A is for abolitionists who where people who urged the U.S. government to end slavery.

B is for battle field hospitals which many women worked in to help wounded solders.
They did not have good hygiene and many died from disease.
C is for the battle of Chancellorville which many consider southern General Robert E.
Lee’s greatest victory over northern General Hooker.
D is for death, the civil war had the largest death toll of any American war dew to new
weapons and old fighting tactics.
E is for every one up in arms after Lincoln’s election and the debate over Fort Sumter the
north and south was ready to start a war.
F is for factories which played a key role in the north’s advantage over the south because
the north could produce more weapons and supplies than the south.
G is for the battle of Gettysburg which was the “high water mark” of the southern
advance. Also it was the bloodiest battle in the war and was the turning point from the
north losing to the north wining. The south could never regain its former army size.
H is for horrible which was the condition of the southern army. The army was usually
dressed in rags and mostly did not have shoes. Toward the end of the war they had to eat
their own horses.
I is for illness. Illness killed more men than bullets due to lack of food and poor living
conditions. It especially ran rampant in hospitals where surgeons had no idea of
pathogens and ignored even basic sanitary procedures.
J is for Johnny rebs which was the union nickname for southern troops. Off the battle
field the opposing factions would trade and be quite friendly. After all some of them
came from the same family.
K is for Klu Klux Klan which is a post war racial hate group who opposed and foiled
many reconstruction plans; it was groups such as these that made reconstruction difficult.
L is for large impact on southern economy after union troops had trampled and burned
most of the south, the southern economy dropped like a ball of lead. The slaves had left,
no one would by southern cotton and the union had destroyed most of the crop fields, the
south had nothing to rely on.
M is for moving the troops of the civil war were constantly moving around.
Communications involved message carriers who constantly had to deliver messages, and
troops had to move to where ever they thought the enemy had moved.
N is for north which is the army that one. The North one because it had more factories,
Population and its government moved faster. In the south the government focused on
state rights which made getting things done even harder to do.
O is for Oreos which are a delicious cookie that is chocolate cookies on the outside with
a creamy vanilla paste on the inside and are absolutely divine dipped in milk. The civil
war soldiers would have appreciated these instead of their regular meal of hard tack
which is made of flour and water and is hard and usually filled with insects. The soldiers
had to dunk the hard tack in coffee to soften it enough to make it edible and to get the
weevils out. Then they would scoop the later out of the coffee. This shows the kind of life
a solder had to live.
P is for population which is another one of the north’s advantages over the south. The
north had twice the population of the south and could easily replace its lost soldiers.
Q is for Quagmires which are extremely boggy swamps which are common in the
Maryland, D.C. area which most of the fighting took place in. Solders would have had to
climb through them and they would have slowed their pace considerably.
R is for rail roads which played a huge part in troop distribution, the civil war was the
first war in which the opposing armies had used rail roads to move troops to different
areas. The north had an advantage over the south because the north had many more miles
of rail road than the south and there fore could move troops faster.
S is for slavery which after Lincoln had made the emancipation proclamation the war was
fought to stop. Lincoln waited till after the battle of Antietam to proclaim the
proclamation because once the U.S had declared the war against slavery the European
countries who where slave free could not fight to keep slavery.
T is for terror which is what the everyday soldier must have felt when the ranks of enemy
troops came rushing at him. Since solders spent most of the day waiting for orders and
marching the expression “99% boredom 1% sheer terror” Was used to describe a
soldier’s life.
U is for union which is what the northern army was called. The union was fighting to
keep the confederates (south) from separating and becoming a new country.
V is for vandalize which the union army did to the south after waging total war in an
attempt to starve the south into surrendering. The union went and burned every field and
home and factory hoping that the south would have to surrender due to internal collapse.
W is for west which was a conflict that started the civil war because the southern people
wanted to move west and grow new crops where as the north did not want to open the
west to people because they were afraid that their factory workers would move west as
well.
eXtreme is the lengths both armies were willing to go to, to win, the union was willing to
completely gut the entire south by burning all they came across. And the south was
willing to not give in even though the end result was inevitable at the end.
Y is for young. The civil war took many of the young lives of our nation. Boys as young
as ten fought and died in the civil war. Many of them served as drummer boys or flute
players and they led troops into battle.
Z is for Zacaton which is a wiry grass found in the south west. Soldiers would have had
to march through this tough grass and it would have made marching harder than ever and
probably inflict many cuts and scrapes