Generally, they drew on the Bible for their understanding of what constituted a generation and how each one, since the time of Adam and Eve, passed through history.
#The great skedaddle how to#
No hard and fast rules informed Americans who lived through the Civil War era how to define a generation or how specifically they should discern the essential qualities of their own generation, but they understood nevertheless that their generation differed from the ones that came before it or after it.
Noah Webster Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Samuel Finley Breese Morse
In 1858, he confessed his own dismay over the sectional issues that had divided the Democratic Party: “My own generation - and I regret to say it - seems too deeply steeped in the trickery of politics to be able to rise above the influence of personal and political gain into the pure field of patriotism.” His observation, as it turned out, was prescient the Confederacy would later be plagued by internal dissent and the conflicting ambitions of its most prominent politicians.
#The great skedaddle free#
In remarks made in 1864 to a Ohio regiment whose term of service had expired in the Union army, Lincoln urged the men to return home and “rise up to the height of a generation of men worthy of a free Government, and we will carry out the great work we have commenced.” Jefferson Davis also saw the sectional conflict as a generational crisis. Abraham Lincoln, for one, regarded the crisis of the war as a “people’s contest” that required Northerners to respond as a generation solidified in purpose to save the Union. It’s quite clear that Americans who experienced the Civil War consciously thought of themselves as part of a distinct generation, a generation defined by its terrible and (in the case of Northerners) triumphant experiences, although historians have been less than astute in acknowledging this cohesiveness among Civil War participants or the extent to which those who lived through the war viewed the conflict as a tragedy - and a challenge - that had beset their particular cohort. After the war was over, members of that generation realized that it had driven them apart and, at the same time, had brought them together in a common experience of human loss and societal transformation. The Civil War generation gained a distinctive identity, its defining traits, out of what it witnessed on the battlefield and suffered behind the lines. As much as any other generation in American history - as much as the Revolutionary generation, the “Greatest Generation” of World War II, or the Baby Boomer generation of the late twentieth century - the men and women of the Civil War generation realized as the bloody ordeal of war unfolded around them that they were going through something awful and something unique, a moment unlike any other, a milestone in the nation’s history.
Judith Carter Henry died later that afternoon, the first civilian casualty of the Civil War, and was buried in the garden she loved.The Civil War generation knew what it was about. Ellen Henry sought refuge in a big fireplace chimney during the bombardment, and her subsequent deafness was attributed to injury to her eardrums from the violent concussion produced by the shelling. She was thrown to the floor, wounded in the neck and side, and one of her feet was partially blown off. Ricketts turned his guns and shelled the house.Ī shell hit Judith Henry’s bedroom and the bed on which she lay was shattered. In an attempt to dislodge the Confederate sharpshooters in the house, Union Artillery Captain James B. While the Henrys were gone, Confederate snipers had taken up hiding positions in the home. This was done as soon as they realized that the spring house was no safer than the dwelling. Henry there, only to have her beg to be taken back to her own bed. There was a spring house to the southwest in a depression that seemed less exposed. But in the growing confusion, that was out of the question. Henry, 85 years old and bedridden, to Portici, the home of Robert Lewis, one mile southeast of the Henry home. The family first considered trying to move Mrs. When the battle began on the opposite hill, artillery shots were coming threateningly near. Henry’s sons, had ridden down from Loudoun just to spend the day. On Sunday, July 21, 1861, Judith Carter Henry, her daughter Ellen and hired colored girl Lucy Griffith were living at Henry House.
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