This is a big assignment, so take your time. You will create three grammatically correct bullet points for topic: The intro to the Civil War The Gettysburg Address Three bullet points for all five videos You will eventually have a formal writing assignment about this topic, but before that assignment you must complete this one with bullet points, I will not accept the formal writing assignment unless this bullet points assignment is done first. The War Between the States April 1861-April 1865 When Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States in March 1861, eleven states in the South seceded from the Union (withdrew from the country) and formed their own: The Confederate States of America. They chose their own president—Jefferson Davis—founded their own capital—Richmond, Virginia—got their own flag—known as the Stars and Bars—and one April dawn in 1861 Confederate cannons fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay, South Carolina. War began. Slavery had been part of this country from the start: the harbor of New Amsterdam (later New York) was often the first stop for thousands of people “stolen from Africa” and “brought to America” (Bob Marley), but the South believed slavery was a ‘southern institution’. For the first two years of the Civil War the South was winning despite the North having three times the population as well as the factories to make guns and cannon. But the South had better military leadership (General Robert E. Lee, who hated slavery and to whom Lincoln asked at the start of the war
to lead the Union army), the southern soldiers (“Johnny Reb”) could ride and shot better than the northern boys (“Billy Yank”), and most of the war was happening on southern land, which gave the South several advantages: assistance from the locals, familiarity with the land, and the additional passion when soldiers fight on their own land (in this case, the South). But in early summer of 1863, General Lee took the war to the North, aiming his 70,000-strong Army of Northern Virginia for the railway hub of Harrisburg in southern Pennsylvania. But there was a small, quiet town nearby that had a warehouse of boots which the army badly needed, so Lee detoured to nearby Gettysburg. And through remarkable coincidences and fate, here the Confederates clashed on July 1,2, and 3 with 90,000 northern soldiers in the bloodiest battle ever fought in the western hemisphere. The South did well for the first day of battle, had mixed results on the second (you will see a clip of that second day) but for the South the third was disastrous: you will see a clip of that too. 55,000 men were either killed or wounded in those three days. The Southern army retreated back to the South (the Northern army too battered to pursue), and while the war lasted two more bloody years, the three-day battle at Gettysburg turned the tide. That November, the battlefield was made into a cemetery and national shrine. It was here that Lincoln spoke less than 300 words which have lived to this day. The Gettysburg Address President Abraham Lincoln November 19, 1863 “