‘Southerners have a sense of defeat which none of the rest of the country has.’ Ken Burns, The Civil War: War is All Hell (1865), Shelby Foote
By the beginning of 1865 the Confederacy was dying. To the west only the tattered Confederate army of Tennessee remained. ibid.
War is All Hell, William Tecumseh Sherman once said … Sherman’s men tore up railroads … a trademark. ibid.
A single stick of firewood cost $5 in Richmond. ibid.
The Mercury Saturday, November 12th 1864, The Employment of Slaves: The African is of an inferior race, whose normal condition is slavery. Prone to barbarism, and incapable of any other state than that of pupillage, he is at his best estate as the slave of the enlightened white man of this country. ibid. newspaper article
Jefferson Davis issued a proclamation pledging to fight on. ibid.
At Pittsburgh two thousand liberated Union prisoners crowded on to the decks of the steamboat Sultana, gleeful to be on their way at last. Near Memphis a boiler exploded and she burst into flames. More than twelve hundred men died, still hundreds of miles from home. Ken Burns, The Civil War: The Better Angels of Our Nature
Three and a half million men went to war. Six hundred and twenty thousand men died in it. As many as in all the rest of America’s wars combined. ibid.
In Mississippi in 1866 one fifth of the state’s entire budget was spent on artificial limbs. ibid.
Survivors went home and got on with the business of living. ibid.
In Washington fireworks filled the sky. A great crowd gathered around the White House called for Lincoln. He was too weary to make a formal speech but asked the band to play Dixie. ibid.
The Confederate states of America had once stretched from the Rappahannock to the Rio Grande. Its leaders had once dreamed of a tropical empire reaching ever southward. ibid.
Thousands of blacks wandered southern roads, searching for relatives or looking for work or food. Thousands more stayed on their plantations as hired hands or sheer-croppers. ibid.
White supremacy was brutally re-imposed throughout the old Confederacy. The white south won that war of attrition. It would take another century before blacks gained back the ground for which so many had given their lives. ibid.
One afternoon in the Spring of 1804 nearly four dozen men crossed the Mississippi and started up the Missouri river. They were beginning the most important expedition in American history. The United States’ first official exploration into unknown spaces. Ken Burns, Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery I, PBS 1997
Jefferson had always been curious about the West. ibid.
For just three cents an acre he [Jefferson] more than doubled the size of his country. It was the greatest land deal in history. ibid.
There are long lapses in Lewis’s journals. ibid.
Floyd – the Corps of Discovery had suffered its first fatality. ibid.
They had emerged on to one of the largest grasslands in the world – the Great Plains. ibid.
The Corps of Discovery met the Teton Sioux. ibid.
Led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the Corps of Discovery had been sent by President Thomas Jefferson to discover the fabled Northwest Passage – a water route across North America that would link the Atlantic to the Pacific. But by the fall of 1804, after struggling 1,600 miles up the Missouri River, they were still in the midst of the Great Plains. One man had already died, and the weather was turning colder. Ken Burns, Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery II, caption
By the fall of 1805, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and the Corps of Discovery had travelled more than 4,000 miles – over the Rocky Mountains and down the Columbia River to become the first American citizens to reach the Pacific Ocean by land. In the East, people had given them up for lost or dead – although President Thomas Jefferson still held out hope for their success. ibid.
The expedition would record in their journals 122 species of animals and 178 plants that had never before been described for Science. ibid.
Shortly after their return the Corps of Discovery quietly disbanded. ibid.
The West stretches from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean. From the northern plains to the Rio Grande. More than two million square miles of the most extraordinary landscape on Earth. Its terrain has always beckoned and repelled. Ken Burns, The West I, PBS 1996
The West is a land of endless seas of grass. Unimaginable distances. Infinite horizons. But it was never empty. People came from every point of the compass. ibid.
There once lived a great people – remembered now as the Anasazi. For centuries their civilisation thrived. ibid.
They were forced to abandon it all ... Not the first people to be displaced by another in the West. And they would not be the last. ibid.
1528 Texas: A handful of Spanish Soldiers staggered ashore... Converting thousands of Indians, and stripping the Aztec and Inca cultures of their enormous wealth. ibid.
‘We came here to serve God and His Majesty,’ one Conquistador wrote. ‘To give light to those who were darkness, and to get rich as all men desire to do.’ ibid.
The horse ... spread across the West ... numbered in the thousands. ibid.
The great father was Thomas Jefferson, president of the new United States, who had just purchased from France half a billion acres. ibid.
By 1821 two young Republics claimed most of the West. The vast territory Thomas Jefferson had bought from France gave the United States claim to nearly half of it. Ken Burns, The West II
Others who called themselves Latter Day Saints fled to the West hoping to find sanctuary. ibid.
There were black trappers as well as white. ibid.
There were now nearly 35,000 American-born immigrants and their slaves in Texas. ibid.
Three independent republics in North America: Mexico, the United States, and under president Sam Houston the new Republic of Texas. ibid.
Everywhere they went, the Mormons gathered converts. And everywhere they went, they made enemies. ibid.
The Mexican-American war lasted more than a year and a half. ibid.
By 1848 the United States claimed virtually all of the West. Ken Burns, The West III
Suddenly, gold seekers rushed in from every corner of the globe. ibid.
The Chinese miners kept to themselves. ibid.
It was the worst slaughter of Indian peoples in United States’ history. ibid.
The Californian gold rush and the war with Mexico changed everything. Ken Burns, The West IV
What would come to be known as Bleeding Kansas. ibid.
Mountain Meadows: The Mormons opened fire ... In less than half an hour one hundred and twenty people had been butchered. ibid.
The Civil War that had already begun in the West now exploded in the East. ibid.
They would build a railroad: it’s completion would be one of the greatest technological achievements of the age. Ken Burns: The West V, The Grandest Enterprise Under God
Buffalo: perhaps as much as thirty million of them. ibid.
‘Son, when I am gone, you are the chief of this people.’ Ken Burns: The West VI, Fight No More Forever, pow-wow
By 1874 railroads had brought millions of settlers to the West opening up new lands for homesteads. ibid.
Most soldiers never met an Indian in battle. Some never saw an Indian at all. ibid.
By 1877 the American conquest of the West was nearly complete. For every Indian in the West there were now nearly 40 whites. Ken Burns: The West VII: The Geography of Hope
Between 1877 and 1887 four a half million more people came West. ibid.
There was less and less room for those who didn’t conform. ibid.
‘The white people are wicked. I want you to teach my people to read and write. But they must not become white people in their ways. It is too bad a life.’ ibid. Sitting Bull
Anti-Chinese violence broke out all across the West. ibid.
The same year that the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, Congress also took action against the Mormons in Utah … the Mormon practice of plural marriage. ibid.
In 1893, the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the new world, celebrated in Chicago: it was called the World’s Columbian Exhibition. Ken Burns, The West VIII: One Sky Above Us I 1887-1914
There were 63 million Americans in 1893; 17 million of them now live west of the Mississippi. ibid.
By the end of the day all 1,920,000 acres in the Oklahoma district had been claimed. ibid.
The Dawes Act, meant to help Indians, devastated them instead. ibid.
Finally, after a heavy snowfall, a burial party arrived at Wounded Knee, dug a pit and dumped in the frozen bodies. ibid.
Miss Waxham: P.S. I like you very much. ibid. Ethel Waxham, correspondence with John Love
Between 1890 and 1904 the population of Los Angeles quadrupled to nearly 200,000. Ken Burns, The West IX
Death would enter the experience of the American people and the body politic of the American nation as it never had before. Ric Burns, Death and the Civil War, PBS 2013
An estimated 750,000 people in all – more than in all other American wars combined. ibid.
April 6-7 1862 Shiloh: 23,741 casualties 3,477 dead. ibid.
No adequate ambulance corps to remove the dead and dying from the field of battle. ibid.
The new black recruits would be paid less than their white counterparts .. One in five would perish. ibid.