From the April 13th Chicago Tribune. By Harriet McLeod, Reuters.
Does everything that is printed about the Civil War during this sesquicentennial have to have something about slavery in it?
Map of South Carolina with Fort Sumter shown and a photo of Confederate re-enactors shown standing in silhouette as the sun rises on an orange sky accompany the article.
About two-dozen Union re-enactors raised a 33-star American flag over Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor in the predawn hours this past Tuesday.
Soon afterwards, a signal shot was fired from a nearby Confederate fortification just as had happened this date 150-years earlier.
These were the first shots of the Civil War which took 620,000 American lives and ended slavery.
Chief Historian of the National Park Service, Robert Sutton, said, "Four million enslaved African-Americans saw this as their revolution." The theme for the Sesquicentennial nationwide is "Civil War to Civil Rights."
"Today we commemorate the beginning of the Civil War, but we also celebrate the fact that, with the end of the war and with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, more people were freed from enslavement at one time than at any time in world history," Sutton said.
And of course, a year later, slaves were freed in the capital of the United States and five months after that they were freed in areas not under Union occupation. The United States government was definitely fighting the war to free the slaves. That is why they moved so quickly on their freedom. You'd almost think they would have been freed the same time Lincoln called for the 75,000 volunteers.
Commemorating the Past. --Old B-Runner
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