Portal:American Civil War/Selected article/Archive2007
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This page occupied the Selected article space on this portal from construction until August 30, 2007, when variable automation was turned on.
The military Sharps Rifle (also known as the Berdan Sharps rifle) was a falling block rifle used during and after the American Civil War. Along with being able to use a standard percussion cap, the Sharps had a fairly unusual pellet primer feed, a device which held a stack of pelleted primers that flipped one over the nipple every time the trigger was pulled and the hammer fell. This was much easier to operate from horseback than individual percussion caps.
The Sharps Rifle was used in the Civil War by the U.S. Army sharpshooters known popularly as "Berdan's Sharpshooters" in honor of their leader Hiram Berdan. The Sharps made a superior sniper weapon of higher accuracy than the more commonly issued muzzle-loading rifled-muskets. This was due mainly to the higher rate of fire of the breech loading mechanism and the fact that the quality of manufacture was superior. It was produced by the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company. (More...)
[edit] August 30, 2007 - September 30, 2007
The Andersonville prison, located at Camp Sumter, was the largest Confederate military prison during the American Civil War. The site of the prison is now Andersonville National Historic Site in Andersonville, Georgia. It includes the site of the Civil War prison, the Andersonville National Cemetery, and the National Prisoner of War Museum. 12,913 Union prisoners died there, mostly of diseases. Captain Henry Wirz, commandant, was the only Civil War soldier executed for war crimes.
[edit] October 1, 2007-October 31, 2007
The Union Army Balloon Corps was a branch of the Federal Army during the American Civil War established by Thaddeus S. C. Lowe as a civilian operation which employed a group of aeronauts and seven specially built, gas-filled aerostats for the purposes of performing aerial reconnaissance of the Confederate Army. A veteran balloonist Lowe met with President Abraham Lincoln on July 11, 1861, and proposed a demonstration with his own balloon, the Enterprise on the White House front lawn. From a height of 500 feet he telegraphed a message to the ground describing his view of the Washington countryside. The Balloon Corps with its hand-selected band of expert aeronauts served in Yorktown, Fair Oaks, Antietam, Fredericksburg and other major battles of the Potomac and Peninsula. The Balloon Corps served the Union Army from October 1861 until Lowe's resignation in the summer of 1863 when it disbanded.
[edit] November 1, 2007-November 30, 2007
The Battle of Antietam, also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, fought on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland and Antietam Creek as part of the Maryland Campaign was the first major battle in the American Civil War to take place on Northern soil. With almost 23,000 casualties, it was the bloodiest single-day battle in American history.
After pursuing Robert E. Lee into Maryland, Union Army commander George B. McClellan launched attacks against the Army of Northern Virginia which had taken defensive positions behind Antietam Creek. Despite having superiority of numbers, McClellan's attack failed to achieve concentration of mass, resulting in a three-phase battle that Lee was able to counter by shifting forces to meet each challenge. Despite ample reserve forces that could have been deployed to exploit localized successes, McClellan failed to destroy Lee's army. Nevertheless, Lee's invasion of Maryland was ended and he was able to withdraw his army back to Virginia without interference from the cautious McClellan. Although the battle was tactically inconclusive, it had unique significance as enough of a victory to give President Abraham Lincoln the confidence to announce his Emancipation Proclamation.
[edit] December 1, 2007-December 31, 2007
The Origins of the American Civil War lay in the complex issues of party politics, competing understandings of federalism, slavery, expansionism, sectionalism, economics, and modernization in the Antebellum period. After the Mexican-American War, the issue of slavery in the new territories led to the Compromise of 1850. While the Compromise of 1850 averted an immediate political crisis, it did not permanently resolve the issue of the power of slaveholders in national politics. Many Northerners, especially the new Republican Party, considered slavery a great national evil, and believed that a small number of Southern owners of large plantations controlled the national government. Southerners denied there was a "slave power conspiracy" and worried instead about the relative political decline of their region as the North grew much faster in terms of population and industrial output. For a chronology of events leading to the American Civil War, see Origins of the American Civil War timeline.
