Life in the north and south before the civil war

Crew[ edit ] North and South was directed by Richard T. Edwards, and Kathleen A. It was produced by David L.

Between the years andthe United States engaged in a civil war, one of the most significant military confrontations in the young republic's life. The conflict dramatically altered the course of American society, eradicating the institution of slavery from the land and accelerating a number of social, economic, and political trends originating in other regions of the country.

It also made lasting cultural impressions across imaginative and material American landscapes, including the gradual growth of a complex tourist industry built upon memory, patriotism, and consumerism, and the immediate expression of a deeply rooted, though politically sensitive, religious attachment to a distinctly southern way of life.

The Civil War, however, was a major turning point in American history for another reason as well: While antebellum America demonstrated marked preoccupations with the reality of death in literature, material culture, religion, diaries and letters, and early medicine, the war led to the extreme escalation of certain tendencies emerging on the social scene, as well as to the production of entirely new views on death and the dead.

The incredible numbers of young men who died during the war, the problems associated with disposal of their bodies, and the rhetorical and symbolic efforts to make sense of the lives lost had profound consequences for American sensibilities and institutional structures.

The Presence of Death During the war years, death was a pervasive element of social life in both the northern and southern sections of the country. Up until the war, Americans were quite familiar with the presence of death, intimate with its consequences in their own homes and local communities.

Some estimates suggest that in the North, where more accurate records of the period are available, the crude death rate in the antebellum period was around 15 per 1, in rural areas, and between 20 and 40 per 1, in more populated cities.

Most people lived into their late thirties if they survived the exceedingly dangerous early years of life. Chances of dying in childhood were also quite high, according to many studies. Infant mortality hovered around per 1, live births, and roughly 10 percent of individuals between one year and twenty-one years died from a wide range of causes.

Despite this close and personal awareness of human mortality, Americans during the Civil War had a radically different set of experiences with death than previously. First and foremost, this conflict produced more deaths than any other war in U. The total number of deaths for both the North and the South, in the four-year period, was overWorld War II is the only other major conflict that comes close to this number, when overindividuals died in battles across the ocean.

More demographic information is available for the Northern armies than for the Confederacy, which did not have the resources to keep accurate records on soldiers.

According to some historians, roughly one out of sixteen white males in the North between the ages of sixteen and forty-three lost his life during the war. Even more astonishing than the overall mortality rates for the entire conflict are the number for particular battles: During the three-day battle at Gettysburg, for example, 3, Union soldiers died; at Antietam, during one day of fighting, the Union lost over 2, young men.

The carnage left on these and other sites, for both sides, boggles the mind, and must have been overwhelming to Americans viewing photographs, visiting battlefields, or reading detailed accounts in newspapers. Another significant difference between this war and other wars after the Revolution is the proximity of the battles to American communities.

The Civil War not only took place on American soil, it pitted neighbor against neighbor, family against family, countrymen against countrymen.

More threatening to American soldiers during the war than mortal wounds on the battlefield was the presence of disease and infection, which had the potential to seriously reduce the number of fighters on both sides.

Nearly twice as many men died as a result of poor health in camps and hospitals than from wounds inflicted during combat. What did soldiers die from? Afflictions such as diarrhea, malaria, smallpox, typhoid fever, pneumonia, and measles wiped out large numbers of men on both sides of the conflict.

The deadly power of disease swept through the ranks because of the incredibly poor conditions in camps, resulting from inadequate shelter, contaminated water supplies, unhealthy diet, and a limited knowledge about proper sanitation and safe hygienic practices. As the war progressed, the Union forces worked especially hard to improve the living conditions of soldiers and patients—death became an urgent public health issue that could be combated with sound, rational decisions about such simple things as clean water, healthy food, and adequate sanitation.

Under wartime conditions, Americans in general, and soldiers in particular, acquired a unique familiarity with human mortality. Regardless of the formidable presence of death in life during the antebellum years, the Civil War posed a series of new challenges for those affected by the carnage— which is to say nearly every American at the time— and produced new attitudes that reflected distinct modifications in how these Americans made sense of death and disposed of their dead.

In the midst of war, unorthodox views on death and the dead body emerged out of the entirely unparalleled experience with human violence, suffering, and mortality in U. On the other hand, some perspectives demonstrated a degree of continuity with more traditional views on the meaning of death, and reinforced deeply rooted religious sensibilities circulating before the onset of the conflict.A lesson plan on compare and contrast the Norther and Southern regions of the United States before the Civil War.

Grades: Middle and High School Length of Time: class days Goals: Students will research and write on . Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War [Andrew F. Smith] on regardbouddhiste.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers.

A historian’s new look at how Union blockades brought about the defeat of a hungry Confederacy In April In the decades before the Civil War, northern and southern development followed increasingly different paths.

Civil War Timeline, Civil War Timeline	Visit Website Did you know?
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By , the North contained 50 percent more people than the South. It was more urbanized and attracted many more European immigrants. Narratives by fugitive slaves before the Civil War and by former slaves in the postbellum era are essential to the study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American history and literature, especially as they relate to the eleven states of the Old Confederacy, an area that included approximately one third of the population of the United States at the time when slave narratives were most.

The Civil War Home Page contains thousands of pages of Civil War material including Photos, Images, Battles, Documents, Associations, Letters & Diaries, Research Records, Biographical Information, Reenacting and Unit Information.

Life Before the Civil War Activity 1. In the decade-and-a-half prior to the Civil War, the United States saw dramatic changes in industrialization in the North, and a rapid increase in transportation (rail and steamship) all over the country.