Battle Lines Summary

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Pages: 3

In Jonathon Fetter-Vorm and Ari Kelman’s book Battle Lines features breathtaking panoramas and revelatory and unforgettable images of the Civil War. The American Civil War is often called the first modern war. The Civil War was unspeakably bloody. The beginning of the Civil War started out as an army versus an army, but turned into so much more when it became a conflict against societies. Americans slaughtered each other with such abandon that even now, with a century and a half standing between us and the fighting, it is still nearly impossible to make sense of the statistics: somewhere between 620,000 and 850,000 dead, more than 1.5 million wounded. The war lasted about four years and in those four years enough people were killed to …show more content…
In numbers, scale, and the economic power of the institution of slavery, American emancipation dwarfed that of any other country. The whites however; refused the blacks who tried to fight in the war. Meanwhile, slaves themselves took actions that helped propel a reluctant white Americans down the road to emancipation.
When the African Americans were told that if they signed up for war that they would become free they started lining up to put their name down. What they didn’t expect was to be denied by the whites and not be able to sign up. The blacks determination to be able to get into the war proved to be a burden and hard on the administration. In August 1861, John C. Fremont, commanding Union forces in Missouri, a state racked by a bitter guerilla war between pro-northern and pro-southern bands, decreed the freedom of its slaves. In the book Battle Lines it shows that blacks were the lowest of the low. The blacks didn’t get along with whites or the Irish either. Battle Lines show how the Irish attacked a young colored man by the name James ten days after the Gettysburg’s address by Lincoln. Not only did the Irish show hatred to colored people they raided an orphanage for colored children then proceeded to burn down the building not caring if anyone was in