Impact of the Civil War essays

Impact of the Civil War essays War, for the most part, has been glorified. The stories have been packed full of honor and bravery in the face of danger. Join the Army, its an adventure, the government tells me and my peers. Though if you sat down with someone whos seen war, the blood soaked battle fields, their dead friend with a bayonet sticking out of his chest, theyll tell you a different story about war. Stripped of its honor and bravery its nothing more butchery. As horrible as it may seem I regretfully think that its here to stay. Well just keep making bigger and better weapons until we blow each other to hell and wipe the Earth clean of all human life. Allan Nevins feels that war is atrocious and overly glorified. He spoke of the Civil War in particular. Possibly one of the bloodiest in our history and the sod thing is that we were killing our own people. Nevins believes that war had two sides the glorious and the terrible. The glorious is represented in things such as statues, poems, and novels (Nevins pg 212). The terrible is represented in pictures of the battlefields and the stories told by those that were there. The battlefield surgical facilities during the Civil War were of the same caliber of those in Napoleons time(Nevins pg 215). Many of the wounded soldiers received no attention for at least a couple days. By that time many had died of shock(Nevins pg 215). From a passage out of Battles and Leaders , General John D. Imboden speaks of soldiers in his forces saying things like,My God! Why cant I die?,My God! Will no one have mercy and kill me?, and Stop! Oh, for Gods sake stop just for one minute; take me out and leave me to die on the roadside.(Nevins pg 216) The war brought with it immorality and neglect. Many large cities were equipped with saloons, brothels, and casinos (Nevins pg 220). Perhaps the largest impact of the war w ...