As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
This is going to be a different examination of war, but is as all war, including the American Civil War. Always there is the focus on glorious victory and enjoyment over horrific numbers of dead, but deliberately censored in this and that is where the Lame Cherry wills to bring you.
What if as you were reading this, armed soldiers appeared at your door, broke it down and started hauling off all of your food with glee, as they tossed to your protests worthless currency as there was nothing to buy in the stores.
What if they shot your dog, your cat ran out the open door and you never saw it again. What if instead of your car, you had a horse you had raised since a colt, and it was confiscated as part of the war effort, as your squawking chickens and squealing pigs would be feeding that army tonight.
What if there was nothing left, the food was gone the wood was gone, the fuel for your lamps, and nothing was left for as far as you could walk and all you had left was weeds for your coffee and weeds for your soup.
Do you think Southerners enjoyed eating mustard greens and pork rinds? They ate this because their State was stripped bare. There was nothing left, because your living where you lived made you expendable.
In cities and towns, women signed on to do jobs once filled by men, such as working as clerks or assembling munitions. On small farms North and South,
women and children raised the crops and tended the livestock. On large plantations in the South, women had to extend their management duties beyond the household into
the fields, relaying orders to overseers and slaves. Although women gained the satisfaction of keeping their families together and contributing to the war effort, they also
found it extremely challenging to add new duties to their already busy lives. Many families struggled to make ends meet. Families that lived near the fighting suffered consid-
erably because both sides stripped the countryside of food, forage for horses, and wood for fires
There is a sound and a scent of a battlefield as it lives and dies. The sounds are groans and screams. The scents are that earthy wet sour of bodies rotting in mass, and the wounded suffering, as the civilians are left to deal with all that has been placed on their front lawns and on the fields where their children played.
People who witnessed battles and skirmishes in their communities were devastated by the loss of life and the destruction around them. From the roar of cannons to the cries of the wounded, the sounds of the Civil War shook people to the core, and the sights that
confronted those who ventured onto the battlefield after the fighting were even worse. In Tennessee, large scale battles such as Shiloh, Stones River, and Franklin
left more wounded than local residents could care for.
Almost every available nearby building became a temporary hospital in the aftermath of these battles. Women in particular tended the wounded. Residents also
helped bury the dead.
It was just the failed politicians, and failed military leaders, but the pretenders who settled what was within by venting without. It is noted in this that the Confederates were executed by the Union, but the Union never prosecuted their own terrorists.
Petty disagreements often fueled the violence, and antagonisms created
during the war continued long afterward. Perhaps most notorious in Tennessee was the feud between Confederate Samuel “Champ” Ferguson and Unionist David “Tinker Dave” Beatty on the Cumberland Plateau, where the population was very divided over the war. Ferguson in 1865 became one of only two Confederates executed by the U.S. army.
620, thousand dead Soldiers, but how many stray bullets or shells killed a civilian. How many civilians died from contact with these armies who brought stress and disease by their all consuming presence.
Throughout the nation, both veterans and civilians had to come to terms with the Civil War’s devastating death toll of close to 620,000 men. It would take decades for many communities to recover, both physically and emotionally.
There is a history in the Civil War which Ken Burns in his racist Lost Cause propaganda never examined. It had to do with a casualty rate which far outstripped the humans. It was the slaughter of the animals.
Horse and mule casualties far surpassed the total number of soldiers that died during the conflict. And was the fate of soldiers, more equines perished from disease or exhaustion than from being hit by bullets. Many died of glanders, which is a highly infectious disease that affects a horse’s nasal passages, respiration and skin. Besides battle causalities, horses had difficulty maintaining the four miles per hour pace regularly achieved by the cavalry. Horses also ate little and drank from muddied streams, and they often became gaunt and sickly.
There are only rough estimates in the number of horses, mules and donkeys which died, but their numbers may have been 5 times that of the humans. These were horses which civilians owned. Some were property to be sold for profit, but numbers were confiscated as war bootie by the Union. The fact is at Gettysburg more horses died than humans.
General Longstreet recorded his officers would return to him with bridle and saddles in hand from the field as their horses were large targets which were gunned for.
During the conflict it is estimated that between 1,000,000 and 3,000,000 equines died, including horses, mules, donkeys and even confiscated children’s ponies. It is estimated that the horse casualties at the Battle of Gettysburg alone, July 1 to July 3, 1863, exceeded 3,000. Diaries and letters of soldiers often mentioned the stench of dead steeds rising up from the fields of battle.You will find references to herds of cattle which of course were food in the thousands and all were slaughtered with that purpose, herded behind the armies. There was though the reality that in the Shenandoah, in driving out General Early, General Sheridan required 150 new horses every day for that campaign in 1865.
General Custer spoke of acquiring one of these confiscated horses which he named Phil Sheridan, that Libby Custer loved to ride, and died after the war. That horse though was some citizen's property confiscated. That horse was spared of the death of war, but 210,000 horses perished in 1864 and those horses came from all across what was America then.
Although by 1864 the sight of one dead horse was common place, the handsome mount was difficult and costly to replace. It was also much easier to replace a soldier than a horse. As the conflict progressed, the Union Army struggled to acquire the 500 horses it needed daily to sustain its army in the field. Sheridan himself required 150 additional steeds each day during the 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign. The army therefore bought and captured nearly 210,000 horses in 1864 in order to offset the mounts that had died.
Even in Lincoln's War of stealing Southern property, at 50 dollars per horse or mule, that would be 150 million dollars in animals alone Abraham Lincoln used up and there was not any replacing a prized pet stolen from a family and left to be slaughtered in a war which Abraham Lincoln had no reason for fighting as General Winfield Scott stated the South would return to the Union in a few years.
This is what Lincoln's Preservation of the Union looked like to the Americans inflicted upon for the financiers who he started this war for.
Is all of this so glorious when it was people's pets? Why is it then something you do not demand a stop being put to it when it is your children doing without, for welfare hand outs to foreign invaders and expanding military budgets in more wars to profit those same Wall Street, London, Paris and Berlin financiers.
The Dead of the Civil War
The Civilian in Civil War
agtG
