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The American Civil War doesn't even pass the test of the bloodiest civil war in the Americas. This dubious honor is held by the Mexican Revolution of 1910, with between 1 and 2 million casualties. It also isn't even the bloodiest war in American history if only combat casualties are considered - 214,938 Civil War combat casualties vs. 291,557 during WWII ...
45
The bloodiest civil war I can think of is the Taiping Rebellion in 19th century China. That conflict is generally thought to have a death toll of 20 million.
Note that this is an estimate made by western observers. There are claims in China that the conflict killed several times that (by population records, Jiangsu went from 42 million to 20 million, and ...
43
Taiwan was basically a part of China, and under Nationalist control at the time. (The Philippines were a foreign country.) Also,the Nationalist army, while weaker than the Communists, was far stronger than anything the Taiwanese were likely to put up.
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Tom Au is right; his answer is the correct answer. I want to add two more data points:
Hainan was closer to Mainland China and would be more difficult to defend against amphibious assault, Taiwan had the advantage of being far enough away that it was difficult for the communists to invade.
Taiwan had another advantage over other islands: It had been ...
22
Reconstruction was dead in some states almost as soon as it started, and it was completely undone nationwide by the compromise that led to the election of Rutherford B. Hayes as President in 1876. The lasting social damage that the song talks about should more accurately be associated with the demise of Reconstruction.
Here are some legacies of the time ...
17
TL/DR; Hubris and false assumptions
They assumed the economy didn't matter. The era of the US Civil war tended to see relatively short, decisive campaigns with a limited engagement of the population at large. Examples include the Mexican-American war (1846-8), Crimean war (1853-6), Austro-Prussian war (1866), Franco-Prussian war (1870-1). Largely, economic ...
15
This question raises interesting questions. However, there are some confusions in the question. And I respectfully disagree with some of the factual and opinion content of the answers previously posted.
Nearly all factual aspects of the conflict between the Tutsi and Hutu during the post-independence period are contested. This is regrettable since much of ...
11
The English Civil War is popular for re-enactment in England. Helps that it occurred over 350 years ago though.
Spanish Civil War 1936-39 seems to be regularly re-enacted too but probably not on the same scale as the English or American Civil Wars.
11
This is Joshua L. Chamberlain - the "text book maneuver" alludes to his role in the Battle of Gettysburg, especially the defense of the "Little Round Top":
The 20th Maine charged down the hill, with the left wing wheeling continually to make the charging line swing like a hinge, thus creating a simultaneous frontal assault and flanking maneuver, ...
11
As stated by others this is not really true. Even though shorter and less bloody compared to those in Bosnia and Croatia, the 10-day war outbroke in Slovenia between Yugoslav army located in the province and Slovenian police forces.
To answer your question: the reason perhaps lies in the fact that Slovenia had ethnically clear picture with majority of ...
11
The White Army was never a unified force but rather a number of armies of varying sizes which rarely co-ordinated their efforts. David Bullock, in The Russian Civil War 1918-22 states
Overall, the White armies were middle class in orientation but were
amazingly heterogeneous. Their ranks contained the full spectrum of
former Russian society, from ...
11
Your questions seems to be based on a logical fallacy: An identifiable minority under a repressive government that maintained at least respect through force of arms.
A repressive government, by definition, will not tolerate an armed, dis-loyal or even hostile minority. The only real world example that comes to mind would be the failed state scenario:
Clan ...
9
The Sri Lankan Civil War was a war where the Sri Lankan government fought the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who were lead by Velupillai Prabhakaran. Velupillai Prabhakaran was killed on May 19 (or 18 depending on your sources), 2009, the Tigers of Tamil Eelam admitted defeat on May 17th, 2009, and the government declared the Civil War over on May 19th, ...
9
In the Civil War era and earlier, the units needed to keep together in order to avoid being ridden down by cavalry. An experienced infantryman could shoot three times a minute, and a line of them could punish a cavalry unit easily. If you scatter, then you have fewer effective shots while an enemy approaches and they get among your men and cut them down.
...
9
Nobody was interested in a court case. Those who thought it was undoable had no reason for a suit, and those who wanted secession needed it as a bold stroke to rally the more undecided Southern factions to their banner. Secession had failed in 1832 and 1850 once people took the time to consider the matter. Secessionists in 1860 needed for it to be a ...
9
The premise of the question is false. It's not true that the KMT/ROC "[went] to the island of Taiwan and not to any other island". Rather than choosing to "go to" Taiwan and not any other island, Taiwan merely happens to be the largest island that the ROC still has control of.
The ROC also "went to" many other islands. Or more correctly, the ROC also had ...
8
Who had the better trained army??? Greater part of officers were Southerns. That was the reason why they thought they would win. And really, during all the war the command of the Southern army was incomparably superior. But they really needed a quick victory, because of the weaker economy. And failed to obtain it. And their tactical superiority helped them ...
8
What comes to mind is Finland, though it doesn't meet all the criteria.
Finland gained its independence from the Russian Empire in 1917; it was a messy affair resulting from the collapse of Russia, and it wasn't clear who was in charge. A struggle for power quickly ensued and flared into civil war between the Reds and Whites.
The Grand Duchy of Finland was ...
8
NOTE This was an attempt to answer the question as originally written:
Someone already asked when and how people began to consider slavery immoral on stack exchange, but no one has asked why. So that is my question; WHY did people in the United States and Europe start to think slavery was immoral after doing it and profiting from it for a long time?
The ...
8
On December 20, South Carolina declared that it seceded. Six days later, Union Major Robert Anderson moved his troops into Fort Sumter.
A letter by South Carolina Governor Francis Pickens to President Buchanan on January 31st demanded that the fort be surrendered. It, along with more messages demanding surrender, were ignored.
On April 11, the amazingly ...
7
In Lviv (Lwow) in Ukraine they re-enact the Polish-Ukrainian civil war of 1918:
http://www.istpravda.com.ua/articles/2012/12/7/102886/
(On the other hand, the "civil war" between Ukrainians and Russian communists
which also began in 1918, still continues, so they do not re-enact it).
It is not completely clear whether the national liberation war in the ...
7
Syria is controlled by Alawites who follow a specialized, somewhat secretive religion. This religion is often described as "shiite muslim," but that is a gross oversimplification. The Alawites have friendly, although sometimes uneasy, association with not only the Maronites, but with other Christian and non-Christian minorities including the Druse and others....
7
In addition to the reasons already given above, the South also believed that Europe could not survive without Southern cotton. At the beginning of the war, Southern merchants organized a cotton embargo to provoke Britain to enter the war on their side. However, Britain had sufficient stocks of cotton to last a year, and was already working to develop ...
7
Right now?
little.
The current opressive power of nations as per 2018, even the smallest one, is times bigger than any other nation in the past, for the simple reason that weapons, armament, and technology is what wins wars today.
The biggest civilian armed resistance moment we're seeing in our times are both the Syrian opposition coalition, and the ...
6
The Russian Civil War (1917-23) and the Chinese Civil War (1930s-1949) have it beaten handily.
It remains the bloodiest war in American History, partly because both sides were Americans.
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The poster wanted to know about the negative effects of Reconstruction, so I am answering that question.
The only direct long term negative effect of Reconstruction era policy I know of is that the South still pays exploitative railway fees to ship goods to other sections of the nation. Following the Civil War, the US was divided into 5 freight rate ...
6
We lost the war in Vietnam because the American public no longer supported it. You can speculate on any number of reasons for this. People stopped believing the Domino Theory. Americans did not feel threatened by the Vietcong or North Vietnam.
It was part of the larger Cold War, but American public could not tolerate the death toll of Americans for purely ...
6
The main problem that secessionists would have faced in court is that the question had been settled over 40 years before the Civil War: secession was illegal.
The only argument that supports unilateral secession, where a state just decides to leave and that's sufficient, is called "Compact Theory". The theory is that the US is not a single nation, but a "...
6
Before the war, the South was hoping they wouldn't have to fight at all; that, upon weighing the pros and cons, the North would just leave them alone (this proved to be true - for a while).
If, however, the North did go into battle against them, the idea was that just as with the American Revolution, when a country of four million souls took on the mighty ...
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