ely Parker with commissary whiskey, give him a tomahawk and scalping knife and send him out at night telling him to bring back the scalps of at least half a dozen major generals. No matter which ones he picked, Grant would end up with a better army.
* GenreShift: It says something about Abraham Lincoln's skill as a statesman and an orator that he was able to redefine the goals of the War - or at least, change the public perception of it - ''twice'' before it was over. With the Emancipation Proclamation, the war went from a typical civil war to a righteous crusade to free fellow human beings in slavery. And then, after Gettysburg, the war went from that to a sacred struggle to preserve the Union, and with it the very ''idea'' of liberty.
* GloryHound: Many. Isaac Trimble said "I intend to be a major general or a corpse."
** George Armstrong Custer became one of the youngest generals in the Union Army largely due to this impulse.[[note]]He was reduced in rank to captain after the war, a standard practice in the peacetime army (wartime promotions were considered temporary for the duration of the war). Persistent disciplinary issues, his unpopularity among frontier troops, and internal Army politics ensured he would never again rise higher than lieutenant colonel, his rank at the Battle of Little Big Horn.[[/note]]
** Daniel Sickles was so selfish and eager for personal glory and promotion that he didn't care what happened to his men, just so long as they and the Confederates did the dying and he took the credit. Historians say that his arrogance and insubordination could've lost the Battle of Gettysburg for the Union army.
* GovernmentInExile: Although it isn't widely known, a substantial number of former Confederate government officials and soldiers, their families, and fellow loyalists emigrated to Brazil after the war ended, establishing an enclave of Confederate expatriates that came to number over 50,000. They claimed to be the legitimate government of the Southern United States until the early 1900s, and their descendants (known as 'Confederados') ''still'' identify themselves with Confederate culture.
** Missouri and Kentucky never left the Union, but they had Rebel governors and legislatures in exile.
** The secessionist government of Texas actually took great pains to ''avert'' this trope, placing pro-Union government officials (such as then-governor Sam Houston) under house arrest and armed guard to prevent them from setting up a Unionist government-in-exile.
*** Justified in more ways than one: Texas, like Virginia, had more than enough remote territory for a rump legislature to set up shop and form a pro-Union state, and Confederate sympathy was not as strong in Texas as in the Deep South. The pro-Confederate legislature easily could have faced a second front in the form of Union troops and Union loyalists within Texas led by the very charismatic (and still very popular) Sam Houston.
* GuileHero: Benjamin Butler (a skillful lawyer before the war), when faced with a demand by a Virginia fort to return some runaway slaves under the Fugitive Slave Act. His reply?
--> "I mean to take Virginia at her word, I am under no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now claims to be. [...] You cannot consistently claim them. I shall hold these Negroes as contraband of war, since they are engaged in the construction of your battery and are claimed as your property."
* HeadInTheSandManagement: JamesBuchanan. Widely considered one of the worst Presidents ever for giving up on the brewing conflict and passing it off to Lincoln.
** When this trope was labeled The Chamberlain, it was definitely ''averted'' by Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who was a BadassBookworm and didn't stick his head in the sand about anything.
* HellholePrison: Just about any prisoner of war camp qualified as such, but Andersonville was perhaps the most notorious, owing to its dubious distinction of having the highest mortality rate of any POW camp, as well as the photographs of some of its former inmates, who resembled living skeletons.
* HeroicBSOD : William S. Rosecrans after his defeat at the battle of Chickamauga.
* HeroicSacrifice : Where oh where to begin? Where oh where to end? A few standouts, perhaps ...
** These also double as YouShallNotPass, considering they gave their lives to halt an enemy's advance, however long they could.
*** Prentiss's Union Division at the Hornet's Nest at Shiloh. Originally a strong point in the Union line, they were left to stand alone when the flanks fell back. The failure of the Confederates to either maneuver around or crush the Hornet's Nest is seen as a decisive factor in the battle.
*** Hood's Texas Brigade (CSA) at Antietam- The last reserve available on the Confederate left, the brigade successfully stymied a whole Union Corps, and took 60% casualties.
*** 20th Maine Regiment at Gettysburg - They were literally at the far end of the Union line and had to hold off a vastly numerically superior Confederate force.
*** 1st Minnesota Regiment (USA) at Gettysburg Day 2. The only available Union regiment guarding a gigantic gap in the Union line. So it was ordered to attack a threatening Confederate brigade (five times its size) to buy time for the Union brass to patch up the line. It did. 282 North Star staters go in. 47 come back.
* HeroAntagonist: No matter which side of the debate you're on, no one can say their side had a monopoly on war heroes.
* HeyItsThatGuy : George Custer served as a general in the Union and fought at Gettysburg. And was actually one of the heroes of the battle.
** Lew Wallace, best known as the author of ''LIterature/BenHur'', was also a Union general and played a significant role in the Battle of Shiloh.
** Winfield Scott, "Old Fuss and Feathers", previously served as a general in the War of 1812 and the Mexican American War.
** Former vice president John C. Breckinridge (who lost the presidential election to Lincoln) served as a Confederate general.
* HistoricalHeroUpgrade: Debates about whether this happened to Abraham Lincoln, why it happened, whether it was deserved, and who knows what else still go on today.
** Lee is also debated to be an example of this, as one writer ironically observed that the man who had come closer than any other in destroying the United States became an American hero.
*** Lee didn't become an American hero because of the War. Lee became an American hero because he realized that there was no way he could win, surrendered and urged reunification and reconciliation instead of decades of guerrilla warfare. Even if it was all pragmatism on his part, it did establish precedents and made reunification relatively peaceful.
* HistoricalVillainUpgrade: Nathan Bedford Forrest was a bastard who butchered prisoners, buried black people alive and played a major role in the founding of the Ku Klux Klan. People have a tendency however, to totally dehumanise him, instead of just a badly screwed up, bitter redneck, not to mention that many accounts leave out that he didn't expect the Klan to become violent and denounced their later actions.
** Sherman and Grant are better examples, being regarded as monsters in much of the south (and even some of the north). Sherman in particular gets a bad rap, despite being a ShellShockedVeteran who came back to serve his country and helped to save it. In a modern story he'd be an AntiHero at worst. But he took part in the Civil War and didn't fight like a gentleman, so we better [[SarcasmMode hang the bastard]]. The charge also doesn't hold up to historical scrutiny as most of the damage the March to the Sea wreaked was on property and military targets, with civilians themselves mostly coming off unscathed (albiet looted). Even many Southern historians acknowledge this, no matter how unpopular that view might make them.
** Grant also received quite a character assassination after his death, due largely to opponents who already tried to get rid of him by accusing him of being a raging drunk during the war and many bitter ex-Confederates (Jubal Early among others) dismissing his military successes as nothing but the use of WeHaveReserves. This was so prevalent that even WinstonChurchill (admittedly something of a Confederate fanboy) and many historians would repeat that "fact" and give Grant contempt for it, overlooking or refusing to acknowledge Grant's use of innovative combat engineering and stratagem. Grant's scandal-hounded presidency didn't help his image much either. Only recently has image begun to be rehabilitated.
** The Klan was originally found as an organization to protect the rights of Southern whites by legal means. When it used violence, Forrest quit, and took up a full-page newspaper ad to announce the fact and urge all other members to do so too.
*** It was actually founded as a social group for Confederate veterans.
* HotBlooded: JEB Stuart, George Custer, George Pickett (before all his men got killed at Gettysburg; cue the CharacterDevelopment), Dan Sickles, P.G.T. Beauregard.
* HumbleHero: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (''again''). Upon enlisting, he was offered the colonelcy of the 20th Maine Regiment; he declined, preferring "to start a little lower and learn the business first." Didn't stop him from rising to the rank of Major General in four years.
* IgnoredExpert: Confederate General James Longstreet played this role to Lee on many, many occasions, most notably at Gettysburg. Many Southerners would still rather blame him than Lee for their defeat there, because the "Lost Cause" mythologizing of the war didn't allow for Lee to ever have failed. Despite Lee having put all blame for the defeat at Gettysburg on himself.
* IHaveManyNames: Guess which war?
** Not just the war, some of the battles in it. Whether you call them First and Second Manassas or First and Second Bull Run depends a lot on where your sympathies lie (well, maybe on where the sympathies of your ancestors or history teacher lay). (Confederate and Union respectively, by the way).
** Similarly Antietam/Sharpsburg and Perryville/Murfreesboro (Union/Confederate).
*** In general, the South named battles after the nearest town (Sharpsburg), while the North named them after the nearest geographic feature (Antietam Creek).
* ImprovisedWeapon: At the 2nd Battle of Bull Run, Confederates in Col. Bradley T. Johnson's and Col. Leroy A. Stafford's brigades fired so much that they ran out of ammunition and resorted to throwing large rocks at the 24th New York, causing occasional damage, and prompting some of the surprised New Yorkers to throw them back. The confederate defense had barely held out against the union attack.
-->Boys! Give 'em the rocks!
-->--Unknown Confederate Irishman
* IntrepidReporter: One of the first wars in which these played a large role.
** They would often wander into camp, find the lowest, worst soldier, drain all the information they could out of him and then publish all of it the next day. This annoyed General Sherman so much, he said:
-->"If I killed all the reporters, there'd be news from Hell before breakfast."
* TheIrishDiaspora: One of the two biggest and most noticeable immigrant communities of the time (the other being German-Americans). In the North, Irish-Americans were split in their loyalties. On one hand you have units like the Irish Brigade and Phil Sheridan, on the other the New York draft riots. The Irish-American community in the South was actually less significant than many Civil War movies would have you believe.
** And the Irish in the south at the time were mostly [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots-Irish_American Scots-Irish]], rather then the stereotypical Irish Catholics who largely were immigrants at this time who tended to settle in the North. In fact, the term Scots-Irish came about not too long before the Civil War for the Protestants (who immigrated from England/Scotland to Ireland, then to America often Appalachia and the Carolinas) to differentiate themselves from the lower class Irish Catholics who came later (mostly starting during the famine of the 1840s). Before that, the Scots-Irish were just called Irish.
** The Civil War is an interesting case of the "out of the frying pan, into the fire" thing for new Irish immigrants. The great Potato Famine of 1845-1852 had led millions of Irish to leave the home country to go to America... and a few years later, America breaks out into open civil war. The famine and the emigration caused such widespread economic destruction and the emigrants just kept going and going and going, to the point that there were songs in Ireland to the effect of "Look, we know the situation is shit here in Ireland, but don't go to America. You'll end up getting drafted and killed!"
* {{Irony}}:
** In retrospect people from [[TheAmericanRevolution Massachusetts]] fighting against secession and condemning the wickedness of rebellion sounds a mite odd.
** Southern politicians seceding for states' rights and against the wickedness of a strong central government after using the federal government to further their purposes when ''they'' still controlled it. Notably to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law in free states and to permit and uphold slavery in US territories even against the will of the majority of their population.
*** Early in the war, Confederate citizens and authorities would invoke the federal Fugitive Slave Law to demand that slaves escaping across the lines be sent back to them. They basically got the answer: If we're right, then you are rebels and traitors and your slaves are contraband of war; if you're right, you live outside the US and therefore the Fugitive Slave Law does not apply.
*** Indeed, there was a point a few decades before the civil war where the some politicians from the ''North'' were actually threatening seceding from the Union. It was thanks to the skilled politicians like Clay, Webster, and Calhoun that the war was prolonged like it was.
** A Confederate army in Texas was attacked by a local Union army and proceeds to win the last official battle of the Civil War several weeks after Lee's surrender, [[{{Retirony}} a day before they planned to disband]].
** The Dunkers were a pacifist sect that lived around Sharpsburg, MD. Their simple, one story church was was the most-easily-identifiable landmark on the Antietam Battlefield. Odd place to host the Civil War's bloodiest day.
** Shiloh Methodist Church was another place of worship that witnessed a horrible battle -- the bloodiest single battle of the war[[note]]Antietam was the bloodiest single ''day''; Shiloh was a two-day affair[[/note]]. Shiloh means "the peaceful place" in Hebrew.
** Wilmer [=McLean=]. After the First Battle of Manassas, he decided to move his family out of the path of the war to a small town called Appomattox Courthouse. "The war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor."
** During Virginia's secession, several counties of that state refused to secede from the Union. So they seceded from the state instead and became West Virginia.
** A sign at the gate of Cemetery Ridge warning anyone who enters armed will be prosecuted.
** Yorktown is again under siege but with the rebels now holding it.
** Because Gettysburg is often identified as the turning point of the war, and the casualties related to those three days so great, it has come to be accepted in popular culture that the last two years of the war were an anti-climax or a sort of "winding down." In actuality, a hefty majority of the war's casualties and much of the major strategic advancements occurred after the battle of Gettysburg. During the Overland Campaign (fought from May 4th to June 24th 1864 in between Fredericksburg and Richmond) the two armies combined suffered 85,000 casualties or an average of 1,700 men killed or wounded per day for 50 days... and that was only one of two major fronts, with a dozen smaller fronts being fought at the same time.
* JumpedAtTheCall: ''The young male population of both sides.'' In the early days of the war, recruiting officers on either side had no trouble filling their quotas. Plenty of the young ''female'' population of both sides cross-dressed as men and enlisted as well. Recruiting officers never particularly checked for gender. Not to mention all the Canadians that ran south to enlist on both sides (mostly on the side of the Union, as Canadians tended to be even more anti-slavery than Northerners; anywhere from 33,000 to 55,000 Canadians served in the US Army during the Civil War). Confederate President Jefferson Davis realized this tendency of his people near the beginning of the war, remarking that "We are about to grind the seed corn of the nation."
* KillItWithFire: Sherman and Sheridan's respective strategies.
* KnowWhenToFoldEm : Lee's surrender.
** After Sherman's army had taken Fort McAllister and received supplies and heavy artillery for a siege operation, William J. Hardee decided to quit the city of Savannah rather than risk being trapped and forced to surrender.
* LaserGuidedKarma: In 1861, South Carolina led the southern states into secession, forming the Confederate States of America, and started the war with the attack on Fort Sumter. Four years later (in 1865), General Sherman's army invades South Carolina and [[DisproportionateRetribution burns the state capital]], Columbia, to the ground.
* LeeroyJenkins: Dan Sickles at the Battle of Gettysburg, which cost him his right leg.
** A much more fortunate LeeroyJenkins for the Union came at the Battle of Missionary Ridge, when the Union men at the base of the ridge attacked uphill without orders, carried the heights, and won the battle.
** Likewise, at Gettysburg, George Custer charged his cavalry brigade headlong into the much larger cavalry ''division'' of J.E.B. Stuart. Custer's 1st Michigan Cavalry suffered the heaviest losses of any Union cavalry brigade, but [[CrazyEnoughToWork they turned back Stuart's charge]]. This was one of the key moments in the battle, as a successful charge by Stuart would have made a Union victory much more difficult. Of course, after the war, Custer's LeeroyJenkins tendencies [[LastStand famously didn't end well]].
** Union Cavalryman Judson Kilpatrick made a habit of this. Gettysburg was most egregious example: for reasons known only to himself, on July 3rd Kilpatrick ordered Elon Farnsworth's brigade to attack Rebel infantry entrenched on Big Round Top. It didn't go well.
** A naval example: Captain Charles Wilkes of the USS ''San Jacinto'', who nearly triggered a war with Britain by capturing a British ship carrying Confederate diplomats (the ''Trent'' incident).
* LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters: See any decently-sized history book.
* LoopholeAbuse - Gen. Ben Butler claimed the Fugitive Slave Law didn't apply to the United States because the Confederacy is technically a foreign country.
* LuckyBastard: Before the civil war, someone tried to assassinate Braxton Bragg by detonating a 12-pound artillery shell under his cot. The cot was destroyed but Bragg emerged without a scratch.
* MeaningfulName: Union general Joseph Hooker liked to pay women for their company so much that his name entered the lexicon as a synonym for prostitute. While the term predates the Civil War by about 20 years, but was popularized by Hookers "convivial and informal" headquarters.
** In an era of flamboyant facial hair, Ambrose Burnside managed to stand out so much that — to this day — they're called sideburns.
* MilesGloriosus: The general historical opinion of George [=McClellan=], a good army organizer, but in the field, an insubordinate braggart who prolonged the war because of his cowardly incompetence.
* ModernMajorGeneral: Ambrose Burnside, by his own admission.
* MoreDakka: As noted above, the Age of Dakka began with the introduction of the Gatling gun. Funnily enough, Gatling was a pacifist who wanted to show the futility of war and reduce the size of armies. [[ExactWords It definitely achieved the latter objective]].
** To give an example, there is the stump of a tree preserved in a a museum. What makes this tree stump special is that it was felled by rifle fire. Not artillery, or Gatling gun fire, but rifle bullets.
** Take a good guess on what happened to the Cornfield near the Dunker Church during the Battle of Antietam... and imagine what it looked like afterwards.
-->...every stalk of corn in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could have been done with a knife.
-->--Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker
** There was a special type of musket ammunition called "Buck n' Ball" which was a cartridge filled with one bullet and 3 buckshot, giving a shooter 4 chances at hitting an enemy. Despite the fact that the buckshot was worthless beyond 100 yards, it was favored and used by the Irish Brigades because they wanted to get up close and strike fear into the enemy.
** Period artillery had a special type of ammunition for close-quarters firing called canister shot, which took the basic idea of buckshot and scaled it up to cannon size. When fired into a tightly-packed advancing enemy formation, the results were horrific.
* MyCountryRightOrWrong: The ''only'' reason that Robert E. Lee, who was a pro-abolitionist who gave up his slaves long before the war began, fought for the Confederacy, as he didn't want to oppose his home state of Virginia.
* MyGreatestFailure: Lee ordering Pickett's charge at Gettysburg.
** Similarly, Grant ordering frontal assaults at Cold Harbor.
* NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast:
** Confederate William "Bloody Bill" Anderson.
** Union General David "Black Davy" Hunter (He liked to burn stuff).
** Union General Ben Franklin "Beast" Butler (If you're a SouthernBelle).
*** His other nickname "Spoons" sounds far less intimidating, but would deter you from inviting him over for dinner... he had a penchant for stealing the silverwear of wealthy Southern families and sending it North for his own personal collection.
** Union General Hugh Judson "Kill Cavalry" Kilpatrick (If you're under his command).
** Any Brigade or Regiment that is predominantly comprised of Irish Soldiers as they had a desire to strike fear into the enemy which was necessary if they wanted to live up to their reputation as hard fighters.
* NightmareFuel:
** Photographs of Union prisoners released from Andersonville Prison. They are eerily similar to those of Holocaust survivors.
*** Although it should be noted that conditions in virtually every other Confederate prison were similar. The Confederacy had extreme difficulty feeding its army, much less prisoners, and photographs of prisoners released from Union prisons are not much better.
** Photographs of post-battle casualties, mostly Confederate corpses at Antietam and Gettysburg.
** Photographs of burial/exhumation details going about their work.
** Descriptions of the effects of artillery upon the human body. Any kind, really, but particularly canister ("shotgun"-style) rounds.
*** Musketry too. Some of the wounded were hit by flying fragments of other people's ''teeth and bones''.
** Slave life in general, but particularly under the thumb of a cruel overseer.
** Practically anything about a hospital, North or South.
** The battle of the Wilderness fought in the woods near Chancellorsville. Rain uncovered the shallow graves. [[KillItWithFire Brush fires killed the wounded who couldn't make it back to camp]].
** Let's just say the whole damn war.
* NoPlansNoPrototypeNoBackup: The CSS ''Arkansas''. One of the largest and certainly the scariest thing afloat on the Mississippi in 1862, its ordered-to-spec driveshaft didn't arrive from the Tredegar Works in Richmond before it had to go out and face essentially the entire brown-water US Navy. It successfully fought them off, too, but its homemade engine parts gave out and the crew was forced to burn her to prevent capture. The Confederate Navy never again managed a presence on the Mississippi.
* NotSoDifferent: It's often misunderstood that the Northern states were not racist simply because they fought against slavery. In actuality, many people in the North were just as racist as the South. Being against slavery did not always mean they were for the rights of African Americans. An example of this can be found in the Draft Riots of New York, as well as such Union heroes as William Sherman, who refused to allow black Union soldiers into his army because, as he wrote to his step-brother, "I won't trust niggers to fight."
** What really is misunderstood is that "racism", not unlike "adolescence", are relatively recent terms. To use either in that time and place is considered an anachronism (to use in that time and place). Case in point, Sherman's use of the n-word proves nothing because in that time and place, the n-word was not pejorative, and did not become so until the 20th century. In addition, the use of Black troops was controversial in more than the obvious. At that time, we had no way of knowing how Black troops would fight on the battlefield. Once given both experience and opportunity to prove themselves, they were well respected by other regiments on the battlefield, with obvious exception being Confederate.
* OccupiersOutOfOurCountry: This is largely the motive of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Confederate Neo-Confederates]].
* OfficerAndAGentleman: Stereotyped Confederate officer. Often for Union officers too.
** Yet another Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain example - chosen to accept the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, he (in a move unpopular with many in the north) [[WorthyOpponent ordered his men to salute the southern soldiers]]. General Gordon, the Confederate officer giving the surrender, later called him "one of the knightliest soldiers of the Federal Army."
* OneSteveLimit: Thoroughly averted.
** While Jefferson Davis was president of the CSA, there was a Union general with the name Jefferson (Columbus) Davis.
** Even more confusing is the situation where two generals serving on opposing sides were named Henry H. Sibley.
** The Confederate Army had generals A.P. Hill and D.H. Hill. They both fought at the battle of Antietam.
** Try not to confuse the Army of Tennessee (Confederate, named for the state) with the Army of ''the'' Tennessee (Union, named for the river).
** One hapless Confederate private was named Abraham Lincoln.
* OnlySaneMan: Sherman was the only major officer at the beginning of the war [[CassandraTruth to realize the fight was going to be long and bloody]], and when he went public with that sentiment he was deemed mad. It didn't help that he suffered a HeroicBSOD early on and had to take some time off.
** Also Governor Sam Houston of Texas resigned his post rather than participate in his state's secession and warned that:
-->After the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives, you may win Southern independence if God be not against you, but I doubt it. I tell you that, while I believe with you in the doctrine of states rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche; and what I fear is, they will overwhelm the South.
* TheParagonAlwaysRebels: Robert E Lee. The greatest officer of the American army in his generation becomes the most lethal adversary it ever faced.
* ThePeterPrinciple: Many examples on both sides, which perhaps was inevitable given that men with experience leading no more than a company rose to commanding armies of tens of thousands of men. Two examples among many:
** Joseph Hooker for the Union. Hooker was a courageous officer who commanded a brigade in the Seven Days', a division at Second Bull Run and a corps at Antietam with considerable skill. Unfortunately, he was also ruthlessly ambitious and (with the help of Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln's Treasury Secretary) connived to take command of the Army of the Potomac in early 1863. Despite showing administrative skill and drafting a good campaign plan, he lost his nerve during the Chancellorsville Campaign, allowing Lee to initiate his [[CrowningMomentOfAwesome greatest victory]]. Hooker commanded a corps, again with distinction, at Chattanooga, but was eventually ReassignedToAntarctica because he couldn't get along with General Sherman.
** For the South John Bell Hood. Like Hooker, he was heroic at lower level command, almost suicidally so; he lost an arm at Gettysburg and a leg at Chickamauga leading his troops in battle. Also like Hooker, he was extremely ambitious and lobbied to replace Joseph Johnston commanding the Army of Tennessee. Unfortunately, Hood's near-reckless leadership style didn't translate well to army command, overseeing [[CurbstompBattle disastrous defeats]] at Peachtree Creek, Atlanta, Franklin and Nashville.
* PocketProtector: A bullet hit Colonel Chamberlain's saber during the defense of Little Round Top, allowing him to make his famous "swinging door" charge soon afterward.
* PoorCommunicationKills: Several noteworthy ones.
** No communication was just as deadly as poor communication during the Battle of Antietam. General [=McClellan=] never had any sense or will to coordinate and command his troops or commit reserves when they were most urgently needed, resulting in many disorganized offensives, needless casualties, and missed opportunities to finish off the Confederates because many of the Union Commanders were left to act on their own initiative.
*** Confederate Lieutenant-Colonel Lightfoot thought he was ordered to move the line back a little bit and ended up starting a total rout instead. He was actually ordered to move his men to a less vulnerable part of the sunken road.
** At Chickamauga, Rosecrans was misinformed that he had a gap in his line and sent out an order to some of his brigades to move to the supposed gap to close it up. He ended up opening an actual gap right in front of Longstreet who rushed in eight brigades through the hole and sent a third of the Union army fleeing in panic.
** At Gettysburg, Lee's army was simply stretched too far from surrounding the union army up at Cemetery hill. As a result, communication breakdowns were very high and the Confederates could not make any sort of effective coordinated attack. Such was the case of an exhausted confederate regiment that was ordered to move out again in support of another offensive.
** After the 1st Day of Gettysburg, Lee gave an order to Ewell that many historians considered to be "not an order at all" which said exactly "attack and take Cemetery Hill, if practicable." Following common sense, Ewell decided to let his exhausted troops rest up and wait for reinforcements, costing the Confederate army their only best chance of dislodging the Union defenders from a very formidable defensive position.
* PutOnABus - Gen. Burnside got given "extended leave" after the Battle of the Crater.
* TheQuisling - "Scalawags", a term used for Southerners who fought for the Union.
** Prisoners of War both Union and Confederate switched sides -- Confederates who turned about and fought for the Union were called "Galvanized Yankees." There were also a few Union officers, early in the war, who fought in battles such as Bull Run before before resigning their commissions and joining the Confederacy.
* RagTagBunchOfMisfits: The Confederate Army of Tennessee, both its leadership and troop contingent. The short-lived Union Army of Virginia, less successfully. On a smaller scale, Wheat's Louisiana Tigers (a Confederate battalion raised in New Orleans that served in the Army of Northern Virginia) were noted for their high complement of criminals and malcontents.
* RatedMForManly: As far as wars go, this one had one of the highest counts of {{Badass}}es among the combatants. And many of them had impressive facial hair.
* RealMenLoveJesus: There was a lot of other examples on both sides and all ranks. It is no accident that one of the best remembered CrowningMusicOfAwesome songs of the era was the [[ChurchMilitant rather grim]] lyrics of Battle Hymn of The Republic. The Civil War happened in the middle of, or just after, one of the periodic waves of religious enthusiasm that hits America. The motto "In God We Trust" made its very first appearance on American money in 1864.
* ReassignedToAntarctica: John Pope got sent to Minnesota after an embarrassing defeat at Second Bull Run.
** Lincoln once joked that he made Simon Cameron (his corrupt and venal first Secretary of War) Minister[[note]]read: Ambassador[[/note]] to Russia because he "couldn't find anyplace further to send him."[[note]]Russia was long the designated dignified hell-hole to send those too incompetent to give an important office but too prominent to be ignored. When AndrewJackson sent JamesBuchanan to St. Petersburg, he commented that he "would have sent him to the North Pole if we kept a minister there."[[/note]]
** General Lew Wallace was blamed by Grant and Halleck for the Union almost losing at Shiloh by not bringing his reserve unit up quickly enough and reassigned to defensive posts in Ohio and later Maryland. Resulted in a mild case of ReassignmentBackfire when his small outpost in Maryland held up an invasion by Jubal Early in 1864 long enough for reinforcements to arrive and drive the Confederates off.
** Irvin [=McDowell=] started the war commanding the Union Army at First Bull Run and ended it heading the Department of the Pacific.
** The Trans-Mississippi Department was a graveyard for failed Confederate generals. Earl Van Dorn, John Magruder, Henry H. Sibley, Theophilus Holmes and Sterling Price are among those banished out west after screwing up major commands.
* RebelliousRebel: Unionists from the South included Texas governor Sam Houston, Tennessee Senator Andrew Johnson (rewarded with selection as Lincoln's running mate in 1864), and Generals Winfield Scott and George Thomas from Virginia. Then there was the entire state of West Virginia, which split off from Virginia and cleaved back into the Union.
** Oh, that's barely scratching the surface. Of all Union forces who served in the war, nearly a quarter of them came from Confederate states. The Confederacy itself was rife with internal divisions and strife, with county after county after county openly rebelling against the central Confederate government and pro-Union guerrilla bands regularly ambushing Confederate government officials and other high-profile targets; indeed, while the Confederacy fought one civil war against the Union, they were, for all intents and purposes, fighting another civil war against themselves. Even the Confederate capital itself, Richmond, was so rife with anti-Confederates that it spent much of the war under strict martial law.[[note]]In retrospect, Richmond may not have been the best choice for a Confederate capital: dangerously close to the border (albeit not ''on'' the border, like UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC, but there were pragmatic and symbolic reasons for the Union not to move its capital, while the Confederacy actively chose Richmond) and full of anti-Confederates--much like the rest of Virginia, truth be told, which leads us to how it was really only picked to keep a halfheartedly-Confederate Virginia in the Confederacy.[[/note]]
* UsefulNotes/RebelsWithRepeaters: The CSA Army.
* RedOniBlueOni: Sherman and Grant.
* RedshirtArmy / WeHaveReserves: Neither side was particularly concerned about the lives of individual men when it came to high-level strategy, they just wanted the war over as quickly as possible. Indeed, many campaigns and individual battle-plans essentially boiled down to throwing the largest possible mass of poorly-trained conscripts at the (smallest) discernible mass of poorly-trained conscripts.
** An intensive, high-casualty strategy made sense for the Central Government as they could afford the kinds of losses that came with it, whereas the rebels could not. As the war ground on most Confederate Generals cottoned on to this and cut down on the higher-casualty manoeuvres (like frontal assaults on entrenched positions). ''Most''.
* ReligiousBruiser: Abolitionists were often very much like this.[[CrowningMusicOfAwesome "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,"]] and all that jazz. Many generals and troops on both sides would also count, given the time period, with Stonewall Jackson, a raging example of TheFundamentalist being perhaps the most iconic.
* RemixedLevel: Second Bull Run/Manassas and The Wilderness fought in the woods near Chancellorsville. Also, Yorktown which was the site of the last British defeat in the Revolution.
* TheRemnant: A surprisingly large number of Confederate soldiers never stopped fighting the war, becoming bandits or outlaws (Jesse James and his gang, for example) rather than disbanding.
** The last surviving Confederate naval vessel, the CSS ''Shenandoah,'' continued to mount raids on Union merchant shipping for nearly a year after Lee's surrender, and holds the distinction of being the only Confederate vessel - civilian or military - to circumnavigate the globe.
** As mentioned above, groups of Confederates and their families fled to Brazil after the war in the hopes of establishing an enclave for fellow exiles. Their descendants still live there today as the ''Confederados.''
* RetiredBadass: 70 year old John Burns of Gettysburg was a vet of the War of 1812 and the Mexican war and was turned down for service at the start of the civil war for being too old. But when the war found him at home anyway in July 1863, he shouldered his gun, joined the troops, fought and was wounded on the first day.
** Postwar, men from each side formed their own organizations of Retired Badasses - the 'Grand Army of the Republic' for Union veterans, and the 'United Confederate Veterans' for the Confederacy.
* RidiculousExchangeRates: The Confederates printed up their own paper money. Each bill bore a promise that the Confederacy would redeem it for "real" dollars 6 months after a peace treaty was signed with the Union in the North (i.e. after the South had won its independence). This Confederate scrip was, predictably, worthless. In fact, the most popular denomination of currency in the South during the war was the gold dollar, which was minted exclusively in the North.
* RoaringRampageOfRevenge: After popular Union General James B [=McPherson=] was killed at the battle of Atlanta, Sherman's troops ''smashed'' the Confederates and pounded the city to the ground. Soon after that, they went on to steal and destroy anything and everything of value to the confederate war effort, leaving a 300-mile trail of desolation and misery between Atlanta and Savannah.
** Every battle fought by former slaves could count as well.
** South Carolina had before and during the war earned a reputation of being the "cockpit of secession," in AndrewJackson's words. Passing Union soldiers would tell South Carolina citizens that they were sorry for the suffering of women and children, but "South Carolina must be ''destroyed.''"
* RockBeatsLaser: Two Confederate brigades at the Second Battle of Bull Run repulsed several Union attacks despite running out of ammunition. Their secret weapon? [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Rocks!]]
* SadClown: Lincoln used humor to hide his anxieties. This led people to believe he was insensitive.
-->"I laugh because I must not weep."
* SamusIsAGirl: [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Cashier Albert Cashier]].
** And thousands of other women -- pre-enlistment medical examinations (in both armies) were a joke.
* {{Scapegoat}}: Union General Charles P. Stone, commander at Ball's Bluff in October 1861. Not only was Stone blamed for that battle's disastrous outcome, he was imprisoned without trial for several months afterwards. After his release Lincoln and Stanton blocked Stone's reappointment, even when Joseph Hooker and Ulysses Grant personally requested him for staff positions. In 1864 Stone was given a brigade command while under constant surveillance, finally resigning.
* SchizoTech: Both sides, but especially the Confederates, suffered from this throughout the war. Volunteer and militia units often had to supply their own weapons, meaning regiments went into battle armed with anything from Revolutionary War-era smooth bore muskets to repeating rifles. Both sides heavily employed cavalry, which aside from reconnaissance use grew increasingly obsolete as the war went on.
** The Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry briefly carried ''lances''.
* ScrewTheRulesIHaveMoney: Several Confederate states, when holding a vote for secession, actually ended up with a small majority of their population voting 'no' - at which point the state legislatures, composed almost exclusively of wealthy slaveholders, proceeded to ''secede anyway'', apparently taking a 'the voters do not truly know what they want' approach to governance.
** The hiring of 'replacements' for the draft (as mentioned above) or outright bribery ensured that the war remained 'a rich man's war but a poor man's fight'.
* ScrewThisImOuttaHere: Desertion was a serious problem in the South; by 1863 men were deserting faster than new recruits could be conscripted to replace them, and by war's end over three-quarters of the Confederate army was [=AWOL=]. Entire Confederate divisions existed solely on paper, their men and command structure having walked out en masse, stealing as much equipment as they could carry. The most notable incidence of desertion was probably Confederate general Pemberton's army, paroled after the surrender at Vicksburg. Mustered with 30,000 men, a month later fewer than 1,500 of them were left to report for duty, the rest having simply changed back into civilian clothes and gone home.
** To be clear, Pemberton's soldiers were ''paroled'' after they had surrendered. In other words, they had all given their words that if they were released and allowed to return home, they would never take up arms against the Union again. It would have been a violation of the laws of war for them to break that promise, or for the Confederate government to compel them to break that promise. They were not "absent without leave" or otherwise deserters.
** This is basically what happened with the entire Confederate States of America after their candidate (John C. Breckinridge) did not win the presidential election of 1860.
* TheScourgeOfGod: From Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address:
--> "...if God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"
** "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord/He is trampling out the vintage where Literature/TheGrapesOfWrath are stored..."
* ScreamingWarrior: Rebel Yells from the South, and a standard "HURRAH!" from the North.
* SedgwickSpeech: TropeNamer.
* ShockingDefeatLegacy: The fall of Vicksburg and consequent division of the Confederacy into two parts.
** The entire war, for some Southerners.
* SmallNameBigEgo - George [=McClellan=] overestimated his worth to the Union. He even flirted with the idea of being dictator.
* TheSnackIsMoreInteresting: During the Battle of Five Forks, Confederate Generals George Pickett, Fitzhugh Lee and Thomas Rosser attended a feast at which large quantities of fish and liquor were consumed. Unaware of the battle, which was going on two miles away, Pickett returned to his forces toward the end of the engagement, which became a Union victory, resulting in the evacuation of the Confederate capital, Richmond.
** There are also numerous accounts of soldiers from one side driving the other out of their encampments, only for the attack to stall because the attacking troops stopped to finish off the breakfast their foes were preparing.
* SociopathicHero: Sherman is often seen and portrayed as this. He was indeed vicious, [[{{Antihero}} extremely]] ruthless, and terrifying in battle, but once the smoke cleared he actually had a reputation for leniency and mercy, regularly permitting defeated enemies to retrieve their belongings and go home without further molestation. He was repeatedly reprimanded by his superiors for this.
* StateSec: Although the Confederates had no independent secret police force, the CSA's military filled this role when not on the front. Suspected abolitionists, Unionists, draft dodgers, deserters, guerrillas, or people who had not contributed sufficiently to the war effort were regularly rounded up and either arrested or summarily executed. Some Confederate army units spent almost the entire war deep in their own territory, rooting out agitators and 'purging' problem communities. The North was little better, going so far as to ''abolish habeas corpus'' for the duration of the war.
** Although the US Constitution actually does make provision for such (Section 9, Article 1), and Congress fulfilled the legislative requirement for it in 1863.
** And it's possible to argue that the suspension saved Maryland, and thus possibly Washington DC and the entire US government, for the Union.
* StoneWall: The partial TropeNamer himself.
* TheStrategist: Lt. General Nathan Bedford Forrest. According to historian Shelby Foote, he along with Abraham Lincoln were the two bonafide geniuses of the period. Basically, he was a homespun SunTzu who instantly could make a battle plan just by looking at the battlefield and the combatants. Unfortunately, he was hampered by his complete lack of ability to command, without the administrative skills, temperament, or intellect to lead an army. (Which might explain why he started the Ku Klux Klan... then [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone abandoned it when it spun out of control in its violence]].)
* SummonBiggerFish: ''Thwarted''. The Confederacy (as noted) wanted to bring in foreign powers to recognize it and provide it with military aid. Lincoln promised to declare war upon anyone who actively helped the Confederacy, even just by gun-running. Winning a war with the USA would have been really, really expensive and there was very little in it for Britain - indeed, France ''might'' have taken the opportunity to attack them again. Not to mention the fact that it have been political suicide for a British government to fight alongside the Confederacy, as abolitionism was ''not'' a minority position in Britain. The Empire outlawed the slave trade in 1807[[hottip:*:And when the Royal Navy enforces maritime trade laws they ''stay'' enforced.]] and abolished slavery wholesale in 1833. It was much, ''much'' cheaper for British firms to just invest in developing (pre-existing) Anglo-Indian and Anglo-Egyptian plantations.
** Many Confederate warships '''were''' however constructed in Britain, and sold to the Confederate navy via loopholes in international trade law. The commerce raider CSS ''Alabama'' is the most notorious example. The US government successfully sued the British government for related damages in 1872.
** The same logic--although not the shipbuilding--applied to France the only other power worth mentioning. Although the French weren't as virulently anti-slavery as the British, they weren't exactly in favor of it either, and going to war to support what the French people probably regarded as a revolt of privileged slaveholders wouldn't have gone down very well in the land of ''liberté, égalité, fraternité''. French industry was also not as dependent on American cotton, so the pressure was felt less, and if France got involved on the side of the Confederacy, it's very possible that Britain would have made a global conflict of it. Even if Britain didn't participate, some other power [[CoughSnarkCough *cough*]] OttoVonBismarck [[CoughSnarkCough *cough*]] might have ginned up a war in Europe while France was distracted. (As it turns out, [[FrancoPrussianWar France didn't need to be distracted to be utterly destroyed by Bismarck]], but that's another issue entirely).
** Apparently Russia seriously considered entering the war on the Union side, at least when Anglo-French intervention was in the cards. The United States had diplomatically supported Russia during the CrimeanWar, for which the Russians were grateful; they also felt common cause after abolishing serfdom.
* TakeThat: Montgomery Meigs, born a Georgian but a career Union officer and staunch U.S. patriot, hated the Confederacy for what he saw as a great betrayal against his country. Late in the war, when the Union dead was filling up the National Cemetery in Washington, Meigs suggested using Robert E. Lee's Union-occupied estate as a new burial ground. It later became Arlington National Cemetery.
* TeamPet - A lot of Northern & Southern regiments had animal mascots. The North had Old Abe, the bald eagle.
* TearJerker: This letter written by a soldier to his wife shortly [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSprdaGol34 before going off to battle.]]
** A.M. Lea capturing a Union flotilla in Galvaston, Texas only to find his Union Navy son dying on the deck.
* TokenMinority: Blacks fought for the North and their exploits are detailed in movies like ''{{Glory}}''.
** Blacks were allowed to serve the Confederate military in a support capacity but were forbidden to enlist as soldiers. However, there were state militias that employed free blacks. While these militias were not officially part of the Confederate military, they did see some action. While the enlistment of slaves was eventually legalized, it was too late in the war to have any effect on the outcome.
** A lot of people don't realize that both sides had a small number of [[http://www.voanews.com/english/news/asia/Surprise-Asians-Fought-In-The-US-Civil-War-120282254.html Chinese soldiers]]. Though most of them fought for the North, the most well-known ones fought for the South. They are Christopher and Stephen Bunker, the sons of conjoined twins [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang_and_eng_bunker Chang and Eng Bunker]], respectively.
** Cherokee chief Stand Watie, the only Native American general and the last Confederate general to surrender.
** Ely Samuel Parker, a Seneca, served on Grant's staff, was present at Appomattox, and was appointed a brevet brigadier general after the war.
* TenMinuteRetirement - Gen. Sherman quit the army when the South seceded but came back when the war began.
* ToTheTuneOf: "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" was adapted from the abolitionist song "John Brown's Body" -- which, in turn, was adapted from the religious revival song "Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us." Another example would be the Union and Confederate versions of "Battle Cry of Freedom."
** The 1861 Confederate song "Maryland, My Maryland" was sung to the tune of the German Christmas carol ''Oh Tannenbaum''. The tune would later be used for the British song ''The Red Flag''.
** Many folk tunes and sports chants around the world are sung to the tune of "Marching through Georgia."
* TooCoolToLive - Grant's former commanding officer and later loyal subordinate, Gen. Charles F. Smith, who died of tetanus and dysentery in 1862. Sherman said that Smith would have eclipsed both him and Grant had he lived.
** Also James B. Mc Pherson, a talented junior officer who quickly rose through the ranks to army command. Respected by both friend and foe, he was considered as a possible successor to Sherman and Grant before his death at the Battle of Atlanta.
** For the Confederates, Albert Sidney Johnston, considered one of the best soldiers on either side. He died command his first major battle at Shiloh, leaving behind a host of [[WhatCouldHaveBeen might-have-beens]] as the Army of Tennessee disintegrated into [[WeAreStrugglingTogether infighting and incompetent leadership]].
* TookALevelInBadass: Robert E. Lee, very much. Though well-respected before the war, he earned the ire of his soldiers and fellow generals for mismanaging an 1861 campaign in West Virginia (admittedly, not ''entirely'' his fault). His men nicknamed him "The Ace of Spades" and "Granny Lee" for his supposed slowness and over-caution. He was even [[ReassignedToAntarctica sent to inspect Georgia's coastal defenses ]] in early 1862. Then came the Seven Days' Battles and no one mocked Lee again.
* UltimateJobSecurity: Ben Butler. Never that great a soldier, he was made a general to convince War Democrats that this wasn't just a Republican war. After Lincoln won his 1864 re-election campaign, he had no more use for Butler. Grant then [[ReassignedToAntarctica put him in charge]] of the amphibious assault on Wilmington, North Carolina, the Confederacy's last open port. The first step in taking Wilmington would be taking Fort Fisher, which Butler signally failed to do, calling off his first and only assault after one man was killed and fifteen wounded out of a 6500-man force. He was promptly hauled in front of the [[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War]] to account for his failure; he rested his defence on the claim that Fort Fisher was impregnable anyhow. ''Midway through his defence speech'', news arrived that his successor had taken Fort Fisher. So what happened then? Well, the Joint Committee unanimously exonerated him on all charges, then voted him a commendation for his calm decision-making in calling off the assault in the face of a superior enemy position. Yeah.
* UnmotivatedCloseUp: Every history of the war makes a point of mentioning that the man in charge of repressing John Brown in 1859 was one Colonel Robert E Lee.
* UnPerson - Lincoln was so hated in the South that he did not even appear on the ballot in 10 states during the 1860 election.
* ValuesDissonance: The Men of the North fought for the Negro, that he might be shipped back to Africa. Only the abolitionists were remotely interested in emancipation until doing so was framed in terms of undermining the rebel war effort, and even then Lincoln's government sat on the idea for a couple of years until they could claim to be winning (post-Antietam) before they actually went ahead with emancipation. There's also the whole slavery thing, which doesn't fly among most people these days.
** Really, the main reasons the Republican Party was opposed to slavery at all (or at the very least, its expansion into new territories and new states) were pragmatic, not moral. The Republicans styled themselves the champions of the [[WorkingClassHero Average Working Man]], and were committed to securing the opportunity of every able-bodied free worker to get a fair wage for a fair day's work. You couldn't get that in a slave-owning society, where you could just have a slave work in a field or factory and not have to worry about compensation or ensuring decent working conditions. The Republicans wanted to end slavery in order to level the playing field.
* VictoryPose: After the Confederate Capitol of Richmond fell, Abraham Lincoln visited the city and sat at Confederate President Jefferson Davis's desk in the Confederate White House.
* VindicatedByHistory: The Gettysburg Address.
** This may need a bit of explanation. Lincoln was just the President; the big draw for the event was Edward Everett, a former preacher, professor, and politician who was widely regarded as one of the great American orators and who spoke for two hours, after which Lincoln was expected to stand up, "say a little something," and sit down again. If you're a US citizen, odds are good that ''every single line'' of Lincoln's address will be at least vaguely familiar to you, and even better that this is the first you've '''ever''' heard of Edward Everett.
*** Everett himself was either impressed with Lincoln's speech or just felt he should say something polite; he reportedly said to Lincoln that Lincoln did a better job of capturing the spirit of the occasion in two minutes than Everett did in two hours.
*** Contemporary reactions were all over the map, but rather humorously tended to follow party lines: Republican sources generally praised Lincoln's remarks:
---->'''Springfield Republican:''' Surprisingly fine as Mr. Everett’s oration was in the Gettysburg consecration, the rhetorical honors of the occasion were won by President Lincoln. His little speech is a perfect gem; deep in feeling, compact in thought and expression, and tasteful and elegant in every word and comma. Then it has the merit of unexpectedness in its verbal perfection and beauty. Turn back and read it over, it will repay study as a model speech. Strong feelings and a large brain are its parents.
*** While Democrats mostly panned it. (One account in a Democrat-leaning paper contained an expansive paean to Everett's speech, then added "President Lincoln also spoke." And that was one of the ''nicer'' examples.)
---->'''Chicago Times:''' The cheeks of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat, and dishwatery utterances.
** There are no photos of Abe giving this speech because photogs expected him to speak longer than Edward Everett.
* WarIsHell: Something ''both'' sides could agree on wholeheartedly. Sherman stated it was his ''job'' to make war unbearable, doing the unthinkable: taking the war to ''civilians''.
-->'''Sherman:''' We can make war so terrible, and make them so sick of war that generations (will) pass away before they again appeal to it.
* WarriorMonk: Episcopalian bishop and Confederate General Leonidas Polk.
* WeAREStrugglingTogether: The Confederacy. People may be familiar with the term "died of states' rights", though many of the examples often cited (like North Carolina supposedly hoarding uniforms while Lee's army went ragged) are apocryphal.
** Union commanders George [=McClellan=] and John Pope at Second Bull Run. By some accounts, [=McClellan=] was so piqued at the prospect of Pope defeating Robert E. Lee (and garnering the attendant glory) that he ''deliberately withheld troops'' from Pope while the battle was in process.
** The Confederate Army of Tennessee under Braxton Bragg was notorious for this. Bragg constantly bickered with subordinates Leonidas Polk, John Breckinridge and William Hardee, all headstrong and ambitious themselves. When James Longstreet's corps temporarily joined Bragg in late 1863, Bragg sent Longstreet to capture Knoxville, just to get rid of him. Bragg so angered Nathan Bedford Forrest during the Chickamauga Campaign that the latter threatened to kill Bragg should they ever meet again.
* WeHaveReserves: An essential part of the Grand Strategy of both sides. The War was cripplingly expensive and bad for the economy, ergo both sides would have preferred it over sooner rather than later. The only way to make the war end sooner was to basically sacrifice more men than strictly necessary in a Grand Strategy of maximum-intensity warfare. At the Operational (campaign) level most people like to paint Grant (and the Union at large) as this, but in reality the tactics of the day were simply wasteful of men. The North just had (far) more to drawn on than the South. The Union's higher casualty rates were due to their fighting a lot of offensive actions - like (frontal) assaults on entrenched enemy formations - while the Confederacy usually had the 'luxury' of being on the defensive. In the Rebels' few offensive and counter-offensive actions, they suffered casualty rates on this order as well.
** The Wilderness Battles
** Also one of the key pieces of logic for the Union's ending of prisoner exchanges. The North could recruit/draft more soldiers when they lost some to capture. The South could not. Starting in 1864, [[OhCrap life for prisoners]] was about to get [[FateWorseThanDeath worse]].
*** However, the major reason the Union ended prisoner exchanges was because Robert E. Lee refused to order his troops not to murder black soldiers who surrendered.
** The main reason that [[TheIrishDiaspora Irish-Americans]] despised President Lincoln [[{{Hatedom}} so vehemently]]. Being poor, Catholic, and a Democrat drastically increased one's chances of being [[{{Conscription}} drafted]]. [[ThePope Pope Pius IX]] even had one of his best preachers go to Ireland to warn the people that if they went to America, they would probably end up being used as cannon fodder in "Lincoln's War". Certain Irish-American neighborhoods in [[BigApplesauce New York City]] detested Lincoln ''so'' much that they voted for [=McClellan=] in the 1864 election by margins of ''[[LandslideElection over 90%]]''.
** Ironically, the Union Armies under Grant suffered proportionately fewer casualties than the Army of Northern Virginia under Lee when you consider them as a percentage of the men engaged. But that's not how the two men are remembered.
* WhamEpisode: The end of the battle of Antietam/Sharpsburg. [=McClellan=], who barely managed more than a glorified standoff when he could have smashed Lee's army thanks to the Confederate battle plans his troops found, is relieved of command for the last time; Matthew Brady's "The Dead of Antietam" gallery is opened delivering the horror of war to the North for the first time; and most importantly, Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, ensuring no European power will support the South while welcoming African-Americans to enlist in the Union Army, a manpower source the Confederacy wouldn't dare access until it was too late. Not to mention the 23,000 casualties, making it the bloodiest single day of the war.
* WHAMLine: Late in the Battle of Gettysburg, General Lee called on Major General George Pickett to rally his division.
-->'''Lee:''' General Pickett, you must see to your division.
--> '''Pickett:''' General Lee, I have no division.
* WhatAnIdiot: The "King Cotton" mentality of many ardent secessionists in the build up to the war. [[SarcasmMode But of course rabidly abolitionist Great Britain will automatically cave! It's not like they own an entire subcontinent that is perfect for cotton cultivation and has loads of cheap labor! Or that there are other countries like Egypt that also grow tons upon tons of cheap cotton and are willing to sell to Britain--and France, too for that matter! Or that Britain depends on the North for FOOD! Or that Britain and France have seen this coming for a decade and have filled their warehouses to the brim with cotton!]]
** In fairness, this is all with hindsight. For the first two years of the conflict, there was a real chance that France and/or Britain might intervene: France for political reasons (Napoleon III's France had just set up a puppet state in Mexico that the Union was not happy about, and thus wanted the U.S. weakened to lessen the threat to it) and Great Britain for economic reasons (a huge chunk of her industry was in textiles). Britain ultimately didn't intervene because a war would have been expensive and (deeply) unpopular, not to mention the fact that they disliked the idea of helping France (who might even have taken the chance to ally with the USA and declare war on Britain in return for the former's recognition of French-backed-Mexico) and were pissed at the Rebels' laid-back and somewhat arrogant diplomatic overtures (the aforementioned 'King Cotton' mentality). Indirect intervention or even simple gun-running was ruled out pretty early on when the USA declared that any kind of British support for the Confederates would mean war.
** Dan Sickles at the Battle of Gettysburg. Historians say that if Sickles had not been arrogant and stupid enough to move out of position to pick a fight with the Confederates, the Union army would've had a better hold on the hills of round top and little round top. Also, if Brig. Gen. William Barksdale had not been killed during the confederate attack on Sickles III Corps, Longstreet's men would've been able to storm up the round top hills unopposed and outflank the union army.
** John Bell Hood during his tenure with the Army of Tennessee. Instead of defending Atlanta from entrenchments Hood orders a counterattack against Sherman's army which decimates his forces. After Atlanta's fall, Hood disengages Sherman and marches '''his entire army''' north into Tennessee, a state garrisoned by twice as many Union troops than Hood's entire force. Not only was Hood [[ForegoneConclusion defeated at Nashville]], his maneuver allowed Sherman to march to the sea virtually unopposed. Historians still wonder what Hood hoped to accomplish with this bizarre campaign.
** Then there's General George [=McClellan=], who enraged AbrahamLincoln with his unwillingness to risk his men and press the advantage. One infamous incident had the ''Confederate war plans actually falling into his hands'' before the Battle of Antietam and he did ''nothing'' about it for 18 hours. As a result, [=McClellan=]'s Antietam "victory" was a glorified standoff when he could have ''crushed'' Lee and end the war on the first day. Lincoln couldn't ''wait'' to get rid of him and replace him with Grant.
* WhatCouldHaveBeen: Early in the war, Abraham Lincoln offered Giuseppe Garibaldi (yes, ''that'' Garibaldi) a corps command in the Army of the Potomac. Garibaldi balked, demanding instead command of all Union forces, an offer Lincoln refused. Perhaps more interesting for its potential effects on Italy than the United States, but still.
* WhatNowEnding: The story of the country's non-european population at the end of the war. The abolitionists have succeeded, and all the slaves are free. Unfortunately, the vast majority of ex-slaves 1) are illiterate and have few if any skills 2) have zero property or savings 3) largely live in an area suffering an economic depression, one that is now actively hostile to their interests and 4) have rather more psychologically screwed-up people among them than average, due to the endemic violence and depravity of the system they had lived their whole lives under.
* WithFriendsLikeThese: Respectively Braxton Bragg for the South and [=McClellan=] for the North.
* TheWoobie: [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Longstreet James Longstreet]], the best corps commander in the conflict on either side. Lost several of his young children to scarlet fever in 1862, was Cassandra-esque in his petitions for a more defensive war, was unjustly blamed for the loss at Gettysburg (thereby taking the blame away from the saintly Lee), had to fight against Grant (the two were very close; Longstreet was best man at Grant's wedding to Longstreet's cousin) and was considered a traitor and scalawag by his fellow Southerners for becoming a Republican and advocating suffrage for former slaves. Whew!
* WoodenShipsAndIronMen: Admiral David Glasgow Farragut. Perhaps the last great exponent, prevailing in the face of deadlier guns, ironclads and mines. "Damn the Torpedoes, full speed ahead!"
** Confederate commerce raiders, of which the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS_Alabama CSS Alabama]] was the most famous.
* WorstAid: It was actually safer to fight through an entire battle than it was to be sent to a field hospital. That's how bad and nonexistent the medical technology of this war was. (See NightmareFuel above.)
** There's a reason for [[AnArmAndALeg amputation being necessary]]: A musket bullet propelled by black power flies so slowly that it actually collected dirt in the air. So even if the bullet didn't shatter bone, all of that contagion would eventually turn a flesh wound into a septic harbor of infectious diseases.
** The only anesthetic and disinfectant available was distilled alcoholic beverages. You heard that right. The same stuff that gets people drunk was also used to stave off the chance of a serious infection.
** Clean hands and clean water for cleaning surgical instruments was, more often than not... optional. Now what does that tell you about the chances of making a full recovery?
** At least 55% of the amputations on the union side alone were done without anesthesia. This led to an increased death rate from traumatic shock.
** Subverted. Contrary to popular belief, anesthesia and chloroform were readily available; administered based on age and health. There was only one actual incident towards the end of the war on the Confederate side where they simply ran out. Amputations were not as common as suggested, but infections were prevalent. It was shortly before and throughout the war that the correlation of germs and disease was fully understood and, but sterilization was standard practice. Overall, the field of medicine of the 1860's was no different from today's, the only exceptions being a better understanding of more serious diseases such as diabetes and cancer. But again, the addictiveness of medicinal drugs like morphine, opium, and laudanum wasn't fully recognized during that era, and these were readily available for use as treatment.
** The Civil War took place concurrently with Louis Pasteur's experiments which established germs as the cause of disease. Unfortunately, his ideas didn't make it across the Atlantic until after the war. One Union surgeon would later comment that, "the Civil War was fought at the end of the medical Middle Ages." Indeed, Civil War doctors were the last generation of doctors to operate on (no pun intended) miasma theory rather than germ theory.
* WorthyOpponent: Blue and Grey often thought each other this.
** Perhaps best exemplified when Union General Chamberlain's division and Confederate General Gordon's corps famously saluted each other as Gordon marched away from the surrender at Appomattox.
** After the war, veteran's reunions would occasionally involve [[RetiredBadass former soldiers]] from ''both'' sides, such as the Gettysburg reunions which continued until the late 1940s, by which point there were too few people left alive to justify them. The general opinion expressed by the attendees was that their opposite numbers had most definitely been worthy opponents.
** General Robert E. Lee was well respected by many members of the Union, including Abraham Lincoln.
** Ulysses S. Grant was similarly well respected by Lee, who, after the war, never, ever tolerated an unkind word about Grant in his presence. Joseph Johnston was similarly disposed towards his rival. Considering that the rival in question was the oft-villainized William T. Sherman, that's saying something. Johnston even served as a pallbearer at Sherman's funeral, and refused to cover up despite poor health and bone-chilling winter. Because of this he caught pneumonia and died a few weeks after Sherman's funeral.
*** Exemplified by Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox. To quote the other wiki: "Dressed in an immaculate uniform, Lee waited for Grant to arrive. Grant, whose headache had ended when he received Lee's note, arrived in a mud-spattered uniform—a government-issue flannel shirt with trousers tucked into muddy boots, no sidearms, and with only his tarnished shoulder straps showing his rank. It was the first time the two men had seen each other face-to-face in almost two decades. Suddenly overcome with sadness, Grant found it hard to get to the point of the meeting and instead the two generals briefly discussed a previous encounter during the Mexican-American War."
*** Actually Lee had little respect for Grant at the start of the campaign, and only came to admire him as it went along. Lee and Meade, the guy who beat him at Gettysburg are probably a straighter example. To quote Lee: "General Meade will make no mistake on my front, and should I make one, will be quick to seize upon it."
*** It would be better to phrase it that Lee never tolerated an unkind word about Grant after Grant had shown him so much respect and mercy at the surrender.
** Indeed the Civil War was full of this, as many Confederate officers had been U.S. Army officers until just before the war.
* WrittenByTheWinners: One of the greatest aversions ever, "Lost Cause" anybody?
* WrongGenreSavvy: Most of the commanding officers on both sides of the War were trained in Napoleonic Wars-era battlefield tactics. Unfortunately major advances in military technology between the 1820s and 1860s meant that these tactics were now badly dated. Battles turned into bloodbaths far more often than anticipated, thanks to the insistence on close-formation warfare - a relic of the days when muskets had just a fifth the range (of the modern rifled-musket and rifle) and a fraction the accuracy. It was infantry that were the big killers now, as artillery had been rendered drastically more inaccurate - unless they wanted to be picked off by snipers, bombardiers were forced to use 'indirect fire' rather than firing over open sights.
* XOnAStick: "Sloosh" was an improvised delicacy and a staple "food" in the confederate army.
-->In the southern army, you ate something called "sloosh".
-->You got issued cornmeal and bacon and you fried the bacon, which left a great deal of grease in the pan.
-->Then you took the cornmeal and swirled it around in the grease to make the dough and make a snake of it and put it around your ramrod and cook it over the campfire.
-->That was sloosh. They ate a lot of that.
-->--Shelby Foote
* YouShallNotPass
** The 400 -+ men of the 2nd Georgia at Antietam. They held up 12,000 Union soldiers at Burnside's Bridge for about 3 hours. Subverted in that it was because the aforementioned Burnside got it stuck in his head that he needed the bridge to cross the creek, even after one of his subordinates literally jumped in and proved it was only knee-deep.
** General John Buford. His tactical brilliance meant he chose his ground perfectly, and his 2,000 cavalry troopers with their [[MoreDakka Spencer repeating carbines]] held off Confederate forces that would soon number 20,000, buying time for General Reynolds to arrive with the First Corp to take position.
*** Arguably the entire history of the Army of Northern Virginia was one huge YouShallNotPass.
** Confederate Lieutenant Richard Dowling at Sabine Pass, Texas held off a sizable Union Navy squadron (carrying about 5,000 soldiers) with just 46 men and 6 cannons. Without any losses for Dowling's force.
* YourTerroristsAreOurFreedomFighters: Both sides sent spies and saboteurs across enemy lines, with expected results. The most famous would be Andrew's Raiders during [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Locomotive_Chase The Great Locomotive Chase]]. All of the Union soldiers participating in it were captured by the Confederates and treated (and in some cases, executed) like spies. After the men managed to return to the USA through either escape or prisoner transfer, the Union government basically awarded everybody who participated with the first Medals of Honor for their bravery.
** The entire Confederate Navy might apply. Jefferson Davis issued letters of marque to private ships, essentially creating a navy of privateers. The Union planned to treat such men as pirates until Davis threatened to execute one Union prisoner for every Confederate sailor hanged.
* ZergRush
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!!Works that are set in this time period are:
[[AC:ComicBooks]]
* The French-Belgian comic book series ''LesTuniquesBleues''.
* Several issues of ''ComicBook/JonahHex'' dealt with Jonah's service in the war. In one issue, Jonah accidentally shoots Stonewall Jackson as the General returns from a reconnaissance, inflicting the wound which cost him his arm and precipitated his death shortly after due to sepsis.
[[AC:{{Film}}]]
* ''Disney's SongOfTheSouth'' is mistakenly thought to occur during this era, but it actually takes place in the post-Civil War Reconstructionist Period. It's received a lot of flak for its idealized portrayal of smiling, happy sharecroppers.
* The film ''{{Film/Glory}}'' -- Showed popular culture once and for all that black didn't just beg for their freedom, but fought for it.
* ''DancesWithWolves'' -- The central character is a Union Cavalry Lieutenant who voluntarily transferred to a remote post so that he could "see the frontier before it was gone". He had been wounded in the leg and was about to have it amputated. Preferring death to dismemberment, he borrowed a horse and rode it back and forth in front of the Confederate line. While the Rebels were trying to shoot him (and missing, since it's really hard to hit a moving target with a musket), the Union soldiers charged and took the field. The General rewarded him by having his private physician save his leg and gave him whatever posting he requested.
* ''Film/ColdMountain'' -- The novel featured both white and black characters, but the film is almost entirely white.
** They did integrate the battle of The Crater, which is historical (and pretty much happened that way).
* ''TheConspirator'' -- About the assassination of AbrahamLincoln and the trial of the conspirators, chiefly Mary Surratt.
* ''{{Gettysburg}}'' -- Four hour epic covering all three days of the Battle of Gettysburg, putting extra emphasis on the heroic actions on both sides. Confederate generals have a discussion around a campfire with a British lieutenant observer about how the war is not about slavery.
** The novel it was based off of (''The Killer Angels'' by Michael Shaara) was better.
*** The movie is shockingly faithful to the novel. About 90% of the novel's contents are intact in the movie.
* ''Major Dundee'' A ''Civil War Western'' epic by Sam Peckinpah. Union soldiers and Confederate prisoners ally to battle the Apaches. The Black soldiers are brave and noble, the southerners are more gallant and skillful than the northerners, and, of course, the Union commander, nominally the hero, is mainly motivated by cynical ambition.
* ''The Horse Soldiers'' -- John Wayne is the hero as a Union cavalryman (Benjamin Grierson, an actual historical character) but spends most of the movie running away from his enemies. Since Grierson's mission was behind-the-lines raiding, not fighting, his actions were considered a great military achievement at the time. What is telling, of course, is that this tale of Union soldiers running away from Confederates was virtually the only Civil War battle detailed in a major Hollywood movie or television show over the first sixty years of the sound era. It features a heroic Confederate charge, complete with streaming flags, a brave ''Southern Belle'', her loyal slave servants, and at one point Wayne's entire command is routed by a battle line of boys from a Mississippi military school! The two leading characters for the Union, played by Wayne and William Holden, are both war-hating pacifists.
** The incident with the Mississippi schoolboys described above is both a CrowningMomentOfHeartwarming and an example of WorthyOpponent, since Grierson/Wayne decided to have his troops deliberately retreat rather than risk a slaughter of the children. This incident in question may not have actually happened during Grierson's raid: it may owe something to the real-life Battle of New Market in 1864, when the student body of the Virginia Military Institute played a key part in the defeat of a numerically superior Union force.
** Director John Ford subverted many tropes, though. For instance, the loyal slave servant (Althea Gibson) [[{{Irony}} ends up]] [[spoiler: shot dead by a Confederate bushwhacker]] for her pains) and the SouthernBelle trope turns into comedy where the ladies of Newton Station throw dirt at the Yankee cavalrymen, dirtying themselves in the process. It also turns out that one of Marlowe/Wayne's men (played by Ford stalwart Hank Worden) knows the area from the time before the war when he helped slaves escape on the "Underground Railroad", and a couple of Confederate deserters (who by their very existence counter the trope of always honorable Southern soldiers) boast about their shooting prowess and then cross the MoralEventHorizon by using the time when one of them shot a female runaway slave right between the eyes. The [[ChildSoldiers schoolboys' action]] is played not as heroic, but equal parts tragedy - there's a real TearJerker moment when a mother begs the commander to spare her one surviving son and not take him into battle with him - and comedy - the little drummer boy then runs away from home (implying that [[AnAesop only ignorant child would want to seek martial glory]]?) to rejoin his comrades, but is captured by the Northerners who let him go after giving him a spanking. Also, the briefing with Grant and Sherman at the beginning makes it clear that the Marlowe/Wayne's raid is part of the operations that resulted in one of the great victories of the North, the taking of Vicksburg, and the brigade handsomely wins the two fights against grownup Confederates that it cannot avoid.
* Perhaps the film that put Hollywood on the map; ''TheBirthOfANation''.
* ''Film/TheGoodTheBadAndTheUgly''.
* ''{{Shenandoah}}'' -- Interestingly for a movie made in the sixties, neither side is displayed particularly flatteringly.
* ''Film/TheGeneral'' -- A Buster Keaton action-comedy about a southern train engineer who tries to become a soldier, and ends up defeating Yankee hijackers.
** Based on a real incident. The movie ''The Great Locomotive Chase'' is a decently accurate re-telling (from the Union Side).
* ''Andersonville''
* ''Django'' is set in the immediate aftermath of the Civil war: The title character is a veteran from the Union army and the villains are a FictionalCounterpart of the Ku Klux Klan.
* ''CSAConfederateStatesOfAmerica'' takes place in a world where the South won the Civil War (the turning point being the battle of Gettysburg). The United States is annexed by the Confederacy; manifest destiny and both World Wars still happen, but they have no qualms about exterminating or enslaving any non-White, non-Christian peoples.
** The executive producer was Spike Lee.
* ''GangsOfNewYork'': Takes place in New York as the Civil War is going on. Throughout the film we see examples of Union soldiers being recruited right off the ships as they immigrate to America, dislike of Lincoln from nativists, and the film's climax is interrupted by the outbreak of the New York Draft Riots.
* ''GoodbyeUncleTom''. Just before the war.
* ''TheThreeStooges'' short "Uncivil War Birds".
* ''Ride with the Devil'', an Ang Lee movie starring TobeyMacGuire, about civil war conflicts between the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayhawker Jayhawkers]] and [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushwhacker Bushwhackers]]. The protagonist is a young German immigrant that chooses to side with the Confederacy, although quickly he discovers the harsh nature of war, losing his friends one-by-one, then his illusions about the very meaning of his fight. A GrayAndGreyMorality movie. Note that the end followed the usual Chinese morality: [[spoiler:the Hero survives most of the war and seeing no real reason to continue, he chooses to go into the west start a new life with his new found family]].
* ''TheOutlawJoseyWales'' is set during the final months and immediately after the war, and follows title character Wales in his vendetta against a sadistic Union commander whose men had murdered Wales' family. The author of a book it was based on was an open and self-admitted segregationist and Klansman, thus the portrayal of the Union as monstrous.
* ''Film/{{Lincoln}}'' opens with a depiction of the Battle of Jenkins Ferry. Lincoln and his staff spend the first half of the movie planning the Battle of Fort Fisher; towards the end of the film, Lincoln visits the carnage of the Petersburg trenches. The balance of the film addresses Lincoln's efforts to pass the 13th Amendment ending slavery.
[[AC:{{Literature}}]]
* ''Film/GoneWithTheWind'' -- Written by a Georgian and very much in the southern heroic mode.
* HarryTurtledove's AlternateHistory novel ''How Few Remain'' was the starting point for his ''{{Timeline-191}}'' series, now nearly a dozen books and counting and up to only the end of WorldWarII.
** His ''TheGunsOfTheSouth'' was an entirely different AlternateHistory in which South African white supremacists [[TimeTravel go back in time]] to arm the Confederacy with modern weaponry (particularly AK-47s) and help them win the Civil War. One of the novel's two focus characters is Robert E. Lee (the other is a Confederate infantryman and schoolteacher who gives the "ground level" view of events).
** Another alternate-history novel is Ward Moore's ''BringTheJubilee'' which is set in a world where the South won the war. But then the protagonist gets involved in a [[spoiler: time-travel experiment and inadvertently ends up changing history during the Battle of Gettysburg, creating our real-world timeline.]]
* ''TheRedBadgeOfCourage''
* Bernard Cornwell's ''Starbuck Chronicles''
* Part of the BackStory for Creator/EdgarRiceBurroughs's ''JohnCarterOfMars'': he had been a Confederate officer.
* The children's novel ''AcrossFiveAprils'' is a recounting of the Civil War stories told to the author by her grandfather.
* AmbroseBierce gained early fame for his Civil War stories.
* The last third of ''FoxesOfHarrow'' by Frank Yerby.
* Multiple books of ''DearAmerica'' and its spinoffs.
* Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize winning ''The Killer Angels'', which was the basis for the movie {{Gettysburg}}, and largely responsible for rescuing Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain from the back pages of history. Shaara's son Jeff Shaara later wrote a prequel (''Gods and Generals'') and a sequel (''The Last Full Measure''). ''Gods and Generals'' depicts the beginning of the war, following Lee, Jackson, Hancock, and Chamberlain from joining their respective sides to late June of '83. ''The Killer Angels'' follows Lee, Longstreet, Buford, and Chamberlain through the battle of Gettysburg. ''The Last Full Measure'' is post-Gettysburg to Appamattox, and features Lee, Longstreet, Grant, and Chamberlain.
* Charles Frazier's ''Literature/ColdMountain'', which was also made into a movie.
* In ''TheHeroesOfOlympus'', it’s said that the Civil War was actually a war spurred on by the Greek and Roman demigod camps taking it out, which forced them to be permanently separated and told the other doesn’t exist to avoid further horrible wars between them. It’s likely the Greek side (which the main protagonists are on) was the Union, as Chiron mentions having trained Chamberlain in one of the earlier ''[[PercyJacksonAndTheOlympians Percy Jackson]]'' books; this would cause UnfortunateImplications, as the Roman-camp demigods are described as more warlike, untrusting, and violent...
* JTEdson's ''Civil War'' series is (unsurprisingly) set during the American Civil War.
* ''Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War'' by NewtGingrich and WilliamRForstchen, the first book of an AlternateHistory trilogy also composed of ''Grant Comes East'' and ''[[ColonCancer Never Call Retreat: Lee and Grant: The Final Victory]]''. The trilogy starts with a Confederate victory at Gettysburg but does '''not''' result in an overall Confederate victory. Basically, Lee's victory causes things to be worse than they were in real life, with the butcher's bill even more staggering for both sides. There's also a memorable scene where Lee's assault on Washington D.C. is bloodily repulsed, with the black troops of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry regiment playing a decisive role.
* ''Lee and Grant at Appomattox'', an historical fiction children’s novel by MacKinlay Kantor, unapologetically portrays Grant as a silent, shabby, and stubborn man who liked animals more than people as well as an unimaginative idiot who loves WeHaveReserves. Naturally, Lee is almost fawningly described and compared to heroic, martial Biblical figures.
* The Civil War trilogy: ''GodsAndGenerals'', ''{{Gettysburg}}'' and ''Last Full Measure''.
[[AC:{{Live-Action TV}}]]
* [[NorthAndSouthUS North and South]]
* ''The Blue and the Gray'' (like ''North and South'', a TV miniseries)
* KenBurns did one of his epic PBS Documentaries on the conflict, known simply as ''The Civil War''. It is remembered for its detail, fairness, depth, and its CrowningMusicOfAwesome, "[[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx6dxrhqPZY Ashokan Farewell]]."
* ''Series/TrueBlood'' has Bill, a 170 year old vampire who was once invited to speak at an event at the local church when it was found he had served during the civil war. The townspeople try to play down the fact he fought for the Confederacy.
* In ''HaveGunWillTravel'', Paladin served as an officer in the Union Army (apparently under that name) and frequently runs into people he served with.
* ''Series/{{Copper}}'' is set in New York during the civil war; Kevin Corcoran, Robert Morehouse and Matthew Freeman are all recently-returned Unionist veterans and the final episodes of series one feature a StoryArc with confederates plotting to attack Manhattan with Greek Fire. John Wilkes Booth also appears briefly in two episodes as an acquaintance of Elizabeth Haverford.
[[AC:{{Music}}]]
* The Decemberists' song "Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)" is a modern song set during the time of the Civil War, shown from the South's perspective.
* "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" by The Band, and later Joan Baez. The closing days of the Civil War as told by a fictional Confederate soldier. Written by a Canadian (Robbie Robertson)!
* "Across The Green Mountain" by BobDylan. Plays over the closing credits of ''Gods And Generals''. Another first-person account of a Confederate soldier.
* "Swan Swan H" by R.E.M. "Hurrah. We're all free now."
* "Gettysburg, 1863" by IcedEarth, a 32 minute song about the titular battle.
* The music video for "Some Nights" by fun.
[[AC:TabletopGames]]
* ''{{Deadlands}}''. Taking place in an AlternateHistory, the Civil War continues some 15 years after the real world culmination (1879, according to ''Deadlands: Reloaded'') due to a resurgence of supernatural activity at Gettysburg.
[[AC:VideoGames]]
* ''Damnation'' is set during a SteamPunk AlternateHistory version that drags on into the early 20th century, and involves a MegaCorp that sells weapons to both sides.
* ''DealtInLead'' A very, very [[AlternateHistory odd]] version of it.
* The Activision game ''Gun'' takes place after the Civil war, and features a Confederate General named after [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Magruder John Magruder]] as the villain. The game, while itself fun, however, has numerous instances of wildly inaccurate dates, such as the game taking place in 1880, but claiming that the Civil War ended ten years prior, when it actually ended 15 years prior. That's not even getting into the other [[WritersCannotDoMath rather stupid errors]] regarding date inconsistency in the game.
* ''The History Channel: Civil War - A Nation Divided'' is an Activision first person shooter set in the Civil War, where players can choose to play on either side in many major battles. Being a first person shooter, RareGuns had to be invoked to make the more rapid-fire guns of the era more common than they actually were in real life. Reloading sequences were also abbreviated[[note]]the revolvers skip adding precussion caps, for one, which would make them unable to fire in real life[[/note]] to speed them up a bit. Reviews were mostly mixed.
** Its sequel ''Civil War - Secret Missions'' is pretty much more of the same, except with more types of guns, somewhat better graphics, and focusing on covert missions related to major battles rather than the major battles themselves.
* The ''VideoGame/CivilWarGenerals'' series is a TurnBasedStrategy game allowing the player to command either side in some of the war's most famous battles.
* ''[[Videogame/EighteenSixtySixAMountAndBladeWestern 1866]]'' (GameMod for ''Videogame/MountAndBlade'') is a WideOpenSandbox StrategyRPG set one year after its end, but it still has some elements of it:
** The MultipleChoicePast quizz of character creation includes a question asking which side the player character chose during the war of the previous years. Note that the question also allows to be a former soldier of the war in Mexico instead of the American Civil War.
** There is a minor faction of Confederate [[TheRemnant remnants]] in the game.
** There is a quick battle scenario about the Battle of Gettysburg, in which the player is an Union soldier.
[[AC:WebOriginal]]
* ''[[http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/09/lee-at-the-alamo Lee at the Alamo]]'' is an online AlternateHistory short story by HarryTurtledove with the point of divergence being in December, 1860, when General David E. Twiggs is unable to take command of the Department of Texas, leaving Lt. Colonel Robert E. Lee as the commander. The story takes place a few months later, just after Texas has voted to join the Confederate States. Lt. Colonel Lee concludes that it is his duty to defend U.S. munitions and property in San Antonio, Texas, including the fabled Alamo, rather than allow their surrender to the seceding Texas government, as Twiggs did do in RealLife, even if he expresses that he has no love for the about-to-take-office Lincoln and his policies. This puts him in a quandary later when his home state Virginia secedes since he's now a hero in the Union. After having had men die under him fighting Confederates, he just doesn't feel right changing sides anymore, nor does he feel right just sitting out the war in safety while people are dying. He settles for a compromise and has Lincoln assign him to the western theater of the war so that he doesn't have to fight Virginia directly.
[[AC:WesternAnimation]]
* Three episodes of ''WesternAnimation/{{Histeria}}''
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