Brief Overview of the Civil War

In this blog I wanted to explore the possibilities of how being involved in the war.  War in general is known for being a traumatizing experience, often times affecting the way people go through life. I don't think James Henry Bread was an exception.  I couldn't find much on Bread's life during the war so I decided to focus on discussing Civil War in general.

The actual causes of the Civil War are widely debated, however it can be summarized into three causes.  State Rights, Slavery, and Political/Economic considerations, though slavery has an effect on the other two.

The Civil War had the most lost of American lives out of any war in history.  Life on an American solider during the civil war was a hard one, like the life of any solider in any war.  It required them to be away from their love ones for intensive training just to get into the battle-field.  They often had to deal with inadequate food or shelter, deal through disease, and traverse through various degrees of weather while traveling with their heavy bags simply so their lives could be some-what bearable.

This is not including the stress they went through in the battlefield.  Times in the Civil War went between long periods of time with nothing to sheer terror from the battlefield and occasionally from a surprise attack.  Going between these extremes must of had terrible amounts of stress to the soldiers.  Surely, never knowing when they could be attacked next must only added on to this stress.

The Civil War was a long prolonged out War.  Both sides expected it to end swiftly but both sides were fairly equal in strength and ability which only dragged out the battle further.  The Civil War took place in a time when more modern tactics of battle were being adopted.  Efficiency played more of a role in this war than in wars of the past due to advancing technology and as a result, more chivalrous and honorable methods of the past were abandoned.

The information I used to wright this were all found on this site, it contains more detail information and of individual battles but I didn't have the time to explore it to deeply to see if there was information in here that would provide useful to us:
http://www.civilwar.com/

This link will take you directly to the Battle section of the site, in case anyone is interested in looking more into the battles of the civil war themselves.
http://www.civilwar.com/battles/battle-summaries.html