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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Civil War Prisons In American Memory, Benjamin Gregory Cloyd
Civil War Prisons In American Memory, Benjamin Gregory Cloyd
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
The memory of Civil War prisons has always been contested. Since 1861, generations of Americans struggled with the questions raised by the deaths of approximately 56,000 prisoners of war, almost one-tenth of all Civil War fatalities. During the war, throughout Reconstruction, and well into the twentieth century, a sectional debate raged over the responsibility for the prison casualties. Republican politicians invoked the savage cruelty of Confederate prisons as they waved the bloody shirt, while hundreds of former prisoners published narratives that blamed various prison officials and promoted sectional bitterness. The animosity reflected a need to identify individuals responsible for the …
Marching Masters: Slavery, Race, And The Confederate Army, 1861-1865, Colin Edward Woodward
Marching Masters: Slavery, Race, And The Confederate Army, 1861-1865, Colin Edward Woodward
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Many historians have examined the Civil War soldier, but few scholars have explored the racial attitudes and policies of the Confederate army. Although Southern men did not fight for slavery alone, the defense of the peculiar institution, and the racial control they believed it assured, united rebels in their support of the Confederacy and the war effort. Amid the destruction of the Civil War, slavery became more important than ever for men battling Yankee armies. The war, nevertheless, tested Confederate soldiers’ idealized view of human bondage. Federal armies wrecked havoc on masters’ farms and plantations, seized hundreds of thousands of …