Union Military Strategy in 1864, history homework help Humanities Assignment Help

In 4-5 sentences, respond to the following:

Kirby made some arguments on the impact of the Civil War on the environment that some historians seem uninterested, however, and few academic military specialists have read environmental history.  On the other side, more than three decades of accumulated literature in environmental history barely touch the Civil War.  This is because the bulk of environmental history is western history, set usually beyond the pale of Civil War fighting.  The “New Western History” that has provoked so much controversy recently is to a considerable extent environmental, a tragic narrative of human depredations upon semi-arid and arid landscapes.  Most historians of environment happen to be westerners, too, and the best graduate programs in the field are in Wisconsin, Kansas, and California.  Ergo the parallelism.  Easterners (it would seem) must wrench environmental-historical criticism backwards, across the Mississippi (Kirby, 2016).

Kirby said that all wars are environmental catastrophes.  Armies destroy farms and livestock; they go through forests like termites; they foul waters; they spread disease; they bombard the countryside with heavy armaments and leave unexploded shells; they deploy chemical poisons that linger far longer than they do; they leave detritus and garbage behind (Widmer, 2014).

This failure to unite Civil War and environmental histories troubled Kirby because he noted that since at least the 1970s “Americans have belonged to a culture steeped in ecological language and politics,” one that presumes a connection between humans and the natural world. Kirby suggested that they needed an environmental analysis of the Civil War because “no one alive at the dawn of the twenty-first century, from the oldest among us to our most immature students, can conceive of war without environmental danger if not disaster.”  Kirby argued that failing to understand the war as an ecological event ignores these important cultural and intellectual developments (Brady, 2012).

The environmental change that I think made the most significant and long-standing impact in US history was Kirby presented a preliminary environmental impact statement of the war, highlighting issues such as disease, destruction of rural and urban landscapes, deforestation, and the ecological ramifications of emancipation and of the death of hundreds of thousands of people and millions of animals.

In 4-5 sentences, respond to the following:

 According to Jack Kirby (Center, n.d.) the main argument that he makes on the impact of the Civil War is that historians and students need to look as far back as the Civil War to begin an environmental analysis. The impacts that he discusses are disease, death, animals, cities and towns, farmland, and trees and forests. However, he explains later on that this damage was only temporary and not very significant at all. During the reconstruction the South expanded its commodity production and exports during the post war. The clearing of trees and forest opened up more land to be farmed and tripled cotton production from the 1860s production. These losses did not impede the economic growth for the South. This also assisted in the building of railroads across the southern Appalachians.

  The environmental change that I believe had the most significant and longstanding impact was disease. I chose this because it affected many things such as men, women, horses, and the environment as a whole. If men did not die in battle, the death rate for disease was high. This caused women to have to run farmlands, created an unbalanced sex ratio that left child bearing able women the companionship to increase family size for at least a generation, and reduced labor, business, and private life. Like in prisons or encampments, the spread of disease was brutal, not only for the humans but horses as well. When a horse died of disease, it could not be moved and buried like a human, therefore the disease ridden horse carcass laid there to decompose into the ground.

In 4-5 sentences, respond to the following:

Kirby makes some good arguments about the environment. He talks about how the landscape had changed because of the war. Disease and death to humans and animals because of the large number of people and animals working, eating, and sleeping in close quarters. Cities and towns were burned down and destroyed, farmlands burned and torn up to make defensive positions or parks commemorating the battlefields. Trees and forest burned or cut down for use in forts and firewood, or just cut down during battles. These all seem to be temporary and not real concerning to the long term environment. There were no poison gases, nuclear waste, or harsh chemicals being dumped into the ground, just changes to the landscape that could be recovered.  The most significant environmental change seems to be the national parks and cemeteries that emerged. This isn’t a bad thing per say, but a course of national history.

In 4 – 5 sentences, respond to the following:

During the 1864 presidential election the candidate’s used the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation as their platforms for running.  Both President Lincoln and George McClellan focused on what they believed was important about both these topics.  For Lincoln that was that emancipation must remain as part of the success of the Civil War, and that they would not accept any sort of peace agreement that did not include emancipation in it (McPherson & Hogue, 2010).  However, many Northerners who were war weary felt that keeping emancipation would prolong the war, especially considering that Grant was unable to provide any effective blows to the South (The Election of 1864: The War Effort Hangs on the Ballot Box, 2016).  For George McClellan, he attempted to claim he was running on a platform of peace.  He knew that many Americans were growing tired of the war and used that to try and persuade voters.  McClellan attempted to argue that he would end the war, however, that peace would ultimately include the South remaining in secession, and bringing slavery back.

As the war raged on and the election grew closer, President Lincoln’s chances of being reelected grew.  Initially even Lincoln did not have faith that he would see a second term to the Presidency, and wrote a memorandum acknowledging that his administration was likely to lose (McPherson & Hogue, 2010).  However, after Sherman seized control of Atlanta, and the Democratic Party was beginning to split, Lincoln’s chances increased drastically.  In considering how much of a landslide the election was, 212 to 21 electoral votes in the favor of Lincoln (The War Behind the Lines: The Election of 1864, 2016), it is unlikely that he really had anything to fear.