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To learn more, visit our Earning Credit Page Transferring credit to the school of your choice Not sure what college you want to attend yet? Browse Articles By Category Browse an area of study or degree level. You are viewing lesson Lesson 11 in chapter 8 of the course:. US Constitution for Elementary US Government for Elementary American Revolution for Elementary Americans in History for Elementary Civil Rights for Elementary American Colonies for Elementary The Civil War for Elementary School. Prominent Americans for Elementary The Depression for Elementary Space Race for Elementary Latest Lessons What is Military Time?

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Browse Browse by subject. Enrolling in a course lets you earn progress by passing quizzes and exams. Take quizzes and exams. Earn certificates of completion. You will also be able to: Create a Goal Create custom courses Get your questions answered. Upgrade to Premium to add all these features to your account! What best describes you? Choose one Student Teacher Parent Tutor. What's your main goal? Overcome with emotion from this profusion of sickness and death, one private wrote in despair: Those who fell to sickness were stricken by the fear—and the near certainty—of approaching death.

Sick and well alike yearned for the comforts of home and to be magically transported from this strange land where so many men were dying. So many men were sick that the routine camp duty for those who remained healthy became more strenuous than ever, for now there were fewer hands to do the work.

Who Was the Common Soldier of America’s Civil War?

Throughout the desolation of this epidemic, the 15th Alabama—just like all the other regiments—was ordered to keep up its drill four hours a day, although those who were not sick began to lose their strength under the physical burdens they had to bear. Oates became outraged at the desperate situation. He faulted the army for keeping the sick in the same camp with the healthy men, which ensured that those who were not yet sick soon would be. Years later he wrote in anger:.


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I do not know who was responsible for it, but it was a great mistake. There was not that care taken of the men of any regiment, so far as my observation extended, which foresight, prudence and economy of war material—leaving humanity out of the question—imperatively demanded…. Had the Confederate authorities made more persistent efforts than they did, hospitals could have been more established in sufficient numbers to have saved the lives of hundreds and thousands of good men, which were for the want of them unnecessarily sacrificed.

Oates believed that the surgeons could be blamed as well. Surely the sights and sounds of death had been more than enough for them at Pageland, but the Alabamians once more had to march across the Manassas battlefield, where those dour reminders of war and combat remained exposed in their shallow graves. From the battlefield, Oates led his men—beaten down by the heat, their own fatigue, and somber thoughts of death—along the Alexandria Pike until they reached a vast open field, not altogether unlike Pageland, about five miles east of Centreville and three miles west of Fairfax Court House.

There they established Camp Toombs, named in honor of Robert Augustus Toombs of Georgia, who had resigned his appointment as Confederate secretary of state to become a brigadier general. The measles predictably followed the column from Pageland to Camp Toombs, even though the sickest men had been quarantined at Pageland. The men of the 15th Alabama, and of a good number of other regiments as well, kept dying.

The doctor told him to stay in his tent, which soldiers were not allowed to do, especially when it came time for drill and dress parade. Oates, however, released Cody from duty from several days and allowed him to get stronger. The army had an epidemic on its hands, and no one seemed to know quite what to do about it.

Civil War Soldiers | HistoryNet

The men turned to religion, as people—and particularly soldiers—do in times of doubt or utter despair. They were desperate, these young Confederate boys who cherished their Bibles and wrote home to their families to inform them that they kept up with their Scripture readings despite the taxing demands that the army placed on them every day.

He carried the book through several battles, treasuring the gift and honoring the girl who had given it to him.


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In camp, an itinerant preacher arrived to do some Bible thumping and held a prayer meeting that attracted large numbers of soldiers. The preacher handed out Bibles to the men, but only if they would promise to carry the Good Book with them, which many of them did. Ill and dying soldiers from the 15th Alabama, including the ones who had been left behind at Pageland and those who had more recently succumbed to disease in Camp Toombs, were transported in uncomfortable springless wagons to the field hospital in Haymarket.

The village, located about six miles southwest of the Manassas battlefield, was not a perfect place to set up a hospital. The men of the 15th Alabama were brought to St. For some, those who held to their faith, knowing they were housed in a church gave them succor and hope. For others, they must have been pleased, at the very least, to have a sturdy and dry roof over their heads.

Many of the sick, however, were quartered in tents raised in the fields around the church, the fields that already held those soldiers who had not recovered from their wounds after the Battle of Manassas. Others were given beds of straw and hay under the only protection available—the tall trees that shaded the yard around the church.

The sick were attended by Dr. Stanford, a native of Georgia who had enlisted in the 15th Alabama at Fort Mitchell on the Chattahoochee, and by a Dr. Shepherd of Eufaula, Alabama, who was nearly 75 years old. Stanford had carefully selected Haymarket as the site of the regimental hospital. Convalescents provided the nursing care to their comrades at the hospital.

The nights in October were cold, and early in the month there was frost, and the suffering of the sick men was intolerable…. It was no uncommon sight at that hospital to see six or seven corpses of 15th Alabama men laid out at once. There were probably worse places to die than under those high trees heavenly trees, the locals call them or in the peaceful fields surrounding the church or in the quiet chancel of St. But the men did die, and whether the place was good or bad, serene or bedlam, the only thing that mattered was that poor boys who could not do anything to save themselves, young men a very long way from their homes in Alabama, were slipping away.

In time, the epidemic abated and the deaths finally ceased, but the Confederate forces in northern Virginia had already paid a very stiff price by losing good men, young men who had not yet even experienced the horror of combat but who had come to know of hell by confronting an invisible enemy against whom they had no defense.

At Camp Toombs, where the remainder of the 15th Alabama spent that autumn, camp life fell into the same old routines. Company and battalion drill, said Oates, was the daily occupation. Years afterward he remembered: As for the sick and dying at Haymarket, Oates could not take his mind off them.

Their suffering, as he had said, was unbearable—to them and to their comrades who survived. It is not known precisely how many men the 15th Alabama buried in the fields around St. A stone marker near the entrance to the church states flatly, without mention of the dead of the 15th Alabama: Oates thought that at least men died there and were buried in the churchyard, but in old age, as he wrote his memoirs and strained to remember the details of the Haymarket hospital, he caught himself and confessed that the number must have been much greater.

With sadness in his heart, Oates said he thought the estimates were all low. And he was probably right. It seems likely that no less than men from the 15th Alabama, and perhaps considerably more than that, fell from disease at Haymarket and are buried in the fields or what is left of them to the north and west of the church building. Haymarket was not unique in the autumn of , for there were hospital sites just like the one at St. The hell faced by the men of the 15th Alabama at Haymarket was experienced by thousands of soldiers on both sides. Few of the men who got sick in their camps recovered from their illnesses; most who contracted measles or mumps or whooping cough or typhoid—or any of the other highly contagious and highly lethal diseases that sliced through Civil War armies—died without ever really understanding what had happened to them or why they had to die.

Over the next four years, disease continued to take its toll in the Confederate and Union ranks, and the terrible scenes that had taken place at Pageland, Camp Toombs, and Haymarket would repeat themselves across the American countryside until the war, and all its hard suffering, finally ended. Oates and the boys of the 15th Alabama learned in the late summer and autumn was a lesson learned by every soldier in every war.

It was a lesson as old as time. War is all misery, cruelty, and hell. Army at the time, the Confederate army was not very ethnically diverse.

Confederate Soldier Facts: Lesson for Kids

A small number of Asian men were forcibly inducted into the Confederate army against their will when they arrived in Louisiana from overseas. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. McPherson , For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War , p. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War , pp. General officers in the Confederate States Army. Confederate mortar crew at Warrington, Florida in , across from Fort Pickens. Ranks and insignia of the Confederate States. Native Americans in the American Civil War. Cherokee in the American Civil War. American Civil War portal.

Grant Postage stamps and postal history of the Confederate States. Estimates of the number of individual Union soldiers range between 1,, and 2,,, with a number between 2,, and 2,, most likely. Union Army records show slightly more than 2,, enlistments but this number apparently includes many re-enlistments. These figures represent the total number of individual soldiers who served at any time during the war, not the size of the army at any given date. The best conjecture for United States Army wounded is , America's Unfinished Revolution, Retrieved 3 August Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.

What They Fought For, ". National Cable Satellite Corporation. Archived from the original on March 9, Retrieved March 9, America's Unfinished Revolution, — United States of America: Retrieved March 2, November 15, by Margaret Wood. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Retrieved January 19, Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Why Men Fought in the Civil War pp Crucible of the Civil War Virginia from secession to commemoration. University of Virginia Press. Soldiers of the Cross: Soldier-Christians and the Impact of the War on their Faith. While God is Marching On. Watson, "Religion and combat motivation in the Confederate armies. Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. Confederate soldiers from slaveholding families expressed no feelings of embarrassment or inconsistency in fighting for their own liberty while holding other people in slavery.


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  6. New York City, New York: Oxford University Press, Inc. Retrieved April 1, It would be wrong, however, to assume that Confederate soldiers were constantly preoccupied with this matter. In fact, only 20 percent of the sample of Southern soldiers explicitly voiced proslavery convictions in their letters or diaries. In the Union sample only 9 percent of the men were born abroad compared with 24 percent of all Union soldiers.

    Unskilled and even skilled laborers are underrepresented in both samples. Indeed, while about one-third of all Confederate soldiers belonged to slaveholding families, slightly more than two-thirds of the sample whose slaveholding status is known did so Officers are overrepresented in both samples. While some 10 percent of Civil War soldiers served as officers for at least half of their time in the army, 47 percent of the Confederate sample and 35 percent of the Union sample did so.

    Both samples are also skewed toward those who volunteered in —62 and therefore contain disproportionately few draftees New York City, New York. The Proclamation is worth three hundred thousand soldiers to our Government at least It shows exactly what this war was brought about for and the intention of its damnable authors. The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem. First Harvard University Press. Retrieved July 1, Coski examines the fights over the symbol's meaning in 'The Confederate Battle Flag: University of Georgia Press. Weitz, A higher duty: Bearman, "Desertion as localism: Army unit solidarity and group norms in the US Civil War.

    The more fiercely the Confederacy fought for its independence, the more bitterly divided it became. To fully understand the vast changes the war unleashed on the country, you must first understand the plight of the Southerners who didn't want secession". Archived from the original on December 18, The erosion of Confederate loyalty in Floyd County, Virginia.

    South Carolina Historical Magazine. Absenteeism among Western North Carolina Soldiers, — The Civil War dictionary. Archived from the original on January 13, Anatomy of a Confederate Reprisal. Collins, "System in the South: Mallet, Josiah Gorgas, and uniform production at the confederate ordnance department. Daniel, Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee: David Baird; et al.

    Retrieved January 5, Archived from the original PDF on July 23, They Say the Wind is Red. More Civil War Curiosities. Retrieved March 8, White Southerners founded the Confederacy on the ideology of white supremacy. Confederate soldiers on their way to Antietam and Gettysburg, their two main forays into U. Confederates maltreated black U. American Heritage History of the Battle of Gettysburg.

    Wartime Fashion

    Retrieved March 5, Lee 's troops seized scores of free black people in Maryland and Pennsylvania and sent them south into slavery. This was in keeping with Confederate national policy, which virtually re-enslaved free people of color into work gangs on earthworks throughout the south. The New York Times.

    The New York Times Company. Frederick Douglass' Black Confederate".

    A Civil War Blog. Buffalo Soldiers and the Medal of Honor, Lee and His Army in Confederate History. A History of the Confederate States of America. The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation. Seddon January , Cobb, Howell January 8, Archived from the original on March 8, Archived from the original on Archived from the original on January 9, Retrieved January 9, Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism , p.

    LII, Part 2, pp. The Decision to Raise a Negro Army, —". The Negro's Civil War: Retrieved March 11, Civil War on the Western Border: The Missouri-Kansas Conflict, — The Kansas City Public Library. Archived from the original on November 5, Retrieved November 5, Ultimately, very few blacks serve in the Confederate armed forces, as compared to hundreds of thousands who serve for the Union.

    The Essential Reference Guide. Retrieved August 28, The Confederate States of America, — Smith, "Race and Retaliation: Archived from the original on May 3, Retrieved May 3, I have given the subject of arming the Negro my hearty support. This, with the emancipation of the Negro, is the heaviest blow yet given the Confederacy.

    The South rave a greatdeel about it and profess to be very angry. Archived from the original on March 7, Retrieved March 6, Negros as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens , vol.

    Putnam Son's, , pp. Joint Resolution on the Subject of Retaliation. Karcher, First Woman in the Republic Liberty, Liberty, Equality, Power. Negro Troops in the Union Army, — Letters of Colonel William Pegram, C. The Old Dominion in the Civil War , , pp. Enhanced Concise Fourth Edition. Confederate troops sometimes murdered black soldiers and their officers as they tried to surrender. In most cases, though, Confederate officers returned captured black soldiers to slavery or put them to hard labor on southern fortifications Expressing outrage at this treatment, in the Lincoln administration suspended the exchange of prisoners until the Confederacy agree to treat white and black prisoners alike.

    Archived from the original on April 7, Retrieved April 7, The law of nations knows of no distinction of color, and if an enemy of the United States should enslave and sell any captured persons of their Army, it would be a case for the severest retaliation, if not redressed upon complaint. Archived from the original on April 21, The Civil War Day by Day: United States Department of Veterans Affairs. Archived from the original on July 30,