Be sure to check out the other parts about the American Civil War:
PART 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYaYCltLsdk&
PART 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiW_supSSOk&
PART 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t56cwRxBtG8&

Crazy that arguably the two most important battles of the entire war were going on at literally the exact same time.

Loved the draft riot logic " The draft favors the rich, so let's take it out on the people that have absolutely no power."

At the onset of the war, the overall Union commander, Gen. Winfield Scott laid out the Anaconda Plan.  That plan was to impose a naval blockade  hold fast in northern Virginia and put the emphasis on the west, taking the Mississippi River (including New Orleans), then advancing through Georgia and back up to Virginia, in effect squeezing the Confederates like a giant anaconda.  Basically this plan worked very well, the Confederate victories in northern Virginia were meaningless.  The two most important Union victories of the war may well have been the capture of New Orleans and Shiloh.

Just to add one small element of human scale to the narrative: I'm 72, and one of my great-grandfathers marched into Vicksburg under U.S. Grant in the 17th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment. He survived and 20 years later named his firstborn son, my maternal grandfather, Grant.

Free Black men were already allowed to join the Navy for some reason, but not the Army, before the war.  This is how Frederick Douglass escaped slavery.  He got ahold of a Navy uniform and then simply bought a ticket to Philadelphia from Baltimore.  Presumably, the railroad ticket sellers and conductors had seen black sailors before and didn't question him.

The Confederates lost the war at Fort Sumter. They started a war they couldn’t possibly win. Sadly, it took four years and a whole lot of death and suffering for that to be clear.

Logistics wins wars. Lee was primarily an engineer in the Old Army, while Grant served as an infantry captain, a quartermaster, and even organized a military hospital during a cholera outbreak.

You failed to mention that Abaraham Lincoln’s threat in outrage to execute a Confederate soldier for every Union prisoner who had been executed, black or white, was never carried out, though the Confederate generals executed hundreds of black prisoners. Thousands of Union prisoners died in prison camps through neglect and maltreatment. Most notably, Andersonville where 13,000, more than one quarter of those imprisoned there died. No such loss of life occured in Union prisons. The massacre of Lawence, KS men and boys was an act of desperation, not retaliation for Lincoln’s unenforced edict while many civilians were murdered in border states mostly by irregular Confederate sympathizers especially in Missouri and Kansas.

The CSA was like the Japanese military of WW2 in that they could not make up losses in man or material, where if the Union lost a battle, they could come back and fight another day.

For example, Gettysburg was the Confederate version of the Battle of Midway in terms of irreplaceable losses.

Sherman's March and the taking of Atlanta was very pivotal too, especially from a psychological perspective.  The capture of Atlanta went a long way toward convincing the North that the war was being won.  If the North had elected McClellan instead of LIncoln in 1864, he would have sued for peace with the South.  In short, Mac would have snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory.

Vicksburg is one of the most amazing Civil War battle sites I've ever been too. Standing on the bluffs that overlook the Mississippi, one can understand just how massive a fortress it was. I took a man with a massive degree of patience to take this and Grant was truly the man for the task. He didn't know how to back off.

"Why didn't the CSA just win key battles?" To quote General George Pickett, a Confed General, "I believe the Yankees had something to do with it." 😂 ((Yes, he really said that, according to historians.)) 😂

In the film "Chatos Land" Jack Palance as a former TX Brigade Capt says it best
"They had more... more men, more guns, more food, more luck. You know, when I look back at it, I know now that it was there for the seeing in '63... except we didn't see it."

If you're losing a battle, just start winning.

Losing control of the Mississippi was the key. The insistence of making Virginia the center of the CSA world was a colossal blunder among others.

People forget the battle at Shiloh showed how bloody this war was about to get. That loss hit the confederacy hard.

Hi, You should do a video on Battle of Chickamauga

Bad AI at 8:44, Jackson was mounted on patrol.

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