This part of the series touches on the American Civil War and the aftermath…..the Southern strategy and the so-called Union invincibility….Maj. Sjursen looks at the war and aftermath with different eyes…..

Part 17 of “American History for Truthdiggers.”

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.” —President Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to the abolitionist Horace Greeley (Aug. 22, 1862)

It is nearly impossible to illustrate the magnitude of the American ordeal of civil war. It is not just the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians killed, but the fact that this war—perhaps more than any other—utterly transformed the United States. The bookshelves simply overflow with fascinating military histories of the conflict, and I’ll leave that part of the story to their distinguished authors. Rather, let us here examine how, in the course of just four years, the war moved from being dedicated solely to the preservation of the Union to becoming a war of liberation to emancipate slaves.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/american-history-for-truthdiggers-the-slow-perilous-shift-to-emancipation/

The war is over….now what?  Next part he looks at the experiment of ‘reconstruction”……

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