March 5, 1865 The part of this letter that most stood out to me was a comment made by Abbott in respect to hospitals that speaks of the larger conflict as a whole. He says, “but a hospital here and one in the states are different institutions entirely.” At this point, Abbott is in Chattanooga, clearly still in the South. What’s interesting to pay attention to is the fact that he says a hospital in the South is completely different from one in the states (emphasis on "states" here). I think it’s commonly known that the northern United States and the Confederacy were viewed as separate entities during the war but it’s still striking to see it stated so plainly. Despite the fact that these two parts really were one big country, and had been until very recently, no longer mattered. It does seem that Abbott views the southern states as not being in the United States. It’s interesting to consider that Union soldiers didn’t consider themselves to be in the United States anymore when they were in places like Tennessee or Georgia. Again, this is something I knew about before, yet it is definitely strange to think about. Imagine going to Florida or Texas and needing a passport? Indeed, the two halves of the country really were opposite cultures from one another. The South was overwhelmingly agricultural (one of the reasons why slavery was still viewed as a valuable institution there) and had very few industrial areas. On the flip side, the North featured far more industrial centers and factories. Slavery was nonexistent with a large part of the labor force being European immigrants. Northerners typically held careers in such areas as “business, medicine, or education.” Additionally, these children were more likely to go to school than their Southern counterparts. Now, this is just my thought, but it really does appear that the North was progressing more satisfactorily than the South, which seemed very much stuck in the past. One of the biggest differences, and one that we frequently read about in Abbott’s letters, is that of the railroad. Around 35% of the United States’ railroad tracks were in the South pre-Civil War. This is consistent with the fact that the North was more industrialized, since it would have more need to utilize trains to transport products. Abbott frequently talks about pulling up railroad lines in the South as well as how important trains were in transporting soldiers. With almost ¾ of the country’s tracks in the North, the Union army certainly had a significant advantage over the South, especially in terms of weapons production (with the factories) and transportation of supplies and troops. It is definitely weird to think about how different the two parts of the country were during the Civil War. It is true today that there are differences between the various parts of the United States. But I don’t think they are as extreme as they were during the Civil War. The North and South were viewed as completely different cultures, whereas today the different cultural regions in the U.S. are all viewed to comprise an overall United States culture. The image I’ve included is a chart from the Civil War Trust website comparing the North and South in a few different ways. I thought it was a good example of the stark contrasts between the two halves. Works Cited/Photo Credit: The Civil War Trust: Saving America’s Civil War Battlefields. “North and South: Different Cultures, Same Country.” http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/civil-war-overview/northandsouth.html (accessed March 19, 2014).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorTessa Wakefield, student intern at the Concordia College Archives, assembled these blog entries in 2013-2014 for the Isaac Mark Abbott Civil War Letters Collection. The posts summarize the content of the letters, interpret Abbott's experiences and place them in the larger context of the Civil War. Archives
March 2014
Categories
All
|