![]() ![]() I generally call it “the Civil War” because, well, that’s the generally accepted name. Rebellion was simply what Union soldiers, and sometimes even Confederate ones, called the war. They commonly used phrases like “this rebellion” and “the great rebellion.” Northerners followed the course of the war in Frank Moore’s popular Rebellion Record, which began to run in 1861, and Lincoln himself frequently used the word “rebellion” to describe the war in public and in private. James Langhorne of the 4th Virginia Infantry lamented to his mother, “I think our country is doomed to a civil war of years duration.” Throughout the struggle Confederates likewise spoke of the “civil war,” or just “this war.”īut most often, Northerners referred to the war as a rebellion. “Now we are engaged in a great civil war,” President Lincoln famously declared in the Gettysburg Address. Understanding why helps us to better understand how the war’s participants understood the conflict, and how they remembered it.ĭuring the war, Northerners and Southerners sometimes used the uncapitalized phrase “civil war” as a declarative description of the mess in which they found themselves, but Civil War was not yet a proper noun. It was called that because the rebellion was what the people who actually fought the war, especially but not only on the Union side, were most likely to call it. ![]() It can come as a surprise, then, to see that its full title is The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. ![]() Its shorthand nickname is the O.R., for Official Records. That massive resource has been a first port of call for historians, amateur and professional, since the moment of its publication today digitization has made it even more widely accessible. In 1881 the United States government published the first of many volumes of the official records of its war with the Confederate States of America. More than 150 years after the shooting began, controversy remains over what to call the conflict between the United States of America and Confederate States of America. Georgetown history professors Chandra Manning and Adam Rothman shed some light on the contemporaneous literature: ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |